Playing fantasy baseball can be a lot of fun, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can also be a huge waste of time. No one wants to be the guy that all of their friends make fun of for having no idea how to play fantasy baseball. If this is your first time playing fantasy baseball, it doesn’t mean that you’re getting to the party too late. You can learn the basics of what you need to know in order to play the game. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when playing fantasy baseball.
Know How Your League Scores
One of the first things that you should do and playing fantasy baseball is learned a scoring system for your league. There are many different ways that fantasy baseball leagues do scoring, and all of them can have an impact on the way that the games are played. For example, some leagues put more of an emphasis on strikeouts, which makes relievers pretty valuable. Other leagues award more points to wins, which makes starting pitchers very valuable. If you to understand how the scoring works, you will not be able to formulate your draft strategy. You need to figure out which positions are the most valuable for your particular league. Obviously, you always want good hitters and stud pitchers. However, the type of hitters and pitchers that you draft can vary, depending on the rules of the league.
Create a Draft Cheat Sheet
If you have paid any attention to major league baseball lately, you know that there are hundreds of different players that you could potentially draft for your team. It’s pretty difficult to keep track of them all, even if you are a die hard fan. Before draft day, you need to go through and make a list of the players that you want to target. Most of the time, when you do your draft online, the system that you use will have players ranked according to their “fantasy baseball experts.” If you don’t know who to draft, you can always go by their rankings. However, most of these so-called “experts” really don’t know any more than you do about who is going to have a big season. Because of this, you should go into the draft with a list of people that you would like to add to your team. Then when it’s getting close to that person’s value according to the experts, you may need to draft him a little earlier before the other players ranked ahead of him are taken.
Put Your Players in the Game
One of the biggest problems that fantasy baseball players have is keeping up with the transactions on a weekly basis. If you are going to win your fantasy baseball league, you’re going to have to check your team almost every day. With a standard rotisserie style fantasy baseball league, they keep track of your stats on a weekly basis. This means that you have to get the players in the game that are actually going to play. If you have a pitcher that is on pace to make two starts this week, get him in the game so that he can accumulate some stats. If you have one shortstop that has an off-day this week, and another one on the bench that plays every day, put the bench player in the game. Of course, you always have to take into consideration the player’s performance. However, you want to maximize your chances of getting stats accumulated in the game.
Work the Waiver Wire
If you want to be competitive, you’re also going to have to work the waiver wire. Pick up players as you go, based on what you need. If one of your pictures is playing awful, drop him and pick up someone better. Don’t be afraid to pull the trigger on waiver wire transactions, as long as you have done a little bit of homework on the players that you are adding and dropping.