You’ve seen my film takes with The Tape Detective series, but today I’m here to bring the data. And I have a lot of it. Yes, we’ve talked to our developers and now you’ll have access to some data from last year’s Best Ball Mania I (and I’ve already cleaned it up a good bit).

I’ll be adding my takeaways from this data in future columns on Underblog and on YouTube, but here’s a link to download the raw data if you want to investigate things yourself. If you’re a content creator and have questions, you can DM me on Twitter (@Haydenwinks) and I’ll try to help you out, but warning it’s not straightforward.

In the meantime, here are some things about the pick-by-pick best ball data…

• team is the team_id for Best Ball Mania I.

• round is the draft round for each player.

• playoff_round is how far this team is in Best Ball Mania I. But pay attention to this because it’s important… The data in this column is wonky. A team that advances to the finals will have four different entries in this same data and they will have four different team IDs. Let me repeat. A team that advances to the finals will have a “Lost”, “Round 2”, “Round 3”, and “Round 4” playoff_round entry, and the team id doesn’t tell you it’s the same team. For this reason, we can’t directly use this to calculate “advance rates” or “best ball win rates”. Instead, I did that for you here.

• made_playoffs is whether or not this team is in the playoffs, but the weirdness of the data from playoff_round applies here. Some teams marked as “Lost” actually made the playoffs. I know, it’s confusing.

• roster_points are how many points the team scored in that round, so the scores will be highest in “Lost” because that’s counting the entire regular season of best ball.

• pick_points are how many points that player scored in that round, so the scores will be highest in “Lost” because that’s counting the entire regular season of best ball.

• draft_time is when the draft took place, but like roster_points and pick_points, the time is dictated on the round. So the only draft times that are accurate in the data set are for teams labeled as “Lost”.