Fantasy baseball

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fantasy baseball is a game whereby players manage imaginary baseball teams based on the real-life performance of baseball players, and compete against one another using those players' statistics to score points. It is the oldest form of fantasy sports, and arguably one of the most difficult and time-intensive due to the 162-game season of the MLB and the inconsistency of players.

Contents

[edit] History

Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball". One of the best-known was the Strat-o-Matic, which began publishing in 1963 a game containing customized baseball cards of Major League Baseball players with their stats from recent 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 debuted in 1985 and took baseball board games to much more realistic levels of play to incorporate 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.

Copious materials accessible since 2006 in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library show that Canadian-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. 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.

The landmark development in fantasy baseball came with the development of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980. Magazine writer/editor Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing it, the name coming from the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise where he and some friends used to meet and play. 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 journalists, 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 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 scores 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 USA Today's early success, 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 Today's expanded coverage.

The use of statistics like pitchers' wins 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 player's performance. Sabermetric thinkers argue wins and RBI often misrepresent the performance of players, since they are largely influenced by "outside" factors like 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 system, 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.

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 due to the fact that some of those sports, such as Football and Auto Racing, only play once a week, making it easier for a person to make adjustments, since they do not have to check their team every day.

[edit] Rotisserie baseball game details

[edit] Player selection

Rotisserie leagues and their descendants typically draft teams before the season begins (or very shortly thereafter). One approach is to hold an auction, whereby each owner has a fixed amount of money to bid for players, and he must fill his team's roster within his 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. Toward that end, they 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, at the league's discretion, there are only so many 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 drafts 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.

[edit] Stakes

Many fantasy leagues are played for money. Owners ante up an 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, these are games in which the main reward is bragging rights or the participants' sense that they not only know how to assess baseball talent but also how to play the fantasy game in all of its dimensions including perhaps above all the selection of real baseball talent.

[edit] Game play

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 and strikeouts (as a pitching statistic) added, respectively. Still other leagues are "6x6", most commonly adding OPS (OBP plus SLG), and holds. However, the "6x6" format does not have a standard or consensus set of categories to use. Other modifications to the rules include a minimum number of at-bats and innings pitched; teams that do not make the minimum were awarded last place in the respective categories.

An alternative head-to-head system states that each team competes against only one team each week. At the end of the week, each team tallies wins and losses based on whatever criteria are set by the league. There are three basic forms of head-to-head leagues (often referred to as "H2H"):

  • Head-to-Head Rotisserie: Wins, losses and ties are based on your 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 stastical 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.

[edit] Strategy

  • Ron Shandler's Low Investment Mound Aces (LIMA) Plan - A 5x5 Rotisserie strategy that proposes spending a maximum of $60 out of a $260 budget on pitching, spending a maximum of $30 on saves, ignoring all other pitching categories, and drafting pitchers who will pitch the fewest innings possible. The idea behind this is that if money is spent on the pitchers with the best skills, you will draft a team with a good ERA and WHIP, without "chasing" after fickle statistics such as wins. Pitchers should be targeted if they possess the following skills:

Correct implementation of the LIMA plan will allow for the majority of a team's budget to go toward offensive players, whose statistics are relatively more easy to project.

The LIMA plan is thought to be better suited for AL- or NL-only leagues, as opposed to mixed (AL and NL) leagues.

[edit] Fantasy trade referees

The growing popularity of fantasy baseball has created a need 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 of experienced fantasy players. Decisions are rendered based on the specifications (number of teams, statistical categories, etc.) of the players' leagues.

In addition, many fantasy baseball service providers offer suggested guidelines for reviewing and determining the appropriateness of any given trade.

[edit] New formats

RotoHog provides a new fantasy baseball format that combines a traditional points-based competition with a liquid market that is used to facilitate real-time player trading. The RotoHog game eliminates 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.

[edit] External links


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