Fantasy Baseball 2.0; Beefing up Yahoo

Each and every season, fantasy baseball as a hobby grows by insane leaps and bounds. Not just the ever increasing queue of people that sign up for a public Yahoo league for the very first time, but the research and gaming technology behind it all too.

Let's face it. The greatest thing to happen to our hobby clearly was the Internet. The net brought us great research and informational sites like Baseball Prospectus, Baseball Reference and Rotoworld. The Internet also brought us live updates, sent directly to your cell phone if you so choose. The modern fantasy sports player has literally hundreds of free resources, all a simple mouse click away. Lots of it still unexplored.

In Fantasy Baseball 2.0, I'd like to explore some of those vast resources with a series of columns on just that. Resources of all sorts that help you become not only better informed, but a better player all around.

Beefing up Yahoo

First of all, a little disclaimer; you are going to need to run the Firefox Internet Browser for some of 2.0 to even work. These tools may work on Internet Explorer, I do not know. I don't use Explorer, ever. Once I switched over to Firefox, I was sooo sold on the simpleness of it all, I don't think I could open up Microsoft's Explorer ever again. I am not even sure that Explorer works on my computer, but hey that's just me.

Last spring I ran across a gentleman by the name of Glenn Carr over at the FBC. Glenn was working with some odd baseball script, I don't remember what it was doing or supposed to be doing exactly, but I remember the script was giving him troubles. So he was bouncing around looking for help, and I replied and turned him on to a Firefox extension that somebody else at the cafe shared with me in the past. [See beauty of the internet above]. This simple extension was Greasemonkey, and the tools that Glenn Carr produced with it really should be shared with all.

Once you have your Firefox set up, and open, you'll need to install the Greasemonkey extension. Now 99% of all Firefox extensions add on by themselves. You click a button, the add-on automatically installs itself, you close your browser, you open your browser, and you are golden. That's really all there is to it.

Greasemonkey is a coders program and it runs simple scripts on certain pages, nothing more. You need not concern yourself with that though. Just know, that these scripts do cool things. Common sense things in many cases.

Go ahead and install greasemonkey, and then restart your browser. Open up in one tab your favorite Yahoo league, and in another tab head on over to Greasespot. At Greasespot you will find hundreds upon hundreds of scripts, all designed to do different tweaks to different sites you probably visit everyday multiple times. Sites like Google, Yahoo and probably even your favorite message board.

The best part about all these scripts is they are run through the greasemonkey extension. What does that mean to you? Well if you have greasemonkey installed right now, look to the bottom right hand corner or your browser, you will see a smiling monkey. Right click on the monkey to shut off any script that may be running, simply refresh the page you are currently viewing and the script will go away. It’s all really that easy. Go ahead and bookmark greasespot, as you will probably be back.

What I want to focus on today is just some of Glenn Carr’s contribution to Greasemonkey, because I know this is truly the best keep secret in fantasy sports. There are millions of fantasy players out there, and these scripts have only been downloaded, in most cases, less than 500 times. It amazes me. Glenn Carr needs a good pimp.

If you do happen by Glenn Carr on some of the forums out there, I believe he goes by the handle "Bwanna", please take the time to thank him, for what I am about to show you is amazing.

The first script is Player Notes - You see those little folder icons next to the players names on your roster. These Icons are designed to take you to another page to read updated news. No more. This script here will display a little tool tip containing the player notes in a small pop up, just by simply mousing over. After installing the 'Player Notes' script, simply refresh your Yahoo League page and you should see a little pop up when you mouse over the folder icon.

Congratulations, you just installed your first greasemonkey script. Painless and kind of cool, but hey, we are just getting started.

If you like that mouse over concept, try Smack Tool tip - This script displays each owners recent smack in a tool tip when hovering over the smack icon, so that you don't have to visit the owner's team page to read their smack

These are some of my favorites.

Would you like to expand the amount of information on your front page, things like the trading block, with out even having to head on over to the trading block itself.

try these scripts.

Trading Block - This script displays the trading block on the league overview page, but only displays teams that have positions, players, etc. listed on the trading block.

Expand Recent Activity - this increases the number of messages displayed on the league overview page, and displays the content of the messages.

Team Notes - Display team notes on league overview page.

Or how about these common sense scripts.

2-Week Stat Filter - Adds options to display player stats over last 2 weeks and 'today'.

Player Search - Adds player search box to sub navigation if it doesn't already exist on the page

Team Stat Totals - Display totals for a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball team

Standings Link - Adds standings link to every page Always keep 'Standings' link one click away.

Watch List Link - Adds the Watch List link to additional pages for football and baseball leagues.

More Player Stats - Adds IP to the big stats displayed at the top of pitcher's profile page. Should add it to both the Profile page and the Game Log page if the current year is displayed

Subnavigation Links - Adds sub navigation links, Roster, Team Log, and Propose Trade to opposing team pages on a Yahoo fantasy baseball league. If these two scripts are also installed, but listed after this script in the order in which they are executed, they'll add a Standings and a player search box same new list of links.

Show MLB Matchup Info - Provides a direct link to the MLB.com scouting report for each of the starting pitcher match ups.

Roto Standings+ - Add some more info to the standings tables for a Yahoo fantasy roto league.

After installing each script, just refresh your Yahoo league page and see if you like the tweak. If you don't like the way it works, just click on the monkey and shut it off. It really is that simple.

Lastly. I want to leave you with this script. It is the granddaddy of them all. I left it for last, so as not to give an edge to the extremely lazy, just the mainly lazy.

These scripts i just shared with you, will already cut hours off your overall research time, but I can't give everything away, now can I.

Okay yes I can .. and here it is ..

Live Stats - Free live baseball fantasy scoring. I don't think it really needs an explanation. Did i mention its very free, and very live. After installing it, look for the link where the red stat tracker link used to be.

So there you go. I hope it all helps. Once you get familiar with some of the scripts here, be sure to head back over to greasespot, and see if you can't find other scripts that are useful to other websites in ways you didn't even think of.

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