Fantasy Baseball for Dummies
Written by TNM, Wednesday March 31 2010
Every day it seems there are more fanatic baseball fans getting involved with fantasy baseball. There are new leagues popping up on a daily basis and starting a league is a simple task.
The wonderful aspect of starting a fantasy baseball league is that it is your fantasy league, so you can set the guidelines any way you want. As long as you enjoy baseball and following stats on a daily basis, then you are set. Time to get you started.
First of all, collect up 10-12 other baseball fanatics who are willing to wheel and deal all summer long during the baseball season. The reason I say 10-12 is that 10 teams is great, however 12 teams is perfect. In order to have a good competitive league, make sure you find people who are total baseball fanatics.
Once you have all the teams, you must elect a commissioner who has a lot of time on their hands as the Commish’s job will be to make all the final decisions, write the league constitution, the bylaws and write the leagues newsletter every week or so with complete standings and statistics.
For the most fun, I suggest using players from both the National and American League. Using both leagues provides enough superstars for every team while using one league leaves you with having to use backups and scrub players.
Each team consists of 23 players from the active rosters of NL and AL teams. Each team should consist of 2 catchers, a first baseman, a second baseman, a shortstop, a third baseman, a backup middle infielder, a backup corner infielder, a designated hitter, 5 outfielders, 5 starting pitchers and 4 relief pitchers.
To keep it simple for beginners, a simple draft is the best way to pick players. Get everyone together and hold a draft. You can pick draft order in numerous ways. I always liked drawing cards. Once the order as been determined, one by one each team picks a player, then the order is reversed, and this continues until each team has 23 players on their roster.
To keep it less complicated for fantasy beginners, team scoring is tabulated by using five offensive categories and four pitching categories. The offensive categories are team batting average, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, and runs scored. The pitching categories are team earned-run average, total wins, total saves and strikeouts.
Scoring is a lot different from Fantasy football where players earn points for performance and each team plays another team each week with the team with the most points winning the game. In fantasy baseball, you do not play other teams per say and points are awarded for team performance every day. The team with the most points at the end of the year is declared the champion.
For example, in a 12-team league, the team that has the most home runs for a day would earn 12 points; the team with the second most home runs would get 11 points, and so forth on down the line with the team with the fewest home runs getting 1 point. This system works for all of the categories.
With the internet, it is not as big of a headache for the Commish in compiling all of the statistics and totaling them up. There are numerous web-sites that offer fantasy baseball sites that do all of the work for you. Some of them might cost money, but there are free ones out there as well.
If one of your players is hurt and put on the disabled list, released or sent to the minors, any player that is not currently on another team’s roster can replace that player. Most leagues have their own disabled list as well. If one of your star players gets hurt, you could put him on your DL and pick up another player as a free agent. However, when your original player returns from the DL, in order to activate him to your roster, you will have to release one of your other players to clear up a roster spot.
There are numerous ways to make it more interesting in coming up with a prize for the winner. If you are gamblers, you could charge a set fee to join with the winner getting the pot in the end. Alternatively, you can make it more interesting and have a first, second, and third place prize. With the winner getting 50% of the pot, second place 30% of the pot, and third place 20% of the pot. This makes it more enticing knowing that the odds are better to win money in the end.
However, for the non-gambling types, some sort of prize is recommended. Maybe a wall plaque, a trophy, or even a certificate to award the winners. It gives them something to play for besides bragging rights.
Play Ball!
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