benchcoach

Catching up

I know it’s been almost a week since I got back from the FSTA conference last Thursday but it’s been pretty hectic. I met a lot of cool people over at the conference and got a better feel of the market and what else is out there. The good news is that several people had heard of Benchcoach and there weren’t any direct competitors. I did meet some companies that provided analytics for fantasy football leagues such as Fantasy Football Draft and their Robocoach technology. A lot of drinking and a lot of networking and overall, I came out of the conference pretty happy with the contacts I made. The final night was capped by a trip to a rooftop bar outside of Wrigley Field. I would highly recommend taking a trip to Wrigley and trying to get into one of those roof top bars although they seemed to be mostly private parties.

Here are some pics from the roof top bar.

Rotonation’s writeup

Rotonation has written a nice review on us. Rotonation is a pretty good blog to read for coverage of the fantasy sports industry so anyone interested should subscribe to their blog.

Latest feature

We recently released a new version of Benchcoach which includes the following new feature: The ability to include your bench players into your projections. This way, if you’re in a league that has a larger bench and fewer starting spots, you can now include the bench players contributions into your projections. We’re looking to add additional features here that would allow you to just include benched hitters or benched pitchers so keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.

More data on the way!

Late last night, Retrosheet announced that they had finally obtained the rights to publish the 1999 game event data. We’re looking to load that data this week, and make use of the complete set of data for the past 50 years to provide additional analytics for those interested.

Retrosheet is an organization of volunteers who collect, codify and publish historical baseball data and it’s due to their efforts that we are able to provide some of our analytics and we can’t say enough nice things about them.

Thanks Retrosheet!

Player IDs

Just saw Tangotiger’s post on player ids and thought we would release our player id mapping file.
We have Yahoo, ESPN, CBS player ids in addition to the retrosheet ids, Holtz ID, Baseball-Reference id and will be looking to add MLB ids in the near future. We also have BIS ids but we’re not sure if we should be publishing them. We’ll ask them and publish those ids if it’s allowable.

We do nightly refreshes so we’ll try to keep posting new player id files periodically or upon request if anyone else is interested.

Blog outage and recovery

We lost the computer that hosts the blog this morning, so we’ve migrated it over to slicehost. We were running it on an old Mac Mini that I had laying around, and after 5 short years it just gave up the ghost.

Slacker.

New Look to the blog

Thanks to the work of a certain Matt Bauer, our blog’s theme looks like our site’s. We also included a link to all our site’s functionality at the top and we now include our tweets on the right side as well.

Positional Rank and Full Projected Standings

We’ve just launched two new features for Benchcoach’s league analyzer.

We now calculate and display your estimated final season standing for all the leagues. This will help head to head league owners determine whether or not their team can make the playoffs.

In addition, we’ve also added positional strength analytics.

You can see which player is above average for that position and which areas are below area. We’re still tweaking this but from the feedback we’ve gotten so far, this is something that people have asked for.

Try out Benchcoach today and take the tour to see what else Benchcoach can do.

Tools for fantasy baseball

Mashable just listed out 20 tools for fantasy baseball and they were nice enough to point out benchcoach with a screen shot. Awesome! Even through the season has started we still have things that people can use, and we’ve got a whole bunch of tools planned for next years draft. Good stuff. (via rotonation)

Does Benchcoach chatter?

Yes, we do over here, but we now also Twitter. Follow us on twitter (search for benchcoach) to find out real time what we’re up to and to