I had the whole morning cleared out to write a dynasty baseball piece and my intention was another prospects article. Don’t worry, you’ll still get that next week, but today marked the ninth or tenth time in a month that I’ve had someone ask me for my preferred dynasty league settings. Now, Twitter is a great medium for certain things, and in fact, you can quickly write up recommended re-draft league settings or even dynasty football, but dynasty baseball is a world of its own.
I’m not only saying in the sense of how complex it is (we’ll get to that) but also that dynasty baseball is the very climax of fantasy sports. The reason we play is essentially to simulate the best parts of a general manager’s job, right? No other sport, nor re-draft baseball leagues afford you that experience quite like dynasty baseball leagues. There is too much turnover in start-up leagues and nowhere near enough strategy or transactions in football or basketball leagues.
Now, this is going to seem intimidating, but I promise you, if you do your dynasty league right, it will bring you 20+ years of joy, help you develop great friendships and take you to a level of fantasy strategy you didn’t even know possible. And if for some reason you are a football-only type of a reader who happened to stumble onto this article, I’m begging you to dive in headfirst and enjoy the unmatched world of dynasty fantasy baseball.
Check out our early consensus rankings for 2020 fantasy baseball drafts
Your league needs to be deep
Oh, and I don’t mean like 3o man-rosters deep, I mean really really deep. My favorite fantasy league (I’ve been in it for 20 years), rosters 1,200 players combined. We all live across the country and once a year, many of us meet up to attend a few ballgames together. We have custom player images with our jerseys on them, custom ballparks, logos, unlimited league history and great articles personalized to our league. I only knew one of these men (my Dad) when I entered the league and now I consider them all to be friends and some are very good friends. Our league forum is my homepage. This can be you in 5 years if you are serious about building an incredible league. I figure if you can at least handle 1,000 players but don’t worry, I’ll be coming out with my top 1,000 dynasty rankings by mid-February just in time for you all to kick off your start-up dynasty drafts. Here is how I’d advise you to go about things:
- 20 Teams
- 25 Starters per week
- 35 Player Rosters
- 15 More Reserved for Farm Players
- 2 C’s start per week
- 1 1B
- 1 2B
- 1 SS
- 1 3B
- 1 CI
- 1 MI
- 5 OF
- 12 P (you’ll have to use those middle relievers just like in real life)
- 25 on Reserve (You might need to use a google sheet or a website to track farm players)
An Auction is Not Enough
Look, I love an auction. If you want to kick your family and friends re-draft league up from a ‘5 to an 8’ in a hurry, just make it an auction league. Dynasty will surely make that a ‘9 or even 10′, but what I’m going recommend here will make it a bonafide ’20’. I’m talking about contracts. You want this to feel realistic, right? Heck, let’s go bigger than that. Not just contracts, but a whole free agent bidding system so we can extend that wonderful draft feeling out over a month. I know that sounds ridiculous but trust me, once you start the league, it won’t feel complicated for long. Let me show you how I’d go about doing it.
- Everyone starts with 100 million to spend (this number bumps up 10 million every year)
- Hold an auction draft for the first 200 players (about 10 per team)
- Everyone signed in the first round of the auction gets a 5-year contract
- Second round is a 4-year deal, third is 3-year, fourth is 2-year, fifth is 1-year
- Then circle back around #6 is five, #7 is four and so on until the 10th round ends things
- You are bidding in terms of annual value and each bid must increase at least 100K
- So if Trout is first he may go for 22.6 million per year for five straight years before becoming a free agent
A week or two later, hold a 20-round live serpentine draft for young players
- Farm guys are free, Rookies cost 500k, 2nd year costs 1 mil, 3rd costs 1.5 mil
- After three years in the bigs, they run out of team control but you get a discount in free agency (more on that later)
After that, you still have about 20 players each to draft, but you can knock it out in one day online. In each of the rounds listed below, you can pass or you can wait until the round is over and pick again and again or as long as you have money left.
- Round 1 is 5 mil per year for 2 years
- Round 2 is 5 mil per year for 1 year
- Round 3 is 4 mil per year for 2 years
- Round 4 is 4 mil for 1 year
- and so forth until you get to 1 mil per year then 500K per year and everyone has filled out their whole 50-man organizational roster
The first year obviously takes a huge effort but everyone will be having such a blast that they won’t even notice the commitment. After the first year, free agency settles in and everything is much more manageable. First things first, your farm draft takes place in January when the fantasy sports world is dead. This is just a slow straight draft to fill out your 15-player farm rosters. If someone doesn’t pick in 12 hours, they get skipped so the draft can keep moving, but they can come back and make their pick whenever they get to it.
Then, you move onto bidding in February. It is much different than the inaugural draft. Players are separated into auction lots with the top 8 players (by WAR) auctioned off for 10 straight days. Anyone who wants the player will submit a blind bid via e-mail by 9 PM then the auction czar (doesn’t have to be the commish–in fact, you all should spread out duties) will open them all to announce the winners.
In free agency, you aren’t bidding based on average annual value, but rather, total money spent. So if Luis Castillo is up for bid, someone may bid 4 years, 50 million, but lose out to the one who bids 5 years, 55 million. In order to prevent lousy strategies (like 90 years for 1 million each), you have to pay a certain annual value for every year you tack on.
- 1 year = no minimum AAV (annual average value)
- 2 years must be accompanied by an AAV of at least 2 mil
- 3 years = AAV of 5 mil+
- 4 years = AAV of 9 mil+
- 5 years = AAV of 14 mil+
- 6 or more years = AAV of 20 mil+
There is also a hometown discount in play. If you lose J.D. Martinez to free agency, you don’t have to bid on him. Instead, you wait to see what the winning bid is and if you want to match that bid MINUS 10%, then you get him. So let’s say he goes for 5 years, 80 mil. You can have him for 5 years, 72 mil (14.4 every year — always rounded to the nearest 100K) and there is nothing that can be done to stop you. Those other teams better bring their top offer if they don’t want the hometown team to sneak in an hour later and steal the player back.
After the top 80 players are auctioned off, you return to an online snake draft like the one from the year prior:
- Round 1 is 5 mil per year, 2 years (repeat each round until everyone passes to the next round)
- Round 2 is 5 mil per year, 1 year
- Round 3 is 4 mil per year, 2 years
- Round 4 is 4 mil, 1 year
- and so forth until you get to 500K, 1 year and everyone has filled out their whole 50-man organizational roster
You don’t have to stick to standard 5×5 roto
Since I started playing dynasty fantasy baseball as a 10-year-old, the industry-standard has been 5 hitting categories (BA, HR, RBI, R, SB) and 5 pitching categories (ERA, WHIP, W, K, SV). These are fine for basic re-draft leagues but I’d recommend you venture out a little. The reason, of course, is that it makes things more of a challenge. Every single site is giving tailored advice with these ten categories in mind. If you mix them up, everyone has to make their own decisions. There are a few ways you could go here:
Basic Plus
We’ll add OBP, SLG, HLD and QS to the 10 categories everyone else uses. Or, you could just replace BA and HRs with OBP and SLG while replacing W with QS and SVs with SV+HLDs
The Woke League
You know, defense is kind of important too, as is base running even beyond stolen bases. So let’s just scrap ALL TEN categories and make this a WAR only league. May the best 50 man roster win.
Psychopath League
You guessed it; this is the type I belong to. It is the greatest hobby in my life. Think you can handle it? Download Diamond Mind Baseball or OOTP Baseball and actually manage your players in simulated games against other managers. For those who don’t have that much time, there are options to build a manager profile (IE: set a lineup, rotation, bullpen and strategies) and the computer will manage all 162 games the way that you’d like. These leagues use the previous year’s statistics, ballpark metrics and weather to make it the most comprehensive and realistic fantasy sports simulation imaginable.
Do you all see why I wasn’t able to give a quick answer on Twitter? Hope some of you give this your best try. You’ll love it!
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