FanGraphs Gets a Fantasy Game
I’m very pleased to announce that FanGraphs has partnered with ottoneu, Inc. to bring you an auction-based, dynasty league, fantasy game.
Our fantasy game is not your standard customizable commissioner service, but is a very specific game, where you manage a roster of 40 Major and Minor League players with a budget of $400 against 11 other teams. There are currently three different scoring options: 4×4, 5×5, and points-based. You can read more about the specific rules here.
One of the exciting things about bringing a fantasy game to FanGraphs is integration. Have you ever wanted to find free agents in your league using the FanGraphs leaderboards? Now you can.
Information about your fantasy leagues will be available in the FanGraphs player cards and elsewhere on the site, making your fantasy baseball research easier and more in depth than ever.
This season, up until March 1st, each team is discounted to $9.99 from the regular price of $19.99. The first 100 people to sign up will get one free team for the 2011 season, with their money refunded to them in 48 hours.
Signups are available now. Just click here and create/join a league.
We’re very excited about this fantasy game and think that once you start playing, you’ll understand why. Niv Shah, the creator of the game, will be sharing his experiences with the game format later today.
10
This sounds incredible!
No words
This sounds incredible. Count me in!
:-O
this is pretty remarkable (on a number of levels!)
Underwhelming, in my opinion. Pay-to-play and auction only? I’ll stick with Yahoo.
It’s a year-round auction keeper. So it does something that Yahoo doesn’t. Your league page will be up all year, and it keeps track of all of your players for you.
If I say “I’m with Jeff Gross”, does that get me anything?
As a commissioner of a year round league that uses Yahoo! the fact that it goes dark for several months makes my life significantly harder. You guys are definitely on to something here.
When do sign ups start?
When/where can we sign up?
I already signed up. But can’t join a league or create my own. I’m sure it’ll update at some point.
Same story here. I think I created a league and it let me create my team to be in it, but I can’t find it anywhere. It came out of my PayPal, so I guess it’s working somewhere?
Opening day hiccup, this will be fixed pretty soon.
David — any leagues you recommend to join? I’m looking for an existing pay league with some serious, fun, and knowledgeable GMs:
QUICK BIO
Played a little college ball at Univ. of Wash, started I Love Baseball (ilovebaseball.org), run YourSports.com, die-hard Mariners fan, not a SABR expert but def understand, love/play Baseball Mogul, currently live/work in Silicon Valley, and am right now playing in a WAR-based league over at ESPN. Looking to step-up my SABR game.
If you know of a couple off-hand, please shoot me an e-mail. It’s really hard to decipher what the good leagues are in current UX over on their site. E-mail is beisbol08 at gmail
Hmm…I currently have about 5 spare minutes a day…can I fit this in those minutes?
sounds great. on another note, David, are you still working on the auction valuation tool (similar to Last Player Picked) or has that been abandoned?
joining a league is very broken.
I keep getting a white page that just says ‘false’
This was a javascript bug on ottoneu’s side, and has been resolved. Sorry about the inconvenience!
I’m still getting that same error.
Is there any way to do the scoring H2H? I’ve long looked forward to a league that does linear weight based scoring but offers H2H format on a daily or 3-day “series” basis. If you can figure out how to make that happen, it’s worth paying for a new fantasy interface.
Haven’t checked out the fantasy site yet but one of the best parts of my cbs league is the integrated chat feature, that sits below the live scoreboard for the days games. It truly makes the fantasy season and is not the same as telling everyone in your league to log into g_chat. Something to think about.
live chat on cbs baseball is the reason I won’t get an Ipad (no flash). literally.
droid works.
THAT is the reason you won’t get an Ipad?
Since I don’t know many people that are as into fantasy baseball as I am, and I am sure there are others like me, maybe the Admin should set up Public leagues for people to join? Another idea — An area were players can blog amongst themselves, so the articles aren’t spammed with people looking for joiners to their leagues or other such stuff.
Maybe regional based leagues could be created as well… I feel a little intimidated looking at all the public leagues and not knowing anybody else well enough to just join up.
We will have ‘celebrity’ commissioners that will allow you to play with a writer that you may read.
Also, if you create a league, you can rename the league to provide hints to those that follow. So the power is in your hands. Just not sure a ton of people will play in the PowerRangers4Eva league…
ok, ok, I get it… I’ll delete my PowerRangers4Eva league… maybe someone would want to join ILovePurpleDinosaurs :-)
I’m signed up, but it won’t let me create a league at the moment. Is this a known technical issue, or am I just being a fool?
absolutely incredible…love that this is year-round
Hi guys,
I’m really happy to see the response to this game so far, and I hope over the next few days I’ll make a compelling argument for why ottoneu Fantasy Baseball is an awesome game to play.
I know more than a few of you have run into some technical hiccups on day one, and I’ve done everything I can to make sure that if you tried to create a team or a league immediately, you should now have that team or league. However, if some of you are still having problems, please email me at help@ottoneu.com so I can step you through the sign-up process and make sure that the issues are not on the ottoneu side of things.
Thanks again for the great response!
I’m reluctant to join a public league where I do not know the managers; to the extent that I don’t want to invest time and have half the league bail after year 1 (or worse, earlier). Is there a private league I can join, or other mechanism to prevent this?
While we do have some interesting things in the works to minimize year over year turnover and keep leagues together for the long haul, there is also an option to create private leagues that are password protected, so that you can play with a trusted set of friends.
Hope that helps!
I am in. are other people in the commentariat in? We could make our own league collectively…
Whenver the kinks get worked out (I cant create a league right now for some reason), I will make a league, called Ed Wade’s Proteges
I will make the league private with a passcode of OMAR
it will be the classic 5×5 setup people are used to, and it will make Yuniesky (slightly) more useful!
Please e-mail me at help@ottoneu.com and let me know what issues you are having with league creation.
Niv i did that about 19 minutes before your comment.
Thanks,
Great – I’m in. I’ll keep an eye on the leagues and jump in when you get set up.
Question: What is the point of a FG league that scores 5×5?
becuase its sort of fun to have slightly irrelevant stats, and besides, we all can do a pretty good job of figuring out who might have the best wOBA, but it then is fun to see Ichiro’s high wOBA wasted on the pathetic mariners or take some mediocre player (michael young?) put up lots of big counting stats on the Rangers…
I’m definitely down to join an existing pay league with some serious, fun, and knowledgeable GMs:
QUICK BIO
Played a little college ball at Univ. of Wash, started I Love Baseball (ilovebaseball.org), run YourSports.com, die-hard Mariners fan, not a SABR expert but def understand, love/play Baseball Mogul, currently live/work in Silicon Valley, and am right now playing in a WAR-based league over at ESPN. Looking to step-up my SABR game.
If you’ve started a league and it has some solid players, then please ping me on e-mail with a quick description of what it is you’re trying to do and I may just join ya: beisbol08 at gmail
I like the direction these guys are heading, but the constitution is just an abortion, and the fact that they are getting $200 per league and awarding nothing in prizes is a total scam. I hope the idea is succesful, because after a few seasons of trial and error, they could have one hell of a league manager tool, and the fangraphs integration will certainly be awesome, but as of now, I see no reason to abandon our current ESPN hosted league with our own constitution and intircacies.
Rob, I’m always looking for ways to improve the game’s rules, and if there are rules you have a particular disagreement with, please e-mail me at niv@ottoneu.com and let me know.
I like the scoring format and the chance to get involved with a more serious/knowledgeable group of owners than I might otherwise in joining some random Yahoo league. One question I have is how is the auction conducted – is it something that can take place on-line over a period of days or is it a one time, everybody log on and conduct the auction?
If its a one time event, any way to find out when that will be for each league? I’ve got some very specific windows of time when I could squeeze one in and I would want to know that before committing to a league.
I’ll be writing a bit more about this in the coming days, but to answer your question, the auction draft is run through some online software I wrote, and there is an ability to pause and restart the auction at any time, for the convenience of each league’s owners.
Cool – thanks!!
slow drafts please.. perhaps at the discretion of the commissioner? After paying I noticed something in the rules about drafts generally taking place the Saturday before the season starts.
Flexibility would be key here as many of us compete in longstanding leagues that also draft at the same date/time.
How do we know which owner is our league commissioner? How do we contact them about the auction? If we need patience, that’s all good, I’ll wait. Thanks for your help Niv.
Robbie
Leagues might have multiple commissioners, as commissioners have the power to add other commissioners. If you go through the various team pages for your league, you should see the owners that are commissioners denoted as such. This is something I added just recently.
I don’t really like having minor league players, there’s no real way to evaluate how good they’ll eventually be, other than reports. Plus they all play in different leagues, further influencing their performances. Too much guess work and luck involved there, plus the extra preparation it requires.
I’d be interested in joining a private league with serious owners. Please email me at mlomba610@yahoo.com if there’s an opening.
To anyone playing 5×5: WTF. This is FanGraphs. This is sabermetrics. This is where you go BEYOND traditional, uninformative stats. Why would you come HERE to play 5×5??
Let go of the RBIs. Put down the wins. You can do it. It’s going to be alright.
you conveyed your sentiment a few posts earlier..let go of the hate…
Almost but not quite…It looks great, but +2 per year per player is just horrible. It means you get to keep everyone forever-you get a guy early and you get his entire career way below market value. If you drafted Albert Pujols as a rookie which would have been a lucky pick more than anything, you’d still only have to pay $21 for him this year. That’s just insane! You need to make players available to be kept for a few years. Any system that allows you to keep players this long, is going to be a disaster (and it’s not just Pujols who was a bit of an exception), if you drafted, say Austin Jackson when he became a good (but not fabulous) prospect (2008), you won’t be paying market value for about another 10 years. If you draft a prospect who flops, you’ve only spent, a few dollars on him so it’s not a big loss.If you want to make it a steady increase you have to increase it by a minimum of +5 a year. I personally prefer an incremental keeper value (+3, +6, +9, and so on).
As one of the legacy users of the game I can re-emphasize that what you mention is why you have the vote-off/arbitration rule, where the league votes to send one player from each team to the auction each year (but the owner gets a “home-town discount” of $5 if they resign them in the auction).
Perhaps not surprisingly, guys from our league who were held below market last season and have now been voted off include: Gallardo, Choo, Heyward, Bautista, Chacin, Stanton, Price, Cano, CarGo, Latos and Posey. You’ll have a hard time naming many other huge breakout guys not on this list, so I think the system works pretty (and probably too) well.
Lastly, the other thing to consider is that MLB teams routinely have hugely successful young players at below market prices for many years up until their arbitration years. Look at Joey Votto – for his ’08/’09/’10 seasons he was paid 390K/438K/525K a total of about 1.4M for putting up 16 WAR. Our league has toyed with other iterations (higher fixed increases, percentage increases, tiered increases, etc.), but have found this works best I think.
There are definitely many different ways to make a keeper league better and your way works. (There are also leagues that sign players to contracts which means you might get them at a discount, but might have to pay a bust.) Major league teams get young players at discounts for years, but if they succeed, really only a few years (Votto will get $5.5 million, $9.5 million, $17.5 million over the next three years and then hit free agency). The other important difference is that teams have to pay players. They can’t just cut them when they are under-performing compared to their cost. Because most fantasy options don’t have this, I think there should be a higher cost of actually keeping the players you want. In any event, I don’t mind keeping players cheaply for a few years. I think that time period is about right and it is what many systems ensure (say +5 every year or an incremental increase of +3, +6,+9, etc..). If you had drafted Votto at $7 as a rookie using the incremental system, you’d get him at $10, $16, $25 over the last three years. Still excellent bargains every year but he starts to get expensive this year. But if you do the fangraph +2 every year you’d have had him for $7, $9, $11, and $13. To keep him this year would only cost you $15. That’s just absurd. You could keep him his entire career and never pay anything close to market value.
There’s an old hardball times article on designing the perfect league that is worth a read and the comments give many good ideas as well. (http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/fantasy/article/designing-the-perfect-keeper-league/)
Regardless, I think anybody who has ever played in a keeper league would find a mere yearly $2 increase a very bad idea.
Gabriel -
With your point about Votto being at $7, 9, 11, 13 though you are ignoring the fact that he would have likely been put through the Ottoneu arbitration process in one of his first seasons, and seen his salary likely moved to the $30-$40 range. In fact, Votto was an arbitration case in our league after our 2009 season when his salary was <$10 and he was put into the draft and saw his salary increase to $31 for last season. There are only 1-2 players that this applies to on each team usually per season and the arbitration process we've found to be very successful at maintaining a balance.
Also regarding your point about teams not being able to just cut under-performing guys, it is important to note that in Ottoneu, you retain 50% of the salary of any player cut against your cap space for the year (ie. you cut a $8 guy, you can only use $4 to go out and sign a free agent, etc.)
Sorry Jazzman, missed about the arbitration process. I still don’t think it’s nearly enough though to have one player out of 40 in this process. I think other systems get the balance much better and would like to see other options available.
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