The One About The Terrible Tweet – Plus Easy Solutions
We had some good-natured fun on twitter yesterday taking shots at CBS Sports’ Chris Towers. He drew the bullseye on his back when he tweeted:
The Ohtani thing brings up a good point I always like to make: Daily lineup leagues are bad.
— Chris Towers (@CTowersCBS) January 17, 2018
The obvious implication: weekly leagues are good. As somebody who writes columns named The Daily Grind, Streaming Wars, and Streaming Away, this left a sour, chalky taste in my mouth. I can actually feel the grit between my teeth, and I’m out of floss.
I generally view weekly formats as the refuge of Neanderthal football fans who need a fantasy fix during the warm weather months but can’t handle actual fantasy baseball. However, now is probably a good time to leave a friendly, politically correct preface to this post. Sporer warned me (actually, he warned twitter person Yancy Eaton) about high horses so I’ll leave mine at the stable.
Now I’m not sure which idiom to use, I got distracted by googling high horses. How about the one with the folks stroking… things … differently. Yeah, let’s use that one. It’s super cool that there are a billion ways to play fantasy baseball. Some of my favorite formats are unusual. No need to shame somebody if their preferences are different from you own. At least not too much.
Usually, when I subject myself to weekly leagues, I spend six days a week throwing a fit about not being able to use platoon hitters. There is one exception when weekly leagues are a solid option – super deep formats like 20-team mixed or AL/NL Only. The deeper the format, the more the league is about building the roster rather than managing the roster. Fantasy baseball is always a balance of both, but the weighting shifts based on the size of the league.
That’s about all I have to say on weekly leagues. You should really play daily formats. You get to use ALL of the players. That’s cool. Even Matt Joyce. Especially Matt Joyce.
Daily leagues definitely have problems. How do you keep 12 or so owners actively invested? Impractically, become a fantasy baseball expert and get invited to elite leagues. We’re try hard as hell. Or, more practically, design leagues that fit the aptitudes of the participants.
A big question is whether to do roto, points, or H2H. Points leagues require the most discipline. Casual fantasy players shouldn’t even consider them. The reason is that they’re essentially one category leagues. Casual owners stop paying attention once they believe they’ve fallen hopelessly behind. That happens fastest in points formats. Nnotably, they usually aren’t actually hopelessly behind, it just feels that way. Perception matters.
Roto leagues have a similar problem, but the 5×5 nature will keep more owners engaged for longer. It also opens more avenues for mistakes and shocking reversals. And when the weaker owners start to ignore their teams in July, it has only a minimal effect on the standings. In this case, daily and weekly leagues suffer from the same problem.
While H2H formats can keep owners engaged via fresh matchups, they tend to have a few rage-inducing flaws. When owners disappear mid-season, it leaves a few lucky teams with very favorable matchups. Weekly results tend to be very random, leaving the playoff format feeling quite a bit like an actual major league postseason. It’s both a feature and a flaw that the best team often does not win the H2H playoffs. Again, these are problems shared in weekly and daily formats, they are just a little more obvious in the daily setting.
The biggest issue with daily league are so-called “fastest fingers” formats, a term I heard used in this context for the first time last night. I’ve always referred to it as “instant waivers.” Less catchy. In these leagues, the owner with the lamest life gets all of the good players by virtue of being first to the waiver wire. They get all the new closers, the promoted prospects, that guy I’m going to hype tomorrow, and the backup to the freshly injured guy.
Great news! Nearly all sites offer Free Agent Acquisition Budgets (FAAB). However, you also have to turn on daily waivers or else the FAAB only applies to players who are cut from other rosters. Most sites will even allow you to set waivers for certain days like every Sunday. I set mine to process daily. This gives everybody a chance to assimilate nearly all information into their waiver strategy. We all get to bid on the new closer, and we can even compete for Nick Tropeano’s spot start.
Once you’ve eliminated the fastest fingers exploit, you’re free to enjoy all the splendors of daily lineup fantasy baseball. You have near endless options as a manager with the ability to stream your way out of a tight spot. Run platoons. Scrounge for long relievers who might earn a win. Every fantasy strategy is at your disposal.
You can follow me on twitter @BaseballATeam
When the entire basis of your argument is centered around whether or not you can use Matt Joyce, it might be a weak argument.
That’s like 2% of the argument. It’s not even the Extra 2%.
“Usually, when I subject myself to weekly leagues, I spend six days a week throwing a fit about not being able to use platoon hitters.” Then more about how you’d like to use platoon hitters. Then, in conclusion, you get to use Matt Joyce. “That’s all I have to say on weekly leagues”. If you had any other part of an argument for daily over weekly it is not present in this piece.
You can use platoon hitters, by the way, by looking at projected SP match-ups and starting Matt Joyce over whatever your fifth outfielder was for the week. There are plenty of arguments against daily leagues so actually, really get off your high horse on the subject. It’s a matter of preference.
Weekly fantasy baseball is not the off season refuge of the fantasy football player. Rather it’s a holdover from the bad old days of dead-tree sports pages and hand calculation of statistics. Weekly lineups and season long Roto aren’t right or wrong ways to play. They’re just the way this whole thing got started.
That being said. The interwebs are a horrible and wonderful thing, but for fantasy baseball it’s pure wonder. Daily lineups. Realtime scoring. Fake baseball can be as close to real as anyone wants it to be. I’m waiting for some enterprising platform to come up with a way to handle automatic mid-game substitutions so that we can run out REAL platoons and REAL bullpens. It will be glorious!
So as a rebuttal to a clearly dumb comment saying “Weekly leagues are the only way to go” (everyone knows this isn’t true), you tell people who play in weekly leagues that they “can’t handle actual fantasy baseball”? Nice.
Yeah man. I’ve done both, but sometimes weekly is nicer because I don’t have the bandwidth to check my roster a few times every day.
Or even want to. I like to disappear without the web for a few days or even a week fishing, hiking or camping. Others don’t.
For this reason, I dropped all daily leagues. It’s all personal preference and no one is right or wrong.
I routinely leave the world behind for at least a week at a time during the Summer and all I play is daily. You simply need to do a weeks worth of daily lineups before you go rather than a weeks worth of weekly lineups. Same thing really except for all the positives that Brad pointed out about daily.
I’ve always primarily done weekly leagues though have participated in a few daily over the years. My main issue with daily is that you MUST constantly be vigilant and need time every single day to manage your flips. The nice thing about weekly is that even if you have a busy work life, you really just need to set aside a few hours a week on Sunday/Monday night to make sure you get your lineup right and put in transactions.
If I didn’t have a job, I would probably do more daily leagues because I would have more time to take advantage. I would not be surprised if many others shared this sentiment.
Any good daily league setup allows you to set your lineups in advance. For example, I’ll always set the entire upcoming week’s lineups on Sunday night. Then during the week I need only take a few moments to check for injuries or changes in pitching assignments each day. I’ll then typically have another big reassessment on Thursday night where I’ll consider things like streaming pitchers over the weekend or if I should target or abandon steals for the week, etc…
It’s not nearly as set-it-and-forget-it as a real weekly lineup. No. but it isn’t a huge daily commitment either if you plan your time properly.
Yeah, I’ve argued that same point with one of my leagues to move to dailies. But having done others, even if you do set your lineup in advance, roster changes or DL moves can happen right before the game, so you have to be pretty diligent. It’s just tough sometimes (especially over busy summers). Weekly helps with that.
To each their own, I personally moved on from the urge to belittle people for what they choose to enjoy sometime in my teens.
I’m in a weekly H2H league myself, I enjoy it, and I suspect that this league is fairly representative in that if we did daily roster transactions the few guys who were really into it would have even more of an advantage. This allows you to be in a league with people who don’t have all the time in the world to commit to fantasy baseball. The only real frustration is early week DL trips.
Real question– How does one get invited to these elite leagues you speak of? I’m consistently 1st or 2nd in my 20-team H2H keeper league, and if I pick up some random single-season league, I’ll often win. I want a tougher challenge. Granted I mostly play on ESPN, so maybe move to another platform? Ottoneu?
@ImperialStout – Contract dynasty leagues is where you need to look. I think at least one of them has an open team to take over. Take over a rebuilding teams for a real challenge. Go to this forum site and leave your e-mail in the chat box at the top (need to be on desktop site): http://baseballdcfantasy.freeforums.net/
I’ll check it out, thanks!
If you are looking for a better challenge, I would recommend Ottoneu, which now has daily, weekly, and (new) H2H options, plus a community of 1,000+ raving fans talking baseball daily: https://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy/ottoneu-first-impressions/
I’ve been toying with the idea. I guess this could be the year!
dang, a downvote? 🙁
Unlimited pickups with a high innings limit & daily moves means you HAVE to grind every day to win. Whomever is willing to spend the biggest volume of time in the game has a big edge. There’s minimal skill, it’s about out-working your competition for extra ABs & IPs.
If I want to grind daily, I’ll jump in DFS in the cadence & timing I desire. I don’t want my fantasy league into a 6-month competition on who can grind the hardest.
So set a 100 moves limit and a 1,450 innings cap. Problem solved.
You still have the fastest fingers/race to the wire, or the “can’t-miss-a-day’s claims” problem.
Daily moves rewards *hard work*. If that’s what you want to reward, fine, but that’s not the joy of season-long to me.
So set waivers for only Wednesday and Sunday. Problem solved.
All leagues reward hard work. Daily only rewards hard work more than weekly if you don’t put sensible rules in place. What daily does do is reward management skills a lot more than weekly. I suppose you can confuse management and hard work since they go hand in hand, but one is purely about effort while the other is the smart application of effort. And yes, smartly applying effort should absolutely be rewarded.
Are we arguing two different things? I thought you were strongly arguing for daily PICKUPS. I don’t have much issue with daily lineup moves, and you’ve proposed 100 moves/1450 IP/twice-a-week pickups as acceptable, so…
We are! This is just about daily lineups, although waiver flexibility is involved. But as noted, adjustments can be made the match the quality and involvement of the league.
If your league is deep enough, there aren’t that many daily pickups that mean that much over the course of a season. In a deep league, almost everyone with talent is already owned.
I also think having Saves + Holds instead of Saves gets rid of the bonus for jumping first on the closer change.
Instead of FAAB, we have residual auction cash as the currency for FAs. FAs get a prorated minimum salary over the course of the year, so you can’t just stream through a million players or speculate on everyone wildly.
Yes, but if you set those leagues to weekly, it pushes a lot of platoon guys to the waiver wire. Our rosters would be very different in my 20 team, 45 player roster league if we could start Enrique Hernandez only against LHP. We’d probably roster 30 percent fewer prospects as a league so contenders could squeeze little matchup advantages onto their roster.
In this case, I view the weekly setting as a good thing (as I touched upon in the post). Forcing contenders to roster the fringier platoon options at the expense of future development seems suboptimal.
“Forcing contenders to roster the fringier platoon options at the expense of future development seems suboptimal.”
Why? Shouldn’t that be a choice you have to make? Either you roster some fringy platoon guys, or you roster future keepers. This seems like good strategery to me.
I mean, it’s a valid variant. But a big part of doing a massive dynasty league is to force everybody to do a little prospecting. I think the weekly format is a parsimonious solution in that case.
I also like that it bumps up replacement level for owners who are contending. If I lose Trevor Story and Didi Gregorius, I can at least get something from a Jordy Mercer waiver add. Shift things to daily and your replacement level shortstop is Pedro Florimon.
Weekly makes zero sense and youre dumb for using the format.
I’m in a 12-team NL-only 5×5 roto league that’s been going since 1990, when stats were only accessible in the newspaper, the commish snail-mailed newsletters with the standings, and the wheel had only been recently invented. When we went to an online service 2000, we chose a daily format to stay as close as we could to a team-managing experience. The holdover that we kept from our analog days, mostly because we enjoyed it, was that we would get together once a month to see a minor league or college baseball game – and drop/add players. We can drop two players each month, along with anyone determined to be out for the season or who’s been traded to an AL team. While this may not be appealing or even possible for most players, we enjoy it because it’s more like managing a team (since you can’t drop and add players constantly), and it keeps everyone interested and invested. Not offering an opinion on daily/weekly, just sharing another approach to the “fastest fingers” dilemma.
Don’t yuck my yum bro! I’m married AF and just bought a new house, and have upwards of dozens of other cool hobbies (like napping, and drinking heavily until I need a nap) that make weekly more appealing. Most of the guys in my league are married with kids and full time jobs.
More power to you if you can keep up with the daily grind, but Diet Fantasy Baseball is just fine!
(Also, if you want to get on a high horse, let’s start talking about how “standard 5×5 leagues” aren’t approximating real baseball because the metrics of player value are terrible proxies for actual real world individual player contribution. Like, all us nerds are past RBI’s as an individual stat but the that’s a standard stat. You want a hill to die on, join me on the “5×5 stats are mostly junk”.)
Nah, 5×5 is the best combination of accessible and easily tracked stats. It minimizes the amount of correlation between categories, forcing managers to make actual tradeoffs. That’s the problem with a points format, there’s no tradeoff to owning Stanton over a guy with less power but more SB like Turner.
SB’s are cute, but SB% is a better indicator of actual skill. Avg is inferior to OBP in pretty much every way. Wins and Saves are meaningless garbage that shouldn’t be fucking tracked for any individual player ever under any circumstances, and you can do a pretty close approximation to FIP using the tools available on the major league platforms.
The whole point of this article is a “no true scotsman..” argument for fantasy baseball nerds anyway, I’m just saying if you’re going to tilt at a windmill I feel like the stats people use are a better straw man to fight than when people set lineups. Like if you’re coming to rotographs for your analysis, you don’t really need “accessible” stats, you know what the hell is going on.
But you still don’t want all the stats you’re tracking to be highly correlated. Otherwise, you should NOT be playing roto. Make a points league.
Ottoneu FGpts is basically a count of offensive WAR + net SB + FIP-WAR. That’s what you’re advocating for. The format exists and WE host it. But if you’re trying to play a roto league on Yahoo, it should probably be a close approximation of vanilla 5×5.
I mean, before I drag this down to “what are the purposes of games and what is the point of ‘play’ as a human social behavior” I’m going to revert back to my OG point that was addressing your article: Don’t yuck my yum.
I have fun in my league (it’s basically a rip off of ottoneu done as a h2h yahoo league). You seem to have fun in yours. Bully for everyone involved! The idea that there is a best way to have fun is, at best, like your opinion man. I get it that the stove is still cold and January roto-baseball is a tough gig (no sarcasm) but this war of “The way other people are enjoying themselves is inferior to the way I enjoy myself doing a similar activity” needs to end.
I get that you’re responding to CBS shots fired. I get that you’re paid American dollars to write about how adults can get better at games/have strong opinions about those games. But damn bro, how much did your pony smoke?
married AF tho
I have many friends that don’t play fantasy baseball because of the daily maintenance. There is another group that is always considering quitting because of the maintenance. Although I do usually spend some time each day checking in on the baseball world, I also realize that I could be spending my time better! Talking down to a group of people that are not spending time on the Internet at the same sites every day doesn’t make much sense to me.
I think it was pretty clear that I was engaging in some lighthearted poking fun while conveying how I prefer to play. And if it’s not, consider this clarification.
Brad – really interesting read.
I’m in a great 12-team, 10×10 dynasty league with a good group of guys, but do feel the daily pickups pain, as well as the finals being somewhat decided by daily pickups.
Additionally, I’m the only guy that doesn’t live in Canada (I now live in Australia), and regularly miss out on FA pickups and would love to get FAAB going.
How would you propose daily FAAB to a league like this? I.e how would it be implemented? Annual FAAB limit? Weekly resets? I’ve never played with it before.
Well if you’re doing daily waivers, you just need to figure out what time the server usually resets and plan accordingly. I find you don’t need to get too creative with the FAAB budget. I do $100 plus unspent draft money. The bonus cash is way more valuable if used in the draft, but it only seems fair to give the inevitable guy stuck holding $30 a small advantage.
I’ve been running a league for almost 20 years. It has evolved to the following:
Non-Keeper. Lets managers come and go if necessary. Also gives a wait-till-next-year optimism if your team was really bad.
AL+NL. So no one gets screwed if a player gets traded to the other league.
Auction Draft. So if someone really wants a particular player he has only to bid enough. No more complaining about being screwed over by the draft order.
Points: In an effort to make it more like real baseball, the points are custom and realistic (SB are NOT worth as much as HR in real baseball). Uses 15 batting stats and 15 pitching stats. Adjusted so the top batters and the top pitchers score about the same number of points (~1000), true replacement level players (ie those often sent down to the minors or released) score about 0. Last players drafted score around 300-400 (unless you pick up a fortunate rookie).
1450 IP limit and RP score more points/IP than SP. Set up so it forces a typical mix of RP and SP. While Saves are worth some points, so are holds and 13 other pitching stats, so you can still do well with set up men.
25 man rosters. Like real baseball. Plus 3DL slots and one NA slot.
Daily line-up changes. Like real baseball. You can platoon. Since you can find out SP many days in advance, you don’t HAVE to check your lineup every day.
3 Days on Waivers for dropped players. So it’s not necessary to check daily and click fast. Also some cash budget to spend on pickups as the tie breaker if multiple teams put in waiver claims.
Limit of 50 moves/season. No streaming, just like real baseball. This allows plenty of slack to replace injured players or grab some hot prospects. (If a team is short on IP and saves some moves, they can grab extra SP the last week of the season.)
No cash. So you don’t have to win to have fun. Any manager who gives up because his team is not doing well is not invited back. It turns out that, even if you are not fighting for 1st place, 3 or 4 teams bunched together in the standings can still inspire some bragging rights battles between them.
This combination of rules has stood the test of time and gets most managers back each year (except for personal reasons outside of fantasy baseball).