ur on-line Handbook & Guide will be posted on our site periodically in a series of columns, getting you slowly ready for draft day and the 2008 season. This way you don’t get overloaded. You can always print out an article for reading later on as well.

Quiet please, class is in session!

There are only two things I hate in this world: 1)  My ex-wife 2) Flat, warm beer, and 3) punk fantasy baseball GM’s that think they know everything because they always win their crummy, shallow family leagues. OK, that’s three, but I had to get flat beer in there as well.

You know who I’m talking about. Those wicked annoying teenagers (or pseudo-men who act like teenagers) who make insane fantasy predictions, usually followed up by “you heard it here first” baloney, and claim that they will beat you anytime, anywhere. Then they complain about the rules and accuse everyone of cheating and conspiring against him, end up quitting, and going home crying to momma.

What is even just as annoying is when experts (columnists, web site writers, etc.), especially those ESPN and Rotoworld knuckleheads, don’t even use proper terminology in their articles – or worse – even the titles of the articles are misused.  How many articles or on-line columns have you read entitled “Waiver Wired” or “Waiver Wire Pickups”? Those articles make recommendations for likely available fantasy baseball free agent players, and I’m not sure many of them really understand the waiver process, if their leagues even use them. Hopefully, by reading this article, you will all have a better understanding and comprehension of fantasy baseball, and you won’t be starring in any of those ESPN commercials about people talking sports out of their ass. Although many of you still may be better off taking pottery lessons, but if you play in fantasy baseball leagues, your league mates will be glad you chose to read this magazine (or maybe not).

FANTASY BASEBALL

History and Traditionalism

The origins of fantasy baseball date back to a small group of academics at the University of Michigan in the 1960s. Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball". One of the best-known was the Strat-o-Matic, which began publishing in 1963 a game containing customized baseball cards of Major League Baseball players with their stats from recent seasons.

The original board game shown above is actually in the real MLB Hall of Fame. Using the baseball cards, participants could then re-create previous seasons using the game rules and the statistics, or compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against each other. Meanwhile, Harold Richman, now the president of Strat-O-Matic, has reached cult status to his loyal followers. Every winter, hundreds of "Strat-O-Maniacs" from all of North America line up in Long Island for Strat-O-Matic baseball's opening day in order to be one of the first fans to get the newest version of the board game, straight from the hands of Richman or Strat-O-Matic lead programmer Bob Winberry. There are a number of celebrity managers as well, including moviemaker Spike Lee, actor Tim Robbins and broadcasters Bob Costas and Jon Miller. Even major leaguers, such as Cal Ripken Jr. and Dale Murphy, have joked that seeing their own Strat-O-Matic card was one of the perks of their big-league arrival.

The game is different from fantasy baseball in that it uses all aspects of a player’s ability, and managerial decisions over a 162-game season. There is a current on-line version, and you can use today’s players, or Hall-of Famers in certain years.

The landmark tabletop game Pursue the Pennant debuted in 1985 and took baseball board games to much more realistic levels of play to incorporate ball park effects, clutch hitting and pitching and many other nuances of the game. Fantasy baseball was the theme of the 1968 darkly comic novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which dealt with themes of creationism and playing god.

Rotisserie League Baseball

The landmark development in fantasy baseball came with the development of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980. Magazine writer/editor Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing it, the name coming from the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise where he and some friends used to meet and play. As enormous baseball fans, Okrent and his friends spent countless hours arguing about the way teams were managed and, over time, convinced themselves that they could do just as good of a job as the yahoos who were actually paid to do so. In the Winter of 1979, Okrent set out to create an elaborate game that would simulate the process of building a ball club. The idea was to determine, once and for all, which of his friends would really make the best general manager. After sketching out the rules over two days in his study in Western Massachusetts (where I grew up and currently live), he pitched the idea to a group of conspirators who quickly bit the hook. The game's innovation was that "owners" in a Rotisserie league would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players and would follow their statistics during the ongoing season to compile their scores. In other words, rather than using statistics for seasons whose outcomes were already known (like the Strat-o-Matic board game), the owners would have to make similar predictions about players' playing time, health, and expected performance that real baseball managers must make.

The Original Real Draft – The Auction Draft

Let’s face it. The franchise that spends their money the most wisely on baseball players is usually the most successful teams. Look at the success of the Patriots Scott Pioli and the A’s Billy Beane. In football, with the advent of the salary cap, every team has the same amount of money to start with, thus making player signings, drafting, and managing (coaching) more critical to the success of the team. In baseball, however, where there is no salary cap and a huge disparity between the “haves’ and the ‘have-nots” that doesn’t necessarily guarantee championships either.

Getting solid baseball players at a great value, and managing their lineups and pitching staffs, while using excellent player scouting and being acute at developing a winning team was the core of success for small market, small budget teams like the 2004 Champion Florida Marlins (25^th total salary) and the 2001 Diamondbacks (8^th total payroll), and the 2002 Angels (15^th total payroll). The same can be said for Rotisserie Fantasy Baseball owners. Your team is not as much affected by the order of your draft picks as much as it is determined by which players to spend the money on, and at what positions.

Members of a Rotisserie league (usually about twelve people) gather around a table to pick teams. While it’s called a “draft”, it’s really an “English Auction.” Each “owner” pays $260 in real money to the pot in exchange for the right to spend that exact sum on ballplayers.

The auction continues until every owner has filled out a roster of 23 players in the following combination: 9 pitchers, 5 outfielders, 2 catchers, 1 first baseman, 1 second baseman, 1 shortstop, 1 third baseman, 1 middle infielder (second or short), 1 corner infielder (first or third), and 1 utility player. In Tout Wars, the league described in Fantasyland, there’s an additional “reserve draft” where each contestant picks six bench players, mostly prospects, like a real MLB draft.

Modern Fantasy Baseball

The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of real-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real-world game works. Fantasy baseball has continued to grow [based on recent studies from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA.org)], but has been overtaken by fantasy football as the most popular form of fantasy sports.

The best leagues play for money or prizes, even if it’s not a lot of money, because owners will take it a little more seriously, and not often keep illegal lineups, therefore jeopardizing the integrity of the league scoring in most scoring categories. The original Rotisserie League used the following statistics:

Batting: average (BA), home runs (HR), runs batted in (RBI), and stolen bases (SB)

Pitching: wins (W), saves (S), earned run average (ERA), and Ratio [Walks + Hits ¸ Innings Pitched (WHIP)].

This is often called a "4x4" league (4 hitting stats and 4 pitching stats). Many leagues adopt a "5x5" format, with runs and strikeouts added, respectively. Still other leagues are "6x6", most commonly adding OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), and holds for middle relievers. However, the "6x6" format does not have a standard or consensus set of categories to use. Other modifications to the rules include a minimum number of at-bats and innings pitched, where teams that do not achieve the minimum were awarded last place in the respective categories.

An alternate head-to-head system is one where each team competes against only one team each week. At the end of the week, each team tallies wins and losses based on whatever criteria are set by the league. There are three basic forms of head-to-head leagues (oftentimes referred to as "H2H"):

Head-to-Head Rotisserie: Wins, losses and ties are based on your team's performance in individual categories.

Head-to-Head One Win: Just like H2H Rotisserie, but the winner receives just one win, rather than one win for each category the team wins. The team that wins the most number of categories is awarded one win for that day’s (or week’s) match-up.

Head-to-Head Points: Stats accumulate points for each team (a Home Run/Stolen Base/etc. is worth a certain number of points), and the team with the most points at the end of the week (or day if a daily format is used) is awarded a win.

Opponents are dictated by a round-robin system. At the end of the season, the team with the best win-loss record is the victor. How close to real baseball or traditional rotisserie is that? Not even close. Most experts and experienced fantasy owners do not play H2H formats, including myself.

In H2H play, a free-agent limit is also sometimes used to limit the so-called "pitch-and-ditch" tactic, a method of play in which a manager drafts a free agent pitcher with the intention of using him in only one game before replacing him with a pitcher who is scheduled to start the following day.

PURE ROTISSERIE SCORING

Since Rotisserie teams are composed of a mishmash of names from different ballclubs, they cannot really “play” one another, making head-to-head leagues completely inappropriate. The goal, then, is to have the players you pick, as a whole, accumulate the highest totals in eight statistical categories: home runs, stolen bases, runs batted in, batting average, saves, wins, earned-run average, and WHIP (a measure of a pitcher’s ability to keep runners off base). Tout Wars, like many leagues, has raised the total to ten by adding runs and strikeouts, thus making it a 5x5 league.

For those of you interested in checking out the Tout Wars professional league, go here:

http://www.toutwars.com/

During the season, trades are permitted, usually until the end of August, just like in real baseball. Before the season, each contestant is given what’s called a “Free Agent Acquisition Budget” (FAAB). Once a week, they are allowed to use this $100 allowance to bid on free agents—any player who is not already on some owner’s team. Through trades and FAAB purchases, it is possible (though not recommended) to turn your roster over completely.

3 Million and Counting

At the moment, somewhere between three and five million people play fantasy baseball. No thanks to the Internet, there is an infinite variety of leagues with an incalculable variety of rules, where most of those leagues prefer to use a straight draft rather than an auction, which is less intense and can be conducted online by contestants in different cities. (See Chapter 2; Draft Strategy). There are “keeper” leagues where a certain number of players are held over from season to season (like real MLB). Traditional Roto leagues like Tout Wars force contestants to study by limiting the pool of biddable players to either the American League or the National League. But to simplify matters, a growing swath of leagues now uses a “mixed” format where all major leaguers are eligible.

The hobby is not regulated, and since there’s no National Rotisserie Association to sanction events or set standards, I have started an internet-based company and a new web site to train and certify fantasy commissioners, and to develop a national standard protocol for rules that should be standard, like trade etiquette, etc. But the concept itself has taken on all sorts of forms, from fantasy football (the most popular derivation), to fantasy golf and, over in England, fantasy cricket (oh, my!) Most of the major Web portals like Yahoo! and ESPN offer free and pay fantasy games, as does Major League Baseball’s official site.

The National Fantasy Baseball Championships

Krause Publications is well established in the fantasy sports industry with a full slate of magazines, online games and live drafts. KP started Fantasy Sports Magazine in 1989 - originally it was called Fantasy Baseball Magazine - as the first national newsstand publication for the industry. The company also established the industry's premiere trade conference in 2000 - The Fantasy Sports Trade Conference - and then created the industry's first multi-city, high-stakes live drafts with the National Fantasy Baseball Championship in 2004 and the National Fantasy Football Championship later that year. KP also custom publishes fantasy baseball and football magazines for industry companies such as Rotowire.com, Rototimes.com, Footballguys.com and FantasyGuru.com.

Discussion of Scoring Formats

The use of statistics like pitchers' wins and batters’ RBI are often scoffed at today by members and followers of the Society for American Baseball Research who prefer to use objective evidence, especially detailed baseball statistics to measure player's performance. Sabermetric thinkers (explained later) argue wins and RBI often misrepresent the performance of players, since they are largely influenced by "outside" factors like run support and bullpen support (for wins) and runners on base (for RBIs).

While I don’t completely agree with that, I do, however, agree that a player’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage are more valuable to a team than a player’s batting average or number of home runs he hits (compare the real baseball value of Adam Dunn to Manny Ramirez, or Alfonso Soriano for that matter, and you’ll see my point). Then there's the inflated value of the stolen base statistic that is so prevalent in category leagues. Is Chone Figgins really an elite player just because he steals bases?

SABERMETRICS

While the standard 4x4 and 5x5 scoring formats have typically used home runs and batting average to simplify the game so that the common fan can understand, Sabermetrics introduces the more useful statistics that may better determine a ball players’ real value in real baseball. After all, real baseball franchises (and therefore fantasy GM’s) are supposed to build a winning team, and building a winner is not just about home runs and batting average. In fact, on-base percentage and slugging percentage is being used more each day by real MLB statisticians and scouts to determine which players, whether free agents or minor leaguers, will help their ball clubs the best.

Sabermetrics is therefore probably the more useful in the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially non-standard baseball statistics. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who was among its first proponents and has long been its most prominent advocate known to the general public.

Bill James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "How many home runs will Ken Griffey, Jr. hit next year?" It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as "Who is your favorite player?" It may, however, attempt to settle questions such as "Was Willie Mays faster than Mickey Mantle?" by establishing several possible parameters for examining speed in objective studies (how many triples each man hit, how many bases each man stole, how many times was he caught stealing) and then reaching a tentative conclusion on the basis of these individual studies.

Chicks may dig the long ball, but there’s more to ballplayers than the home run.

Sabermetricians, including non-mathematician traditionalists like myself, frequently call into question traditional measures of baseball skill. For instance, batting average is generally considered by them to be a statistic of limited usefulness because it turns out to be a poor predictor of a team's ability to score runs. A more typical sabermetric reasoning would say that runs win ballgames, and that therefore a good measure of a player's worth is his ability to help his team score more runs than the opposing team. Accordingly, sabermetric measures — such as Bill James's runs created and win shares, or Pete Palmer's total player rating — are usually phrased in terms of either runs or team wins; a truly outstanding player, for example, might be described as being worth 54 runs more than an average player at the same position over the course of a full season.

Sabermetrics is concerned both with determining the value of a player in a season gone bye, and with trying to predict the value of a player in the future based on his past performances. While many areas of study are still in development, it has yielded a number of interesting insights into the game of baseball and in the area of performance measurement.

Afterall, fantasy baseball is all about picking the best players that will have the better current season for your fantasy teams, so predictions about a player’s upcoming season is most vital to winning.

Some sabermetric measurements, ones that I happen to agree with, have entered mainstream baseball usage, especially OPS (on-base plus slugging) and, to a lesser extent, WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched).

Billy Beane has been the general manager of the Oakland Athletics since 1997. Although not a public proponent of sabermetrics, it has been widely noted that Beane has steered the team during his tenure according to sabermetric principles. Since the Oakland Athletics have lower revenues and are considered a small market team, Beane's use of sabermetrics to capitalize on what are perceived to be undervalued talents is sometimes credited with keeping the A's competitive with larger market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. Finding these undervalued talents is the core of fantasy baseball success, and ultimately the final judge in determining fantasy baseball supremacy and baseball acuity – the ultimate hard-on of egotism that makes the game fun and engaging.

Anybody with little or no knowledge can draft any player they want without repercussion, because any fantasy player in the rotten shallow leagues without free agent limits can grab 100 free agents on a trial-an-error approach until they get a team that ends up being competitive. If that’s your cup of tea, so be it, and therefore my suggestion for developing age groups in fantasy leagues, just like little leagues do.

Money Ball

It is widely thought that few other teams in baseball apply these principles, thus making the Athletics a test case for sabermetrics in action. In 2003, Michael Lewis published Moneyball, a book about Beane and how his approach to running the Athletics works. Theo Epstein, GM of the Boston Red Sox, is the first GM of a large market team to utilize principles of sabermetrics. He has hired sabermetricians Bill James and Eric Van to work for the Red Sox.

Rob Neyer is a columnist for ESPN's web site who has supported sabermetrics since the mid-1990s. He has authored or co-authored several books about baseball, and his ESPN website page focuses on sabermetric methods for looking at baseball players' and teams' performance. Also, Ron Shandler, author of Baseball Forecaster, an annual publication focused on applying sabermetrics to fantasy baseball, and founder of Baseball HQ, a website with the same focus.

Craig R. Wright, a statistician for the Texas Rangers, was the first front office employee in Major League Baseball to work under the title "Sabermetrician." He went on to a career as a consultant to several major league teams. He is the primary author (with Tom House) of The Diamond Appraised (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989) (ISBN 0-671-67769-1). That book's later translation into Japanese allowed Wright to add the Hanshin Tigers to his stable of major league clients.

Baseball Prospectus is an annual publication and web site produced by a group of sabermetricians who originally met over the Internet. Several Baseball Prospectus authors have invented or improved upon widely relied upon sabermetric measures and techniques. The website publishes analytical articles as well as advanced statistics and projections for individuals and teams.  Their web site is at www.baseballprospectus.com