You may recall that last month, I sought out experts on MLB salary arbitration. My goal is to be trained on the traditional method of projecting a player’s arbitration salary. Many qualified people wrote in offering their expertise, and I was fortunate to be able to hire two of them for my project.
While I’ve identified my arbitration teachers, I now have a better understanding of the stats I’ll need at my fingertips for each player. Not only do I need a bunch of different stats collected from various sources, but I’ll need to create different multiyear slices of these stats. The result will be a very robust spreadsheet, referred to as my “grid” in industry parlance.
I’ve got solid enough skills in Microsoft Excel, but I’ll need more than that to assemble the spreadsheet I’m envisioning. I need an absolute Excel wizard. This will be well beyond some basic VLOOKUPs. If you’re a master in Excel and a big fan of baseball statistics, please drop me a line at mlbarbitration@gmail.com explaining your qualifications. I’m looking for someone who can work with me to create my spreadsheet over the next few months as a paid project. You do not need to be an expert in arbitration – I’ll explain how I want the spreadsheet to look and function.
You might want a database person to build this in SQL, which would be better than a spreadsheet.
Second this but idk how helpful it may be if he doesn’t know how to run queries etc . you know?
Could probably build a user-friendly front-end that interfaces with it.
Agreed on database. Much easier to manipulate data, group & total quickly. With a proper interface the end user really doesn’t need to know the database side at all.. As long as they can communicate what they want to happen. That’s the tricky part sometimes.
“Could probably build a user-friendly front-end that interfaces with it.”
Like Excel???
I am seeking a user-friendly rear end myself……
Try prunes Bob…
I think I can get all the functionality pretty easily in a spreadsheet. Perhaps it could one day be on the web, but I’m not sure on that.
I don’t know that “the web” is the assumption behind using a database backend here – Excel’s a fine frontend to a SQL backend. It just makes it easier to query the data (i.e., “select from where ‘ is easier to write than a bunch of MATCH/INDEX or VLOOKUP or whatnot.) Excel happily considers SQL a data source and will display it as a worksheet, and the SQL database could sit on your local machine just as easily as a server somewhere else.
That said I’m sure whomever you hire will be able to explain the benefits/drawbacks of that given the complete specifications.
This is true. For that matter, a simple CSV file could be used for the same purpose for version 1. Then when that becomes too much to handle you can create a SQL database or something and swap out the data sources with little interruption. The new data features that Excel has launched in recent years has made this a lot easier also. Adding these data sources to the data model and then using pivot tables to slice the data is what their processing engine in optimized for.
I will try to get Dave S to contact you today.. he is an absolute wizard on excell… created functional video games like snake on it .. for fun!
Could you please hire someone from the Cubs front office? I’d like for them to have some money at least for next off-season.
I laughed out loud!!!
Excel will probably crash pulling this much data and using IF Statements and VLookups. Power BI might be more useful with this. I’d be interested but I’m already swamped with work. :/
I’ve used Excel to analyse data a lot more complicated than this would be.
It may take a while to do all the math, but after a while the program will come back and it will have your numbers.
Excel can handle millions of rows if you use the data model/power query features. It’s very similar to Power BI but accessible to a wider audience.
Excell is a heck of a tool. is love to learn how to use it to its full extent.
If you want to really learn it, go to a forum and start helping. They say teachers often learn more than the students. It was true in my case. The experts will correct you and you’ll see ways of doing things you’ve never considered before.
My favorite resource to learn from was the “Dueling Excel” videos that Bill Jelen and Mike GIrvin used to put out. Not only did they solve real-world problems, but they showed how there are multiple solutions to every problem. Very cool format.
Go to coursera take one of the mastering excel courses. It’ll run you $49 and you’ll learn everything you need to know. Extremely user friendly and video based. Very simple to go back and rewatch a video if you were having struggles with any portion.
However this requires work and a little bit of dedication. It’s easier to say you want to learn it and not put in any work!
I’d be happy to help.
I would love to apply however i already have a job as a welfare recipient..
And “the crowd” in school thought Math wasn’t important…..
While I honestly believe this is better suited for Access, at least as far as storing and sorting stats goes, I don’t believe it’s beyond the realm of Excel. If half of the players are still in their rookie deals, and, say, 40% of those are going through arbitration, you have less than 160 players with a max of 6 rows each of stats, provided you’re not trying to go fancy and do things like splits against RHP/LHP, home/away, by month, etc. So that is less than 1000 rows of data, divided into two categories: pitchers and position players. Then if you wanted a comparison database of even 3x that, you’re still looking at fewer than 4000 rows total.
TBH, I have no problem saying I could make up the formulas necessary to get this to do what you want once the data is in there. Making complex analytical workbooks is part of what I do for a living. My problem is I’ve never learned macros, so getting these from various sites and inputting them properly is something I couldn’t help with. On excelforum.com, however, there is a section to post paid work. They have experts whose skills are top-notch.
Excel does a much better job of data analysis than Access can. Access is great for storing lots of data, but Excel is the ideal tool for forecasting and financial modeling, which is exactly what this project sounds like.
It does seem like it will be macro-heavy, though. Excel is powerful but it doesn’t do everything!
Access is less accessible for a wide audience so it would require some pretty specific things to go that route. Excel can do just about anything Access can until you reach a certain scale, in which case you should probably just build a SQL database.
VBA/macros are rarely the answer either. In my experience, VBA solutions are typically stop-gap measures until a more robust solution can be implemented, or until the data structure is rebuilt.
I’ve seen VBA capable of pulling data from a database and pasting it, though, which is all that this would need to do. For most things, I avoid macros if I can, mostly because I don’t like not being able to undo them easily once they’re triggered.
As for Excel vs Access, Excel can store the data just as well, but you eat up valuable resources getting formulas to try to parse it out in certain ways or you have to make a bunch of pivot tables and keep refreshing them. Access is built to store and sort. I agree on the wider access thing, but it’s not like Access is difficult to learn how to use. It’s just a little more esoteric in learning how to build out effectively, hence the expert.
Can I just add that Excel really isn’t a great tool for this.
If you “need to create different multiyear slices of these stats” then that is what simple SQL is great at. Basic Access is a pretty simple step from Excel and Excel will happily talk to a database to get it’s data. You might not need much more than a single big table which can be shown in Excel easily, but using basic SQL to slice and dice it in many different ways.
TBH I have over 10+ years of working with Excel and Data like this, and Access is not good at this type of data. It’s slow, cumbersome and not secure (albeit security may not be important here)
If anything, Excel would be your basic front-end (for now) and you could tie it to SQL Server with normalized data (i.e. various different tables for all the entities you would need to group by).
Either way, Excel is a good place to start. From there you can build/migrate it out to bigger and better things
Shout outs to all the people with “Microsoft Excel” on their resumes clicking on this article, but then sadly realizing the guy wants more knowledge than, “I know the program exists, there are rows and columns and I may have used it.”
Anyone who thinks paid Excel consulting work is ever that easy has never done it.
Pretty sure that’s his point
I can even wrap text! I thought I was a shoo-in!
Lmao. I know more than that but thats a pretty true statement. Good stuff.
I’m pretty good at feigning expertise by searching through Stack Overflow answers, is that good enough?
you had me at Excell, and lost me at Expert/Wizard
At my age, Excel is the latest version of a powder that helps bowel movements…..
Hey Pads Fans/koamalu/outinleftfield/websoulsurfer/ watermelonmtnscout/The Padfather did you apply?
Using PowerBI or Quickbase might be the better choice for the information. I know of 3 people off the top of my head who can send you down the right path. I’ll share this with them.
What does this have anything to do with Sports rumors
They can pretty much post whatever they want here since they provide me with all of my baseball news in one place at no cost.
Perhaps the 3 paragraphs text you skipped just below the headline would answer your question?
Analysis from the spreadsheet will start LOTS of rumors
R u guys even speaking English
I like how everybody has a better solution to a problem they don’t even know the details of. Access has its place and PowerBI has its place but is not the solution for all. Excel works as a solution for many projects.
I’m a boomer who doesn’t use Excel, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Can’t wait for someone to enter this conversation proposing: “Why even use a spreadsheet and model this when I can just write a learning algorithm to calculate arbitration salaries better than you ever could?”
Just wait. It’ll happen. Over-engineered solutions have already been proposed and will continue to be. Ego.
The learning algorithm would still need some sort of data source to “learn” (if you’re going with Azure ML or something like that
I just sent you an Email, but I figured I’d announce my candidacy because this sounds like a fun project!
I’m an Excel Developer-turned full-stack Developer with over 10+ years of Excel Automation and Data Modeling, and started learning it via being a massive baseball fan.
Whichever way you want to go down (Excel and then a DB-backed workbook to Web App), I can do it.