Fantasy baseball

Fantasy baseball is a fun game where people act like they are owners and general managers of their own virtual baseball teams. Players start by choosing their team members in a draft, picking from all the players in Major League Baseball (MLB). After the draft, players earn points each week based on how well real baseball players do in actual games.

While most often played with MLB teams, fantasy baseball can also include players from college baseball in America or leagues in other countries, like the KBO League. This game lets fans enjoy and follow baseball in a new and exciting way.

History

Early simulations

Fantasy baseball games date back to the 1800s. The game Sebring Parlor Base Ball, from 1866, let people play by moving a coin on a wooden board. Later games used dice or spinners to decide outcomes, sometimes with approval from real players. In 1930, a game called National Pastime used special cards for MLB players. Players would roll dice and check the card of the player "at bat" to see what happened — like a single, double, triple, home run, or strikeout. Players who did well the year before had better chances of good results in the game.

One famous early game was APBA, started in 1951. It used cards for MLB players with results based on their past stats. People could make fantasy teams from these cards and play against others. Another game, Strat-O-Matic, began in 1961 and also used player cards and dice to simulate games.

Rotisserie League Baseball

Modern fantasy baseball began in the 1980s when a group of writers created Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980. They named it after a restaurant in New York City where they met. Daniel Okrent helped start the league and made the scoring system. Players chose teams of real MLB players and watched their real-life stats during the season to score points. Instead of using old stats to guess results, they had to predict how players would do that season. The real performance of the players decided who won.

Rotisserie baseball became very popular, even though it was hard to collect stats by hand at first. Early leagues used stats that were easy to find in newspapers or USA Today. Okrent said the league grew fast because the writers in it gave it a lot of attention. During a break in real baseball games in 1981, writers covered their own fantasy teams, which helped many more people learn about it.

Continued expansion

In 1985, a company called Grandstand Sports Services started the first national rotisserie baseball leagues online through Q-Link, which later became America Online. They added features like automatic drafting and live scoring.

In 1989, a game called Dugout Derby let people pick teams by phone for a contest in newspapers. It gave vacations to the top players each week.

The Internet made fantasy sports grow a lot in the 1990s. ESPN started an online fantasy baseball game in 1995. By 2003, about 15 million people played fantasy sports.

Daily fantasy sports started in 2009 with a company called FanDuel. Another big company, DraftKings, started in 2012. In 2013, MLB invested in DraftKings, and in 2015, it became the official daily fantasy game of MLB.

By 2022, about 62.5 million people in the United States and Canada played fantasy sports, and about one in five of them played fantasy baseball.

League types

Fantasy baseball leagues can be organized in different ways. In some leagues, teams are ranked at the end of the season based on how well they do in certain statistics, like home runs or pitching wins. Points are given depending on these rankings.

Another common way is head-to-head competition, where each team faces one other team each week. The winner is decided in different ways, such as who does better in the most statistics or who earns the most points. Teams can also keep players from one year to the next in some leagues, or follow a salary cap where each player has a set value and teams cannot spend more than a certain amount.

Draft

Before each season, fantasy baseball leagues have a draft where each team chooses players from the Major League Baseball. These players stay on the team’s roster unless they are traded or dropped, which puts them back in a pool where any team can claim them.

The order of picks can be random or based on the previous year’s standings, with the team that did worst getting the first pick. Some drafts use a “snake” method, where the first picker in odd rounds picks last in even rounds to keep things fair. In an auction draft, each owner has a pretend budget to “buy” players, taking turns naming players and bidding on them.

Drafts can happen live, with owners picking in real time, or auto, where a computer picks based on the owner’s pre-set rankings. Most drafts happen online, but some are done in person using computers or paper lists.

Team owners use many strategies and tools, like expert rankings and computer programs, to pick the best players for the coming season.

Team rosters

In fantasy baseball, each team has players from different positions, just like in real baseball. Team owners decide which players start each week or even each day. Only the starting players' stats count for that week's match.

Players who usually sit on the bench can become starters if the regular starter gets hurt, plays badly, or if their team isn't playing that day. Owners also think about a player's past performance and who they are playing against when deciding to start or bench them. Some leagues don’t have weekly matchups, so all players on the team help with the season’s total stats.

Different websites have different rules about how many players can be at each position and on the bench. For example, ESPN and Yahoo have different setups for their default teams. Some leagues have special spots for injured players who can’t play for a while. There are also rules about how often team owners can change their players to keep things fair.

Demographics

According to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, about 62.5 million people in the US and Canada played fantasy sports in 2022. In 2023, about 19% of American adults played fantasy sports, up from 13% in 2014. Fantasy baseball is the third most popular fantasy sport, after fantasy football and fantasy basketball. Most fantasy sports players are male, and many are between 18 and 34 years old.