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A Word About Fantasy Baseball Position Eligibility

February 5, 2019 By Draft Buddy 1 Comment

Colorodo Rockies Garrett Hampson

This is Garrett Hampson, 2B/SS for the Colorado Rockies. Recently picked in one of my drafts at SS, not eligible at 2B, got me looking closer at fantasy baseball position eligibility.

The Super Bowl is (painfully) over, so now it is time to put all of our attention to the upcoming Major League Baseball season and fantasy baseball. Pitchers and catchers report early next week, with fielders trickling in after that for full squad workouts starting between February 16 to 21.

The first spring training games are February 21, and every team is playing on February 23. The regular season starts March 20 for the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners, squaring off in Tokyo, Japan for a two-game series. Make sure to check if your fantasy league includes these stats or not. Official Opening Day is Thursday March 28, the earliest Opening Day in MLB history. Not long now!

Lets take a minute to talk about position eligibility, certainly a more complicated issue than fantasy football in which players almost always have a single position that rarely changes. In fantasy baseball, many players have multiple position eligibility, and it can change often and even in-season, depending on your league rules. It is important to know the rules for your league, but even knowing doesn’t make tracking it an easy task.

Here is a reminder about fantasy baseball position eligibility rules for the popular league managers, plus the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC):

Position Eligibility Rules

CBS P.E. Rules (scroll down a bit)

  • 20 games played preseason, 5 games played in-season

ESPN P.E. Rules

  • 20 games played preseason, 10 games played in-season
  • 5 starts (3 in-season) to quality as a starting pitcher
  • 8 relief appearances (5 in-season) to qualify as a relief pitcher

Fantrax P.E. Rules

  • 20 games played preseason, 10 games played in-season
  • 5 starts (3 in-season) to quality as a starting pitcher
  • 8 relief appearances (5 in-season) to qualify as a relief pitcher

Yahoo P.E. Rules

  • 5 starts or 10 games played preseason and in-season
  • 3 starts to quality as a starting pitcher
  • 5 relief appearances to qualify as a relief pitcher

NFBC P.E. Rules (click “Rosters” to find P.E.)

  • 20 games played pre-season, 10 games played in-season
  • Does not use separate starter and relief pitcher positions

That is the gist of it, but there are other considerations. Such as, what if a player did not play in the Majors prior to this season? Then he could be eligible at the position he played the most in the Minors. What if a player with MLB experience missed all of last season? Then he could be eligible at the position(s) based on the last season he played in the Majors. What if a player only hit as DH last year, but your league doesn’t use a DH position? Probably only eligible as a utility option.

Last week I joined a slow best ball draft over at Fantrax. To my surprise, the rules for that league do not exactly match my Fantrax summary, above. For their best ball leagues each player is only eligible at a single position to start the season, determined by the position they played the majority of games last season.

Plus, players will not earn any in-season eligibility at other positions. I can only guess that is because figuring out the best ball lineups every week with multiple positions would be a nightmare. That’s fine, but definitely a need to know section of the rules, which gets back to my original point – make sure to know your league rules with respect to position eligibility.

Tracking Position Eligibility

To help you determine position eligibility and find multi-position eligible players for your fantasy baseball league, we have our games played by position tool. Draft Buddy (Excel download) includes games played by position for all hitters to dynamically identify position eligibility for your league settings, or you can manually adjust positions as necessary.

Unfortunately we do not have minor league statistics in our database because those are outside our budget constraints. However, we do have daily stat updates in-season to help identify new position eligibility for players.

Value Changes

Instead of recreating the wheel, here is a good article by Austin Bristow II from October of last year published at Pitcher List highlighting players who gained or lost position eligibility for 2019 based on last season. Clearly this can result in a value change for the individual player when gaining or losing position eligibility.

Plus consider the impact when a position group light on quality options to begin with gets deeper or shallower. There are some good comments to that article by readers with respect to the depth at first base this season.

Next Steps

The positions you see on our website player pages are from our depth charts that member krby13 keeps updated for us. If a player does not meet position eligibility based on 20 games played the prior season, then the depth chart positions are assigned as a default for Draft Buddy.

This was highlighted to me as an area for improvement when I input Garrett Hampson in Draft Buddy recently, at second base. He is a shortstop for fantasy. He played seven games at 2B but 8 games at SS last season. However, we have him as Colorado Rockies projected 2B in the depth charts.

Realizing this potential inconsistency between a player’s anticipated position and qualifying fantasy position – and we are a fantasy site – I am considering ways to make the tracking of positions more robust across the site and all of our tools.

Lastly, here is an excellent scouting report on Hampson. He was drafted early round 17 in my ongoing 12-team points draft. His NFBC ADP is currently 190th overall.

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy Tagged With: 2019 fantasy positions, 2019 position eligibility, baseball positions, cbs, cbs position eligibility, colorado rockies, espn, espn position eligibility, fantasy baseball position eligibility, fantrax, fantrax position eligibility, garrett hampson, garrett hampson scouting report, mlb, mlb opening day, nfbc, nfbc position eligibility, opening day, pitcher list, position eligibility, yahoo, yahoo position eligibility

Introducing Draft Buddy RotoBowl I – Roto Fantasy Football

July 30, 2018 By Chris Spencer 15 Comments

Roto Fantasy FootballTired of seeing your fantasy football season crumble because of one bad week in December?

Tired of putting up the 2nd highest points for the week only to lose to the weekly high score?

Tired of playing checkers and want to play chess?

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above then you, my friend, are ready for roto fantasy football. Yes, it is just like roto fantasy baseball, tracking where you rank in each scoring statistic (a.k.a. category) as opposed to scoring a single fantasy points total for the week or season. Roto is short for rotisserie, the original way to play fantasy sports.

I recently discovered that FanTrax offers roto scoring for their fantasy football product while reading Matt Williams (@MattWi77iams) series on his inaugural roto football experts league. I’m starting up a league myself and I’m looking for others to join me!

Roto Scoring

For a short explanation how a roto scoring league works, lets say you have a 12-team league and 10 statistical categories. One of the statistical categories is passing yards. The team that has the highest passing yards in the league earns 12 points (since there are 12 teams) for that category. The team that has the second highest passing yards earns 11 points. Third – 10 points, fourth – 9 points, and so on down to the lowest passing yards scoring just 1 point.

One key to roto scoring is it does not matter how many more yards, or stats of whatever category, your team has over the next team. It could be 500 yards or 1 yard, only the ranking matters in awarding points. In our fictional 12-team league with 10 categories, the maximum a team can score is 120 points by finishing first in each category.

Roto scoring also allows for the use of ratio stats, such as passing completion percentage, rushing yards per attempt, etc., which is difficult to apply in a traditional fantasy points scoring league.

Statistical Categories

  • Passing Touchdowns
  • Passing Yards
  • Passing Yards/Attempt
  • Rushing Touchdowns
  • Rushing Yards
  • Rushing Yards/Carry
  • Receiving Touchdowns
  • Receiving Yards
  • Receptions
  • Turnovers (Fumbles Lost and Interceptions)

We’ll have nice symmetry with 3 stats for each: passing, rushing and receiving plus one universal negative stat (turnovers). Also, there are eight counting stats and two ratios.

Rosters

  • QB (1)
  • RB (2)
  • WR (3)
  • TE (1)
  • FLEX (3)
  • Bench (6)

That’s right, no kickers or defense. We’re keeping it simple. The Flex position is RB/WR/TE. If we get 12 teams or less we will probably make one of the Flex positions a “super” flex (QB/RB/WR/TE).

Draft

Slow draft (8 hours per pick, timer turned off overnight) starting when league fills to at least 10 teams or as many as 16.

In-Season Management

This is a league we expect you to actively manage your team during the season. If we are going to do this, lets do it right! There are weekly starting lineups and waivers.

Standings

Points will accumulate for the season. There are no weekly head-to-head matchups. The highest points after Week 17 will be crowned the Draft Buddy RotoBowl I Champion!

Draft Order

  1. Bubba – @bdentrek
  2. Chris W – @cman113060
  3. Jim – @Fantasytaz
  4. Pat – @PJHofer07
  5. Mike S – @MStepney71
  6. Josh – @kingsperry37
  7. Chris S – @Roto_Chris
  8. Mike Z – @FFzinger
  9. Dan – @DanYoldi79
  10. Pat – @PolkaPat
  11. Mike A – @MikeJAdamson
  12. Matt – @Razzball_MB
  13. Steve – @fantasygeek37
  14. Evan – @EvFWFB
  15. Brad – @RotoPilot

Follow Along

We’re no longer accepting participants but you can check in on the draft here.
If you have any questions hit me up on Twitter @Roto_Chris or leave a comment below!

Filed Under: Fantasy Football Tagged With: category scoring, fantasy football league, fantrax, rotisserie, roto fantasy football, roto leagues, roto scoring, rotobowl

Comparing FanTrax, NFBC and RTS Fantasy Baseball League Options

March 10, 2015 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

Fantasy baseball season is underway! We are less than – oh my – one month to Opening Day. That is April 6th for those who haven’t marked it on the calendars yet.

If you are still looking for a fantasy league to join, like myself, then I thought I would summarize some options for us. This is if you don’t have a decent local or private league to join, and don’t want to get one going yourself, which can certainly be a chore being commissioner.

These are publicly available leagues operated by various websites. I believe they are reputable businesses. This is not paid advertising. I’m just trying to lend a hand as one fantasy player to other fantasy players.

I wouldn’t post options here that I don’t believe are good options, but always do your own due diligence before laying down your hard earned cash.

FanTrax

FanTrax Classic Drafts

  • Lobby
  • 12-team leagues
  • Entry fees $10, $25, $50, $100 and $250
  • Payouts 79% ($10 entry) and 85-92% ($25 and up)

There are numerous options here to get your fix. FanTrax has classic 5×5 roto and fantasy points leagues, season long cumulative and head-to-head standings. I’m having a little trouble finding the specific rules, but it appears these are weekly transactions leagues – weekly add/drops and lineup changes. That is much preferred for me over daily transactions. The thing holding me back here is all of the drafts are live drafts. I’d like a slow draft. Of course wait any longer and a live draft will be my only option.

NFBC

National Fantasy Baseball Championship

  • Satellite Series
  • 12 and 15-team leagues
  • Entry fees $125 and up
  • Payouts 80% at lowest entry fees

Talk about options, this one has it, although mostly based on entry fee and prize structure, whether your league is part of a larger overall competition or not. Plus, NFBC leagues are generally for those in a slightly higher to much higher tax bracket. I’m going to focus on the stand-alone satellite leagues, but if you want a 5-star fantasy baseball league experience you should look into these live draft events hosted in Las Vegas, Chicago and New York. Professionally run and a great track record.

A satellite is a great way to understand the NFBC league format – classic roto, cumulative scoring. I like the ability to decide 12 or 15-team drafts. Deep starting lineups and rosters put more emphasis on the draft. Alas, still no slow draft options but a lot of time slots available for live drafts.

RTSports

RealTime Fantasy Sports

  • Overview
  • 10 and 12-team leagues
  • Entry fees $19.95 and up
  • Payouts under 75% at $29.95 and lower but 85%+ at $49.95 and up

In terms of time commitment, maybe a 10-team league is a good option. The range of formats in this post underscores the importance of creating custom cheatsheets (preferably via Draft Buddy or Last Player Picked) to properly value players.

Back to RTS leagues, they have roto and points, head-to-head and cumulative, and even draft masters (draft only, no in-season transactions) and their own overall championship. Transactions are weekly or twice weekly. There are AL and NL-only options if that interests you. I am seeing some auction draft and slow draft options in their lobby. Lots of selection here, although FanTrax is more competitive at the lower entry fees.

 
I haven’t decided which of these I am going to sign up for as of yet. Perhaps I will diversify across each site and then I can comment later on the experience at each. I am also tempted by the FanTrax salary cap game (which takes me way back to my original fantasy sports initiation playing CDM Sports games published in Sporting News, pre-Internet), and of course I want to keep some budget for in-season daily fantasy baseball.

If there are other fantasy baseball league options you think I should consider, then please post a comment and let us know.

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball Tagged With: auction draft, cdm sports, custom cheatsheets, fantasy baseball leagues, fantasy points leagues, fantrax, national fantasy baseball championship, nfbc, payouts, realtime fantasy sports, roto leagues, rts, salary cap, slow draft

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