Fantasy baseball, has anyone played it?

[Hardbopjazz]

We're starting a fantasy league at my office. There are to free fantasy baseball web sites that I've found, yahoo and Fox sports. Anyone played either one before? What’s the difference?

[Brandon Burke]

I've not compared the different leagues (mostly because I don't care that much) but I have to assume that fantasy baseball is among the more involved of the fantasy sports. It all depends upon how serious you want to get, of course, but baseball differs from the others because you've got, among other things: line-ups to choose in accordance with the L/R arm of your opposing pitcher(s); the ballpark(s) your players are hitting in; and generally just way more choices to make re personnel.

The playing surfaces in football and basketball are always the same so you never have to worry about that. True, a December game in Green Bay is much different than one in Jacksonville but it usually doesn't involve a near complete player switcheroo. As far as basketball is concerned, you gotta work around Shaq Fu (and maybe Yao) but other than that you pretty much play the best five guys you got every day.

It's fun. I did it last year but it can be a lot to keep up with and I wasn't particularly good at (or concerned with) doing that.

[GregK]

I've used the yahoo one for the last three years. I've also used CBS sportsline, and they are pretty much the same thing, the only differences that I could tell were the graphics and the presentation of stats, etc. The actualy playing is the same between the two. Pretty involved from day to day (setting lineups, pitchers, etc), but you can make the rules go any way you want. You can change it so that you change lineups once a week, for example. Whatever suits you. We do a live draft, where we all meet at the site at a certain time and day and take turns picking players. And no matter who I pick, I always somehow end up dead last, not even close to even 5th place

[Jazzmoose]

I played something called Scoresheet Baseball back when I was a baseball fanatic which is a lot like Fantasy Baseball, except the stats are run through a game simulation to create games, with a season, pitching change and pinch hit decisions, etc. It was a lot of fun, but a bit of work. Plus it was a large enough league that you had to know all of the rosters rather than just the stars or even just the starters. Looking back now, I don't know how I had the time.

Oh yeah; I was single...