Today's Fantasy Rx

Four different fantasy games are available at both TSN and Yahoo. Both of these links will provide you with essentially the same page, albeit located on the different servers.

The four offerings are:
Ultimate Fantasy Baseball, TSN's version of the Diamond Challenge
SportingNews.com Basic Fantasy Baseball, a free half-season version of the Premium Salary Cap-style Game
Premium Fantasy Game, TSN's version of the standard ESPN game
Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball, the free though somewhat limited version of the Premium Fantasy Game

I'll break down the first two contests in today's article. We should have two more days of these reviews, but then I hope to spend a couple of days covering the LABR drafts:

Internet Fantasy Baseball Contest Review of:

TSN Ultimate Fantasy Baseball

Cost: Until March 6th, 1 team is $17.95, a $2 discount, and 3 teams are $34.95, a $5 discount.

Prizes: $1,000 grand prize, $500 second place and so on down to $25 each for 51st-100th place finishers. Each division winner also wins $50. The catch: Unlike CDM, where you can enter the same roster on different teams and theoretically win both 1st and 2nd place prize money, etc., while TSN allows you to finish in 1st and 2nd place, etc., they only award one overall prize per person. So if your teams finish 1st and 2nd, you'd only win $1,000, and TSN gets to keep the other $500. Also, the "division" is basically their league structure; they allow up to 20 teams per division.

Style: Salary cap/points. You have $50M Sporting News Dollars to spend on 14 players (9 hitters and 5 pitchers listed, so I assume one player at each position, a UT/DH, and either four starters and a reliever or five starters). You must always have 14 players on your team to score points. Rosters are locked in each evening at 12pm Eastern.

Points Breakdown:
For batters:
20 points for every Home Run
15 points for every Triple
10 points for every Double and Stolen Base
5 points for every Single, Run, and RBI
3 points for every Walk and HBP
-1 points for every Strikeout
-2 points for every out

For pitchers:
30 points for every Win and Save
15 points for every IP
3 points for every Strikeout
-3 points for every Walk/HBP
-5 points for every Hit Allowed
-10 points for every Earned Run
-15 points for every Loss

Transactions: You begin the season with 3 pitcher trades and 3 hitter trades, meaning that you can switch three pitchers and three hitters in the first week. Every Thursday you receive three more hitter trades, and you spend as many as you own at any given time. Beginning on April 9th, you receive three more pitcher trades every Tuesday with similar restrictions.

The Sporting News Player Price Market adjusts the prices for all players based upon daily trading activity similar to a stock market. When a player is bought, his price increases and vice-versa. Prices update every day at the roster deadline in response to the trades of the previous day. Your salary cap changes in accordance with the changes in your players' salaries, so your cap will increase and decrease in response to how other owners perceive your players. While I don't see this mentioned anywhere, there seems to be an assumption in the rules that your cap won't drop below $50M, although I could be wrong.

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

We played a similar game last year in the $100,000 Reggie Jackson-sponsored Challenge. However, Reggie didn't allow daily transactions, so you can gain significant advantages here by:

1. Whenever you change pitchers, make sure the new pitcher is scheduled for a start the following day. Keep him until he makes a second start, and then change to someone else about to make a start and so on. By rotating pitchers in this manner, you'll maximize your starts and therefore your points scored.

2. Since a loss is equivalent to giving up three hits or 1.5 ER, focus on high skills' pitchers that don't allow baserunners. Then consider team offenses. Also, pitchers who routinely tire after five or six innings are much worse risks than those that have even a decent chance to complete any game they start.

3. Spend as much cap space as possible on offense. Avoid players with low OBP and yet lots of plate appearances like Tony Womack and Garret Anderson, as their extra outs will drag you down. Hitters in the upper half of batting orders with high OBPs as a group will accumulate the most points. You should change hitters to maximize cap space to open up room for more pitchers, and change pitchers to minimize downside in their starts.

4. Start off with at least a few players likely to start quickly while logically also avoiding traditionally slow starters. Players starting off solidly will be quickly bought by other teams, increasing your cap and thereby giving you room to shift down to more consistent commodities.

Above all, make sure you can update your rosters every day as much as possible, preferably right before the noon Eastern deadline. You can take advantage of late-breaking roster news and game day decisions.

Moving on to:

Internet Fantasy Baseball Contest Review of:

Sportingnews.com Basic Fantasy Baseball

While this contest differs in many ways from the one described above, here's the primary upgrade in the minds of most people and where TSN focused their marketing:

It's free, but…

That's only what they want you to think. In the above version, you only have to pay a single time to own your team. Now, in order to compete, you need to shell out sixty-three dollars to have a chance at any significant money. Here's how they stiff you:

Instead of separate hitter and pitcher trades, you only have one type of trade for any player. You begin the year with two trades and gain two more trade every Tuesday beginning on April 9th. This game ends at the All-Star break, and by that point, you can accumulate up to 28 trades.

Of course, you'll want more trades, and you'll need more trades to compete. TSN allows you to buy up to an additional 75 trades, and to insure a top finish you'll need every single one of them to keep starting fresh pitchers.

They're kind enough to provide a discount on bulk purchases, so you can purchase 12 trades for $10, 6 trades for $5, or 1 trade for $1. So for 75 trades, you'll need to spend $63 (($10*6)+($1*3)).

Is it possible to win by spending less? Definitely, but if your goal is to reduce as much risk as possible, or similarly to reduce the odds against winning, you'll need every available trade.

To briefly discuss the rest of the game, the scoring is identical, the freeze deadline is the same, most strategies are the same, and the Player Price Market operates the same way.

Basic differences include:

You now have $30M to spend on 8 players: 1 catcher, 1 corner, 1 MIF, 1 outfielders, and 3 pitchers.

All the prizes are roughly cut in half, but instead of division prizes, they award from $50 down to $10 the 11th through 250th place finishers.

For over 3.5 times as much money up front as the "Premium" game, you'll need to finish in the top 8 to even have a chance at breaking even. In the Ultimate game, you make money if you finish in either the top 100 or win your 20-team division.

Jess has advised me to tone down the focus on the money-aspect of Fantasy Baseball since almost everyone plays the game primarily for fun. I completely agree, but these last two days of games appear to be practically scams compared to more reputable private leagues. In the process of these reviews, we've discovered a portion of the undesirable underside of the fantasy world, and as some of you suggested these reviews, you deserve to know your options before signing away your money and time.

I'll cover the two contests based on Yahoo tomorrow. I certainly hope that they present a less unnerving dichotomy than today's two.

Today's Fantasy Rx: Don't play the Basic/"free" TSN game. If you want to participate in either of the games reviewed today, please spend your two sawbucks up front on the contest with better prizes and more roster flexibility.