Fantasy Baseball Fun: An Unusual Format That Could Hone Your Skills Bigtime

The 2008 fantasy season is hitting the home stretch and my playoff push is in full gear. I currently sit fourth in my league of 14, a mere five games off the lead. By the end of the week, I will be within a game or two. As always, there are always three certainties:

1. No one can get enough saves. (I happen to at this moment have four closers in a 14-team league due to injuries.)
2. The DL is going to kill someone. (I've lost Chien-Ming Wang, Mike Lowell, David Ortiz, Roy Oswalt, and Kerry Wood for significant periods of time this season.)
3. The waiver wire is the source of eternal youth. (My acquisitions this year off of waivers:  Cliff Lee, Fernando Tatis, David DeJesus, Kazuo Matsui, Glen Perkins, Gil Meche, Grant Balfour, John Danks, Joel Hanrahan, Dioner Navarro, Fred Lewis.)

Fantasy boils down in the end to having a deep team. That is how I have always been able to manage a top-two team in my league since I started doing this seven years ago. I draft the deepest team.

I was introduced to a format a few years back that really was innovative and quite fun. I credit this format that I played for developing my fantasy skills in waiver-wire navigation, draft strategy, and deep teams. I wanted to throw it out there for everyone so that they could possibly give it a whirl for next year. Also, it could be employed for football, so get your thinking caps on!

There are typical formats in fantasy: head-to-head, points, rotisserie, and salary cap, to name a few. Let's add a new one: one man per each real team.

Here are the requirements—they are very simple: First, you must have exactly one player from every team in the major leagues. That's right—everyone must have a San Francisco Giant, everyone must have a Washington National, everyone must have an Oakland Athletic...the list goes on and on.

Second, a disabled player can be stashed away on your DL and replaced by another player from that team. Trades go down in partner relations (or a contingency is made with the commissioner for a multi-team deal that has to take place over a specific period of time, which is orchestrated by the commissioner).

There are many tricks to drafting and managing such a team, as one can imagine. First and foremost is the trade deadline and waiver period. Let's say an owner had Mark Teixeira this year (representing ATL). He was then traded to the Angels in exchange for Casey Kotchman.  Since both players are likely owned, both need to be traded or released within a week of the trade date. Some owners may take the route of refusing to draft a player that is likely to be traded during the year to avoid this.

Draft strategy is completely changed in this format. When I did this for the first time, the teams that everyone struggled to find were Kansas City, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay. My first pick in the entire draft turned out to be Carl Crawford at roughly ninth overall. Crawford was quite possibly the most valuable player in that league because of the fact that Tampa Bay had so few resources. I would have taken Johan Santana had he still been available, of course.

The trick here is that some teams are more plentiful than others. I would always wait to draft a Red Sox or Yankees player because I could nab a useful part later from them in the form of a Trot Nixon, Tim Wakefield, or Hideki Matsui. No such similar players exist at that level for a team like the Royals. They are getting better now, though.

This format tests your knowledge of the game in a way no other format can. The roster is set up so up to 25 players are active for a night. This league is the true test of a fantasy baseballer. Fantasy baseballers need to know even the mid- and low-level players on every team to be successful. This league's format is a massive help in gaining that knowledge to be a successful fantasy player, adept at dealing with the problems that occur in your ordinary formats. Obviously, this is best suited for a points league or a rotisserie league, and a live draft is a must.

If anyone would like to participate in a league like this starting next spring, please get in touch with me at [e-mail] and we will set it up. This format is a lot of fun and a great training ground for fantasy success.

Good luck down the stretch! I guarantee you the deepest team will win. Hopefully that team is yours...