What is the best (free) Fantasy Baseball site?

March 2, 2007 2:18 PM

I'm in charge of organizing our informal, low-key fantasy baseball pool this year. We've used Yahoo for the past two years and while it wasn't a bad experience, I wonder if there is better out there...
posted by gavia to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (5 answers total)

The past few years my buddies and I have been using CBS Sportsline as the host for our fantasy needs. They have all sorts of customization options and worked great for us. I tried Yahoo! for a seperate league and really was dissappointed by it in comparison to CBS.

This year we are debating between CBS and ESPN. If it matters, we always play a free roto league with no money on the line.
posted by bigcheesegump at 2:43 PM on March 2, 2007

ESPN is going free this year, and since they bought talentedmrroto.com they should have gotten some good feedback from those guys into fixing some problems they had before.

I am usually a Yahoo! guy, but we're going ESPN in one league to see how much they've improved. My other two, we are keeping in Yahoo!.
posted by scottymacten at 3:06 PM on March 2, 2007

ESPN is free for the first time this year, and has highly customizable private leagues. My keeper league moved there from Sandbox just this week.
posted by mbd1mbd1 at 3:07 PM on March 2, 2007

I was going to set up a Yahoo free league for some coworkers and myself until I saw the draft times that were available for their free leagues: weekdays only, mornings and early afternoons. Maybe that's changed since I checked (a couple weeks ago), but if you work normal hours and want to do a live draft, it pretty much rules out Yahoo as an option (unless the boss doesn't care if you draft at work).

I ended up setting up a league with ESPN. I like the fact that they have some interesting scoring categories (e.g. runs created, total bases, quality starts), and they are apparently going to provide real-time stats for the free leagues this year.
posted by letourneau at 3:12 PM on March 2, 2007

until I saw the draft times that were available for their free leagues

Yahoo! won't announce it ahead of time, but they routinely open up previously closed draft times. There was concern in my main league that we wouldn't be able to get a weeknight draft slot and a day later many were available. Check often and you should be able to find one to suit your needs.

Though I do like Yahoo's fantasy baseball setup, I could be convinced to go elsewhere. Of course, since they released users' all-time fantasy stats a year and a half ago, well, I can never leave.
posted by dorisfromregopark at 4:57 PM on March 2, 2007