How I Changed Rotisserie Baseball

Before the 2006 NFL season, the greatest living sportswriter, Bill Simmons of ESPN.com, wrote a column about what was wrong with fantasy football, and how to change it. I loved nearly all of his ideas, and when it came time to draw up the rules for my football league, I used most of his. The league turned out to be great.

The biggest innovation Simmons introduced was having the fantasy league playoffs coincide with the real-life playoffs. All teams that make the fantasy playoffs, he suggested, should get to protect a certain number of their players that make the real-life playoffs, and then get the chance to pick players in a 5-round redraft from the teams that did not make the (fantasy) playoffs. To be fair, the team with the best regular season should get the first pick in all five rounds of the redraft.

During the playoffs, the scoring was cumulative, and as you can imagine, Air Bud Golden Receiver, a Jimmy Schneider-owned team that gambled in the redraft by selecting a few extra Indianapolis Colts (plus, he had Peyton Manning as his QB already), won. He was 16-1 during the regular season, so he was clearly our best owner in both the regular and postseason. The added strategy of figuring out who to protect from our existing rosters, and deciding which of the real-life playoff teams would advance the furthest, made it the best fantasy football league we’ve ever been in. Not to mention, when we drafted before the season, we had to at least keep in the backs of our mind what the playoff chances of the guys we were drafting were (Hence, a guy from the Texans whose numbers might be comparable with a guy from the Patriots would be worth a tad less in our league because the Texans were unlikely to make the playoffs, etc.).

With that innovation in mind, I refer you to the 2007 Major League Baseball season, which starts eight days from now.

I have combined my satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the existing system, as well as compiled complaints from friends, to create what I think should be the new model for keep-everyone-happy fantasy baseball. Here’s how it works:

First, the league is a hybrid. The regular season is rotisserie, with each owners ranked in six (not five) hitting and six pitching categories. The postseason is head-to-head.

The top six teams at the end of the regular season make the playoffs, which, as in Simmons’s fantasy football model, coincide with the real-life MLB playoffs. But here’s where I had to be super-duper creative:

Instead of cumulative points, the playoffs are head-to-head, and I’m going to have to keep the stats via Microsoft Excel because no stat service in its right mind is as neurotic as I am.

Here’s how I set up the playoffs: The top two teams from the regular season get byes during the American League Division Series and National League Division Series, while the No. 3 team plays the No. 6 team and the No. 4 team plays the No. 5 team in head-to-head matchups. Obviously, any players those teams have on their rosters that are playing in the real-life playoffs can accumulate points for them (there will obviously be empty slots on the rosters). The fantasy teams compete against one another in each of the 12 categories, and whomever wins more categories wins their Division Series matchup, and goes on to the League Championship Series round. The lower-seeded winner from the Division Series games plays the regular season champion, and the higher seed plays the regular season runner-up.

Here’s where we have the redraft. With only four real-life teams left, none of the remaining fantasy teams are going to have full rosters. Of course, they are going to be allowed to keep all the players they have that are playing in the League Championship Series. But they are going to need more players. These four fantasy teams remaining will each get to select 5 players (3 hitters, 2 pitchers) from the other six teams in the league. Of course, those players will all be players from the four remaining real-life teams. The regular season champ will get the first pick of each round of the redraft, to reward him/her for his/her work.
Then, those four teams will battle it out – just like the real-life teams will battle it out – and the winners will play in the World Series. By then, who knows how many players each team will have left?

The redraft will obviously be highly strategic: Each team is going to have its feelings on who will make the World Series, so will want to select players it thinks will advance past the League Championship Series. There’s no bench during the playoffs, so who you have left is who you get. No roster moves. If you’re stuck with a guy who winds up giving up 20 runs during the playoffs, oh well, you’re stuck with him. So do you want him on your team at the start of the playoffs if you think there’s a shot of him giving up 55 home runs? See what I mean?

Of course, this is a highly unusual experiment. I’m not aware of anyone having tried this before. But it answers the complaints I hear from my friends who hate head-to-head (the obvious drawback of head-to-head is that if you lose each category by one point, you lose 10-0) or those who hate roto-style (if you’re out of it by July, you’re out of it by July, and have no reason to really check your rosters anymore).

Having six playoff teams ensures that most teams will have a shot for most of the year. The last-place team will probably be reasonably close to the sixth-and-final playoff spot.

I’ve also imposed a roster-move limit of 50 moves. That does a few things: First of all, it will stop teams from making a ton of roster moves the last week of the season to get all undrafted playoff players onto its roster. Second of all, it makes the draft that much more important. Third, there are a lot of people who work and can only check their computers like a few times a day, and this will help them.

I’ve also tried to take out some luck from the equation by using a sixth category for both pitching and offense. The six categories for hitting are the usual five (AVG, R, HR, RBI, SB), plus one more very important statistic (on base percentage plus slugging percentage, or OPS). Having OPS means that players who walk and hit a lot of doubles and triples will actually get rewarded for those skills, which contribute to the most important thing they can do at work, which is generate runs.

The six pitching categories are again your usual five (W, ERA, K, WHIP and Saves), along with home runs allowed. Having home runs allowed in the mix is an important inclusion, because a lot of the other stats are just based on luck and happenstance. Relievers who give up runs that were already on base when they got in the game don’t get hurt in the ERA category. Closers who come into a game with a three-run lead and give up two runs before finally getting the last out actually get credited with a save. You know how it goes. But giving up a home run is something that usually happens because a pitcher makes a mistake, and a fantasy team should pay for that. In addition to the regular maximum innings pitched limit to prevent teams from drafting a zillion starters and winning the Wins and strikeouts category, I’ve imposed a 10-inning-per-week MINIMUM so guys can’t use all relievers in an effort to steal the home runs-allowed category. GENIUS!

Having the extra category on each side satisfies statheads like me who realize that a lot of baseball statistics are out of the actual players’ control, and won’t alienate traditional players who like to have categories like Wins, strikeouts, etc. Plus, why the hell aren’t we rewarding players for walks, doubles and triples more with that OPS stat? Oh wait, not WE, why aren’t YOU rewarding players for walks, doubles and triples more?

So there it is: A new way to play rotisserie baseball. I can’t imagine that every single person in the world will be happy, but I find it highly unlikely that this league will be anything but the biggest success in the history of sports.

And THAT’S an understatement.