Touching base/taking requests re: Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball

[Fantasy Sports Genie]

Oh God yes, that reminds me. The ability to pick up a player on a Tuesday and use him on that same Tuesday. ESPN lets you use any player whose team's game hasn't started yet, but I'd even settle for before first pitch of the earliest game, or even a set deadline like noon EST or Pacific or whatever. If I have a start limit, and it's Sunday, and my pitcher gets scratched, I want to be able to try and grab somebody for a start, if I want, and so forth.

I believe that's a setting you can alter in each league (well each custom not sure on public) on yahoo

It's been 3 - 4 years since I've used Yahoo, so it may very well be possible now. I hope it is.

A quick drive-by on this one. Yes, we've offered that option for ages, but when we had plus leagues, it was only available to plus leagues. But we haven't had them for... 3 or 4 years now, I'd guess.

If this is what you want, then you set your "Allow Roster Changes" setting to "Daily - Today". But while this fixes the edge case you mentioned, it introduces a different one. Suppose you want to drop guy A to add guy B. If guy A has already played today, you can't. Because the change would take place today, and you can't drop A for today when he's already played today. People always say, "Well then just do it for tomorrow", but that really isn't fair to others in your league; we can't let managers kinda queue up things to do in the future. Suppose another owner wanted to drop a guy who hadn't played today to pick up player B, but they find that they can't because you said you want to do it tomorrow. Not really fair to tell them, "You can't do that today; someone wants to do it tomorrow." So some people switch to Daily - Today and it does exactly what they want. But others find it frustrating to have to remember to do their drop/adds first thing in the morning, and they end up deciding they prefer Daily - Tomorrow.

Hope this helps...

[GiantsFan14]

Why wouldn't someone be able to just do the transaction and not have it take effect until the next day? That's how it works in regular leagues anyways isn't it?

[Fantasy Sports Genie]

Why wouldn't someone be able to just do the transaction and not have it take effect until the next day? That's how it works in regular leagues anyways isn't it?

Because that isn't what they asked for. They want to do it and have it take effect today. And they can do that. But what they can't do is do it today and have it take place today, unless it is too late, in which case it will take place tomorrow. That scenario is what I was explaining in my earlier post; we don't let you say, "I want to add this person tomorrow" when someone else could legitimately say, "I want to add that person today."

[daullaz]

On that same note, is it possible to combine "Daily - Today" option with the new daily waivers concept, giving us something where all players placed on waivers at the time their game starts, but all waivers process first thing the next morning?

This has the benefit of allowing for immediate changes to work around roster issues (as h0rt has suggested) while still allowing everyone the same shot at taking advantage of in-game situations.

The big negative I can see is that one of the main reasons for putting all players on waivers in the first place is to not just award the big prospect promotion to the guy closest to the computer, and by not having players on waivers before games start, that's not going to change.

[bigh0rt]

Why wouldn't someone be able to just do the transaction and not have it take effect until the next day? That's how it works in regular leagues anyways isn't it?

Because that isn't what they asked for. They want to do it and have it take effect today. And they can do that. But what they can't do is do it today and have it take place today, unless it is too late, in which case it will take place tomorrow. That scenario is what I was explaining in my earlier post; we don't let you say, "I want to add this person tomorrow" when someone else could legitimately say, "I want to add that person today."

Eh, I don't particularly care for that. I fully understand the mentality behind it, in that somebody has a legitimate gripe if they want to add a player for Monday, and you want to add him for Tuesday; but ultimately, even if I'm adding him for tomorrow because he/they already played today, I'm still adding him to my team before whoever wants him today is trying to add them to their team. Yes, that has more of the 'first come, first serve' that we are often trying to eliminate via Waivers, and such, but I don't feel that Player A should be penalized and not have access to a player, while Player B should, if that player is a Free Agent.

It's not a deal breaker, I just think you should be able to make a transactions whenever you're at the computer -- what should change is when those transactions take effect (today, if applicable. if not, tomorrow).

Keep up the great work, Genie.

[Mookie4ever]

Big props to the Fantasy Sports Genie.

I had some difficulties with a Fantasy Hockey League that I set up and was commishing for my son and his hockey team. The Genie helped me out and saved me tons of time and effort.

I stopped using Yahoo years ago because of the lack of customizability and clunkiness. It's a lot better now. The customizability is great, rankings are at least usable now and the customer service is terrific. Yahoo got itself a user back.

Thanks again Genie

[Fantasy Sports Genie]

Okay. First of all, a quick thanks to the quality community at the Cafe'. So many Internet outposts would just fill a thread like this with, "how about u dont suck so much roflcopter". The fact that we can have a real discussion about this stuff is really great. I'm sure I won't hit every point in the 8 pages, but let's see what I can do. I'll remind people of some ground rules:

- I can't always tell you everything I know. If I did, my employer would quickly tell me to stop posting here.
- In particular, I usually can't say if/when we are going to implement a feature in the future.
- If there is a feature I really know we aren't going to implement for some philosophical reason, I try to be up front about that and explain why.
- I'll often refer to "The List". So much cool stuff to do, so little time, so we always have a backlog of things we could do or would like to do, and sometimes it takes years for things to get off that list and actually get done. But if I say something is on "The List", I mean, "Yes. We know what that is. We know people want it. But it always has to get evaluated against all the other things we could do instead, and so far it hasn't won that battle."

re: Creating custom stats
The interest is understood. It is difficult to design a friendly user interface for such a thing, but we get why you'd want it. It also complicates other features we have, or that are asked for elsewhere in this thread.

re: Deeper player pool
We definitely get this one. It is complicated for a few reasons, many of which aren't particularly of interest to you guys as users. I do think this is an area where it shows that the Cafe aren't typical users; you guys definitely lean more towards the "power user" end of our user base, so while this feature is regularly requested here on the Cafe, we seldom get this feedback from other channels. That doesn't mean it won't ever happen, but may lend some perspective.

re: Message boards
This is a bit depressing since we just redid our message boards, but I hear you. Can people clarify what features in particular they are missing from our current implementation? Someone later mentioned the need to Edit Post. Thanks for that specific.

re: Improving player notes
Got it. In general, I've tried to spread the message here at Yahoo! that if the fantasy site is using real estate for data that doesn't impact your fantasy matchup, it may not be a good use of space.

re: League specific rankings
This has been on my personal wish list for a while. I've started this project a few times, and never gotten very far before being pulled off onto other things. It is largely a problem of scale. We have a LOT of leagues, with a lot of different settings. And it only gets harder if you look at things asked for elsewhere hear like custom stats, custom time ranges, etc. etc. But definitely on "The List"

re: Recaps, like we did for football
We're looking at it. Doing this for a roto league vs. a H2H points league is a different beast. We're trying to understand what that would look like.

re: Custom time ranges
Understood, but difficult due to scale. There aren't many places we can benefit from caching/sharing because leagues are all so different, but we can cache stat totals for the time ranges we display. If you can suddenly ask for stats over the last 37 days, and all sorts of people can do that, it could be expensive.

re: Custom display stats
That is, showing (perhaps optionally) more stats that aren't scoring stats for your league. It is on "The List".

re: Limiting starts/IP per H2H matchup
As a fantasy player I weep when I see this heh... we've had this discussion before, but it keeps coming up. I really think most leagues would be unhappy with this if we did implement it due to fenceposting on the last day. I should put a FAQ on this in the FAQ forum, because each time people explain all the "easy" ways to fix it, and we go through why they actually aren't easy or don't work. It keeps coming up, so at some point we may just do it anyway, but I really think it isn't a great idea, and I continue to believe that various features we already have are a better way to prevent streaming within H2H leagues.

re: Customized playoff schedules
Oh. I just read this carefully and it isn't what I thought. This is an interesting idea. I happen to know the code around playoff matchups is really tough to work with. Normally when people ask for this, they mean that they want custom seeding, and the more we discuss this with users, I think what they really want is custom tiebreakers so we get the seeds the way they want to begin with. But I now understand what you're asking for in this case.

re: Daily lineups for hitters, but weekly lineups for pitchers
Now that is actually sort of interesting. I'd have to think about that.

re: Adding last 2 weeks and last 6 weeks to rankings
We already do last 2 weeks, and have for a few years heh... We don't do last 6 weeks. The trick here is just how many different options to offer. If we do 6 weeks, someone asks for 8 weeks. And the page gets wider and wider, and doing custom ranks for leagues gets harder and harder. It is a tough balance.

re: Making it easier to download stats
I covered this in the thread. Difficult/impossible for us to do for contractual reasons. Someone asked for downloadable lists of players by positional eligibility. That wouldn't be tough if our contracts allow it; I could get a business guy to look into whether that is doable. In particular, almost every year I end up running a custom query for people here for guys that qualify as both SP and RP. For renewed leagues, *some* of what is asked for by Skin Blues is available on the Last Season page, under the Draft Results tab. Not everything, but possible people don't know about that. And I think it only exists for renewed leagues.

re: Better mobile app
We put a lot of work into our mobile apps, and these days they are very highly rated, so if there are particular things you don't like, we'd be interested in hearing them. I noticed the request for one app with all the games in it. I'm pretty sure there was a particular reason they didn't do it that way, but I'm not remembering it at the moment.

re: Year round access
On "The List". I'm a big fan.

re: Improved predraft ranking tool
Yup, that tool is showing its age. I'll make sure it is on The List if it isn't already there.

re: New stat categories
The last time we added new stats, we were careful about documenting all the easy-to-forget edge cases that go into this process. That makes it more likely we can add new ones going forward, and it is at least possible we'll sneak some in for this year.

re: Continuous waivers
As I mentioned in the thread, this is now implemented for all our draft and trade games. This basically means all unowned players are always on waivers, and your league specifies one or more days of the week when waivers clear. Done.

re: Enforcing minimums within roto
I'm not really understanding this. I understand why you don't want people to tank, and you want them to play more, but if they aren't, I don't really know how to punish them or... un-punish them in an automated way. Do you just mean you'd want us to automatically change people's rosters if they fall sufficiently below the GP/IP limits?

re: Multiple matchups per week in H2H
We know about this one. It comes up periodically, but not in high demand. It is largely difficult as a presentation problem. Lots of modules/pages would have to change to somehow show you all the matchups in a clear manner.

re: Adding decimal places to average stats
Makes sense. Not sure I've heard it asked for before. So I can mention it, but it may not be prioritized very highly.

re: ESPN's Player Rater
This has come up in a few contexts. I'll make a note to learn more about this and see where it fits in to the bigger picture.

re: Allowing swapping directly into the DL slot
This comes up periodically, and there are opponents as well as proponents for the idea. It is unlikely to change, but it is a known point of discussion. Same for letting people do transactions with a healthy player in the DL slot.

re: NA roster slots
Understood. On "The List".

re: Positional eligibility
I know I've spelled out *exactly* how that works from season to season, to assure people that it is entirely objective rather than subjective. If you aren't able to find that via searching the forums, I can try to write it up in the FAQ forum.

re: Streamlining plus league payouts
I'll pass on this feedback

re: Salaries/contracts
I almost think we should just start a different thread to discuss what people would really want in this area. It is again a power user feature, but it is at least on the radar. But difficult to do in a general way since leagues work so differently. We have some support for this, but I'm sure it isn't everything you might want. It was mentioned we should add this to our Plus leagues. That probably won't happen, since we stopped having Plus leagues years ago

re: Auction drafts for Pro Leagues
I think this is an issue of demand. We don't have many auction leagues. We don't have many pro leagues. It would be very difficult to reliably fill auction pro leagues so they could draft.

re: League transactions via e-mail, perhaps in a daily digest.
Interesting. Not sure I've heard that one before. I'll get it on "The List". It was also mentioned later in the thread to get these as mobile notifications; definitely on "The List".

re: Updating weekly rosters after Sunday at midnight, but before Monday games start
It is on "The List". I've always wondered why leagues lamenting this don't make their roster deadline Monday at midnight instead of Sunday at midnight, but in any case, we hear this one regularly, so we get that it is something lots of people want.

re: RP only slot
I don't see how that is really implementable in a fair way. Pitchers are assigned SP or RP via a completely objective formula. There isn't really a fair way to say, "I realize he's qualified as a SP, but I know he isn't really, so don't let him go in an SP slot." And we never take away positional eligibility during a season, because that leads to all sorts of pain and drama.

re: List of pitchers with two starts
So this isn't what you want, but I recently realized there is a page I wrote that somehow never got linked into the site heh... If you go to a URL like: http://basketball.fantasysports.yahoo.c ... team_games , it will tell you how many games each real team plays in each week. We don't yet tie this to individual players yet, so while that is useful info, it could be more user friendly. Now beyond that you're asking for starting pitchers. The problem there is that we don't get projected starting pitchers far enough in advance to every really know if a guy is projected to start twice in a week. It has been suggested that we could just assume that teams use a regular rotation and project out from there. We could, but experience tells me if we do that, we'll get just as many complaints as we do now; we'll just get them every time the simple assumption turns out to be wrong. We've all seen these threads: "Thanks Yahoo! for screwing me over. You said soandso was going to start, but he didn't, and now I'm going to lose my matchup." We do the best we can to present the information we have. Making educated guesses about who is going to start without any real data seems like it would take us in a bad direction.

re: The ability to use a player on the day you add him
This was discussed within the thread. The feature in question exists, and is Daily - Today roster changes. Someone later asked if it could be combined with Continuous Waivers. Sure. Any league can enable both of these features if they want.

re: Video highlights
Those clips were part of a partnership deal that has since lapsed. I'm pretty sure at the time we got way more feedback that they were wasting space on the page than positive feedback. I think Bwanna even wrote a Greasemonkey script to remove those icons heh

re: Public keeper leagues
This is the first request I've seen for such a thing. I'd wonder if there would be enough interest. We'd also have to pick a standard, public set of rules, which is a tricky business, and keeper leagues typically involve a lot of commish intervention, so it would take some thought.

re: Streamlined interface for points leagues
I'd need to better understand what page/pages you are referring to. I can tell you that points leagues are a *very* small portion of our baseball leagues. H2H and roto dominate.


Whew. I think that's it for now. Once again, we appreciate the thoughts and feedback. As a practical reality, I'm sure many of the requested features here won't get implemented this year, but hopefully some of them will. May the odds be ever in your favor...

EDIT: I got 23 bases for that post heh... You think it is impossible to get 3 home runs in a game? Try getting 23 bases.

[daullaz]

stuff

EDIT: I got 23 bases for that post heh... You think it is impossible to get 3 home runs in a game? Try getting 23 bases.

This is why you rule.

[GRIN]

The Cafe and Yahoo are lucky to have you Genie.

re: Message boards
This is a bit depressing since we just redid our message boards, but I hear you. Can people clarify what features in particular they are missing from our current implementation? Someone later mentioned the need to Edit Post. Thanks for that specific.

I post a weekly wrap-up/preview report on the message board. I use the same basic format each week (Matchup of the week, Last week and In other news sections). I use bold, italics, underline, HTML links and images. Since the structure is the same each week I copy the previous week's post and paste into a new message board post and then revise the message as necessary. When initially pasted, the new message appears to be formatted correctly. But once I actually post the message, the message doesn't always get posted as it appeared just before I hit the Submit button.

The most common problems for me are blank lines being removed (causing a squished look), and seemingly random lines whose soft returns are mid-way across the width of the message as opposed to all the way across (like it's now in a partial column format or the right margin has been moved to the left) and HTML links which are no longer clickable.

I hope this was clear. If not please let me know and I can somehow get you a screen print.
Thanks Genie!

[Bwanna]

Fantastic response. Thank you!

Starting thinking about functionality that some gm scripts provide, and I'll add these requests:

- Better daily matchup data for hitter and pitchers other than just the canned analysis text that is sometimes even for the wrong matchup
I.e., provide something similar to what my matchups script does that just shows actual data, only I'm sure Yahoo can do a lot better.

- Also I like to be able to see all the stat category values in all the matchups, thus another script:


- I sometimes forget about or pending claims in leagues because they are only displayed on my team page, and not also on the league home page. Can that information be displayed in both places?
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24044

- On the Yahoo player profile page, the matchup data for a pitcher shows his team's next opponent, even if he won't be starting against them, which is worthless and sometimes misleading. If Yahoo could should the matchup data based on the next projected start it would be great.

- A nit, but how about showing a player's age next to his birthdate on his profile page, so I don't have to waste cycles figuring that out?
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/10066

- I really like to see all of the transactions for all of my leagues on the home page:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/72998

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/85285


- Color-code the roto standings stat table so I can at-a-glance tell where strengths and weaknesses are, and with whom it makes the most sense talk trades:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9173

- Providing a way to copy my roster in plaintext or otherwise-pasteable format would be very helpful:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/53909

- A way to display all of a pitcher's latest appearances so I can make decisions when relievers are less likely to make an appearance:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/29811


Just a few more ideas.