Couldn’t we all use a helping hand once in awhile? Especially if it’s free! Something this site has become known for is tracking down great free Fantasy Baseball draft tools and free Fantasy Football draft tools. Why am I always finding new tools? Well, it’s mostly because I’m always looking for help with my own Fantasy Baseball teams!
A couple years ago, I also posted the 34 Best Free In-Season Fantasy Baseball Tools, too, to help you once your draft is over and the season has begun!
While all the articles we’re going to mention here are free, there are some absolutely awesome premium Fantasy Baseball draft tools, too. For instance, the premium version of FantasyPros’ Draft Wizard gives you a lot of bang for your buck. From their award-winning Draft Simulator to their Draft Analyzer to their Cheat Sheet Creator and the ultimate Draft Assistant, you’ll have every base covered. The way they have it set up now, you pay one subscription fee, and you can have the tool for ALL SPORTS all year long, plus you can get it for unlimited leagues! If you’re a Fantasy fan that plays in both Fantasy Baseball and Fantasy Football leagues, this is the must-have tool for you.
If Switzerland played Fantasy Sports, they would have added this tool to their Swiss Army knife.
When you consider what you could win by taking the championship home in your Fantasy Baseball of Fantasy Football leagues, it’s a solid investment. If you have more than one league — this is a fantastic investment.
Send us some of your favorite FREE Fantasy Baseball Draft tools and I’ll add them into the list if I think they’ll be helpful to readers. (If you’re a website or a writer, and I missed your creation, shoot me a note!) You can contact me through this link – but be specific with why your draft tool is so helpful to readers!
These free Fantasy Baseball draft tools are not ranked in any order. But I numbered them for referencing in other articles. Enjoy!
This is a) entertaining as heck, and b) very helpful.
“The Draft Simulator is an efficient way to practice for your draft. It’s similar to doing a live mock draft except that you’re drafting against our computer algorithm (which uses a random selection of expert cheat sheets and ADP sources).”
You select your league size, roster requirements and which spot in the draft order your team will be picking – and then begin your mock draft. It’s a very fast exercise. You can knock out a mock draft in less than 15 minutes! You can experiment, too. Draft one player to see what might happen a few rounds later, then if you don’t like it, you can revert your picks and try a different player. It’s all about being completely prepared for what might happen during your real drafts.
I did a 23-round mock draft in 10 mins. It even shows you the percentages of players that experts would recommend you pick. At any time in your draft, you can choose to auto-pick the rest of the way, or just start over.
If you upgrade to a PRO account, you’ll get more in-depth analysis, keeper support and more customizable settings. My guess is – you’ll like the free part of the simulator after using it a few times, and then you’ll fall in love with the upgraded version.
Goose at Fantasy Rundown sorts through all of the Fantasy Baseball articles that get posted daily on all of the other Fantasy websites. Then, unlike an RSS feed, he handpicks the best articles every day — and posts a link to them on his site, with a sentence about why that one is worth reading. (He does this for Fantasy Football, too.)
This is your new morning sports page — but for Fantasy Baseball!
He’s like your personal assistant, tracking down great content for you to read. The quick synopsis for each article makes it so you’re not just clicking blind. Great stuff!
You should be familiar with FantasyPros.com by now. While you might not have ever visited their site, you likely have seen their rankings widget on many Fantasy Baseball sites! Their free rankings on their site show the consensus rankings of over 28 writers!
You can sort by all players, by all hitters, by all pitchers or by individual positions. And you’ll see the “Best” spot a player has been ranked and the “Worst.” You’ll also get the average ranking spot, as well as the players ADP, and a special “vs. ADP” column. You can adjust the number of games for position eligibility – and you can sort rankings by just your favorite columnists, or eliminate ones you think are no bueno.
Formerly Rotoworld, NBC Sports is one of the most extensive player news sources out there, and they do a great job of updating players you’re interested in – just before you realize you are interested in them! The smart move on your part is to open up their headlines page in one tab on your browser, and just bounce back and forth to it throughout the day. It auto-refreshes, so you’ll see the top breaking news on the day. It could be info on a big-name player, or a big piece of news on a small-name player.
Along with the Mock Draft Simulator above, this tool analyzes how your team did and measures it up against other teams to see how you did.
That’s for free.
If you upgrade to a PRO account, you’ll get details on strengths and weaknesses, along with analysis of your ESPN and Yahoo drafts, and your real drafts. You can also import mock drafts from Yahoo! and ESPN.
If you’re a Fantasy Baseball player, you have really have to love awesome niche sites like this one. They do relief pitchers — and that’s it. Nobody follows MLB bullpens like these guys. No one does a better job of being in front of possible bullpen changes.
Hang onto your hat.
This isn’t your grandfather’s version of MLB depth charts. You’ll get a team’s projected 25-man roster, including a projected batting lineup, bench, starting rotation and bullpen. They also show the platoons they expect to see, and indicate which players are on the outside looking in. Finally, they show notable minor leaguers for each squad, at each position.
Roster Resource had its own website a few years ago, and they were crushing it so bad, FanGraphs went out and acquired them. This is a big deal.
Just a ton of information for each baseball team. Well done. It’s also something I refer to frequently when writing articles, building player rankings, etc.
In 2006 and 2007, I sat in on meetings at CBS Sports where they were trying to think of ways to data-mine all the information they had from owners playing on their Fantasy league services. This “Roster Trends” page was the result of those meetings, and other league services have since copied that, much like they did the original Commissioner.com product that CBS SportsLine used.
With this page, you can see the the “Most Added,” “Most Dropped,” “Most Viewed,” and “Most Traded” players in CBS leagues. If you are in a CBS league already, you can view this within your league, and it will show you which players are available on the waiver wire — which is absolutely invaluable!
Everybody loves them some ADP. The industry standard for Average Draft Positions has recently become the ADP rankings from the National Fantasy Championships, which is possibly the largest and most important competition in the nation.
I remember working with Robert Burghardt back in 2000, when I owned FantasyRef.com. Smart guy! I really like this tool, too! Cool way to get dollar values for a league with a specific size and style. And you don’t end up seeing 40 catchers with dollar values, like you would at some of the major media sites. (Very few leagues are drafting 40 catchers – much less spending $1 or more on them!)
You can even adjust the percentages you would like to spend on each position. They also show you their projections for each player for the coming season, so you understand why there’s a difference in price.
Let’s face it – we can all be our own Fantasy Baseball experts. You do the research, the reading and the statistical analysis, so why not create your own cheat sheet? You can set up some different tiers for each position, and you can write in some specific player notes to help you during the draft.
A quick one-page, table-view look at position eligibility of players in standard Rotisserie leagues that use 20-games played as the eligibility mark. STELLAR WORK!
As I mentioned before, ThomasGeorge.com has been doing this forever. So if you ever want to do your own projections, download the previous three years or so, average them out, then adjust those stats accordingly. Enjoy over 20 SEASONS’ worth of stats!
This is like the ProFootballTalk.com of Baseball, which makes it one of the great free fantasy baseball draft tools out there. They have their fingers on the pulse of every Major League Baseball team, and you’ll know about possible deals (and possible players to pick up) before nearly everyone else.
If you’ve ever spent any time over at Reddit, then you know that a great Reddit, with active Redditors, can provide a ton of great information. It’s essentially like crowdsourcing out your Fantasy GM job, getting help with player news, analysis, figuring out who to pick up and drop, and Fantasy strategies. Even if you don’t post comments, just reading what everyone else writes is extremely helpful.
Also, don’t forget their Reddit.com/r/FindaLeague page. Use this free forum to find a league to join – or to find players to join your Fantasy Baseball league.
They say it all, “Monitoring the lineups for all 30 teams so you don’t have to.” Keep an eye on this during Spring Training! They also have a Spring Training Trends section that looks very promising, helping Fantasy Baseball owners stay ahead of the game with lineup observations and charts!
Another great source for stats. As a matter of fact, they claim to be the only site to have Major League, Minor League and College Stats for players all on the same page. You gotta love that! (ESPN’s Tristan Cockcroft turned me on to this site back in 2003 and I can’t get enough of it.) They have some great stat records dating back to the late ‘50s.
The design team over at MLB just makes beautiful pages, and Baseball Savant’s tools on their page are fantastic. Figure out which hitters give themselves the best chances at home runs and line drives.
I like their Fantasy Advice Search Tool! You input the two player names you are choosing between, and the app spits out a percentage that shows how many Fantasy Baseball experts like one player over another. That basically means — this percentage of experts would choose “this” player over “that” player.
Many Fantasy Baseball sites have closer charts, showing which pitchers are considered the closers, who’s the setup guy, who’s next in line for saves and maybe even some dark-horse picks for saves. But this is by far one of the best closer charts around!
Have you ever set up a Google Alert for anything before? It’s pretty awesome. Type in things you are interested in, and every day (or however often you choose), you’ll get a Google Alert email with links to all of the most recent articles on that topic. For instance, if you add “Fantasy Baseball” to your Google Alerts, you’ll get links to all the top Fantasy articles sent to your inbox from news websites like CBS Sports, ESPN and a ton of sites you didn’t even know about. It’s a great way to start every day!
Another one of the best emails I get each morning is this Prospects Report from Baseball America. Every single day of the season, the BAPR tracks down all the top prospects and show you their boxscores from the previous night’s games. From the minor leagues to Arizona Fall League to winter ball, they’ve got you covered on prospects. Free Fantasy Baseball draft tools, are the best!
Once again, another stellar free tool from FanGraphs/Roster Resource, as they keep you abreast of the Opening Day status of each player on each MLB team.
OK, this is the last one from RR, I promise! The really cool part is how you can break it down by contract extension, 40-man roster, trades, etc. Very cool… Oh, and also, don’t forget to check out their Free-Agent Tracker Tool!
There is absolutely no way to get faster news and reactions to news than by following Fantasy Baseball writers on Twitter. It’s one of the more common free Fantasy Baseball draft tools, but it is still one of the best.
So do you have some free Fantasy Baseball draft tools that I don’t know about yet? Shoot me an email through my “Contact DG” page and I’ll check it out — and possibly add it! You’re also welcome to comment on this post about any of the tools above and your experiences with them. Good luck!
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David, I'm blown away. I was completely unaware of many of these tools. What an extremely helpful compilation!
Thanks, Tim! I've been kinda working on this off and on for a few weekends. The "101 Fantasy Baseball Tips" e-book has me much farther behind on this site than I hoped to be! But yeah, the guys that created these tools/pages definitely deserve some props. Big help! (Thanks again!)
I am all about draftstreet and thrill of weekly and daily leagues so I was wondering which one of these tools you think is better for those kind of leagues as opposed to the season long league. Great list, much appreciated!
Hmmm, well, I'd say check out DFSEdge.com for daily articles, and I'd also use their MLB Position Rankings Tool with starting lineups/salaries for all of the daily Fantasy sites, including DraftStreet.com.
Thanks for the tool list. You may also wish to mention http://www.draftlotto.com (in addition to or instead of draftpicklottery) - this website has far more features than draftpicklottery, and moreover, is free.
It's great you've posted these, but the post needs to be updated. All data and links are pointing to 2013. Mailing it in a little this year?