My fantasy league has evolved many times over its 6 year existence. Being a group of friends who loved fantasy football, we started with a Yahoo based, head to head weekly match-up with as many categories as we felt fit. We were not happy with a 5×5 setup, and so we added the rest to get somewhere in the neighborhood of a 12×12 league.

Thankfully this all changed last year when ESPN allowed us to do a points league and that’s where my work began. I had become pretty familiar with sabremetrics at least on small level of understanding. I didn’t know how they came up with the statistics they used, but I trusted that they worked and understood the results of the work.

Everyone knows that baseball is based on who scores more runs than the other team, but recently its becoming more popular to understand that preventing a run is just as good (if not possibly better) than scoring one. With that in mind I wondered why fantasy leagues couldn’t be based in the same manner. Baseball games aren’t won on lost based on categories, at the end of the day its runs scored vs runs scored.

Reading Tom Tango’s book taught me how his research allowed him to weight events that occur in baseball such as outs, singles, doubles, homers, etc. These values all have a value in how often they score runs. The nice thing about these numbers is that they are linear statistics so Tango scaled these into a statistic called weighted on-base average (wOBA, sounds like woah-bah).

Tango scaled wOBA to mirror on base percentage which most baseball fans are pretty familiar with, so that it wasn’t necessary to become familiar with another scale of good, average, and bad. I took the weighted values and turned them into points for a fantasy baseball league. Then I took fielder independent pitching (FIP, sounds like fip, not f i p) which measures the abilities pitchers have to get through games and prevent runs on their own. Pitchers get points for getting outs, strikeouts, get docked for giving up home runs, and walks.

It took me a solid week by I was able to get pitchers and hitters on the same level and hey, we have a new league. So like a good commissioner, I tested this league out by manually entering stats and scenarios and came up with some ground rules. Each week each team can only have 7 games started by pitchers. We limit each team to one free agent pick up per week, thus creating a strategy based league that requires quality over quantity.

The end result was very pleasing, even though nobody else in the league really understood wOBA or FIP, they understood the points and what they meant and were able to compete very well. My team rode a hot August and September from Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander, and Ubaldo Jiminez get get a spot in the playoffs and then eventually win out. It wasn’t easy and 8 teams were pretty competitive all season, even my fiancee’s team turned up the heat late and before the season she could name more Cardinals from the 1998 team, then she could have from the 2009 team (now she has favorite players, and has a passion of dislike towards Brad Lidge, she’s awesome!)

For a fun friends and family league the first season was absolutely successful. Everyone liked the points format as they could better understand how they were doing each week, they saw how preventing runs came in handy, if not just as handy as scoring them. This year everyone wanted to continue with the system and we’re getting ready to draft here in 3 weeks, and by the keepers chosen, I can see that everyone has caught on. Back to the cellar for me? Well my fiancee is scheduled to face off against me in week one, and she plans on starting off with a win.

Internet blogs are a wonderful thing. Anyone can start a blog, and then develop their blog in anyway they want to. The real possibilities are literally endless. The trick with blogs is motivating one to continue writing one, eventually to hopefully develop a fan base. Having a good reason to start a blog isn’t a bad idea either. Perhaps the writer wants to start something new, maybe the writer thinks they can do better than the predecessors, or like me would like to develop my writing skills in a very fun way.

This blog, Fantasy by the Book will serve many purposes on the subject of baseball. The blog will be 3 parts fantasy baseball, 1 part fictional baseball, 1 part sabremetric understanding, and 1 part off topic. However like any good recipe there is room for tweaking, eyeballing, and changes. So if you enjoy baseball this blog is for you. If you play in fantasy baseball this blog is for you. If you are my mom (no I do not live in her basement), or my beautiful fiancee (she is real) this blog is for you.

I love fantasy baseball and since I was introduced to Tom Tango’s “The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball” I have striven to find a more true to baseball experience to fantasy baseball. Tom Tango and his team have developed many new ways to measure value in baseball and based on these measures I have developed a scoring system that brings out what I believe to be a truer fantasy baseball.

In baseball the object is to win on a day to day basis by outscoring your opponent. Your team’s pitching and defense prevent runs, and your offense scores runs in an attempt to win every day. Fantasy baseball is limited as we have no real control over the players (and luckily I get that urge to control satisfied with my fictional baseball ventures) making it really tough to pull that off. But my league features a week to week game structure that basis its points scoring on measures that give points for runs produced and runs prevented.

Fantasy Baseball is gaining much exposure and continues to grow every season. Most fantasy leagues still run rotisserie format with 5×5 scoring structures. While this a tried and true tradition of fantasy baseball in my opinion it is quite old. Many of the categories actually have little to do with the players actual performance and has more to do with the team he is playing on. I will get more detailed into this later on as its a great subject for debate for me.

With all of that in mind the blog’s name, ‘Fantasy by the Book’ was one of the easiest creations I have ever had to name. Typically I struggle forever and a day trying to come up with names for things, sometimes even very mundane items. But this name came very quickly and I am very happy with it. My passion for baseball is very strong and I owe a lot of that to The Book by Tom Tango, other writers out there like David Cameron (ussmariner.com), and those at FanGraphs.com among many many others.

I truly hope you enjoy reading my blog as I know I will love reading it. Hopefully we can all learn something together!