Extensive. Innovative. Flexible. Powerful. These are the key traits that
describe Rhino Baseball and that set it apart from its competitors. Since 1998,
Rhino Baseball been leading the charge in
providing robust software for serious fantasy baseball enthusiasts.
We didn't create this software to just cover the basics and do what everybody
else does. And we're not aiming to please the casual fantasy player or users
with weak computer skills. Rather, our goal was to create software that goes far
beyond the basics and covers every aspect of fantasy baseball. We wanted to
build something that experienced fantasy players could really sink their teeth
into and take both their leagues and skills as a GM to the next level. In order
to accomplish that we had to invent data retrieval & analysis tools for
rotisserie baseball that were unlike anything anyone else had ever built in the
past. So we crafted an extensive set of innovative analysis tools and tied them
together to a powerful database. The result is database software that's powerful
and rich enough to satisfy even those fantasy baseball experts who have been
playing for more years than they care to count.
Here are some of the key features that make Rhino Baseball a truly unique
piece of fantasy baseball software:
Relational Database Power:
The
main ingredient that makes Rhino Baseball so
powerful is its built-in relational database. The Rhino
Baseball Database, which uses the Sybase SQL Anywhere database
engine, provides you with powerful search, sort, filter, and query capabilities.
And it comes fully loaded with
player info and combined AL/NL player stats from 1994-2005 so that you can setup team rosters and begin
calculating forecasts & player values as quickly as possible. Integration with
our stats downloading service makes importing weekly MLB player stats a snap. Imagine performing complex database queries such as
"show me all the left-handed hitting 1B who are 30 years old or younger,
who have hit 20+ HR and scored 75+ Runs." Or maybe you prefer to
"graphically compare my team's ERA versus the other teams in my league
over the last 6 weeks." Queries like that are easy to perform in Rhino Baseball thanks to the power of
its SQL database.
Flexible Stats File Importing:
While other software products limit you to loading only those stat files
provided by the software maker itself, Rhino Baseball lets you download
& import stat files from virtually anywhere. If you don't wish to use our
weekly stats service to obtain MLB player stats files, you can get stats from TQ
Stats, Computer Sports World, STATS Inc, or another 3rd-party provider
that offers year-to-date stat files in simple Text file format. Simply setup a
file layout in Rhino Baseball and you can import those files. We give you the
flexibility to choose the stats file provider that you like best and that
provides all the stat categories you need. And
importing is fast. Run three AL/NL mixed leagues? Import
the files once and they're automatically available to every league (no need to do
separate imports for each league). New players are automatically identified
and added to your
database, and when importing is finished, your league's Free Agent Pool is automatically
updated.
In-Depth Fantasy Team Analysis:
Perhaps the core function of any fantasy league management program is
calculating your team stats, point scores, and standings. Most programs do
that just fine, but they fail to provide anything useful in the way of team analysis tools.
Rhino Baseball not only generates your Year-to-Date team stats, but can create weekly,
biweekly, monthly, and playoff period totals as well for both scoring &
non-scoring stat categories. Even better, Rhino Baseball's helpful Team
Stats Analyzer examines your league's stat categories to determine the
weekly and yearly stat goals you should be shooting for, and the stat levels your
team must attain to gain 1 point in the standings in each stat category. The Analyzer
also breaks down team point scores into strength rankings for power, speed,
pitching control, etc. The Point Changes report
lets you pick any 2 stat periods and compare the point score gains & losses
by stat category for all teams over that time period. You can also create
Team Graphs
to analyze point
score trends over a selected time span. You can even
generate Projected Team Stats & Scores based on
the latest set of player projections. Rhino Baseball goes far beyond the basics
of stats and scores, and gives you the tools needed to figure out what it takes to
win.
Advanced Player Projections System:
There isn't another baseball product on the market that comes close to
equaling Rhino Baseball's level of sophistication in the stats forecasting arena.
Other draft prep packages that provide stat forecasts give you a set of player
projections that have been generated by somebody else. You don't have any
input into how those projections were derived. With Rhino Baseball, you get a
state-of-the-art stats
forecasting engine that dynamically calculates player projections
based on an assortment of settings that you can tweak, such as expected
playing time, pitching role & batting order spot, weeks out due to a recent
injury, and
forecast method (normal, aggressive, conservative). You can even adjust the
3-year weighting percentages and turn off factors that you don't want the
forecasting engine to take into account. Why use somebody else's stale forecasts,
when you can create your own customized projections any time of year using Rhino
Baseball?
That's right, any time of year. Rhino Baseball can
also produce stat projections at any point during the regular season that take into account
the actual major league stats that players have already accumulated. You can even
generate "remaining forecasts" which predict the stats that players
will put up for the rest of the year.
Comprehensive Draft Prep Tools:
This is where Rhino Baseball really shines. If you play in a competitive league,
preparing for your draft must go beyond simply generating projected
stats, dollar values, and player ratings. Rhino Baseball takes the next step and
puts those values to work, helping you determine who to keep on your
freeze list, what kind of team you can assemble on draft day while staying
within your spending budget, and how well the various draft plans you create
meet your target stat goals. Rhino Baseball's draft prep tools are truly unique in the fantasy
industry. That's because they were designed by an expert with 20 years of
experience playing ultra-style fantasy sports (baseball, football, and hockey).
If you play in an auction style keeper league, Rhino Baseball lets you enter the
Freeze
Lists for the teams in your league, then calculate projected
Dollar
Values (raw values, draft values, optimal bids) based on your particular
league rules & rosters. Owners in straight draft leagues can generate projected
Fantasy
Points instead of dollar values. Keeper league owners can use
the Freeze List Analyzer to evaluate players based
on Profit earned, Value Above Last Starter, and keeper Risk Level.
Once you've
finalized your freeze list and calculated a final set of dollar values,
use the Draft Assistant to create a wish-list of players that meet certain price
& position criteria. This lets you test several "what-if"
scenarios to see how a given group of players
affects both your spending budget & projected team stats. After creating
multiple draft plans, use the Draft Plan Analyzer to see which
plan best meets your stat goals and gives you the best chance to
win your league. The final step is to print a Draft Cheatsheet
that lists the available players grouped by position (and ranked by Dollar Value or Fantasy Points)
and take it to your
draft.
Concise Draft Tracking Tools:
Being able to use your laptop to track players taken and money spent during your
live rotisserie baseball auction is a really cool thing. While everyone else is
flipping through papers to hunt for player info, furiously crunching numbers
with their pocket calculators, and crossing off their checklists by hand, you
can use Rhino Baseball to quickly find key player & team data and track the
action with a minimum of effort. But not all live draft tracking tools are
created equally. Some of them overwhelm their users by presenting too many
options and too much extraneous information. That's the last thing you need in
the heat of a fast-paced draft. The live draft tracking functions in Rhino
Baseball are designed to concisely convey the most important data to you without
making your eyes bug out from information overload.
The Draft Central screen presents draft-inflated
dollar values and optimal bid prices (or fantasy point ratings), stat
projections and 3-year averages, and key player info for both available &
drafted players in a clear, easy-to-read manner. And with just a few clicks you
can quickly record draft picks, view a position-by-position cheatsheet, and get
a detailed pick-by-pick summary of the entire draft. Use the
Draft Rosters & Team Spending screen to review the
drafted rosters and spending analysis for all fantasy teams in your league. Use
the innovative Draft Advisor function to review
your best draft plan (player wish-list and budget) and quickly get a list
of recommended replacements for those players in your plan who have just been
drafted by your opponents. This helps you adjust your draft plan on the fly and
ensures that you're keeping pace with the pre-draft statistical goals you've set
for your team. There's even a Player Researcher
tool that helps you rapidly determine who the best remaining players are that
meet your desired stat criteria (e.g. which remaining players will help you the
most in OBA, HR, RBI, SB, ERA, Wins, Saves, K's, WHIP, etc.).
Informative Player Analysis Tools:
Rhino Baseball doesn't limit you to accessing only current major league and
fantasy player stats. The database contains Final AL/NL stats from the past 7
Major League seasons, and you can view straight or weighted
3-year
stat averages for over 1500 players. The
Player
Graphs function lets you view color graphs
that compare
stat trends over time for a
chosen group of players, and group trends for all players by age, position, or playing
time. Our unique Impact Ratings tool shows you how
many points the average fantasy team in your league would gain or lose in your standings if it had a
given player on its active roster. The Stock
Market Report analyzes recent statistical trends and generates buy/sell/hold
recommendations for every player. It also produces "Stock Values"
that indicate how much better or worse
a player is performing compared to his year-to-date stat projections.
Innovative Trade Analysis Tools:
Perhaps no other question in fantasy
baseball is as important as "should I make this trade?" Rhino Baseball
helps you answer that question through the use of two innovative tools. The
Trade
Analyzer lets you simulate a
trade and see how it affects the projected point
scores & standings of every team in your fantasy league. And it doesn't just
show you total point gains/losses by team, but also the net gains/losses in each
scoring category. The 2nd tool is the Player Evaluator, which is
one of the most versatile analysis tools in Rhino Baseball. It evaluates a given
set of players based on 10 different factors (age, salary, contract
status, actual stats, projected stats, position, etc.) and generates a Quality
Rating for each player. The Evaluator then compares the player ratings to help you
decide whether it's in your best interests to trade, reserve, freeze,
or waive the affected players.
Multiple Reporting Options:
When it comes to creating & publishing
reports, Rhino Baseball gives you plenty of options. Want
to save your reports in HTML format for uploading
to your league's web site? No problem. Want to dump data into
Excel
or Lotus format so you can work with it in a spreadsheet? You can do that
too. Want full-color snapshots of your data that can be viewed, searched, sorted, filtered,
printed, and easily shared with other members of your league? Then simply save
your data in PSR
report format and manage those reports using
the Rhino Viewer. The Viewer is
a
companion program that's bundled with Rhino Baseball. It can also be downloaded
for free from
our web site by members of your fantasy league. Speedy creation of the most common weekly reports is
simple using Rhino Baseball's Auto-Report
Maker feature, which automatically generates up to 30 reports (PSR or
HTML) at the click of a
button.
Smooth Integration with 3rd-party Software:
Unlike many fantasy programs, Rhino Baseball provides smooth integration with
several popular, 3rd-party programs. Want to startup Internet Explorer, AOL,
or Opera and navigate directly
to your favorite web site? Need to create a ZIP file containing your stat
reports using WinZip? Want to open up AOL or Outlook Express so that you can
send an email to your league mates? Need to launch your FTP software to upload
files to your league's web site? You can do all of those things without leaving the
Rhino Baseball environment. This lets you get your work done much faster (you don't
have to switch in & out of Rhino Baseball on a frequent basis).
Educational Screen Demos:
We'll be the first to admit that Rhino Baseball
is loaded with so many features that it takes awhile to learn how to use them
all effectively. This simply isn't a program that you're going to learn in a few days. That's the main reason why we've included helpful
screen
demos which
walk you through the most complex program functions in a step-by-step manner.
Watching these narrated, computer-based movies, each one lasting 1 to 5 minutes in length, is
the best way to quickly learn how to use Rhino Baseball.
