Today's Fantasy Rx

One final note on Diamond Challenge prizes: I've been advised by reader Lance Taschner that CDM has added the following prize adjustment to this year's contest:

The Top 25 finishers overall are guaranteed to win at least $2,850! In the event that a Top 25 finisher fails to win his league and division, and his cash prizes for league, division, overall, and field total less than $2,850, we still will award $2,850 to the team owner.

For our many readers that play some version of standard roto, these contests will constitute an interesting alternative to straight category play. Baseball Weekly Fantasy Baseball and Baseball Weekly Lumber Company Budget Baseball both offer reduced fees compared to the Diamond Challenge, but they also offer correspondingly cheaper prize amounts. Budget Baseball even has no costs other than the initial entry fee, although you can only win five grand plus a Jason Giambi autographed shirt, perfect for all your distraught Bay Area friends.

Before I begin, a small promise to my readers: I will not plug Wise Guy Baseball at any point in these reviews. While most of their strategies are applicable to the CDM Fantasy Baseball games, I don't believe that you need Wise Guy Baseball in these as much as you might need Wise Guy Baseball for the CDM Challenge games. So while we still recommend Wise Guy Baseball for newcomers to the Challenges, I will not be repeatedly mentioning Wise Guy Baseball in today's reviews.

Internet Fantasy Baseball Contest Review of:

Baseball Weekly Fantasy Baseball

Let's get the costs out of the way first.

$39.95/entry by February 28th; $49.95/entry after February 28th
$2/taxi squad switch
$5/new player purchase, and you'll use all 14
$1/DH shift
$3/August taxi squad expansion, and you'll use both

Since you'll likely need at least three or four taxi squad moves a week, let's round up to figure out the total entry fee to compete with the top players:
$39.95
+ $200 ($2 * 4 * 25 weeks)
+ $70 ($5 * 14)
+ $6 ($3 *2)
Minimum Cost = $315.95 to have a chance at competing with the top players.

I would again recommend budgeting about $400 per team just to make sure you have the necessary resources to make all those last minute changes. Now for the good news; the prize money is the second highest of the four games only to Diamond Challenge:

Overall winner: $15,000 cash.
League winner: $500 cash.

Additional cash prizes from $5,000 to $50 are also awarded to each of the top 250 finishers, and the top 5 finishers in each 25-team league also win prizes varying from $250 down to a free entry in next year's BBW Fantasy Baseball.

Style: Points-based contest, where the team with the most total points wins; points are accumulated as follows:

Hitting Points
Single: 1 point
Double: 2 points
Triple: 3 points
Home Run: 4 points
RBI or Run: 1 point each
Walk: 1 point
Stolen Base: 1 point

Pitching Points
Win: 10 points
Save: 10 points
IP: 1 point each (.333 point for each third of an inning pitched)
Strikeout: 1 point

You'll need to find a set of projections that includes all these statistics. I know BBHQ's subscriber-only projections include everything listed, and we're also planning on projecting all these numbers when we complete our set in a week or two. If anyone knows of another source that includes 2B and 3B, please let us know, and we'll post a link to the site.

The major differences in this scoring system compared to the Challenge contests is that bad pitchers no longer hurt you since Earned Runs and Baserunners are no longer relevant. Someone like Mike Hampton will have substantial value because he'll accumulate wins, IP, and a decent amount of K's. Also, since additional AB are not counted anywhere, the value of BA is essentially zero, so guys like Russ Branyan leap up in value while Ichiro falls down the list to somewhere around the 50th most cost-efficient OF.

Our current projections have top hitters earning above 700 points this year. The rather small list includes Jason Giambi, Todd Helton, Alex Rodriguez, Shawn Green, and Sammy Sosa. A couple dozen more players, almost entirely first basemen, third basemen, and outfielders, also project to over 600 points.

Pitchers projected to over 600 points include Armando Benitez, Bartolo Colon, Trevor Hoffman, Randy Johnson, Robb Nen, Kaz Sasaki, Curt Schilling, although Johnson blows everyone away with almost 800 points.

A simple way of determining each player's value is to divide his projected points by his assigned salary. Hitters with a ratio above .350 include Steve Cox, Frank Menechino (if he wins the 2B job), Felipe Lopez, Jose Macias, D'Angelo Jimenez, Juan Uribe, Adam Dunn, and Jeremy Giambi.

Starting pitchers above a .350 points/salary ratio include Brian Lawrence, Ruben Quevedo, Joe Kennedy, Eric Gagne, Brandon Duckworth, Lance Davis, Brett Tomko, Joel Pineiro, and Chad Durbin. A telling sign of the value of relievers is that only Chad Fox even breaks a .300 ratio, only Kelvin Escobar, listed as a starter, and Matt Herges even break .275, and Matt Anderson is the only other closer above .245.

Aside from taking most of these relievers, you're only going want a couple players at most from the above two paragraphs. Probably Dunn and Uribe, maybe Giambi, Duckworth, or Pineiro depending on their projected playing time at the beginning of the regular season.

I'll discuss strategies after moving through the remainder of the particulars

League size: 25 teams, standings determined by overall points.

Roster Breakdown: 2C, 2-1B, 2-3B, 2-2B, 2-SS, 6OF, 2DH, 6SP, 4RP, 12 taxi.
You must keep 8 hitters and 4 pitchers on your taxi squad, an unfortunate counter to the strategy of loading up on starters. Given this constraint, you'll likely want to keep almost exclusively the top 10 pitchers on your roster at all time to maximize match-up opportunities, and then you can fill in your offense with your variety of bench help.

Salary structure: Most of the player salaries are essentially doubled from the Challenge salaries, and you also have a doubled cap to $60,000. However, the salaries are not exactly doubled, so bargains will emerge in these salary lists that don't exist in the Challenges and vice-versa. We'll again post our rosters close to Opening Day after we have a better idea of pitching rotations.

Upside
The money's also really nice, and BBWFB is a good way to learn points-based games while still playing for significant rewards.

Downside
BBWFB also requires a substantial time commitment, especially since you just can't copy your roster as you can between the Diamond and Internet Challenges. Your pitcher focus has to be exclusively on wins and IP, since you'll already be using pitchers with plenty of strikeouts. Figure an additional 15 minutes to manage your Fantasy Baseball roster each week, as they're again due every Sunday at 11pm.

You'll need to spend between $300-$400 to have a chance to win your league, and this format will seem a bit unusual to many traditional roto players.

If you still want to play, here's how to win:

1. A good rule also for the Challenges, but especially in points-based games, you absolutely must maximize games played for hitters and IP for pitchers. You should vary your taxi squad players from several different teams to insure you always have a group of starters where nearly everyone will play 7 games a week.

2. Including players from a variety of teams also allows you stay out of pitcher-friendly stadiums with teams that have many quality pitchers. I'd generally avoid players when they're on the road against the Mets, Padres, Dodgers, Athletics, and Mariners, as well as teams like the Cubs during April when the weather remains uncertain. On the other hand, target starts against Colorado, Houston, Texas, Milwaukee and Boston, as these stadiums will rarely provide much protection for opposing hitters, especially since the only great starters on these teams are Oswalt, Miller, Park, and Pedro.

3. Target players at the top of batting orders. Since runs and RBIs are counted equally, whomever reaches base the most will likely accumulate top numbers.

4. Choose pitchers exclusively among those with great strikeout ratios that can pitch deep into games. The only pitchers to break 200 Ks last year were Randy, Schilling, Park, Wood, Nomo, Clemens, Mussina, Zito, and Colon. We'll likely own at least half of those, and we may wind up owning all of them depending on how the rotations fall in the first two weeks. As you're already focusing on pitchers making two starts each week, now you'll modify that focus to center on pitchers who will rack up 2 points every inning while hoping the best for wins.

Now we'll also be playing BBW Fantasy Baseball for the first time this year, so we're likely missing dozens of important strategies. If any of you have tactics you'd like to share with your fellow readers, please e-mail them in, and I'll post them in the near future.

Internet Fantasy Baseball Contest Review of:

Baseball Weekly Lumber Company Budget Baseball

Costs: A one-team entry fee of $29.95/team. No transaction fees at all.

Prizes
1st overall: $5,00 & an autographed Jason Giambi jersey
2nd: $1,000 & an autographed Luis Gonzalez jersey
3rd: $750 & an autographed Moises Alou shirt
4th: $500 & an autographed J.D. Drew shirt
5th: $250 & an autographed Sean Casey shirt

The next five finishers win $100/each, while the top 11-50 win $50 each, turning a nice little $20.05 profit on their investment, an admittedly greater return than most money market accounts.

League winners also pull another hundred, second place finishers win $50, third place gets you a polo shirt, and fourth place nets a free entry in next year's contest. Fifth place is a poster, which you should probably let the neighborhood kids take to scout camp to use as target practice for their .22s...or their shotguns...or even their bows. Finishing 5th after all the required effort will likely cause some owners to want to use themselves as target practice.

What we don't really understand is the ordering of the autographed shirts. Does anyone, other than some misguided Cubs' fans already noticing his spring injury, really want a Moises Alou shirt over the latter two. I'd expect the players involved to finish their careers "ranked" as follows:

J.D. Drew if he can ever stay healthy
Jason Giambi if he doesn't slip too much
Sean Casey if he stops hitting grounds balls
Luis Gonzalez
Moises Alou

They list two additional prizes on the website:

All entries will be entered into a raffle for an additional Andruw Jones autographed, player shirt.

The overall leader each week beginning with points from March 31 - April 7 will be awarded $25.
Additionally a Roberto Alomar autographed shirt will be awarded to the team that has the highest weekly point total for the entire season.

All the rules and scoring are identical to BBW Fantasy Baseball as discussed above, so there's little reason to run different rosters.

We'll also probably run three teams for Budget Baseball since we like our odds of winning a combined $60.15 between the three leagues.

I hope these reviews have given you a better idea about these ever-popular CDM games. I have a few more reviews of different sites' games planned for the next few days, so again, if you have a particular game you'd like reviewed, send it on over and I'll get to it ASAP.

Today's Fantasy Rx: If you're at all interested in BBW Fantasy Baseball, you can save $10 on your entry fee if you register your team(s) today. While I mentioned these decreased costs about a month ago before the end of January deadline (where all teams were an additional five dollars cheaper), today is the last day to take advantage of this discount.