… I’ve already had to use my cell phone to make a last minute roster change.
… I’ve already had a baseball-related bad dream.
… I’ve already lamented (only half-jokingly) that my season is over.
… I’ve already begun to think about this year’s keepers.
… I’ve already said out loud “thank god baseball’s back.”
I spent 4 hours at my computer on Saturday, drafting a fantasy baseball team. The Monster League, populated by NoS posters Willis and RJ and frequent commenter Angry Ed, is a beautiful mix of friendly and competitive. During our Winter Meetings (a once-yearly gathering for pizza and rules adjustments) and our Live Online Draft, we throw playful jabs between orders of business, mocking our own fantasy management inability as often as we make fun of the skills of others. It’s not a bad situation; in fact, it’s been the best league I’ve ever been in.
Sixteen teams, twenty-five rounds, twenty-five roster spots (including minor leaguers). Roto league with five offensive and five pitching stats. Thousands and thousands of players to choose from. The Monster League is big compared to other fantasy baseball leagues, but not that much bigger. All fantasy baseball is that unwieldy. Compared to fantasy football, basketball or golf, putting together a baseball team is a bear. Too many combinations of players, too many positions, too many scenarios in which you are suddenly without a viable starting catcher. It’s a rough game, and it’s a complicated one, and therein lies the joy of it.
Fantasy baseball drafts are big enough that you can’t plan for it all. You have to draft based on instinct and knowledge. You get better with experience – eventually you begin to understand the opportunity cost of waiting to draft certain positions in favor of others – but in the end it is complex enough that it really does tend to separate out those that manage well from those than don’t. In fantasy sports, luck becomes less important as the roster size goes up. You may hit the jackpot in fantasy hockey and have two hot hands carry you into the playoffs. But it takes a thoroughly deep team to survive a roto baseball league. And teams like that come together when you have encyclopedic knowledge and a good sense of value.
The season, the real season, is days away. Right now, all the fantasy baseball owners are undefeated. Enjoy it while you can, because we’ll soon discover how good we are at all of this.
Which one do you keep?
There are 2 basic kinds of fantasy leagues when it comes to how players are chosen from year to year: keeper and re-draft. (An auction where all players are put back in the pool is just a re-draft where the draft style is auction.) And when it comes to keeper leagues there are very many ways to set them up.
It could be as simple as keeping just one player from the previous season – A franchise player. Or it could be as complex as keeping the same roster year to year – a dynasty league. Or anything in between. Whatever way your league chooses to run things, there should always be an eye towards parity.
Why is parity so important in fantasy leagues? Because the goal of any fantasy team should be to win the league this year. Not next year. Did you join your fantasy league mainly because you enjoy doing maths and managing and spending money on nothing? I doubt it. You probably joined for the same reasons everyone else is playing: your friends and the love of the sport. You don’t see me playing a fantasy fishing season (even though I get the damn emails). I’m not playing because I don’t enjoy playing fantasy sports (I clearly do, I’m writing a blog about it), but because I don’t particularly enjoy fishing — especially from a watching others do the fishing perspective.
I’m also not saying that a team that makes good decisions over the season shouldn’t get rewarded with good keepers. It should never get to the point where some teams don’t have a real chance of winning the league solely because of the keeper rules.
With that in mind, lets look at some of the methods of setting up and retaining parity in a keeper league. Read more »
Don't let your league feel like this
This time of year is tough for the two biggest fantasy sports: Football and Baseball. It’s the off-season. There are no more lineup deadlines to meet and no opposing team to trash talk. Fantasy players are left wondering what to do with themselves. Well, The Commissioner is here to help with a few thought and experiences on what to do with the time.
Research – It’s never too early to start your research. Everyone does better with more knowledge under their belts. Learn about all the upcoming rookies, and who has the position that’s blocking them from being full time. Study the other people in your league. Look at the history and see what players they like – even the slightest upper hand in a trade is valuable. Pay attention to trades and free agency moves. Are they moving to a pitcher’s park or did they go from have a good offensive line to the Detroit Lions?
Keep The League Together – Maybe you all play fantasy football or basketball in the baseball off-season (or vice versa) to keep the rivalries strong. Perhaps it’s just a couple pools to keep people chatting about the league. I have one friend who runs a fantasy football playoffs league. Rules are you get one player or the coach or defense from each of the 8 playoff teams to fill the roster. Points are only given to players who play each week, so having a RB for the Super Bowl winner is nice. No limit to the number of people playing because there is no draft. Now even after the season is done, there are still players to root for. Maybe it’s only an extra month, but it’s something.
Winter Meetings – This is something my fantasy baseball league is doing for the second year now. We all get together at a restaurant/bar have some food and drink and discuss the future of our teams and the league. This is very nice for us since it is a keeper league and it allows people to possibly make some trades. I’ve heard of leagues getting together to go to games and then most people barely paying attention to the game because they’re too busy wheelin’ and dealin’ for trades.
Those are just some of the things I’ve experienced, please leave me some comments if you have seen or done other things or have ideas for what the league can do. All in all, I think the best leagues are the ones where everyone is continually interested. Especially if that means the interest carries throughout the off-season
Hello fellow fantasy commissioners. Welcome to our corner. Here we shall discuss the trials, tribulations, tribbles, and elations of the job of fantasy commissioner.
Today’s topic is the league constitution.
Every league should have one. I mean it! There needs to be a place for everyone to go and review the rules and stop any disputes before they happen or blow up into friendship destorying disasters. As a commissioner, it will mean less work for you and resolving the disputes are never fun. (People start thinking you take sides and are unfair, turning a fun activity into something much less enjoyable.) Don’t assume that because everyone in your league is friends that you can work it all out, this may be true, but if it’s not then you are up shit’s creek and have no paddle.
Are you still thinking that you don’t need one or that you don’t think you can write one? It doesn’t have to be a spectacular document that gets displayed for ages in the National Archives. It doesn’t have to cover everything. It never will anyway – even if you’ve had a league for 20 years, there’s still something that may come up. This is where you, as commissioner, make the tough decisions, and then add the rule to the constitution. In this way, your constitution is always changing and getting better.
The first step to building a constitution is to brainstorm and write down what you can think of. Go through the day to day and add that to what happens. Read more »
The New York Times recent came up with a flowchart based on being exposed to Dungeons and Dragons at an early age. There are 2 reasons I am posting this here.
The first is that Fantasy Baseball is listed as one of the nerdy things that comes about from being exposed to Dungeons and Dragons. So the New York Times is saying that if you play fantasy baseball then you are a nerd. Don’t try to disagree, you know the Gray Lady cannot do wrong.
The second reason for this post is because I have to… The chart has blogging about the chart as something that a nerd like myself would do, and who am I to stand in the way?
I tend to look at all Major League Baseball before the All Star Break as an extended Spring Training. Yes, there are stats being recorded and yes, the wins do count. But everything is just so 
abstract and whimsical during the first half of the season. If my Yankees go on a 3 game losing streak, I’ll be disappointed, but I will not lament a playoff berth-costing slide. If Frank Thomas stays healthy for three dozen straight games and bangs out thirty homers, I’m not going to assume he’ll play all 162 and break Bond’s record. It is very easy to look at a team firing on all pistons in the spring and early summer and just assume the trend will continue as the season begins to grind away at everybody. Perhaps I’m more cynical than most, but the first 75 or 80 games are glorified tune-ups.
Keeping that in mind, I’ve got a couple of observations I’d like to share about the regular season now that we’ve got about a week’s worth of this extended Spring Training in the book.
1. The Baltimore Orioles are not good. When your mashers are Aubrey Huff and Melvin Mora, you do not have a good baseball team. Brian Roberts will likely get caught trying to sneak out of Charm City on a mail plane, and Nick Markakis will spend the next three years being drafted too low in fantasy baseball because no one will be on base when he is at bat. And there is no home field advantage, since Camden Yards serves as Yankees/Fenway South for all AL East games. Sorry, Baltimore, at least you have Duff Goldman and a temporary 0.800 winning percentage.
2. Mets fans should’ve expected Pedro Martinez to get injured in his first game. I mean, come on. The Gods of Sport are a humorous bunch, and they would not let a 36 year old whose delivery has been ruining his body for a decade last more than one game. That’s just how they operate and by now we should all know that.
3. The Cult of Joe Torre is going strong in Los Angeles. Sporting a 4-2 record and fresh off an ESPN story that treats him like Elvis, people flock from all over the West Coast in the hopes that his rhythmicly slow gait to the mound and his ability to put runners in motion in predictable situations will cure their ills and inspire them to greatness.
4. No one saw the Detroit Tigers starting out 0-6. It doesn’t matter, really, since these games hardly count, but it is worth noting.
