The 2017 Fantasy Baseball Season has Begun
Fantasy Baseball
At this point, I’ve got 4 fantasy leagues I’m playing in and two have started their draft. All four are completely different games and none are actually standard rotisserie leagues. The one I’m currently drafting for is a Scoresheet Baseball league and we’re using the entire MLB pool of players to chose our teams from. Scoresheet uses an interesting ruleset and scoring such that each week you are given the results of 5–7 games that your team played based on your player’s stats. You set up a lineup and pitching rotation and defense actually counts as errors can be very costly. Each game is scored in a manner similar to MLB where your players actually have “at bats” and perform based on what they did that week so you have to make sure you’re guys are actually playing or they don’t accumulate plate appearances. Since it’s played like a MLB game, HRs are good but not as significant as they are in Roto – though they can drive in 4 runs depending on how the players ahead of them in the inning performed. It’s kinda complicated but it’s a fun method of simulating running a MLB team. Once the season starts I’ll have to put together a post from one of the games.
The other game that’s started it’s draft is another Scoresheet league, but this one is called a Root league. In this contest, you draft players mostly from one major league team – the team you “root” for. Actually, it seems everyone wanted to “root” for Boston so they limited owners from that MLB team. Well, I grabbed my favorite team – the Angels – who are not expected to perform to well during the season. Sure everyone always wants Mike Trout, but they pretty much pass on the rest of the team these days. In the league the first 3 players had to be from your “root” team so I grabbed Trout, Albert Pujols, and Kole Calhoun. I think those are a good start and since the team isn’t strong on pitching depth, I then went out to other teams to grab my pitching before coming back to the Angels for more fielding. I think it’s a decent strategy, but we’ll see as things progress through the season.
One of the other leagues is a hybrid league incorporating Head-to-Head and Rotisserie features. It drafts tomorrow and I’m still not sure how things are gonna be scored precisely. I’ve got my work cut out for me tomorrow getting prepared for the draft.
The final league is in a different format as well called Mendoza. This league uses an auction for player acquisition and I actually took over a team that did pretty well last year. It uses both AL and NL and has an interesting scoring system. They basically use Runs Created and other higher level sabermetrics to determine how much a player contributes and then they derive a win-loss record for each team based on those stats. It’s kinda complicated but I’ve played before and it’s pretty fun.
In all, I feel I might have bitten off more that I can chew but I’m enjoying the drafts and auctions so far. Hopefully I’ll be able to put together a decent team in each league and maybe even a winner.