2020 Fantasy Baseball Home Run Derby

The Game Room
1

Baseball is (hopefully?) back! Assuming COVID-19 Pt. 2 doesn’t shut everything down for good, I’m looking forward to the season, warts, runners on 2nd and all. I’m starting up a very casual fantasy baseball league that we can run right here on the board. It’ll be just a basic Home Run Derby.

How it works:

  1. You select 10 players that you keep throughout the season. At the end of the year, you count up the home runs that they’ve collectively hit, and the whoever has the highest total wins*. No roster changes throughout the season, no trades - just a draft-and-hold league.
    *Tiebreaker goes to the highest individual HR hitter.

  2. You have a budget of $200 to select your team.

  3. Each player costs however many HRs they hit in 2019. You want to draft Pete Alonso? He costs $53. Want to draft Billy Hamilton for some reason? He’s free.

  4. There are no other eligibility requirements. You do not have to draft for every position, and you can select anyone you want that you think will score points.

  5. Because of the nature of the game, participation is unlimited.

If you’re interested, PM me with your roster, and post in the thread that you’re playing. (I wouldn’t post your roster in the thread - you don’t want to give away your secrets.) Deadline is July 22.

2

Edit:

After tinkering, the budget is either way too high, or we need bigger rosters. I’m going to slash the budget to $120.

3

It’s a clever setup for a game, but the roster size with the proposed budget seems misaligned.

The top 10 players last year hit a total of 450 HRs. 200 seems reasonable but 120 seems very restrictive.

In fact there were ten players tied at rank 120 that all hit 20 HRs.

There were 29 players tied at rank 211 that hit 12 HRs.

I like the idea of the game but regression and statistical analysis on players that far from prominence is too esoteric for me.

4

When you start plugging in guys that didn’t play last year who are free, guys who were injured for most of the season, and rookies that you expect to do well, there’s a tremendous amount of variance to fit into a $120 budget.

5

Good thoughts. Figured you must have another angle I wasn’t seeing.