Where to Play Fantasy Baseball

If you’re new to fantasy baseball you may already know you can play for free online at several different sites. But what are the main sites to play? And which ones are best? I’m going to quickly go over them and give you a few details


ESPN – http://games.espn.go.com/frontpage/baseball

ESPN is the gold standard of online reality games. You can play for free, set up your own custom leagues for free, and get most of their fantasy information and expert opinions for free (some if it is published as ESPN inside material). Even if you don’t play here, you should hardly avoid all the fantasy advice they provide, lots of rankings, lots of sleepers, lots of draft day wisdom. Plus they have a really nice draft room program, and the AI for missing bidders isn’t too bad, other than not keeping up to date on injured players.

Basically their customization options are to the wall, a well populated mock draft lobby when most other sites don’t even have mock drafts. There’s little contest between them and those on a tier lower than them like CBS and FOX.

Oh, and also, I really like ESPN’s fast to use roster setup interface. It’s easy to set your roster for a month in advance in only like 10 minutes, then just keep up day to day with injuries and what not. Really like that about them.


Yahoo! – http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/b1

Yahoo! has a pretty nice fantasy baseball site too. They have informational articles and videos, not nearly as many as ESPN, but still. They also have a downloadable draft kit thanks to rotowire.com, which explains the basics of fantasy baseball, draft strategies, and player rankings. Their draft room program is good, except their missing owner AI is brutally bad. The thing will bid $5 over what a player’s average draft value is, which is already $10 over what Yahoo! ranks their actual value, which is then already $5-$10 over what they should be ranking as their actual value.

That brings me to another thing, Yahoo! ranks superstar player auction values as super high, which really matches the strategy munchkins straight off of WOW and into your league will use. Not always a fan of the caliber of fellow online players on Yahoo!. But if you’re setting up a league just with your friends that won’t be an issue.


MLB – http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/fantasy/fb/info/index.jsp

If you want to play fantasy baseball you can’t go too wrong with the MLB itself. They have a system set up for easy fantasy baseball, possibly good for the beginner. Instead of using the more common category based scoring, they use a points system, where players get points for what they do and the team with the most points at the end of the week wins the game. Like fantasy football. Or worthwhile fantasy basketball. And instead of individual pitchers you pick a team’s pitching, like a fantasy football defense. Phillies would be a good pick for that by the way. They have snake draft and autodraft options, but not an auction draft.

They also have some decent fantasy information and even have a T.V. show about fantasy football on the MLB network called Fantasy 411 you can watch everyday.


CBS – http://fantasynews.cbssports.com/fantasybaseball

CBS offers some customizable league options, though not at the level of ESPN or Yahoo! They also feature fantasy information from CBS and a GM assistant who will recommend who you should play each day. They have autodrafts and snake drafts but not auction drafts. They also have a draft kit and lots of player rankings and news.

They feature some expanded options for paying customers, but I can’t recommend you pay for what you can have for free. Especially when what you’re paying for is a poor man’s version of what you can have for free.


FOX Sports – http://msn.foxsports.com/fantasy/baseball

More of the same second tier kind of options. Some league scoring and setup customization, have their own experts and some news. The thing about FOX fantasy sports is that their website makes me want to kill myself. It loads slowly, I can’t get it to auto-log-in no matter what I do, and its design isn’t even that convenient or nice. And when you’ve got as many roster moves as you do in fantasy baseball, I just can’t imagine anyone maintaining their sanity using this site. But apparently some people do. Again, not much compared to ESPN or Yahoo!, and five minutes on their site makes me want to shoot myself in the face.


Fleaflicker – http://www.fleaflicker.com/mlb/

This loveable little site offers an alternative take for those who want to setup their fantasy league online. They try to be very customizable, in some ways they are more customizable than say ESPN, but in other ways a lot less customizable. I think their fantasy baseball scoring is purely point based and they don’t have auction drafts. But I also believe they feature free keeper leagues and have a lot of other features which might interest you. A site worth checking out for the veteran fantasy commissioner, especially.

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