How Does Fantasy Baseball Work?

The world of fantasy baseball is a fascinating one to enter. It is truly a unique fantasy sport compared to football, basketball, and hockey. Fantasy baseball often frustrates the players who spend a lot of time on it, but the victors are greeted with sweet sensations. Fantasy baseball takes more patience and skill than any other fantasy sport, and once you play, you'll see why. Once you've decided to jump into the world of fantasy baseball, you have to know how it works.

Joining a League

The first thing you have to do is go through the process of joining a league. You can play on numerous different sites, but the best to get started with are Yahoo.com and ESPN.com. These two sites have the easiest and most user-friendly interfaces. You can join a league with your friends or join a public league with total strangers. It would definitely be better if you can join a custom league created by your friends. They will give you the name and password of the league. You'll have to create a team name, a password to your account, and toggle other settings before you are ready to participate in the play of the actual league.

Draft

Once you're in a league, you have to draft your fantasy baseball team. You can either do a live draft or an automated draft. A live draft occurs when all players in the league log on to the site at the same time and manually draft. This can be a fun social event. You get to see the draft and participate in it in real time. Automated drafts are often better for most leagues, however, because they don't require the members to be physically present. In either case, you should rank your players ahead of time to ensure that you'll get the players you want.

Setting Your Lineup

Once the draft is complete, you have to set your lineup for the first game. A typical fantasy baseball league involves between 10 and 12 teams, so you will face each team multiple times throughout the course of the Major League Baseball (MLB) season. Check your league's game format. This will tell you have many starters you will need from each position. You should also check the scoring rules to see which categories matter the most in your particular league. This would be even more beneficial to do before the draft so that you can draft your team accordingly.

Scouring the Waiver Wire

From time to time, you will need to watch for players to pick up as free agents. Some of your players will get hurt and miss time, and you'll also need to make decisions on bench or dropping healthy players that aren't performing well at the moment. You should always be checking on the available players in your league. You should see how they've been playing lately and what they are likely to do in the future. You may be able to get a huge advantage over your opponents by paying close attention to the waiver wire.

Fantasy baseball takes a larger time commitment than other games since your players will have about five games per week during most weeks. You need to check your lineups every day. If you're willing to put in the time, you can have a good fantasy baseball team. You'll have a better experience if you watch the real games a lot to follow your team's players. You can even make spreadsheets and score the games while you're watching. One stolen base could be the difference between a tie and a win.

Sarah writes on her blog about sports and sports reviews.