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.