Today's Fantasy Rx.

As of yesterday, I've completed around 2425 player reviews, including over 1,265 position players and over 1,160 pitchers. About sixty players were covered as both American Leaguers and National Leaguers, an overlap that I expect to remedy next year by simply including full seasons statistics for every player in whatever league they begin the year. A few players also overlapped due to their selections in the Rule 5 draft, thereby earning two separate reviews.

Only one person e-mailed me about a missing player, Pablo Ozuna. I overlooked him since he missed the entire year due to injury, thereby staying out of my primary statistical references. Instead of adding yet another day of reviews, I'll go back and add him to second base prospects in the next day or two. I know I used this as my Rx a few days ago, but if there's anyone else in the majors, AAA, or AA that you'd like to see reviewed, I'm perfectly willing to go back and add them at this point.

Now that the reviews are completed, I plan to contextualize them over the next couple of days. However, that must wait for a day or two as I'd like to first provide additional explanation of some of our valuation models, which will begin after I provide a brief update on where this article is headed over the next few weeks.

Several of you have written in about the archive, we are working on improving it. We're also hoping to develop a player archive sometime soon, but we neither have the software nor programming expertise to set up any sort of automatic archiving like the daily news update sites, which has delayed both of these projects past our intended completion date.

By next week, I expect to run a few articles on the current available fantasy sources, including magazines and websites, so I can offer my recommendations on what services you should use depending on your budget. We recently picked up four of this year's magazines, but so far I've only barely had time to glance at them.

Sometime soon I also hope to discuss one or more of the CDM Challenge games more thoroughly. You can make a lot of money by simply playing the percentages, though you need to know several tips in order to maintain an advantage over most of your opponents. CDM's own rating system is ludicrously useless in evaluating players, so I'll offer a few more concrete options.

Finally, I'm sure many of you would like to know when we'll post our 2002 projections. We're working on them every day now, but due to time constraints, I'll be happy if we have them available when position players report to Spring Training near the end of the month. I know this is later than some of you would prefer, but we're committed to the daily columns and can't prognosticate any faster.

Now that the reviews are finished, I have much more freedom as to my daily articles, so if you'd like to me to discuss a subject or to review a particular topic more thoroughly, please let me know. I also may begin cribbing ideas from general e-mails, so don't be surprised if you find yourself mentioned on an article. If you're uncomfortable with publication of your thoughts, please just include a "Do not post" note with future correspondence.

Sometimes referred to as a scarcity model, we based Category Dollars on work originally presented by John Benson in Rotisserie Baseball: Playing for Blood, but we believe we've refined our calculations into both a more precise and easier to use method than anything we've previously seen published.

Everyone who's written to us seems to understand how Category Dollars work for the quantitative categories, normally including HR, RBI, SB, W, S, and R and K in 5x5. Before elaborating on the qualitative categories, I'll provide another brief example in case anyone had questions that didn't have a chance to e-mail.

Cliff Floyd's 31 home runs, divided by the total 2480 HR produced by the top 168 position players in a standard 12-team NL league, gives him a .0125 share of the Home Run Dollars. In a 12-team, 4x4 league with a $260 budget and a 65/35 offense/defense split, $507 Home Run Dollars need to be distributed among those 268 players. .0125 * $507 = $6.3375 Home Run Dollars for Floyd. Similar calculations are run for his other two quantitative categories.

The "top 168 position players" constantly change after every updated projection, and these calculations can be run quite simply in most spreadsheets, insuring that the top overall players, those most likely to be drafted, are included regardless of position.

I'll digress for a moment to return to position scarcity. Looking back to the very first day of NL Catcher reviews, I only listed 15 catchers with at least $1 of value. Some of you might wonder, "What happened to the other nine catchers?" The answer is that while they must be drafted and thereby given a dollar of value, they neither inherently earn nor deserve any allocated value in our calculations.

Due to the sheer number of position players available in most leagues, especially in relatively shallow mixed leagues, an effective valuation system must distribute available funds to the top offensive players, regardless of position, to insure that you always consider the top offensive options. The number of required catchers can exceed the actual total of catchers with positive value because position scarcity is a question of strategy, not a question of valuation.

I provided 8 different 2001 dollar values with every major leaguer from last season, and the values in the second and fourth column (TCD) are where you find positive amounts for these other catchers. Only position players with horrible batting averages will fall into negative Total Category Dollars. Many other players will still possess positive values without ranking in the top 168. While you certainly could configure the formulas to insure an accurate position distribution, we believe that the importance of drafting additional objective value outweighs any positional concerns.

On one of our draft sheets each season, we list all players with negative draft value that we believe will earn positive TCD. In case the draft goes badly for us and we run short of position players, or in Ultra leagues with deep reserve rosters, we then have an available pool of players for the late rounds who won't hurt our team, but also won't help as much as those with Positive Draft Value.

As this column already appears fairly long and I'm trying to return to a more "normal" length after all the reviews, I'll stop here and continue tomorrow with a more thorough description of valuation in qualitative categories.

Today's Fantasy Rx: Mastersball.com's message board has hosted a somewhat lively debate regarding this exact subject over the past few days. I encourage everyone with some extra time to browse through the strings "Calculating Batting Average", "Fantasy Theory: BA", "More BA", and "BA, my final post (I hope)". I'll also be reviewing these ideas again in preparation for tomorrow's article.