Author: Brant Tedeschi

Have you heard that CBSSports recently launched their own app store?  We been watching from the sidelines since its launch a few months back but things are about to change.   We pride ourselves as being ahead of the curve by creating useful and affordable fantasy tools that we ourselves use on a daily basis.  For the first time, we are expanding our efforts to support another platform.

Some of the best features at FantasySP are now available in the CBSSports App Store as standalone apps. All the following apps are available or will shortly become available for their NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB App Stores:

• Player Trends Plus – This app brings our Player Trends  to CBSSports! It shows trending player news from hundreds of sources and allows the user to flip through each source. The days of relying on one source for player news are over. It’s perfect for setting your lineup and following big news trends as they unfold.  You can easily get a leg up on the waiver wire if you are the first to hear about breaking injury news.  Needless to say, it is a must have for Sundays.
• Trade Analyzer  – Our suite of Trade Analyzer’s are among the best in the industry. Their goal is to analyze trades to decide the winner of the trade and if it’s a fair trade. It analyzes raw statistical analysis in dozens of categories, compares performance to expert predictions, looks at trending performance, and much more.  This is a great tool for league commissioners and those who need help in deciding if a trade is right for you.
• Fantasy Assistant – Our tool helps you dominate your league by recommending waiver wire pickups, analyzing historical team performance, breaking down team ratings by starting lineup /entire roster, evaluates player importance, and much more.  This version has been tweaked to run on the CBSSports platform and is a must for any serious fantasy sports player.

We have a few important characteristics in each and every fantasy tool and fantasy app that we create.  Each app MUST be easy to use whether you are a first time player or a fantasy veteran.  Each app MUST share the same visual polish and signature of the FantasySP brand.  Each app MUST be of the utmost quality in terms of visual interface and the usefulness of the tool.  Each app MUST be affordable so users of all ages can take advantage of them.

You also may be wondering that since FantasySP is supporting CBSSports apps that updates and features will only be released for one platform or the other.  The good news is that these apps were created to be cross platform compatible.  New features and improvements can be created once and easily pushed out to all of our users.   This means that when a change is made to our FantasySP website, then the CBSSports apps will also have this change go live.

It’s been awhile since my last weekly release notes post.  There is no real need for it at the moment, and I may go back to it at a later point in time.  So for now I’ll have random posts listing a few of the more important features.

The biggest changes to the site are for the fantasy assistant.  Many of you want more options for suggestions to include the best available hitter or pitcher.  As of today you are now able to find the best available hitter regardless of position, or  best pitcher.  This feature has been most requested by users and I am happy to finally deliver it.   Check out what the new suggestions area looks like:

There have been a few other changes as well.  Normally in a fantasy league, you’ll see a collection of your team’s stats based on the guys that you played in your starting lineup.  This is important mainly for Roto leagues where you are ranked in each category.  Those stats are freely available on your fantasy site, so there is little use to duplicate them on FantasySP.

So I decided to come up with Adjusted Team Stats for Pitching and Hitting.  These team stats are based on your entire roster RIGHT NOW.  Any time you add/drop a player, your team stats change based on your new player acquisition.  We are not looking at their performance numbers since being on your team, but rather the entire season.  This may be useful when trying to figure out where your team may end up in 2 months based on your current roster.  Here is what it looks like when browsing your fantasy team roster:

There have also been a few tweaks to the accuracy of player suggestions.  Hitters specifically should return more accurate results.

Other small updates to the site:

We have added a Top 100 Fantasy Baseball listing.   You can sort by our FSP player rating metric to find out who we think are the best players.  You can also sort by a specific category such as stolen basis or WHIP.  All of these stats can be grabbed based on position and number of days.

Another highly requested feature has arrived on the mobile site.  The ability to mark transactions and/or News as read is now available.

This weeks bug fixes are for both FantasySP and FantasySP careers.  Nothing ground breaking to report here and this is not exactly interesting stuff. In any case, here goes:

• Careers – Fix for names with hyphens in them.
• Careers – Added robots.txt
• Careers – SEO changes for better titles and descriptions.
• Careers – Generated sitemaps for each sport to allow bots to easily crawl the site.
• FantasySP – Fantasy Assistant colors have been slightly changed.  You now see a black titlebox with a green “Select My Team” button.  Before the title box was green as well.
• FantasySP – Fantasy Assistant has a new message that says “Select Your Team” so new users understand what to do next. (Hopefully this helps)
• FantasySP – Weekly notices asking for a user to track players have been disabled.
• FantasySP – A MLB source is no longer being used.