Fantasy Baseball for lazy retards

January 17, 2008 2:37 PM

So my friend and I want to do fantasy baseball this season, but we don't know the first thing about running one. Compounding the issue is the fact that we're too lazy to rank players, and too busy to constantly be tracking stats. What's the easiest, most low-impact fantasy baseball system for a couple of lazy fanatics?
posted by c:\awesome to sports, hobbies, & recreation (7 answers total)

Ideally, what I'd like is something like this: at the beginning of the season we draft players for our team, or auto-draft or whatever. Over the course of a month the website tallies how well each player does, and guesstimates how well the team would do. Then, every so often (monthly, every two months), you can trade a player or two. Basically, I just want to check in at the end of the day, see how my team did, and close the tab. Is there anything out there that low maintenance?
posted by c:\awesome at 2:44 PM on January 17, 2008

Ive always used yahoo fantasy baseball. Its easy to use you only have to rank players if you feel like it or really want them for your team. Most of the scoring is good set as the default. Its free too so thats also good. Most of the time I just set up my team and then let it run, checking in on only about 3 or 4 times a month and done fine. Of course theres a lot more that you can add but you have to pay for it which isn't that much.
posted by lilkeith07 at 2:46 PM on January 17, 2008

yahoo fantasy baseball is awesome. I'm as lazy as you, and I'm in a league full of guys like me - I actually do spend a fair amount of time ranking my players pre-draft (about 6 hrs) but once the season starts I check my team about once a week, making sure my pitchers all are active on their next starts so their stats will count, and that's about it. Once a month, I also look at my lineup, and shift around a few guys as needed between my bench and my lineup.

For three consecutive years now, I've finished third in my league with this approach.

Yahoo offers pretty robust trading facilities, as well, and it's all really easy to use. And free.
posted by pdb at 2:50 PM on January 17, 2008

My boyfriend and his friends use Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball. They do a full draft at the beginning of the season, online over the course of several hours, then have the "commissioner" (whichever guy they put in charge of their league; usually my boyfriend) go through and double-check all the picks and enter them into Yahoo!'s backend.

As he was explaining all of this to me one day last spring over dinner at the Mexican place down the street, actually, the guy at the table behind him leaned over to say he, too, did fantasy baseball on Yahoo!. It's kind of become the de facto standard these days, even for guys who used to do it pen-and-paper. There was some other site everyone used to use, apparently, but then it either became a pay site or got bought out by Yahoo!—can't remember which it was.

Anyway, that seems to be the way to go—and it's definitely as low-maintenance as what you're looking for. My boyfriend hardly paid attention to it this year (he was, well, too busy hanging out with me much of the time) and he still won almost all his leagues, just checking it a couple times a day.
posted by limeonaire at 4:43 PM on January 17, 2008

I've always preferred ESPN Fantasy Baseball over Yahoo. Reliable/free/fast live scores (I'd get stat updates on my team well before ESPN GameCast showed them), completely customizable leagues (you guys only want to track HR, AVG, and RBI? No problem.), more intuitive interface, etc.

Some complained last year when they were working the kinks out of the new, all-free system, but they fixed all the stat errors pretty quickly. In their second all-free year, they should be even more reliable.
posted by themadjuggler at 5:38 PM on January 17, 2008

I've played Sporting News Ultimate Fantasy Baseball for the last 4 years and it's very good. The $19.95 fee is not much considering the daily enjoyment of checking how I did last night and contemplating what trades I could make.

The only bad thing about it is I have all this free time on my hands during the off season.
posted by smoothhickory at 6:17 PM on January 17, 2008

I like Yahoo. It works, it offers some flexibility, it doesn't crash my computer.
posted by Mozzie at 9:55 AM on January 18, 2008