Alright, with permission from Ally, I am going to go ahead and set this stuff up as soon as possible. My current plan, unless someone has a better suggestion, is to use a custom league through ESPN.com, because first (and most importantly) it's free, and secondly, that will let us set our own scoring rules and exceed the normal limit of 10 teams.
A couple things I need input on before I go ahead and create the league:
- League name.
- Scoring type. The two most common types of fantasy baseball leagues are Rotisserie and Head-to-head. For both types, a team's players are tallied up by several categories of statistics. In Rotisserie, the teams are ranked in every category and the standings are determined by each team's ranks within these categories. In head-to-head, teams are matched up for a given week and they compete directly with each other in these categories, and the team who has the better stats for the week gets a win. Standings in head to head leagues are determined by win-loss-tie record, obviously. Most people prefer rotisserie because since everyone's competing with everyone, there's no opportunity for a lucky win or unlucky loss, but some people like that head-to-head makes things more personal and therefore more enjoyable. I've played both ways, so I have no preference in this regard.
- Scoring categories. These are just the types of statistics that our league will track in determining points. The last time I played fantasy baseball, the categories were hits, runs, runs batted in, home runs, strikeouts, batting average, and on-base percentage for hitters, and wins, losses, runs, earned run average (ERA), strikeouts, saves, and WHIP for pitchers. We can add or subtract categories as necessary, and in some leagues we can assign different point values per each category. For instance, if we want ERA to be worth more than wins, we can assign the ERA category to be worth 4 points while the win category is only worth 2, and so on.
- Live versus auction draft. Given that this forum is made up from people from all over the place with wildly different work/school schedules, my inclination is to avoid a live draft. But if we're going to do a turn-based draft, we're going to have to get this started pretty quickly, or set a time limit on each pick, as the season starts in less than two weeks.
