Fantasy Baseball '11

Joined my first league this year. Fantasy football veteran… but I have no idea what I’m doing with baseball.

Help.

Who’s the running backs of this- the pitchers? Who do i pick first? what positions do I fill? You get the hint.

fantasy baseball is split between those who love pitching and those who love hitting. personally i think you have to decide which route youre going then loading up there and filling in the other later. some of it depends on how the scoring in your league is? from there you can better determine which route you go.

personally i will usually go hitting, unless of course theres noone good to take or an unbelievable pitcher falls to me. but your starters go once every 5 where as your hitter are every day, could hurt ya if theyre bad though lol. it will also depend where you draft. get some info on your scoring and draft position and i can give more info.

Assuming your playing in a somewhat standard league: full out your entire roster before you draft closers or spend draft $$ on closers.

And don’t overpay for speed.

Otherwise it all depends on the rules of the league you’re playing in.

even if you pick a good starting group you constantly have to swap players and crap to keep up.

If you don’t know anything about baseball, follow the sport this season then play fantasy next year.

Unless you don’t mind finishing last.

[quote]therajraj wrote:
even if you pick a good starting group you constantly have to swap players and crap to keep up.

If you don’t know anything about baseball, follow the sport this season then play fantasy next year.

Unless you don’t mind finishing last.[/quote]

Well I know plenty about baseball, just not actually playing fantasy baseball.

I know I’ve gotta swap a lot being as everyone gets injured all the time and what not, but I was more curious as to whether to focus on grabbing guys that hit above .290 or pitchers that win games.

And my league is not one that takes into account money per player, etc. It’s a simple draft.

Here’s my team. I play in a 12 team keeper league (the K’s are my 16 keepers for this year). This team finished 2nd in league roto stats last year (although i missed the playoffs all-together because it was a H2H league and I didn’t have good luck at all). The leauge is score on the categories in the right columns.

One of the biggest tricks to fantasy is to have the deepest bench IMO, since injuries are unavoidable.

What are the categories for scoring in your league?

For pitchers, I’d look at guys like Halladay, Lincecum, Josh Johnson and Felix Hernandez. One thing to keep in mind is that the NL’s elite pitchers are typically going to get more points than the AL’s due to the DH altering stats a bit. With the four mentioned above (assuming Johnson is fully healthy this year; I’d put him at the bottom of this list for now) you’re going to get a lot of Ks, probably a lot of wins with Halladay and Lincecum and perhaps with Johnson and Hernandez, they’re stuff is just fucking nasty and they have really good control so it’s very likely that when things are said and done, they’ll have racked up a lot of Ks, a low ERA, not a lot of hits given up, very few homers allowed and so on. I would go with Lincecum. He should bounce back from a bit of a down year last year. It’s really a tie with him and Halladay, but I give the edge to Lincecum simply because he’s in a much more pitcher-friendly stadium than in Philly.