Making Sense of ADP

ADP, or Average Draft Position, is one of the most commonly cited statistics in fantasy baseball discourse. It allows owners to look at a single number and quickly determine a player's market value, making it easier to identify potential value picks in a draft. Furthermore, fantasy analysts can use it to determine how a particular player is perceived in the industry, helping them identify both breakouts and busts.

We've all grown so accustomed to working with ADP that we don't think about it anymore. In truth, we probably should. One of the most common traps for novice fantasy owners is to draft based on ADP, leaving them unable to respond to the nuance of a specific draft. There is also no universal ADP, so everybody who uses it has to choose which source to draw from. It's relatively rare for the sources to diverge substantially, but it does happen and can generate an advantage for the perceptive owner.

Let's take a closer look at what ADP means and how it's used.

A Brief Overview of ADP

ADP may be defined as the average pick number with which a player is taken in a standard redraft league. If a particular platform hosts fantasy drafts, it likely publishes ADP data based on the behavior of owners on the site. For example, ESPN, CBS Sports, Yahoo!, Fantrax, RT Sports, and the NFBC all have distinct ADP data. FantasyPros is also worth a mention here, as it aggregates all six ADP sources above to produce a single composite number.

Most sites also show you ADP in the draft room, creating the temptation to pick whoever has the earliest ADP remaining as opposed to the best fit for your roster. This can help you early on in a draft but turns into a problem later on.

For instance, most fantasy analysts agree that there is a clear top three in 2020: Mike Trout, Ronald Acuna Jr, and Christian Yelich. All three combine power, speed, and average, reliably contributing above-average numbers across the board. If you're lucky enough to have a top-three pick this season, you probably shouldn't deviate from this trio of excellence.

Everybody agonizes over who should go first, so ADP is quite uniform at the beginning. Both Trout and Acuna have a composite ADP of 1.6 on FantasyPros, with Yelich's 3.0 suggesting very little deviation at the top. It's much more of an inexact science as the draft goes on though, and you can probably stop looking at ADP completely once 150 or so selections are made.

For example, Bryan Reynolds of the Pittsburgh Pirates slashed .314/.377/.503 with 16 HR last season. Fantasy owners are generally skeptical of his performance, taking him around 180th overall per FantasyPros. ADP may say that you can wait on him, but Reynolds could be selected much earlier if he has another believer in your league. He was selected 113th in one NFBC league, dashing the hopes of anyone banking on his availability later on. If you feel that Reynolds is the best available option for your roster, you should take him regardless of ADP. You don't want to miss your guys.

What Differentiates ADP Sources From One Another?

There are two significant factors that can change a player's value from platform to platform: a site's default format and a player's default ranking and projection on the site. Some people assume that all sites have the same default format because it says "5x5 roto," but roster construction matters. For example, standard CBS leagues include two catchers, while ESPN and Yahoo! only use one catcher. Catchers are generally drafted earlier on CBS as a result.

Likewise, the NFBC (or National Fantasy Baseball Championship) structures most of its leagues differently. While most other platforms focus on individual leagues that have no bearing on each other, NFBC leagues frequently have a large overall prize for the best team regardless of league. This encourages owners to select risky, high-variance players earlier, as you need to spike a few lottery tickets to get the 100th percentile outcome and win the top prize. Finishing in the 80th percentile in every category is generally enough to dominate a single fantasy league, reducing the need for variance plays.

Similarly, rankings can affect when players are selected on a site. For example, here is the FantasyPros ADP data for Joey Gallo:

ESPN drafters see Gallo as a top-50 fantasy asset, while he's outside of the top 100 on RT Sports. Both are clearly outliers relative to the other sites, so let's examine why.

RT Sports is the easier of the two. Every other site ranks Gallo in the 60-80 range by default, meaning that he pops up on the draft screen in the fifth or sixth round of most drafts. RT Sports has Gallo at 106, a full two rounds later. It sounds lame (and you shouldn't do this), but owners are more likely to select players who are displayed by default as opposed to searching for other options, especially in the first half of a draft. Maybe drafters assume that he's already been taken?

ESPN ranks Gallo 74th, so showing up earlier isn't the reason he's so popular. His ESPN projections (.222/.344/.527 with 39 HR in 482 ABs) are slightly more pessimistic than his FanGraphs Depth Charts projections (.227/.354/.554 with 44 HR in 482 ABs), so that's not it either. Honestly, it likely comes down to his player caption.

Most sites have player captions or outlooks that provide owners with a brief snapshot of a player's profile for emergency reference. The ESPN profile on Gallo is overwhelmingly positive:

"Three true outcomes" hitter: Thy name is Joey Gallo. No player in baseball history has seen a greater percentage of his plate appearances end in a home run, walk or strikeout than Gallo (59%). But while he's an all-or-nothing type, his flaws aren't nearly as damaging as many of the models who have come before him. While Gallo's 2019 season ended July 23 due to a broken hamate bone, until that point he had boosted his line-drive rate to 25% and posted top-six Statcast numbers with his 93.0 mph average exit velocity, 52.3% hard-contact rate and 11.4% barrel rate per trip to the plate, things that make him the most truly threatening power source in all of baseball. When healthy, Gallo stakes a legitimate claim to a 50-homer, 100-walk, albeit 200-strikeout, ceiling season, and his improving metrics make him less of a drain on your batting average than once feared. Check back on him during spring training to ensure no lingering injury effects, but if he's in the clear, he's a potential points-league monster (top 25-capable) who should also find himself in the season-ending Player Rater top 50."

ESPN is projecting Gallo to lose 30 points from his 2019 batting average and fall 10 long balls shy of 50, but that's not the impression you get from reading the above. In the heat of the moment, such a positive take appears to be pointing undecided ESPN drafters toward choosing Gallo nearly every time.

Which ADP Should I Use?

You should look at two different sources of ADP for most drafts: your platform's and a second one based on how competitive your league is. If you're drafting on CBS, you should have a rough sense of that site's ADP and rankings. Not only do they control who both you and your rivals see on your screen by default, but anybody who leaves the draft or disconnects may end up auto-selecting based on default rankings. Since everyone else can see your site's ADP too, you need another source to act as a differentiator.

Your other source depends on how competitive your league is. If it's full of owners who really know the player pool, this author recommends NFBC draft data. All NFBC leagues are high-stakes, so its player base tends to be better prepared than other platforms. If your league has owners who prioritize players from their home team or are more interested in the social aspects of fantasy baseball than hardcore analysis, FantasyPros is likely a better source than the cutthroat NFBC environment.

Ultimately, ADP is a tool you can use to predict a rival's behavior and inform your own decisions. You should never make a pick based on ADP alone, but instead utilize it as one factor among many in your decision-making process.

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