Fantasy Baseball > Fantasy Advice > How to Set Up a Custom Fantasy Baseball League

How to Set Up a Custom Fantasy League

First off, there's nothing wrong with the standard-issue, 5x5 Fantasy Baseball League setup. The standard league setup can be just as fun and just as challenging as, so long as you're in a competitive league (or at least in a league that's as competitive as you are). But, the fact that you're here checking out the expert advice of we, the Fantasy Baseball Bastards, chances are good that you want more from your fantasy baseball experience. One way to do that is to devise your own league rules, meaning deciding which categories you want to track in your league.

In our inaugural season, before the days of the internet when we had to do the fantasy stats by hand (what a bunch of old bastards!), we kept track of 10 offensive categories (Runs, Hits, Doubles+Triples, HR, RBI, Walks, Strikeouts, Stolen Base %, On-Base% and Batting Average), and 6 pitching categories (Win%, Saves, WHIP, K/9, ERA and Shutouts). We don't think you necessarily need to use all these stats in your custom fantasy baseball league, per se, but we chose those at the time (in 1992) because those were the categories that we thought were the best indicators of a players' value to an actual baseball team and to a teams' total worth.

Custom Fantasy League Setup: Use Stats that Matter

We see a lot of n00bs go all crazy on the stats once they realize they can set up their own, custom statistics for their fantasy baseball league. They start tracking all kinds of stupid stats that no one cares about and won't care about on draft day. I got dragged into a league once where the eggheaded, retard of a Commissioner decided that we would track triples as a separate category. All of a sudden, a bunch of slap-hitting speed merchants who batted in the 7th, 8th or even the 9th slots were being drafted ahead of guys who would hit 30 doubles every year like clockwork.

These days, there are a ton of stupid stats being kept that can make your league no fun at all. Making a league fun and competitive is really the key. Use stats that matter to you and the fantasy geeks in your league with you. If you're all kind of knowledgeable, use the standard 5x5 format. If you're a bunch of Fantasy Baseball gurus like the Fantasy Baseball Bastards (so you think), then pile up the stats that matter.

Some Fantasy Baseball Stats Have Been Combined
to Improve Fantasy Baseball

We used to keep track of walks on offense as a single category. For one thing, the stat was readily available in a box score on in Baseball Weekly way back in the doing-fantasy-baseball-stats-by-hand days. Now, however, we have baseball stats available to us like Total Bases, Slugging Percentage, On-Base Percentage, etc. This means that we don't have to do nearly as much math and statistical research as we used to, of course. More importantly, it means that we can better gauge a player's worth with one of these stats that combines walks - a valuable stat unto itself - along with other ways they get on base. Really, the most important thing for an offensive player is to get on base. If you can't get on base, you can't score - period. The stats we mentioned above entail things like total bases, how many bases a batter reached with a single hit, how often he gets on base, and a few combinations of fantasy stats therein. While these stats don't make the Walks category insignificant (since some of them use walks as a part of their formula), they do make the fantasy category of Walks an obsolete fantasy baseball statistic.

Don't Let a Dumb Guy Run Your League

I've been doing this so long that I've had my fair share of Commissioner duties, and I've also been in enough league to where I just couldn't believe how f*cking stupid the commissioner was. A lot of them had good intentions, but they were just plain ol' dumb guys.

Dumb guys like to prove how smart they are by out-thinking themselves. They can't get out of their own heads, so they add in categories like Fielding Percentage, Errors, Hit By Pitch, or they'll just pile up as many stats as they can possibly pile up in a fantasy league. These are the guys who will lobby for using redundant stats on top of each other, like On-Base Percentage, Walks, Total Bases and On-Base+ Slugging all in the same league.

As a sidenote, I was once in a Fantasy Football League where the knuckle-dragging commissioner decided that it would be more accurate to have every team start 2 Quarterbacks every week!!! No matter what I said, no matter how much mathematics and statistical analysis I showed him, no matter how many times I said, "NFL teams only start one Quarterback every week," he insisted that "Every team has 2 quarterbacks." I would say, "Some teams have 3 or 4 quarterbacks on their roster! Why don't we start 3 quarterbacks every week?!"

He just couldn't see the math in front of his face. He refused to acknowledge the mathematical fact that terrible quarterbacks still score more points in Fantasy Football than most wide receivers for the simple fact that QBs touch the ball on every play. He just couldn't see the light - the obvious, factual light.

Why? Because he was a dumb guy... and he ruined our league. When it came time for him to start his fantasy baseball league, I saw the list of stats and told him, "No thanks, stupid."

Custom Fantasy League
Categories to Avoid

You know the old adage: "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." Just because you can customize a league to no end doesn't mean you should.

This goes back to the "don't let a dumb guy run your league" advice we already gave you. A dumb guy won't be able to resist the temptation to add in a bunch of gratuitous categories in your fantasy league. He thinks they'll make him look smart, when in fact it does quite the opposite.

One fantasy category has been tried repeatedly, and each time it results in fantasy owners bitching about it. That category is Errors and you need to avoid it like the plague.

Errors Count in Real Baseball; Adding Errors in Your Custom Fantasy League Will Suck

We've tried it for an entire season, and it sucked, starting in week 1. Think of it this way: you're not going to draft a player because of his lack of errors, you're going to draft him for his offense whether you keep track of errors in your fantasy league or not.

Some will argue that including Errors in a fantasy baseball league will not only make it more accurate to real baseball, but it will add in an extra draft strategy. While this isn't untrue, no one will draft a player because he's a great fielder, especially when Errors would only be one category. Instead, the draft strategy around Errors would be to draft a guy who qualifies at a certain position but rarely plays there, like when David Ortiz or Jim Thome qualify at first base, or when Edgar Martinez used to qualify at third base. This doesn't help you draft a better team, it helps you avoid the rules, and it suddenly over-values players who are really nothing more than a DH. Suddenly, Edgar Martinez is my #1 pick (back in the day) if I need a stud third baseman in a league that uses Errors as a statistical category.

Worst of all, it's just not fun to track Errors in fantasy baseball, especially when you win or lose that category 0-1 and then you beat your opponent or lose to your opponent by 1 point that week. It just sucks all the way around, either way, and Errors should be left for real baseball.

And before your dumb-guy fantasy baseball commissioner decides to out-smart you by keeping a category for Fielding Percentage instead of Errors, tell that moron to kick rocks and get lost. He's not fit to run a fantasy baseball league... which is tremendously sad, by the way. Moving on...

Don't Get Carried Away With All These
New Baseball Stats

Look, we love MLB Network as much as the next fantasy baseball fanatic, but all these new stats that are crawling out of the woodwork are just getting ridiculous. Maybe we're just traditionalists or purists, but for God's sake, man, enough with jamming this WAR stat down our throats. "Win Against Replacement" - just gimme a break, man. It doesn't even make sense when you say it out loud.

We aren't sure if the online fantasy baseball sites have adopted this stat yet for 2013, but we're expecting some will. If they do, we highly recommend against you using it in your fantasy baseball league. For one thing, different sites and different baseball statistician nerds calculate it different ways, and those different ways incorporate their opinion into the equation. Putting opinion into a mathematical is a bad way to go, therefore so is WAR as a fantasy baseball category. Stick to cold, hard numbers and facts. Players either hit home runs or they don't - there's no room for opinions in baseball stats... ya nerds.