2022: What Is Wrong With Fantasy Baseball?

In what has become an evergreen piece here at FantasyGuru, Ray Flowers shares his thoughts on where the game of fantasy baseball currently resides. Is everything OK? Clearly it’s not given the title of this piece. What are the issues, and the potential solutions?

I know people don’t want to hear it, they don’t want to even think it, but fantasy baseball is dying.

Here are 10 key points that lead me to the above position.

1 – Kids aren’t playing baseball like they used to. Seems like every kid in the world loves basketball – like all of them. Every time I talk to my nephew, it’s all hoops. I know that Jeff Mans’ son loves basketball. Ted Schuster coaches his kids in hoops. Top Shot, sneakers, commercials… it is all about hoops with the kids. Plus, there is the difference in the games. You can play a game of 1-on-1 with two of you, and a $20 ball, if you want a game of hoops. To play a game of baseball, you need at least eight or so kids to fake it (we used to try with six when we were kids), and you need a $100 bat, a $75 glove, a $50 pair of cleats and $50 worth of baseballs, not to mention a field which takes up a massive amount of space, while a hoop can be erected virtually anywhere. It’s more expensive and more difficult to play baseball. With less kids playing and following the game, it’s obvious that in coming years the game of fantasy baseball could struggle to attract gamers.

2 – Folks are playing other fantasy sports, taking time away from the planning/execution needed to win in fantasy baseball. Ergo, many have simply started to fade away to take up other sports. Fantasy Golf and Fantasy NASCAR are growing. We have Fantasy Olympics, Fantasy Movies, Fantasy Bachelor and Bachelorette etc. The fantasy game is stronger than ever, and everywhere it seems there is some sort of fantasy game, there is even Fantasy Hallmark Christmas movies, but the plethora of newer options could be draining the life out of fantasy baseball.

3 – The onset of legalized gambling across the land, has turned some folks attention to other arenas of sport. You should be able to do participate in gambling and fantasy, and of course many of you do, but both “games” take a tremendous amount of dedication if one hopes to consistently be successful. Most people don’t have the time to compete in multiple hobbies, at least not at a high level. Further, some folks play fantasy baseball to make money. If that’s how you view the game, as a moneymaking endeavor and not just as a fun recreational affair, then why wouldn’t those folks lean toward gambling where they can undoubtedly have access to bigger monitory gains at a much quicker pace than having to wait for a baseball season to play out?  

4 – People are all about immediate gratification these days. In the old days, it used to take like 20-30 seconds to download an email without attachments on that 28.8K modem. Now if your computer takes four seconds to open up an email, or for that matter a web page, you get flustered. No way in hell are we gonna put up with that nonsense, right? To think, my cell phone is about a gazillion times more powerful/useful than my first computer, a VIC-20. Honestly, gazillion might not be a big enough number. How about it’s a million times better than my first “real computer,” a Compaq portable. The fact is, that phone in your hand, the one you might be reading this article on, blows away computers we depended on for our livelihoods a decade ago. With the ability to access virtually anything in the world with a tool that’s constantly in your hand/pocket, well, you can see how patience is a lost art.

5 – Game play has become laborious. The actual game takes forever to play. I can’t even imagine a scenario where my nephew would watch a three and a half hour game, if not four hours, and he loves sports. Here is a podcast talking pace of the game and how it is crushing the sport.

6 – The baseball season is too long. This is a complaint I hear a lot from folks who don’t play fantasy baseball, and I totally get it. The baseball season is 10 times longer than the football season in terms of games played, and doubles the hockey and basketball seasons in terms of games. I’ve always personally felt that was one of the great appeals of fantasy football. Until recently, we had SUN/MON to worry about in the NFL. Now we’ve got Thursday each week, Saturday’s come into play late in the year, but the fact is you could play an entire season of fantasy football by only paying attention three days a week for four months (probably not well mind you, but you could pull it off). Even if you gave the same time commitment to baseball in terms of days a week, you would still need to pay attention two extra months for the baseball season. Baseball is long and drawn out. It’s the beauty of the game, but that beauty has turned ugly for some folks who think of baseball as a gargantuan task to complete, versus an intriguing competition played out over months.

Let me ask a legitimate question. Is season long fantasy baseball an outmoded model for the majority of the world in 2022? If people don’t have the patience to wait four seconds for a webpage, how are they possibly going to pay attention every day for six months? That doesn’t even include all the preseason prep either.

7 – The emergence of the DFS game has shifted folks focus, giving them an option to avoid having to wait six months for a resolution. That daily action appeals to so many people that it’s truly amazing that it took so long for DFS to become a thing in the fantasy space. The time investment aspect with DFS is a huge edge over the seasonal game. You can play DFS once a week, twice, five times, take a week or two off if you’re traveling etc. In seasonal fantasy baseball you can’t take that time off – that is if you expect to win you can’t. Of course, there’s also the ability to win oodles of cash in the DFS game. So much of this is pie-in-the-sky nonsense as taking down large-scale GPP Tournaments is something that no one should plan on (kinda like buying a lottery ticket – you can buy one, but don’t do so thinking you’re gonna be the one who wins the $100 million jackpot), but get rich schemes/plans are as old as time itself.

8 – Folks are aging out of fantasy baseball. I’m not looking at any concrete data here, just speaking off the cuff from my personal experience. It sure seems like the game is filled with a lot of 40+ year old’s and fewer 20 year old’s than ever before. I get the real sense that folks look at the seasonal as a game for old folks whereas youngster lean to the DFS game. There’s a strong group of fantasy fanatics in this older age bracket, it includes me as you are likely well aware, the folks that grew up with the game who love it and will play it until they no longer can. Are they being replaced by a younger generation? It’s not happening, at least according to my personal experience, when it comes to the season game at least.

9 – Injuries are too numerous, and they just kill your chances to win in the fantasy game.

Why are you going to invest all your time, energy and money in a hobby that can just crush your soul, almost immediately? Year after year guys go down with injury, and it’s so damn difficult to handle those absences while keeping your team competitive. Last year, I had a team that had 12 guys on the IL at one point. Twelve. Like, how is that fun? Injuries are so prevalent that your starter goes down, you replace him off waivers, and then the replacement gets hurt. Tell me that hasn’t happened to you. There’s very little incentive for teams to push their multi-million-dollar investments given the way the IL is currently set up, and they make liberal use of it.

From Sportac… here is the IL data from 2021.

Look at the numbers… by year.

Think of it. In a season of 60 team games played in 2020, there were 456 players placed on the IL… which is more than there were in the 2015 season of — 162 games.

Baseball isn’t like other sports. When a quarterback gets hurt, the next QB still throws 30 passes a game. When a 30-homer hitter goes down in baseball, he might be replaced by a good defender with 15 homer power. When the backup QB comes in, he plays the whole game. When the backup first baseman comes in, he might find himself in a platoon sharing work with the #3 first baseman on the team. You get the point.

Injuries suck, and the number of games missed has grown to the point that its damn near an epidemic.

10 – Teams have a plan with their pitching staff, but we don’t always know what it is, and even if we do, we can’t really take advantage of it in many instances.

An opener here.

A bullpen game there.

A starting pitcher pulled at 4.1 innings despite giving up one run and throwing 78 pitches.

A last minute skippage of a start mid-week for no real reason other than to get the guy a bit of rest.

The usage of arms has strayed so far from “the norm” that it makes it incredibly frustrating to try and manage your staff (this speaks to an issue I will raise elsewhere, that of needing to change how we reward points in the fantasy game for pitching). It has never been more difficult to figure starting pitching out, and I haven’t even mentioned the madness that is trying to figure out who is getting save chances with ever team, something I’ve been pushing for us to address for years with the idea of solds (saves + holds).

A new setup/system is needed or seasonal fantasy baseball is going to die.

Unless we devise a new way for season long fantasy baseball to remain relevant, I fear it will slowly fade away.

Given everything above, what are some potential solutions?

• We need to do a better job of listening to what is relevant to people playing the game. Being stuck in 2003 with rules/setup etc. isn’t helping anyone. We need to do a better job as an industry of evolving. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but I’ve started to change the last couple of years. I might want the game to be played in a certain way, while you might want it to be played in another way. The fact is – there should be space for both of us to play the game however the hell we want to. We should also listen more closely to what folks are saying to us about the game. Instead of saying ‘it has to be 5x’5 with only weekly lineup changes’ we should be embracing logical moves that folks want to make in other directions.
• We could move from seasonal roto to seasonal head-to-head. When folks see that they are in 12^th place out of 15 teams on May 13^th they mentally start to give up realizing their odds of winning are extremely small. However, a 2-5 team in a H2H setup could go on a winning streak, still make the playoffs and win the league. I’ve written and talked about why I dislike H2H for years, with a passion really, but there is no denying that people seem to prefer it in ever increasing numbers. This setup keeps folks more interested because they feel like they always have the chance to either – comeback over the course of the season or to beat the socks off of their sister/co-worker/significant other in any given week. If that’s what folks want, we should move to it as an industry, just don’t expect me to personally play in those formats. Again, we need more “game” diversity.
• What about changing the setup itself? Ron Shandler put forth an innovative idea that didn’t take hold, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a terrific attempt to speak to the world in the 21^st century. Folks seem to have varying views on playing a 162-game season, but we know for certain that they love drafting. So, Ron suggested we do six, one-month long periods in a league. You get to redraft each month, so injuries don’t kill you. You get to redraft each month so you can move on from the Ke’Bryan Hayes and Victor Robles of the world who are killing you. You get to redraft each month with more data at your disposal to decide how to put your team together. I don’t know how many folks would have the time to sit down and do a 3-hour draft six times so we would probably have to hybrid this thing up a bit.
• Maybe we could do half season baseball leagues instead of monthly. This setup would allow two drafts to take place. It would crown two winners. This way the baseball purists would get two leagues in one, while the folks who want to focus on football in the summer could bow out after playing just the first half. It would allow those folks to pivot toward football after the first half of the year, because we all know that some owners go MIA in the second half of baseball, while allowing hardcore baseball folks to keep on playing.
• Perhaps we could great a setup where the first and second half teams against one another with a late season playoff? Maybe two 10-week regular seasons, and then six weeks of playoffs? The folks in the playoffs would then get to draft three times. Some folks wouldn’t like it as I’m sure they would want to “keep their team,” but it sure would keep more teams involved, create a lot of fun, and basically offer somewhat of a hybrid approach to the roto/h2h game.
• Maybe a player salary cap system could be used, as Ron’s system did, to cut down the time investment a bit since you wouldn’t have to sit through a three-hour draft, you would merely have to put your own team together. This setup would allow every team to own Yordan Alvarez or Walker Buehler. That’s how the game used to be played in the olden days anyway. I’m intrigued by this idea as I see it as a mixture of seasonal/DFS/H2H.
• We could standardize the scoring systems used. Are we playing 4×4, 5×5, 6×6? Points leagues? Head-to-head? OBP instead of batting average? Football doesn’t need this though, so I doubt this angle would help much, and it does go against the general theme of accepting whatever it is that people want to do.
• Perhaps new scoring should be considered? Why do we still count saves? No one runs anymore, but we still count steals. The average starting pitcher in 2021 didn’t even seem to pitch five innings, so why are we counting wins? A reworking of the setup might attract some folks, and frankly, it is desperately needed.
• Maybe we need to take the lead from fantasy football. What is the best part about fantasy sports? Most would say the draft. So, let’s start adding more of the draft and let it be formats in fantasy baseball. You can draft your team, put your best foot forward, and then sit back and see how it does. You could do this five, 20, 50 times a season, get a whole boatload of teams drafted and see how they play out. You get to draft a ton but then you can relax and just enjoy the season. Termed “Best Ball,” this format has been adopted by the NFBC in the Cutline Event with a couple of FAAB periods to keep you interested in season but clearly not so many as to overwhelm anyone (Best Ball leagues have exploded in popularity in fantasy football).
  
  

I’m worried for the future of the game I love, especially after what went down in 2020 with Covid and what is going on in 2021-22 with the CBA. If you are reading this you likely aren’t overly concerned, but I’ve received plenty of note from folks the last two years saying they are just out. The cost, the game, other interests… they are just done with fantasy baseball. I’m fearful that if we don’t find a better way to connect with each other, and by extension with the game, that this wonderful game that we’ve created over the last couple of decades will die a slow death. It’s already happening if you look close enough. Unless we find a way to plug the damn, to stop the loss of folks from the season long game of fantasy baseball, it might just be me and you talking about seasonal fantasy baseball in a few years.

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