Monday, April 29, 2013
DYNASTY League Baseball: Where Heroes Come Back To Life | Seamheads.com
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posted on April 29, 2013 at 11:29 AM by Jim Furtado to fantasy baseball, reviews, simulation
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3 comment(s)
I love Dynasty League Baseball and have played it for years. I love it so much I provided a free ad for the game this season to thank Mike Cieslinski for the many years of enjoyment I’ve gotten from the game. At some point I will do an in-depth review of the game for the site to so you can get a better idea about the game’s strengths and weaknesses.
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1 2 >Most people find the draft one of the most fun parts of roto ball.
Most people find that one of the most fun parts of roto ball.
0 seconds to hours. It isn't just the actual draft that takes time it is also the creating of lists and such that takes time.
Most people find the draft one of the most fun parts of roto ball.
Concur.
I think this is one of the best features of keeper leagues; you cut the draft from a tedious 6-7 hours, to a manageable 4-5.
Oh, and eliminate reserve lists. FAAB is the way to go.
On the plus side, I now know who Craig Gentry is.
Edit: Couple of interesting things on Grantland right now. A nice revisit of The Malice in the Palace..and how the hell does Bill Simmons land an interview with The President?
1. Draft one player at each of the 9 positions.
2. At the end of the season, add up their WAR.
3. Whoever has the most WAR wins.
4. If a player for whatever reason ends up playing more games at a different position than you drafted him at (i.e. you draft Buster Posey as your catcher but he ends up playing more games at 1B), his WAR for the year is counted as 0.
Election year. The President isn't going to turn down anything and shows up for everything.
I'm thinking that you don't actually much like Fantasy.
I'd be up for a non-keeper free ESPN league. I prefer their site to all the others. I usually just join a random league which makes me feel like a nerd. It would be cool to play with people from here.
This strategy doesn't work, really. You end up not spending all of your money and finishing in the bottom half. What happens is that the top players always go for more than your value. Maybe someone else has a strategy to get the best SS and 2B at any cost. Or get teh 2 best catchers. Or even just has different values than you do. In a 12-team league, you'll always get outbid on the top tier of players by somebody.
Second tier of players is somewhat the same. You might get a couple of them at close to your value, but only, say 3-4. And you won't get a huge bargain on those, either.
So you're left with the third tier players, the guys worth $10-$15. You can probably get 7-8 of those for $5-$10 less than their value. But if there are 3 SS and 3 2B in this tier, you can't buy all 6 of them. So you're somewhat limited. Now you've got 3 guys at $25 which you paid value for (spent $75 got $75). 8 guys at $12 that you paid $7 for (spent $56 got $96). Now what? You still need 13 more players. You have $129 to spend. But there's no $10 players left. And a few other guys have some money left, too. So you have to go after the best guys left. You probably overpay for some of them. But even if you don't, you get 5 players for $8 that are worth $8. This is a best case scenario because you have to hope that all 5 $8 players are at places you need.
So now you're sitting at having spent $171 with value of $211. Still need 8 more players. You have $89 but nobody to spend even $10 on. You identify 8 players all worth $6. You probably only need to spend $2 each because most of the other people are out of money. You have money to spend more, but that's irrelevant now. You fill out your roster and now you have only spent $187. You got $259 of value for your money, but that doesn't even come close to winning the league.
Why can't you win the league? Because the guy(s) who overspent on the stars were also scooping up some of those $12 for $7. And some of those $6 for $2. So somebody ends up with $300 in value. Probably 3-4 people. Sure, a few guys who overspent will also be stuck getting $1 for $1 and end up with less than $260 in value, but that just means that you're ahead of them.
So basically, you have to take the extra $73 and overpay for some top talent. But since top talent always comes out in the first half of the draft, you don't know how much you'll have.
We've cut the time to select picks from 90 seconds to 60 seconds this year, in hopes of alleviating some of that boredom.
I like fantasy (or at least I used to) but at this point in my life, if I spend 5 minutes working on my fantasy team instead of staring at my kids, I feel guilty.
It's been pretty obvious for a while now that Simmons knows somebody. I mean, I enjoy reading a lot of his stuff, but I never thought he was such a great writer that he deserved to get his own adjunct websites from ESPN. He's hardly the greatest talent they have in their stable or anything.
I'd say with Simmons it's actually hard work and exposure. He was online doing his thing going on 15+ years ago, and while he's no Halberstam or Angell, neither are 98% of the sportswriters out there.
He might be ESPN.com's most valuable resource.
Yup. I've been playing fantasy baseball with some of my friends for the past 5-6 years or so. Last season was the first year we did an auction-style keeper league. At least one of my friends' strategy was to not bid (and overpay) on top players at all. His theory was that everyone would blow their $$$ on 3-4 top players and he'd scoop up all the mid-level players and a have a nice, balanced roster. It didn't really work out like that- yes, he got a bunch of middling talent, but he was left with like $50 or so, money that could've gone to a top player.
I was going to go that route, but then realized I needed some talent on my team (unfortunately, one of my big overpays was Hanley Ramirez) so I started spending cash.
Anyway, not only do these two already have a history together, I'm thinking that the President was already a fan; I'm sure he's spend significant time on ESPN.com at one point in his life like the rest of us. Bill Simmons doesn't need to know someone who knows someone in this case.
We've cut the time to select picks from 90 seconds to 60 seconds this year, in hopes of alleviating some of that boredom.
You guys do an actual draft? Like Football?
Sorry, baseball should be auction only.
Why?
I've been doing it for about 20 years now (skipping the 1995 season because of the labour issue), and it's provided me endless hours of entertainment and education (learning stats, discovering young players, talking baseball with others).
Why?
Because drafting creates unecessary imbalance. Some years the top one or two picks are insanely more valauble, some years the #10/#11 combo is better than #1/#20, so a team can get a huge advantage by random draft order.
It's also boring, especially in bigger leagues, as you wait around for guys to pick. An auction means you're potentially in on every player.
I don't find this to be the case at all. There are enough roster spots in fantasy baseball that no one player can carry a team and that draft order doesn't have a huge impact.
Now, you may be right that auction is more fun, but I would guess that a draft is done for the majority of baseball leagues.
Really? The few times I've done draft leagues, there tended to be a huge gap in value somewhere in the top-5 picks. The difference from #11 to #20 tended to be de minimus.
Just from memory, getting to draft peak ARod #1 in one league created a huge value bonus for my team. I won that league.
What's the advantage of a draft?
They are faster, and I think probably easier to do online.
The computer is worthless in auction drafts. Those guys might as well not play.
Its worse than that. The autodraft teams in an auction muck the whole thing up. Don't do it unless the whole league can attend.
Also, although we plan ahead a day that everyone agrees on, usually one or two people have late plans that take them away from the draft. Auto-drafting in a standard draft league actually gives pretty decent teams most of the time.
This did not work for us (again, this was our first time using an auction so we were working out the kinks). The "computer controlled" teams would *always* outbid the human drafters- even if it meant spending $100+ on one player. I think one team ended up with one $200 player, 2 $40 players, and 19 $1 players, or something like that.
Last year my league went from an online draft to an online auction. The auction was both more interesting and faster because guys couldn't wander away from their computer when it wasn't their pick, get distracted, and then make everybody wait for them to pick when their slot came around.
It gives the worst teams in the league a fighting chance to improve the next year.
That said, we have one perpetually terrible owner in our league who still squanders his 1st- or 2nd-overall pick some how. The one year he gets Pedro Martinez (crossing over to the AL), he deals him later to get a terrible package of players.
So I resolved to pay more attention, and I've finished in last place the last two years.
We tried once and the computer went WAY too fast for us. We had to press pause with every player, solicit bids, then resumed the draft after we essentially held our auction off-line. And a few guys had to leave early, and the computer kept taking guys that were out for the year, or were once good players that were old and crappy.
This. Our auction takes pretty much all day. In a league I cared less about, we did a draft, and finished it in less than an hour.
I quite like the GameDayRitual system, which tries to simulate a bidding window for each free agent (league settings can move this to anywhere between 2 and 48 hours), during which multiple teams can bid, but you're limited to 3 bids max, and have imperfect information about who else is bidding. The longer draft format allows for being away from the computer most of the time, with occasional check-ins to adjust bids and monitor your team set-up.
I'm running one of these leagues; second year of existence. Contracts can persist through multiple years, though as a lot are 1-year, you still get plenty of talent for the next draft. Plus minor leagues, lineups, auto-substitution, park effects, and no-trade clauses. It's a shame the website and service is such a shambles; they're never ready to start until early March, and it seems a really cut-price operation. But the mechanics are clever if you want the detail.
Might have a spare slot; one of the potential owners hasn't checked in. It was started off a Yankees forum, though not all of us are Yankees fans.
Before that, my cousin and I were talking friends into it, and then opening the remaining slots of a private league to the public. This resulted in a lot of half-assed playing and deadbeat teams. We've tried it hard to make it as simple but challenging as possible (2 catchers, OBP instead of AVG) and adding the complications of an auction would only rock the boat.
But maybe someday....
We're trying it for the first time and I'm skeptical about the process. The Skype thing interests me, though. Can you do a 12-way conference call on Skype? We have a few guys who can't make it into town, and for the local guys, people just said that there was no point being in the same room.
Somebody used to run this contest (BPro maybe? Us?) but I can't recall what it was named. It wasn't negative WAR but it was "pick 5 really crappy guys" (or was it 9) and see who does the worst. I think the scoring was OPS with some sort of playing time adjustment. Neifi was always a popular pick. I seem to recall I used to do pretty well.
if I spend 5 minutes working on my fantasy team instead of staring at my kids,
"Dad"
"Yeah, son."
"Ummm ... the way you're always staring at us is ... kinda creepy."
That has been my experience exactly. We usually have 4-6 committed owners and a bunch of deadbeats. There is no way we could talk enough people into doing a live auction.
For a strategy that supports not caring about your fantasy team, it would involve a lot of caring in determining values for players and hard ceilings for bids.
When I was in college we did a small bizaro-roto league.
I think the categories were BA, HR/AB, CS, Errors, ERA, Losses, WHIP, and Blowups (ER>2*IP)
Jose O-fer-man was the dominant player, I think it was '92: 534 AB, .260, 1 HR, 16 CS, 42 E
For years in two separate leagues. It usually works pretty well, but all of the owners (or all but one, who has had another owner draft for him) have shown up. Having 1/3rd of the league not there would be a big problem, I'd think.
This seems an exceptionally bad idea in a keeper league since all your keepers will be mid-level players. I guess it leaves you with lots of money to spend in next year's auction and maybe a cheap star if one of those mid-level guys breaks out but ...
Here's a non-baseball fun idea to try. For years, friends and I do an NCAA auction but it's not your standard sort of one. First, we cap entrants at 6 (although I think we went 7 one year due to miscommunication). Every team has to be bought. Total $ is capped (we used to do $5 so you know it wasn't about the money) and any money you have left at the end just goes into the pot. And the kicker is you get 1 point per win from one of your teams, no differential between the round the win is in.
It works out quite fun and, generally, the one who wins is the one who does the best job on the middle "value" teams. Half of the points (wins) are in the first round -- which does have the drawback that after the 1st and certainly 2nd round, half the field is out -- but damn that first round is even more fun to watch. I was the first one to discover Gonzaga back in the day and cleaned up for a couple of years. It was partly fun because it did mean you had to dig into those middle teams to try to figure out which ones the NCAA had under-rated.
At 63 wins and a $30 pot, the average is about 50 cents a win. #12 seeds usually went for about 25 cents, maybe a bit less. The #1 seed nobody had faith in usually went for a little over $1, the top one might bring in $1.50; #16 seeds for a penny. So you hit the right #12 seed and you get 2-3 points for 25 cents, awesome return -- pay $1.50 for a #1 seed and they have to make the final 4 to produce profit.
One guy did eventually put together the big spreadsheet of how often each seed won which took some of the fun out of the draft strategizing (he gave the sheet to all of us in true Moneyball fashion :-). But still I've always found it much more fun than brackets and the 3-4 hours (with beer and burgers) of bullshitting and ####-giving and guessing team nicknames (and making up team nicknames -- the Oral Roberts 69ers of course!) for the auction itself was just a blast.
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