Is Head to Head Baseball Dead?

Baseball has been mainly a season long, rotisserie game since the beginning. The grind of going from Game 1 to 162 truly does elevate the best team/manager to the top of the mountain at seasons end in most instances. There have always been pockets of those who prefer the head to head setup, choosing to be different, and if I’m are being honest it’s pretty damn clear that such setups have grown in popularity in fantasy baseball in recent years. H2H has grown so markedly that I felt I needed to refute it, something I discussed in this podcast. To me, and it’s a word that I used in the podcast multiple times, playing H2H baseball is a sprint whereas the game of baseball should be played in fantasy as it is in the real world – like a marathon. So, the question is – will the sprint that will be the 2020 season be better set for H2H or roto setups? I’m here to tell you…

HEAD TO HEAD BASEBALL IS DEAD

Let’s lay it out.

Baseball is a 26-week battle in a traditional year.

Most H2H leagues don’t play Week 26, or they combine Weeks 25-26 into one matchup. So, the season is only 25 weeks long for the majority of H2H leagues (I’m offering an educated guess here, I don’t have raw data to back it up, but I’m also fairly confident that I’m right with this postulation).

Assuming that setup, a 25-week regular season, leagues will play a regular season of 20-22 weeks, followed by a 3/4 week playoff. Here is how some of the main providers have it setup.

A bit of difference, but in the end pretty similar with an average ending to the regular season coming after 22 Weeks and the playoffs ending after Week 25.

What is 2020 gonna look like?

The answer is – who knows?

I’m still assuming they are playing games this season as I think it would be catastrophic to the sport if they cannot figure it out. By that I mean, and no hyperbole here, baseball would be doing lasting damage to the game that they would likely never rebound from. With everything going on in the world today, millionaires and billionaires being unable to come to an agreement would likely crush the sport (for more, see What Is Wrong With Fantasy Baseball?). They aren’t playing 114 games or more after the owners said – no. That leaves us with a season between 50-80 games, more or less.

Let’s look at each level of games played with the following baseline. Baseball is normally made up of 162 games over a 26-week period which equates to an average of 6.23 games played per week. Using that mark, I’m going to round it to 6.2 games per week to simplify things, we would end up with the following length of weeks for games played in 2020.

In this scenario, even an 80-game season, which seems like the most we are getting at this point (plus or minus a game or two), we are going to have a 13-week regular season. That’s HALF the length of the normal regular season. Even if we get aggressive, say only four teams make the playoffs instead of six and give each playoff matchup just a single week, and we play the whole regular season out (not excising the final week of the regular season), we end up with an 11-week regular season and two weeks of playoffs. Here is that same chart with a two-week playoff for each segment.

Are you really going to play a regular season of six weeks and then do playoffs? Even if MLB gets up to 70 games, which is sounding like a high level for what the owners apparently want, we would end up with a seven-week regular season which would be one-third the norm.

Let’s get more aggressive. Let’s say that MLB manages to stuff some double-headers in there. In this scenario we will bump up the games played from 6.2 games per week up to 7.0, or one per calendar day.

Now, lets add the playoff component to the mix.

Realize, this is some very basic stuff. I know that many leagues do fantasy playoffs for three weeks, in fact from what I’ve seen that seems to be the majority, and in both the above scenarios laid out above I’ve set the playoffs at just two weeks. If you add another week for the playoffs, pushing things to three, the regular season outlook is even more bleak.

THE FANTASY FOOTBALL COMP

Really folks, what’s the point? Even in fantasy football we do 13 regular season matchups followed by three playoff weeks (everyone is soft and doesn’t play Week 17).  A simply set of two charts from above, with fantasy football tossed into the mix.

Here is the 6.2 games a week list.

Here is the seven games a week list.

Remember, in both sets listed we have baseball playing two weeks of playoffs, or just two-thirds of what is used in fantasy football. What we have to deal with this season in baseball is a campaign that doesn’t come close to measuring up to what we do in football.

SO WHERE DOES ALL THIS LEAVE US?

It’s time to give up the ghost folks.

It’s over.

Head-to-Head Baseball is out for 2020… at least in the form you are used to playing it.

‘Screw you Ray, we’re still doing it.’

My response – why?

Why would you want a season of 7-8 weeks, instead of 21-22, to determine the result of your regular season. As mentioned in the link above to my podcast, H2H already has issues with it. You can game the system, you can crush the waiver-wire focusing on one week, you can punt categories etc. The H2H game is as much about working the system as it is drafting the best team, and that’s over 22 weeks. Dropping the regular season to one-third of that, as the powers that be seem nearly certain to do, would introduce even more white/noise and randomness to the game of fantasy baseball? Why? We need to be better than this. To that end, I’ve got a solution – or a couple of them.

1 – Play roto this year.

If the season is as few as 50-games, it’s a full-on sprint anyway. Even the roto leagues will be tight and basically feel like a long H2H matchup.

2 – Split the season into two halves, then add the playoffs.

Such a setup as this would play out thusly, though it would be messy (we would have to split up some of the segments because of unequal games played). I would posit the start of the season will be more unclear in terms of game play than the second, so I’m going to, when in doubt, extend the second (ore third) segment the extra week. This is based on the 6.2 games per week method.

3 – Split the season into three sections, then add the playoffs.

This is based on the 6.2 games per week method.

Of course, any of these H2H setups would require mental gymnastics to complete. Who are you facing each week? Gotta be more than one team, so how do you work that? How do you do it in odd week segments? Do you extend the playoffs to three weeks and shorten the season to equalize things? My head is starting to hurt. You would also fail to play each opponent in a straight up manner, with the best you could hope for being facing each team in a group scenario. Just don’t, please I beg you, send me a note saying you can just go 1-on-1 each week and not even face all the teams in your league. Hell, if you’re in a 12-team league, and the season is 50 games, your regular season would be a total of six weeks. You would barely face half the league that way. Seems completely lame to me. As I said, it would be a total mess.

In the end, I think it’s clear what we need to do.

We need to eliminate H2H baseball in 2020.