Special to Fantasy Alarm from Ron Shandler - Play Monthly Fantasy Baseball with him at Shandler Park
I was there at the beginning.
It started with a little green book – 1984’s Rotisserie League Baseball – that changed the world of sports fandom forever. We were among the early adopters who painstakingly compiled the statistics by hand from the Tuesday and Wednesday editions of USA Today. We muddled through eight-hour drafts, thumbing through three-month-old magazines to find the next player. We made trades by telephone – talking into it, not typing onto it.
Back then, it took an incredible amount of time to play the game, but the novelty and excitement kept us coming back every year. We loved Fantasy Baseball 1.0.
However, the game was not without its flaws. Perhaps the most common advisory request I’d get in the 1990s was, “how do we keep everyone involved all season?” I had a handy list of artificial fixes, from standings penalties to category prizes.
But diehard or not, it has always been tough to stay engaged for six months, especially if your team was struggling. No matter how you cut it, playing full season fantasy requires a significant time commitment.
When the internet exploded, the problem took on a new dimension. Instant access to information fostered shorter attention spans and spiked the need for immediate gratification. We wanted more and more in less and less time. Fantasy formats that were less labor-intensive – shallow mixed leagues, football! – fueled the growth of the industry. And it made perfect sense that a daily fantasy game would be the next step.
Daily fantasy baseball is highly engaging – a nightly adrenaline rush – that solves the problem of too much time. But it, too, is not without flaws.
In football, the individual game holds great meaning since there are fewer of them. But baseball has never been a quick-trigger game; it’s all about critical mass.
To wit… Nelson Cruz led all of baseball with 40 home runs last year, but he went homerless in 122 of his 159 games (77%). On any individual night, we had less than a 1 in 4 chance of rostering a single HR from baseball’s best power hitter.
And so, daily fantasy success requires that you play the game frequently. It’s how you build the critical mass. But that takes more time.
Baseball is also about continuity. Players fit into structured roles; most MLB teams generally use the same core lineups each day. You can find this type of roster stability in most full-season fantasy leagues, but not in the daily game.
There are plenty of flaws to go around for both formats, but is there a way to design a game that addresses all the issues?
The key variable has always been time.
Time can be a great benefit and a great obstacle. In full-season leagues, the long time horizon allows us to better evaluate skill. However, too many variables over the course of six months make projecting at-bats and innings – playing time – damn near impossible for too many players.
The daily game offers the exact opposite scenario. We can pretty much nail playing time on any given night, but skill can be a crapshoot.
What if we adjusted the game’s time horizon so that we can find some equilibrium between projecting skill and projecting playing time?
The four-week time span is somewhat of a sweet spot. Although it might seem otherwise, one month is enough time to evaluate aggregate skill across a roster of players. Research has shown that 80% of full-season fantasy winners are already in a money spot (1st through 4th place) by the end of April each year. Even 78% of Major League division winners are within three games of first place by May 1.
The tactical challenges of the daily game come into play on a monthly basis. The MLB schedule – nearly irrelevant in a full-season league – drives decisions in a monthly game. Match-ups, home games and opposition feed into the roster-building process.
But unlike the daily game, you can build something over more than one night. The continuity and drama of following the standings every day is perhaps the element most lacking in day-game play.
And unlike full-season leagues, your team doesn’t have to take a fatal hit when Jose Fernandez or Prince Fielder go down with injuries through no fault of your own. You can always start over.
Even new MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recognizes that time is an important variable in building the fantasy baseball industry. At the Sloan Analytics Conference held earlier this month, he said: “Our difficulty is that MLB’s fantasy products need to evolve in a way that they don’t require quite the 162-game, 183-day commitment that the traditional fantasy crowd might (have). I think we need to develop games that require a less constant commitment.”