Prog Draft Database created by crazystengel.

www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx

If you are clever with excel or some alternative (really what I'm thinking is [R] or Python, but I understand excel can be pretty clever in the right hands) you could probably quickly throw together some form of automatic "list all the players whose debut was season X in each position and a summary of their performance over their career", and maybe even rank them automatically...

I wrote some perl not long ago to scour Baseball-Reference for players' career WAR (oWAR for batters since dWAR is so crazy and nonsensicle and wouldn't translate well to the sim) and list them based on debut year. I just drafted and traded mostly based on career WAR, a little manual checking of individuals was done but it cut down on that vastly. Sadly, the league folded shortly after, and I had lined up a ton of trades for 1st and 2nd round picks in a super deep draft year. Oh well.

Posted by profcake on 7/3/2012 10:29:00 AM (view original):
Prog Draft Database created by crazystengel.

www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx

Thanks for the plug, profcake.  This is a private forum, with draft results from every season between 1885-2010 listed (for many seasons, we already have multiple drafts).  If anyone wants to be added to the forum, just shoot me a sitemail.

You need to be able to use excel and access....

I downloaded the salary spreadsheets they issue each year when they release the new players.  MIne is actually old, a 2010 vintage, but I don't really have any leages approaching that point, so it's good enough for me.  They have different spreadsheets for hitters and pitchers. 

Then i use a formula to determine the rookie year for a player, and put it in a new column. 

Then I do load both spreadsheets to access to find duplicate player numbers (players who have seasons listed as both hitters and pitchers).  I manually update the rookie year for those players (Probably an easier way to do this).

Then I use the color red to indicate good stats... For example, I sort the spreadsheet by WHIP#, and then mark in red all WHIP#'s of 1.25 (arbitrary number) or lower.   I mark in another color all the stats I want to avoid (ie: all HR/9 over .75).

Then I sort the spreadsheets by rookie year, and save this as my master file. 

Each season, I go in and pull out only those records for rookie players in the target year(s) and make a draft spreadsheet for those years...

Not easy, but I know it's sucessful because I have a lot more than the average luck in progressives.