Fantasy baseball
Encyclopedia
Fantasy baseball is a game where participants manage an imaginary roster of real Major League baseball
players. The participants compete against one another using those players' real life statistics
to score points. It is one of the most commonly played fantasy sports games, and is arguably one of the most difficult and time-intensive due to the 162-game season of the MLB and the inconsistency of players.
computer in 1960 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron, and distributed for several years by the IBM Corporation. It allowed two teams to play one another using random number generation and player statistics to determine a game's outcome, including a play by play description. In the fall of 1961 Rege Cordic
, a KDKA (Pittsburgh) radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program. The game was coded for a computer with only 20,000 memory positions and was entirely self-contained.
Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball." One of the best-known was Strat-o-Matic
, which in 1963 began publishing a game containing customized baseball card
s of Major League Baseball
players with their stats from past seasons. Participants could then re-create previous seasons using the game rules and the statistics, or compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against each other. The landmark tabletop game Pursue the Pennant (now DYNASTY League Baseball) debuted in 1985 and took baseball board games to much more realistic levels of play; it incorporated ball park effects, clutch hitting and pitching, and many other nuances of the game. Fantasy baseball was the theme of Robert Coover's 1968 darkly comic novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
, which dealt with themes of creationism and playing god.
The first public open fantasy baseball game, Dugout Derby, was developed in 1989 by Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos of Phoneworks who teamed with a West Coast Ad Agency (Wakeman & deForest) to launch the game in twelve of the largest local newspapers across the country. Papers that offered Dugout Derby included the LA Time, Chicago Sun Times, and NY Post. Archives of Dugout Derby are available in most public libraries. Dugout Derby allowed readers to create a team of major league players, earn stats for those players based on actual performance, trade those players on a daily basis, and accrue points in an effort to compete against one another to win prizes.
Copious materials accessible since 2006 in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library
show that American writer Jack Kerouac
(1922–1969) played his own form of fantasy baseball starting quite young and continued developing and playing this perhaps private version of fantasy baseball during most of his life. His version of fantasy baseball, however, was completely fictitious, with made up players and statistics. At the Library from November 2007 – February 2008, an exhibition on Kerouac's life and works includes several display cases of Kerouac's highly detailed fantasy baseball records, including charts, sketches, and notes.
Magazine writer/editor Daniel Okrent
is credited with inventing the pastime, coming up with the idea on a flight to Texas. After presenting his first vision of rotisserie baseball to friends there, none seemed interested. Upon returning to New York a month later he received an enthusiastic reception from a different group of friends, who then collaborated on the first rotisserie league.
The game's innovation was that "owners" in a Rotisserie league would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players and would follow their statistics "during the ongoing season" to compile their scores. In other words, rather than using statistics for seasons whose outcomes were already known, the owners would have to make similar predictions about players' playing time, health, and expected performance that real baseball managers must make.
Because Okrent was a member of the media, other journalists, especially sports writers, were introduced to the game. Many early players were introduced to the game by these sports journalists, especially during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike; with little else to write about, many baseball writers wrote columns about Rotisserie league.
Rotisserie league baseball, nicknamed roto, proved to be hugely popular, even in the 1980s when full statistics and accurate reporting were often hard to come by. The traditional statistics used in early Rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box score
s and then from weekly information published in USA Today
. Okrent, based on discussions with colleagues at USA Today, credits Rotisserie league baseball with much of the early success of USA Today, since the paper provided much more detailed box scores than most competitors and eventually even created a special paper, Baseball Weekly
, that almost exclusively contained statistics and box scores. Local papers soon caught up with USA Todays expanded coverage.
The use of statistics like pitchers' win
s and RBI are often scoffed at today by members and followers of the Society for American Baseball Research
who prefer to use objective evidence, especially detailed baseball statistics
to measure players' performance. Sabermetric thinkers argue wins and RBIs often misrepresent the performance of players, since they are largely influenced by outside factors such as run support and bullpen support (for wins) and runners on base (for RBIs).
The advent of powerful computers and the Internet
revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring systems, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of real-time simulation
of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real-world game works. According to statistics from a 2009 article in Forbes, nearly 11 million people play fantasy baseball today.
Fantasy baseball has continued to grow [based on recent studies from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA.org)], but has been overtaken by fantasy football as the most popular form of fantasy sports. This is primarily because some of those sports, such as football and auto racing, only participate once a week, making it easier for a person to make adjustments, since they do not have to check their team daily.
, whereby each owner has a fixed amount of money to bid for players, and he must fill his team's roster within their budget. Another approach is to perform a serpentine system
draft of available players until all teams are filled.
In either case, the skills of the team managers come into play in the "preseason" by their knowledge of the talent and ability to forecast the performance of Major League Baseball players and prospects for the coming season. The team managers draw on a great variety of sources of information, including tout sheets by various forecasters, who predict the coming season's performance and the likely overall "value" (often in terms of auction dollars) of the Major League players.
Some leagues allow teams to keep some players from one year to the next, allowing savvy owners to build fantasy dynasties. These leagues are often referred to as "Keeper Leagues." Keeper leagues have the same people in them, and owners keep their players, unless any off-season moves are made.
Many leagues allow teams to trade with each other during the season, as well as to replace players who get hurt or stop performing well with players from the pool of those who are not presently owned. However, some leagues prohibit such in-season "free agent" replacements, feeling that the game is more interesting when teams must live and die by the quality of their draft.
Also, some leagues limit free-agent moves that a fantasy team can make per season, and a team may not just drop all of their players if they are not progressing well during a season. The free-agent limit is also sometimes used to limit the so-called "pitch-and-ditch" tactic, a method of play in which a manager picks up a free-agent pitcher with the intention of using him in only one game before replacing him with a pitcher who is scheduled to start the following day.
In most leagues, when a player who was injured returns to play, it is the choice of the team manager who to drop from his team. Usually, they are not forced to drop the replacement. Some companies actually offer real-world insurance on fantasy league players.
. The winner is the team that doesn't lose in the playoffs, or has the most points at the end of season if the league does not hold playoffs.
Another style, the original style of playing fantasy, is rotisserie. The statistics compiled by the players from each team are then ranked by category, and the team with the highest cumulative rank at the end of the season is determined to be the winner.
The original Rotisserie League used the following statistics:
This is often called a "4x4" league (4 hitting stats and 4 pitching stats). Many leagues adopt a "5x5" format, with runs
scored and strikeout
s added as hitting and pitching stats, respectively. Still other leagues are "6x6", most commonly adding OPS (OBP
plus SLG), and holds
. Occasionally, a league will adopt a format that keeps track of more statistics (such as a '7x7"), vary the stats tracked to favor hitting or pitching, or include fielding statistics such as fielding percentage
. Other modifications to the rules include a minimum number of at-bats and innings pitched for categories that are averaged; teams that do not make the minimum were awarded last place in the respective categories.
Typical set-ups for head-to-head leagues are:
Opponents are dictated by a round-robin system. At the end of the season, the team with the best win-loss record is the victor.
Many head-to-head leagues also feature playoffs over the last 3–4 weeks of the MLB regular season. A set number of teams make the "postseason" and play a single-elimination tournament to decide a victor.
Another new format of fantasy sports is 'daily fantasy sports'. Rather than joining leagues and selecting rosters that compete for an entire season, competitors are able to draft a line-up for a single day and compete against others with cash being awarded to the winner just hours after the games on the field that day have ended. A typical contest would pit 2, 4 or 6 people against each other.
There are also fantasy baseball leagues that specialize in the Major League Baseball playoffs. Many fantasy baseball leagues stop their seasons at the end of the regular season.
Simulation games use computer programs, processing actual MLB player statistics, to generate results for contests matching teams composed of MLB players ‘drafted’ by ‘owners.’ This is thought to produce an experience which is more akin to that of being a real general manager. Notable simulation games include ones using historical stats such as Diamond Mind Baseball and Strat-O-Matic. Fantasy baseball simulation games that use a “predictive” model, meaning managers must guess how their players will perform, include Box Baseball and Scoresheet Baseball.
Many keeper leagues, as well as some single season leagues, have adopted salary cap rules similar to the NHL. In a "Salary Cap League", a salary is assigned to each player before the manager selects his team. Salaries are usually determined by the MLB player's real salary. Otherwise a number value is assigned – usually by an online baseball pool program – or it is determined through an auction process. Each manager must ensure that they do not go over the predefined salary cap when selecting players.
One emerging option for a keeper league is the Draft Round Values system. This is a Sabermetric approach for determining the values of players selected in a particular round. The round a player was selected in the previous season is conceded in the upcoming seasons draft when they are elected to be carried over. Tables are provided with these values and a conversion chart that calculates the rounds to be conceded when multiple players from the same round selected as keepers. These tables also work for balancing multiple player trades.
Keeper leagues are especially easy in auction formats, where last year's dollar values can be used to calculate keeper values. At least one league uses this system in combination with a minimum rookie keeper wage scale with great success.
Also some leagues have introduced a rookie draft into their fantasy league. By using the rankings from the last season to determine the draft order last place gets 1st pick and so on. Also in some leagues trading picks is also allowed.
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
players. The participants compete against one another using those players' real life statistics
Baseball statistics
Statistics play an important role in summarizing baseball performance and evaluating players in the sport.Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itself to easy record-keeping and statistics...
to score points. It is one of the most commonly played fantasy sports games, and is arguably one of the most difficult and time-intensive due to the 162-game season of the MLB and the inconsistency of players.
History
An early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620IBM 1620
The IBM 1620 was announced by IBM on October 21, 1959, and marketed as an inexpensive "scientific computer". After a total production of about two thousand machines, it was withdrawn on November 19, 1970...
computer in 1960 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron, and distributed for several years by the IBM Corporation. It allowed two teams to play one another using random number generation and player statistics to determine a game's outcome, including a play by play description. In the fall of 1961 Rege Cordic
Regis Cordic
Regis John "Rege" Cordic was an American radio personality and actor.His career in entertainment divides roughly in half: from 1948 to 1965, he was the dominant morning drive-time radio host in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, he was a successful voice, television,...
, a KDKA (Pittsburgh) radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program. The game was coded for a computer with only 20,000 memory positions and was entirely self-contained.
Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball." One of the best-known was Strat-o-Matic
Strat-o-Matic
Strat-O-Matic is a game company based in Glen Head, New York, that develops and publishes sports simulation games. It produces tabletop baseball, football, basketball, and ice hockey simulations, as well as personal computer adaptations of each, but it is primarily known for its baseball...
, which in 1963 began publishing a game containing customized baseball card
Baseball card
A baseball card is a type of trading card relating to baseball, usually printed on some type of paper stock or card stock. A card will usually feature one or more baseball players or other baseball-related sports figures...
s of Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
players with their stats from past seasons. Participants could then re-create previous seasons using the game rules and the statistics, or compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against each other. The landmark tabletop game Pursue the Pennant (now DYNASTY League Baseball) debuted in 1985 and took baseball board games to much more realistic levels of play; it incorporated ball park effects, clutch hitting and pitching, and many other nuances of the game. Fantasy baseball was the theme of Robert Coover's 1968 darkly comic novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is Robert Coover's second novel, published in 1968.-Plot summary:J. Henry Waugh is an accountant, albeit an unhappy one...
, which dealt with themes of creationism and playing god.
The first public open fantasy baseball game, Dugout Derby, was developed in 1989 by Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos of Phoneworks who teamed with a West Coast Ad Agency (Wakeman & deForest) to launch the game in twelve of the largest local newspapers across the country. Papers that offered Dugout Derby included the LA Time, Chicago Sun Times, and NY Post. Archives of Dugout Derby are available in most public libraries. Dugout Derby allowed readers to create a team of major league players, earn stats for those players based on actual performance, trade those players on a daily basis, and accrue points in an effort to compete against one another to win prizes.
Copious materials accessible since 2006 in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
show that American writer Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
(1922–1969) played his own form of fantasy baseball starting quite young and continued developing and playing this perhaps private version of fantasy baseball during most of his life. His version of fantasy baseball, however, was completely fictitious, with made up players and statistics. At the Library from November 2007 – February 2008, an exhibition on Kerouac's life and works includes several display cases of Kerouac's highly detailed fantasy baseball records, including charts, sketches, and notes.
Rotisserie League Baseball
The most common scoring system in Fantasy Baseball is known as "Rotisserie". The landmark development in fantasy baseball came with the development of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980, named after the New York City restaurant, La Rotisserie Française, where its founders met for lunch and first played the game.Magazine writer/editor Daniel Okrent
Daniel Okrent
Daniel Okrent is an American writer and editor. He is best known for having served as the first public editor of The New York Times newspaper, for inventing Rotisserie League Baseball, and for writing several books, most recently Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.-Education and...
is credited with inventing the pastime, coming up with the idea on a flight to Texas. After presenting his first vision of rotisserie baseball to friends there, none seemed interested. Upon returning to New York a month later he received an enthusiastic reception from a different group of friends, who then collaborated on the first rotisserie league.
The game's innovation was that "owners" in a Rotisserie league would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players and would follow their statistics "during the ongoing season" to compile their scores. In other words, rather than using statistics for seasons whose outcomes were already known, the owners would have to make similar predictions about players' playing time, health, and expected performance that real baseball managers must make.
Because Okrent was a member of the media, other journalists, especially sports writers, were introduced to the game. Many early players were introduced to the game by these sports journalists, especially during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike; with little else to write about, many baseball writers wrote columns about Rotisserie league.
Rotisserie league baseball, nicknamed roto, proved to be hugely popular, even in the 1980s when full statistics and accurate reporting were often hard to come by. The traditional statistics used in early Rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box score
Box score
A box score is a structured summary of the results from a sport competition. The box score lists the game score as well as individual and team achievements in the game....
s and then from weekly information published in USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
. Okrent, based on discussions with colleagues at USA Today, credits Rotisserie league baseball with much of the early success of USA Today, since the paper provided much more detailed box scores than most competitors and eventually even created a special paper, Baseball Weekly
Sports Weekly
USA Today Sports Weekly is a weekly magazine that covers Major League Baseball, Minor League Baseball, NCAA baseball and the National Football League. In the February 15, 2006 issue, the magazine added coverage of NASCAR...
, that almost exclusively contained statistics and box scores. Local papers soon caught up with USA Todays expanded coverage.
The use of statistics like pitchers' win
Win (baseball)
In professional baseball, there are two types of decisions: a win and a loss . In each game, one pitcher on the winning team is awarded a win and one pitcher on the losing team is given a loss in their respective statistics. These pitchers are collectively known as the pitchers of record. Only...
s and RBI are often scoffed at today by members and followers of the Society for American Baseball Research
Society for American Baseball Research
The Society for American Baseball Research was established in Cooperstown, New York, in August 1971 by Bob Davids of Washington, D.C. The Society's mission is to foster the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball, while generating interest in the game...
who prefer to use objective evidence, especially detailed baseball statistics
Baseball statistics
Statistics play an important role in summarizing baseball performance and evaluating players in the sport.Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itself to easy record-keeping and statistics...
to measure players' performance. Sabermetric thinkers argue wins and RBIs often misrepresent the performance of players, since they are largely influenced by outside factors such as run support and bullpen support (for wins) and runners on base (for RBIs).
The advent of powerful computers and the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring systems, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of real-time simulation
Simulation
Simulation is the imitation of some real thing available, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system....
of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real-world game works. According to statistics from a 2009 article in Forbes, nearly 11 million people play fantasy baseball today.
Fantasy baseball has continued to grow [based on recent studies from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA.org)], but has been overtaken by fantasy football as the most popular form of fantasy sports. This is primarily because some of those sports, such as football and auto racing, only participate once a week, making it easier for a person to make adjustments, since they do not have to check their team daily.
Player selection
Rotisserie leagues and their descendants typically draft teams before the season begins (or very shortly thereafter). One approach is to hold an auctionAuction
An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder...
, whereby each owner has a fixed amount of money to bid for players, and he must fill his team's roster within their budget. Another approach is to perform a serpentine system
Serpentine system
The serpentine system is a method employed in the organization of a competition to define the seeded teams and arrange them in pools. The n ranked teams that will be involved in the tournament are distributed in m pools according to the following algorithm:For instance, 12 teams would be organized...
draft of available players until all teams are filled.
In either case, the skills of the team managers come into play in the "preseason" by their knowledge of the talent and ability to forecast the performance of Major League Baseball players and prospects for the coming season. The team managers draw on a great variety of sources of information, including tout sheets by various forecasters, who predict the coming season's performance and the likely overall "value" (often in terms of auction dollars) of the Major League players.
Some leagues allow teams to keep some players from one year to the next, allowing savvy owners to build fantasy dynasties. These leagues are often referred to as "Keeper Leagues." Keeper leagues have the same people in them, and owners keep their players, unless any off-season moves are made.
Many leagues allow teams to trade with each other during the season, as well as to replace players who get hurt or stop performing well with players from the pool of those who are not presently owned. However, some leagues prohibit such in-season "free agent" replacements, feeling that the game is more interesting when teams must live and die by the quality of their draft.
Also, some leagues limit free-agent moves that a fantasy team can make per season, and a team may not just drop all of their players if they are not progressing well during a season. The free-agent limit is also sometimes used to limit the so-called "pitch-and-ditch" tactic, a method of play in which a manager picks up a free-agent pitcher with the intention of using him in only one game before replacing him with a pitcher who is scheduled to start the following day.
In most leagues, when a player who was injured returns to play, it is the choice of the team manager who to drop from his team. Usually, they are not forced to drop the replacement. Some companies actually offer real-world insurance on fantasy league players.
Stakes
Many fantasy leagues are played for money. Owners pay an ante or entry fee at the beginning of the season and may also be charged for in-season activity such as trades and "free agent" acquisitions. The pool of money is collected and then distributed to the winner(s) at the end of the season. Most often, however, the main reward of fantasy games is bragging rights or pride in the participants' ability to assess baseball talent. Established leagues often have a plaque or trophy that is passed to the annual champion.Game play
There are different ways to play fantasy baseball. One way to play is a head-to-head format that makes each individual team play against a different team each week to acquire wins through total points scored for the week. Teams with the most wins at the end of the season often enter into a playoff similar to the MLB postseasonMajor League Baseball postseason
The Major League Baseball postseason is an elimination tournament held after the conclusion of Major League Baseball's regular season. It consists of one best-of-five series and two best-of-seven series...
. The winner is the team that doesn't lose in the playoffs, or has the most points at the end of season if the league does not hold playoffs.
Another style, the original style of playing fantasy, is rotisserie. The statistics compiled by the players from each team are then ranked by category, and the team with the highest cumulative rank at the end of the season is determined to be the winner.
The original Rotisserie League used the following statistics:
- team batting averageBatting averageBatting average is a statistic in both cricket and baseball that measures the performance of cricket batsmen and baseball hitters. The two statistics are related in that baseball averages are directly descended from the concept of cricket averages.- Cricket :...
(total hits divided by total at-bats) - total home runHome runIn baseball, a home run is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to reach home safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team in the process...
s - total runs batted inRun batted inRuns batted in or RBIs is a statistic used in baseball and softball to credit a batter when the outcome of his at-bat results in a run being scored, except in certain situations such as when an error is made on the play. The first team to track RBI was the Buffalo Bisons.Common nicknames for an RBI...
- total stolen baseStolen baseIn baseball, a stolen base occurs when a baserunner successfully advances to the next base while the pitcher is delivering the ball to home plate...
s - total winWin (baseball)In professional baseball, there are two types of decisions: a win and a loss . In each game, one pitcher on the winning team is awarded a win and one pitcher on the losing team is given a loss in their respective statistics. These pitchers are collectively known as the pitchers of record. Only...
s - total saves
- team earned run averageEarned run averageIn baseball statistics, earned run average is the mean of earned runs given up by a pitcher per nine innings pitched. It is determined by dividing the number of earned runs allowed by the number of innings pitched and multiplying by nine...
(9 times total earned runs divided by total innings pitched, the lower the better) - team WHIPWalks plus hits per inning pitchedIn baseball statistics, walks plus hits per inning pitched is a sabermetric measurement of the number of baserunners a pitcher has allowed per inning pitched. It is a measure of a pitcher's ability to prevent batters from reaching base...
(total number of hitHit (baseball)In baseball statistics, a hit , also called a base hit, is credited to a batter when the batter safely reaches first base after hitting the ball into fair territory, without the benefit of an error or a fielder's choice....
s and walkBase on ballsA base on balls is credited to a batter and against a pitcher in baseball statistics when a batter receives four pitches that the umpire calls balls. It is better known as a walk. The base on balls is defined in Section 2.00 of baseball's Official Rules, and further detail is given in 6.08...
s allowed by pitchers divided by total inningsInningsAn inning, or innings, is a fixed-length segment of a game in any of a variety of sports – most notably cricket and baseball during which one team attempts to score while the other team attempts to prevent the first from scoring. In cricket, the term innings is both singular and plural and is...
pitched, the lower the better)
This is often called a "4x4" league (4 hitting stats and 4 pitching stats). Many leagues adopt a "5x5" format, with runs
Run (baseball)
In baseball, a run is scored when a player advances around first, second and third base and returns safely to home plate, touching the bases in that order, before three outs are recorded and all obligations to reach base safely on batted balls are met or assured...
scored and strikeout
Strikeout
In baseball or softball, a strikeout or strike-out occurs when a batter receives three strikes during his time at bat. A strikeout is a statistic recorded for both pitchers and batters....
s added as hitting and pitching stats, respectively. Still other leagues are "6x6", most commonly adding OPS (OBP
On base percentage
In baseball statistics, on-base percentage is a measure of how often a batter reaches base for any reason other than a fielding error, fielder's choice, dropped/uncaught third strike, fielder's obstruction, or catcher's interference In baseball statistics, on-base percentage (OBP) (sometimes...
plus SLG), and holds
Hold (baseball)
A hold is awarded to a relief pitcher who meets the following three conditions:Unlike saves, wins, and losses, more than one pitcher per team can earn a hold for a game, though it is not possible for a pitcher to receive more than one hold in a given game...
. Occasionally, a league will adopt a format that keeps track of more statistics (such as a '7x7"), vary the stats tracked to favor hitting or pitching, or include fielding statistics such as fielding percentage
Fielding percentage
In baseball statistics, fielding percentage, also known as fielding average, is a measure that reflects the percentage of times a defensive player properly handles a batted or thrown ball...
. Other modifications to the rules include a minimum number of at-bats and innings pitched for categories that are averaged; teams that do not make the minimum were awarded last place in the respective categories.
Typical set-ups for head-to-head leagues are:
- Head-to-Head Rotisserie: Wins, losses and ties are based on the team's performance in individual categories.
- Head-to-Head One Win: Just like H2H Rotisserie, but the winner receives just one win, rather than one win for each category the team wins.
- Head-to-Head Points: Stats accumulate points for each team (a Home Run/Stolen Base/etc. is worth a certain number of points), and the team with the most points at the end of the week is awarded a win. These leagues often take advantage of several other statistical categories, from outfield assists to quality starts.
Opponents are dictated by a round-robin system. At the end of the season, the team with the best win-loss record is the victor.
Many head-to-head leagues also feature playoffs over the last 3–4 weeks of the MLB regular season. A set number of teams make the "postseason" and play a single-elimination tournament to decide a victor.
Fantasy trade referees
The growing popularity of fantasy baseball has created a niche for fantasy baseball trade referees. Owners of fantasy teams often trade players, and often those trades incite disputes within leagues. Third party websites provide fantasy players a place to have their trades reviewed by a panel "judges" in exchange for a fee. Decisions are rendered based on the specifications (number of teams, statistical categories, etc.) of the players' leagues. These third party sites are becoming a source of controversy due to their questionable value with all the free forums available to modern day fantasy players.New formats
New fantasy baseball formats have appeared that combine a traditional points-based competition with a liquid market that is used to facilitate real-time player trading. These games eliminate the need for fantasy trade judging by having team owners buy and sell players on a trading floor instead of negotiating trades directly with other owners.Another new format of fantasy sports is 'daily fantasy sports'. Rather than joining leagues and selecting rosters that compete for an entire season, competitors are able to draft a line-up for a single day and compete against others with cash being awarded to the winner just hours after the games on the field that day have ended. A typical contest would pit 2, 4 or 6 people against each other.
There are also fantasy baseball leagues that specialize in the Major League Baseball playoffs. Many fantasy baseball leagues stop their seasons at the end of the regular season.
Simulation games use computer programs, processing actual MLB player statistics, to generate results for contests matching teams composed of MLB players ‘drafted’ by ‘owners.’ This is thought to produce an experience which is more akin to that of being a real general manager. Notable simulation games include ones using historical stats such as Diamond Mind Baseball and Strat-O-Matic. Fantasy baseball simulation games that use a “predictive” model, meaning managers must guess how their players will perform, include Box Baseball and Scoresheet Baseball.
Keeper leagues
Any fantasy baseball pool that "rolls over" into other years is called a "Keeper" or "Dynasty" league. The leagues can be run each year in any of the above formats with a winner declared at the end of each season. At the end of the year team managers decide which players they wish to protect (the number varies – from protecting and keeping all players, to keeping as few as three or four players). Before the MLB season opener, a fantasy draft is held to fill out the rest of the roster.Many keeper leagues, as well as some single season leagues, have adopted salary cap rules similar to the NHL. In a "Salary Cap League", a salary is assigned to each player before the manager selects his team. Salaries are usually determined by the MLB player's real salary. Otherwise a number value is assigned – usually by an online baseball pool program – or it is determined through an auction process. Each manager must ensure that they do not go over the predefined salary cap when selecting players.
One emerging option for a keeper league is the Draft Round Values system. This is a Sabermetric approach for determining the values of players selected in a particular round. The round a player was selected in the previous season is conceded in the upcoming seasons draft when they are elected to be carried over. Tables are provided with these values and a conversion chart that calculates the rounds to be conceded when multiple players from the same round selected as keepers. These tables also work for balancing multiple player trades.
Keeper leagues are especially easy in auction formats, where last year's dollar values can be used to calculate keeper values. At least one league uses this system in combination with a minimum rookie keeper wage scale with great success.
Also some leagues have introduced a rookie draft into their fantasy league. By using the rankings from the last season to determine the draft order last place gets 1st pick and so on. Also in some leagues trading picks is also allowed.