I'm gonna be blunt and honest to start this article and answer the question that many of you are asking when you come to this site. Why should I pay for a membership? Honestly, there are many reasons. One of the reasons is our award-winning rankings. Another reason, and probably most useful is you will be able to use our customizable Fantasy Baseball Cheat Sheet. If you are a member you can find them on our members-only page.
That second point is why I'm writing this. Ok so now you might be asking why should I use the Fantasy Six Pack Cheat Sheet, instead of the other sites that make their own. Well, I'm going to tell you why.
I have used this same cheat sheet myself over the last three years. In that span of time, I have done very well for myself in my leagues, including...
- Winning the Fantasy Six Pack Staff League 3-years in a row.
- Razzslam Top-10 (2020, 2022) and Top-20 (2021)
- RTSports Best Ball Overall top 30 and Division Winner (2X)
- Winning or finishing in the money in many of my various other leagues.
If the results alone don't convince you, I will explain how the cheat sheet will benefit you below along with how to use it. I also made some video tutorials of both our Points League Cheat Sheet and Category League Cheat Sheet.
Fantasy Baseball Cheat Sheet
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Purpose of the Cheat Sheet
Before I jump into the specifics of each sheet (categories and points), I want to mention what my goal is when creating the sheets. It is not meant to tell you exactly who to draft and when. That choice is ultimately up to you.
You decide how you want to build your team. Do you want to go pitcher heavy? Attack speed or saves early? Get your middle infielders first? All options are on the table.
The cheat sheet will give you the information you need to make a more informed decision. It will help you find underrated and overrated players because we give you a value for players, either overall or by category, and their ADP.
Maybe our values say that Player A is near the top of the board, but his ADP is not. You now have the information to decide whether you should take the chance and wait to see if you can get them a bit closer to their ADP or maybe you want to draft him now.
I know for myself, in drafts I have seen a player get drafted and cringed because I didn't think of him. Or in the panic of a 60-second timer, completely miss a player that was on the board because the site draft room didn't have him listed near the top, or the player filter was on a different position. All these things happen to all of us. Using the cheat sheet has helped me prevent many mistakes during my drafts and led to a lot more success too.
Points League Cheat Sheet
The Fantasy Baseball Points League Cheat Sheet is useful for any points league format, including your home league's custom scoring. But it also comes preloaded for Best Ball leagues on Underdog, RTSports and NFBC.
Setup
I highly suggest reading the instructions tab first. It walks you through how to set up and what all the columns mean on the cheat sheet tab in the Excel Spreadsheet. After you have read the instruction, head on over to the setup tab.
There the first thing you will want to do is pick what site you are playing on in the drop-down in cell B2
- NFBC
- RTSports
- Underdog
- Fantrax Best Ball
- Fantrax
- ESPN
- CBS
- Yahoo
- Other
If you choose one of the specific sites the scoring will automatically update to that site's default scoring for their points/best ball leagues. The ADP and position eligibility that is used on the cheat sheet tab will also update to that site's ADP and position eligibility. You can change the scoring for the categories if your league customized them, it will still use the default ADP and position eligibility.
If you play elsewhere, choose "Other". You will then need to modify the scoring categories below. ADP will still update, but it will be a consensus ADP between the major sites.
One important note about changing the scoring. Once you do, the default scoring settings will no longer automatically update. You will either need to download a new sheet or change the scoring manually.
You can always close the sheet and start over again with the preset scoring settings.
Once you have everything set up to match your league configuration, head on over to the Cheat Sheet tab.
Cheat Sheet Tab Preparation
This is the tab you will use during your draft. You will see 10 columns, all of these are explained on the instructions tab, but I'll go through most of them in this article too.
The first thing to note is all of them are sortable and filterable. So if you want to filter by only outfielders you would click the drop-down arrow at the bottom right of the Position header cell. Then in the text box that appears you type "OF" and hit enter or click the OK button. It will only show outfielders on the list.
To clear this filter quickly, click the same drow-down arrow and then click "Clear Filter from Position".
It is very important that if you choose a different scoring format than what is loaded by default, you must re-sort this tab by Projected Score (largest to smallest) before you begin your draft. You don't have to use that field, but it is what I would use, or Overall Value since it is based off of that score.
If you decide to sort by any other columns during your draft, you will want to remember at some point to re-sort by the column that you prefer to use. Again that one for me is the Projected Score or Overall Value.
Cheat Sheet Tab Use
OK now that we have all that, let's start actually using the cheat sheet.
The sheet tells you a player's projected score, position, and rank compared to all other players left on the draft board (Undrafted Players Projection Rank). We also show you the ADP and the ADP Rank of all players not drafted yet (Undrafted Players ADP Rank).
Where the magic happens is in the Value fields. We have three on the points sheet, Overall, Hitter and Pitcher. These fields tell you the relative value of the player to who else is available. We compare them to all players (Overall), only hitters (if they are a hitter) and only pitchers (if they are a pitcher). Another nice feature we added is highlighting the top-10 Overall, Hitters and Pitchers.
If you want to sort by these fields to see only the top pitchers available for example, then you can. Again it is important to remember that you sorted this way so you can undo it or resort by overall at some point. If you don't then it will look like the pitchers are all the top available players to you.
As a player is drafted you will want to delete that player's data from the sheet. To do this, right-click the row number of the player and then click delete.
Right after you do that the player's row will be gone. The most valuable part of the cheat sheet happens now. All the Value fields will be updated to account for that player no longer being available.
In the screenshot above I remove Aaron Judge, the top-rated bat according to the projections and RTSports scoring format. When I did that you see that Juan Soto and Jose Ramirez's Overall and Hitter values increased slightly. The Undrafted Players Projection Rank and ADP Rank changed as well since it is based on who is available.
This happens for all other players as well. Pitcher-only values don't change when removing a hitter, same goes for hitters-only values when removing a pitcher. The overall score will adjust though.
Categories League Cheat Sheet
This Cheat Sheet is useful in all of your leagues that use categories as a scoring method. It can be used to help you draft in your head-to-head category leagues or Rotiserrie. The player's values are built off the same formula I use to build my award-winning rankings, which I tweaked in 2021 and led me to finish in the top-10 in 2021 (2022 results are still pending). I'm also in the top-10 for multi-year accuracy on FantasyPros with this formula.
Setup
For the category league sheet, there is not as much setup as the points league, so I combined the instructions and setup on one tab. Again I highly suggest reading through all the instructions to get a full understanding of the sheet.
The customization built in for this sheet is based on some category choices. As OBP and OPS leagues are becoming more popular I allow you to change to use either one of those categories instead of batting average. I have done the same for Quality Starts by allowing you to replace Wins with it.
There is also the ability to choose which site you are playing on. This updates position eligibility and ADP for your leagues site.
Once you have chosen the categories and site that your league uses, off to the Cheat Sheet tab.
Cheat Sheet Tab Preparation
This sheet should look similar to the points league one. The big difference though is there are a lot more columns, I"ll explain those later.
Also just like the points sheet you will want to re-sort the sheet by the column that helps you the most. For me, it is either the Undrafted Players Projection Rank (Smallest to Largest). This is the rank of all the available players in the draft according to my formula used to rank them. Similarly, you could sort by Overall Value (Largest to Smallest) and it would be the same order.
All of these fields are filterable and sortable as well. I just want to reiterate if you do filter or sort that you remember to undo the filter or re-sort by an overall value/rank field at some point. For how to do this go to the Points Sheet Preparation section.
Cheat Sheet Tab Use
A lot of this again will be very similar to the Points League Cheat Sheet, there is just more data to digest on the Categories one.
We still have the Overall, Hitter and Pitcher Value fields and if you didn't read above, I'll explain that these give you the relative value of the player to who else is available. We compare them to all players (Overall), only hitters (if they are a hitter) and only pitchers (if they are a pitcher). The sheet highlights the top-10 players for Overall, Hitters and Pitchers.
Where the category cheat sheet shines is we expanded these values fields to the specific categories. So you will have a relative value field for each of the 10 categories your league uses. This helps you be smarter when building your team.
Overall value is only a piece of the puzzle when drafting in category leagues. You can't just take the top player because the draft room board or ADP says he is at the top.
For example. If you've drafted heavy power early and need some speed, and maybe average too, then you need to start targeting those categories with your picks. This is where these category-specific value fields help, it will help you identify those players. To do so, sort (Largest to Smallest) by the category field you need to target to see the players that can help you the most in that category.
Now as I mentioned at the very beginning of this article, we simply provide the information. We do not make the picks for you. You need to use all of the sheet to make informed draft picks. For example, if you sort by steals, you'll see Estuary Ruiz is near the top for that category. However, his ADP is in the 300's. Clearly, you do not need to draft Ruiz for steals early in your drafts or at all.
When a player is drafted in your league you need to remove the player from the cheat sheet. This will update the values for all remaining players. You can see an example of how to do this in the Points League Use section.
Conclusion
These Fantasy Baseball Draft Cheat Sheets are only available to our All-Access members.
We also have one more thing that Mr. Dave Eddy himself provided. It is a Draft Tracker. I might write an article separately for this but download this sheet as well to help you track your team. This is going to be very helpful for those of you in Category Rotisserie leagues.
Feel free to email us by using our contact form or hit me up on Twitter, @F6P_Joe if you have questions.
Be prepared for the upcoming season by checking out all the Fantasy Baseball content on Fantasy Six Pack.
