Highly Custom League: Home Team

Last winter, I debuted the Highly Custom League series with nine unique and unusual league designs. Entries in this series covered 2×2 Roto, Split Auctions, Roto-to-Head, Rotating Divisions, WAR wars, Category Wars, Public Trade Negotiations, If Only, and Elimination.

I implemented the Roto-to-Head format in Dynasty To Be Named Later (aka DTBNL, my patron 25-team dynasty league). We used the extensible platform provided by FanTrax to hack it together. While we didn’t have any major upsets, everybody seemed to really enjoy the wrinkle on the standard roto format.

Also via my patrons, we ran an elimination league named Top Tout (Beta). At some point, I’ll post a full breakdown with lessons learned. A second beta season may be required.

Today, we return with the 10th custom league. This one comes courtesy of Ariel Cohen. I’ll let him introduce it.

Here’s a highly customizable league for you – (And I play this with my family) Its a family league. NY Mets Only (Or any team that you want). Anyone who was on the Mets this year, or if you want last year and year before. 4-5 teams. Points league. 4 roster spots – SP, RP, IF, OF (catchers included with IF, but could also do OF) Interesting and great for a family.

Design Aesthetic

Draft Type: Snake with KDS

Teams: 5 or fewer

Scoring: Roto or Head-to-Head

Positions: SP, RP, IF, OF

Hitter Categories: Points

Pitcher Categories: Points

Waivers: Weekly FAAB

Trades: None

Compatible Modules: Roto-to-Head, WAR wars, Public Trade Negotiations

There’s a simple beauty to this format. Ariel presents it as a family-based design, and it’s obviously purpose-built for that use case. Want to indoctrinate your children to fantasy baseball AND your favorite club? This is the league for you. FanTrax can even accommodate our needs without any customizations or manual commissioning.

I also view this as an interesting idea for college roommates or work colleagues. In essence, the idea is to bond around a small, easily digested player pool. It’s a lot easier to wrap your head around the complexities of fantasy baseball when there are only 40 or so players available for 16 to 20 roster spots.

I recommend weekly FAAB and lineups with no trading to keep the playing field as level as possible. Sadly, there’s no simple way to balance the draft. I suggest using a KDS (Kentucky Derby Style) pref list.

Some teams (i.e. the Angels) could offer a huge advantage to the first pick. A pseudo-auction for each draft position could overcome this by basically handicapping the league. The participant with the most on the line gets their preferred draft position. Rather than using dollars, consider trying chores, video game time, or similar as the store of value.

As for the preferred points scoring system, I almost always default to the FGpts used in ottoneu. Of the major purveyors of points formats, ottoneu’s system is by far the most intuitive because it links fairly closely with player quality. Nearly all of the idiosyncrasies have to do with home runs and are thus easy to understand. CBS, FanTrax, ESPN, and Yahoo points systems incorporate bizarre, indefensible quirks. However, any points system should work passably so long as saves are valued similarly to holds.