I’ve really avoided spamming this challenge with nothing but gaming and sports posts. Hell, I had two fantasy football drafts last weekend, and NOT A PEEP. So I’m taking today for my nerdy sports stuff. Sue me.
If you’re like me, you’re a poor bastard with 4 fantasy baseball teams and an equal number of squads to manage in fantasy football. Now, let’s say a player suddenly gets red hot and starts putting up numbers, and you want him on as many of your squads as possible…it’s a pain in the ass to do. Scouting out players can be unbelievably awkward, involving multiple tabs splattered across the screen like blood at the site of a chainsaw triple homicide.
A short while ago, I finally totally switched up my primary browser from Firefox to Chrome. Well…to Chromium, but then it decided to crap out on me, so Chrome it is. So I was taking a look through available extensions, and came across one called Pickemfirst.
First off, it’s also available for IE and Firefox. Secondly, it’s goddamn awesome for fantasy sports.
First, you add the extension to your browser. Then you start up an account on the site, and plug in your teams. Currently, Pickemfirst supports football, college football, hockey, baseball and pro basketball for most of the popular league hosts (Yahoo, ESPN, etc.).
So, you add your leagues to your profile. Make sure to check that your rosters are synced with the service once the draft has happened (and that any roster changes have updated…it does happen automatically, but only so many times per day).
Now, when you added the extension to your browser, a little button with the Pickemfirst logo showed up somewhere along the top of it. Press that button, and the various sports Pickemfirst supports appear in a drop down menu. Choose a sport on ANY page online, and give it a few seconds to sync things up with your leagues, and suddenly coloured logos start popping up beside every player’s name…like this (on the Indianapolis Colts roster page on NFL.com, and looking at a general baseball page on ESPN) :
A Blue P means that I have that guy on at least one of my teams. A green P means that player is available in at least one league. And a grey P means he’s unavailable across the board.
Okay, that’s the starting point. But it goes a lot deeper than that. Clicking on one of those little letters brings up a lot of information. Let’s use Indianapolis tight end Dallas Clark as an example here.
When you click on that little letter next to anyone, regardless of the player’s availability, you get a window open up that looks like this : 
That shows me Clark’s availability in the 3 leagues (the 4th I’m in hadn’t drafted yet when I wrote this up). So I have him in the 3rd, but not in the first 2. However, every single one of those tabs along the top brings up different information. The next tab over is news on that player…game performance, injury updates and the like. Next to that is stats. Next up is stat projections for the season. All of that is pretty basic, easy to understand stuff. The next tab after that, the one that looks like (and is) a line graph gives you something a bit different…a player’s fantasy production trends against the average at his position, and the top player at his position.
So, a metric shit ton of information is available about every single guy you look up. Finally, you can look up mention of that player on most of the popular fantasy sports blogs, and his overall draft rankings, too. In the rank window, you can also access that player’s page at Rotoworld, ESPN, Yahoo and CBS Sports.
Beyond that, let’s say you find a guy that you really want. Since Pickemfirst is plugged in to your leagues, you can acquire a player directly through the little window that opens up.
Now, Clark is kind of useless to use for this example, because he isn’t available anywhere. So for this example, we’ll use his teammate : wide receiver Austin Collie. If I bring him up, he IS available in my Matrix hall of fame league. So if I bring up his window showing league availability, I can then press the section of it for that league and be taken directly to the transactions page in that Yahoo league with Collie already selected.
And even if the guy IS on another team, you can still use this ‘quick jump’ feature to try to instigate a trade.
This goddamn thing is GOLD. You can also ‘rank’ your teams in order of importance or what not, and you can do some stat selection to make sure that the stats you’re seeing are the ones that matter in your league.
Get it, love it, enjoy.
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