Theme
Fantasy baseball played with real seasons from baseball history. You draft players, but you don't get their careers — each week, every player on your roster turns into one real season he actually had.
Draft Willie Mays and one week he might play as 1965 Mays, the next as 1954 Mays, the next as 1971 Mays. The games are real games that really happened, with the box scores they really had. Your job is to build a roster deep enough that whatever the years give you, you can still put a good lineup out.
Your league drafts once, before the season. It's a snake draft — order reverses each round — and it runs 24 rounds, so everyone ends up with 24 players.
The commissioner picks the date and a clock of 60 or 90 seconds a pick. If your clock runs out, the system picks for you and fills the positions you still need first.
Your protection against that is the queue — a ranked list of players you want, built from the draft board before or during the draft. The queue is kept on the server, so it keeps working even if your connection drops or you step away: when your clock runs out, you get the highest queued player who can still fill a spot you need, instead of whoever the system would have chosen.
You draft the whole player, so a man's position eligibility comes with him. Two-way players are drafted twice: Babe Ruth's bat and Babe Ruth's arm are separate picks, and taking one leaves the other on the board.
Not every year of a career is available. A season has to be a real one — enough playing time that drawing it gives you a genuine week rather than a handful of at-bats.
A season qualifies if the player reached, of the most games any team played that year:
He also needs enough career games overall, so that he doesn't run out of real games to draw and start repeating them.
Your league picks the range of years it draws from, anywhere inside 1897–2025. That range is fixed when the league is created, because changing it later would invalidate everything already drafted and played.
Every week runs on the same clock, in this order.
| Monday | 4pm, 7pm |
| Tuesday–Saturday | 10am, 1pm, 4pm, 7pm |
| Sunday | 10am, 1pm, 4pm |
All times US Eastern. 25 game slots a week. Monday is light on purpose — it's a traditional off day — and Sunday finishes early, like a real getaway day.
A player never draws the same game twice until he's been through everything his season has to give.
Every game a starter plays is scored from its real box score, and the totals add up to your week.
| Singles | +1 |
| Doubles | +2 |
| Triples | +3 |
| Home runs | +4 |
| Runs | +1 |
| Runs batted in | +1 |
| Walks | +1 |
| Stolen bases | +1 |
| Strikeouts | -0.5 |
| Outs recorded | +0.5 |
| Strikeouts | +1.8 |
| Wins (starter) | +6 |
| Wins (relief) | +4 |
| Saves | +8 |
| Losses | -1.6 |
| Earned runs | -1.6 |
| Hits allowed | -0.8 |
| Walks allowed | -0.8 |
Pitching is scored per out rather than per inning, because that's what the box scores actually record, and thirds of an inning are where rounding starts.
These are the values a new league is created with. A league keeps the scoring it was made with for its whole life, so an older league can score differently — scoring never changes underneath a season in progress.
Each week you play one other team head to head. More points wins. Your record is wins, losses and ties, and the standings update once a week after the final out — not in a trickle as each game lands.
Leagues can also be played with the older category scoring, where you compare five or more statistics a side and win each one individually. Points is the default and it's what we'd suggest for a first league.
In a category league the bigger number takes a category, except in SO, CS, GIDP, L, ER, ERA and WHIP, where fewer wins. SO there is a batter's strikeouts; a pitcher's K still wants more. If one side of your lineup plays no games in a week — no pitcher threw, say — that side has no number in its categories, and no number never beats a real one, even where fewer wins.
Two teams on the same record are separated by how much they won by, and then — in a category league — by all-play.
A league can finish with a bracket, or not — the commissioner decides when the league is made, and "no playoffs" is always one of the choices.
The standings freeze when the bracket starts. They're the final standings, and they're what the seeds were drawn from, so a playoff result doesn't move them. The champion is whoever wins the final, which needn't be the team that finished top — that's the whole point of playing a bracket.
A tied playoff game goes to the better seed, and that includes the final. The regular season can absorb a tie as half a win; a bracket can't, because somebody has to play next week — or lift the trophy.
Anyone not on a roster in your league is a free agent, and you can take one whenever you like. It's first come, first served — there are no waivers and no claims to wait on. If the player is there, he's yours the moment you take him.
Trades are between two managers: you offer, they accept, and it's done. There is no veto and no review, so an accepted trade is final. Both sides move the same number of players, and if any part of a trade can't go through, none of it does — half a trade landing would leave someone robbed with no way to undo it. Like every roster change, an accepted trade takes effect at the next reveal — both rosters swap the moment that week's seasons appear.
The trade deadline falls around 70% of the way through the regular season. Without one, a team with nothing left to play for could hand its best players to a contender.
Every game, box score and stat line here is built from Retrosheet. Their notice, which we are required to show and are glad to: The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at www.retrosheet.org.
The uniform number on a player's badge comes from the roster tables of Wikipedia's team-season articles (text under CC BY-SA); a player without a listed number wears the year of his season instead, and nobody wore a number before 1929.