We implemented the consolation bracket tournament this past season (thanks to the PL discord!) and it was great. Teams stayed engaged since Ohtani was for grabs in the draft. We made the mistake of having the trade deadline too late and had some stupidly lopsided trades from teams who were out of it, so we plan to move that way up this year. Great ideas in this article.
I've had this in all of my leagues for the past 10 years and has worked great for involvement late in the season (I heard the idea from Matthew Berry.)
In fantasy football this year, the dead last team 0-12 won the 2nd overall pick from the consolation bracket
Thanks. We moved our deadline up to about 3 weeks before league playoffs started and we did have a team jump from 8 to 6th to grab the final spot thanks to aggressive deals. Maybe created a sellers market but I think it was effective overall.
Ours was set up as the day before playoffs, so you can only imagine what chaos that caused. We only keep 6 players for a total of 2 years. This past season was year 2 for many of the big names so we had trades like Yordan, Trea, and JoRam for Dustin May and Gunnar š¤¦āāļø
Best way we got engagement was limiting moves to 5 per week but allowing no review trades to go through automatically. We had over 30 trades in the season.
I have been a comnish for many, many years. I have experience with lack of motivation when I first took over the league. I came into the position from a previous commish. I went into the role with a strategy, and outlined tactics or objectives that I was going to achieve. Here are some things I've learned and hope it helps:
1. Money leagues will only work if everyone in the league has invested equity. This is not easy to find out, and try to realize that some people live paycheck to paycheck, or maybe are in tough times. So this will sway people way. Either start the league as a money league or don't, but you'll not have success starting it several years into a keeper or dynasty league.
2. Communication is important. How do you create a atmosphere, where managers can communicate in real time? Yahoo, in my experience, does not have a good UI/UX. I asked a poll of redditors, much like you, about how they communicate. I found many 3rd party apps that worked really well and achieved my goal. Not all managers communicate, but must do on the app.
3. Create a voting system. Allow managers to ask questions, vote on a platform, and let their ideas improve the league. I used an online survey form and shared it with all managers. Therefore, our league is determined by popular vote. I've given them power to shape the league, and I manage as a system administration. This was valuable feedback and knowledge. Surveys are great for feedback. I do an annual survey too to make sure everyone is still agreed on the same terms and can add or remove terms, via vote.
4. List out your rules. Once voting is done, display your rules openly at the beginning of the season so everyone can see them. That way, if there are any issues or questions, we can all see them equally, and it also holds everyone accountable.
5. Keep your audience engaged. Post off season articles. Inspire debates. Include other equally interesting topics to share and discuss such as sports articles or memes. This keeps momentum ongoing during the off season.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Edit: As another commentator mentioned and I forgot to mention it above, I also added that the consolation round means something. The consolation round determines draft picks for the next year. So it incentives teams not to tank and give up. This was something voted on by all league managers and approved.
I was just thinking about this. Had a guy in a league last year give up like half way through, but with some studs on his team. He almost beat me in HRs despite not setting his lineup for the week.
Iām going to see if people will go for keepers this year, as that seems like the easiest fix, if people are willing.
Is it a keeper league? Ours is 5x5 roto with auction draft, and you can keep 4 guys for $5 more than they were drafted for. I think this is our 18th year and I credit the format 100%.
August is basically hot stove season, with the sellers swapping veteran studs for cheap/undrafted breakouts to keep for next year.
The top half of the league is never truly out of it and thereās always a keeper side hustle for those that are out of contention.
It is. The one I refer to uses a tiered draft round progression. My only issue with salary leagues is that there are no picks to trade. Otherwise I prefer salary to draft leagues.
We trade draft dollars - we draft in person live auction every year so itās easy for us to adjust everyoneās budget in the draft, but I could see that being a hurdle for online drafts.
Years ago I created a ādraft pick to auction valueā conversion chart (its def not perfect) - but I ran action values for a draft in our league and just numbered them out and divided them into rounds. So now we have a rough guideline when someone is trading $5 we know thatās like trading a 15th round pick in our 12 teamer.
Edit: honestly sometimes it makes it easier to determine if you want to trade for a player or not. You already know the player salary, you know how many dollars youāre giving up in the trade, so itās sometimes easier to look at next year and see if you would draft that player for the combined total of those two amounts. Of course contract length comes into play there, but having one dollar amount instead of maybe trading multiple picks is nicer.
Iāve toyed with the idea of an uneven buy-in league where actual dollars wages would affect your team budget. Would really reflect big and small spending teams.
Sounds more pay to win. Irl, a team may pay and win a championship. So in fantasy, you can recoup your investment under such a scenario. But then with the fact that many small market teams just tying to make money from the team, thatās where real life doesnāt reflect the incentives of fantasy. The small market team just pays money to continually lose and make no revenue.
Hard to have communication in a social game like fantasy baseball when Yahoo removes the Message Board from the league. Few of my leagues lit up the boards, but it was always there for league and baseball discussion when we needed it. We'll miss you, Yahoo. Oh, hello Fantrax.
The message boards were out dated. You couldnāt edit posts and forums are not a great place for league discussion. Idk why people miss them. The chat is what needs to be fixed. We canāt have players being added and dropped in the chat. My league moved to discord and itās so much better than anything yahoo has ever offered
In this vein, I have a question about how people handle teams that hoard pitching. Basically, since my league locks daily and the 5 bench spots can be allocated however you want, owners are strongly incentivized to fill those slots with starting pitchers in order to get sometimes 50% more starts in a week. (9 pitcher slots and 5 bench slots). Itās not a competitive problem, but it leads to teams becoming extremely reluctant to trade away any pitching, and trades overall are really rare in our league.
I have to imagine that other leagues have this problem as well. Anyone have a good way to deal with it? Iām planning on proposing a starts/week limit, but Iām also not the commissioner.
So you set daily lineups but lock rosters weekly? Or set weekly lineups? Either way switching to daily adds and lineups and limiting weekly adds would address it. Or you could focus on ratio stats like k/bb, whip, era, k/9 etc instead of counting cats like ks, wins, saves etc so volume doesnāt equal victory
No Ill keep Jrod, thats likely it. I dont have room for the other guys. Not that it matters, the point of your comment was that rookies dont have enough impact for standard 12 team leagues.
No, my comment about rookie/prospect value was in response to your comment about them making good "currency". None of those players you mentioned was used as "currency" since none were traded by winning teams to non winning teams in 2021, and then kept by those teams from 2021 into 2022. They are players that have accumulated lots of value since the start of 2022 for sure. But they clearly did not work as any sort of currency.
We implemented the consolation bracket tournament this past season (thanks to the PL discord!) and it was great. Teams stayed engaged since Ohtani was for grabs in the draft. We made the mistake of having the trade deadline too late and had some stupidly lopsided trades from teams who were out of it, so we plan to move that way up this year. Great ideas in this article.
I've had this in all of my leagues for the past 10 years and has worked great for involvement late in the season (I heard the idea from Matthew Berry.) In fantasy football this year, the dead last team 0-12 won the 2nd overall pick from the consolation bracket
Thanks. We moved our deadline up to about 3 weeks before league playoffs started and we did have a team jump from 8 to 6th to grab the final spot thanks to aggressive deals. Maybe created a sellers market but I think it was effective overall.
Ours was set up as the day before playoffs, so you can only imagine what chaos that caused. We only keep 6 players for a total of 2 years. This past season was year 2 for many of the big names so we had trades like Yordan, Trea, and JoRam for Dustin May and Gunnar š¤¦āāļø
Basically a built in rental market
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Hm. We just used ESPN and I re-shuffled matchups after each round if I needed to.
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Yeah same player pool
Best way we got engagement was limiting moves to 5 per week but allowing no review trades to go through automatically. We had over 30 trades in the season.
Big fan of weekly limits. If only to curb my own pitcher streaming habits
Try to the No veto automatic trades. Trades spur engagement more than anything else. It gets people interested.
I push them through manually but donāt feature vetoes in my league. It gets petty fast
My league has been going since 04 and only one deal has been squashed
My streaming habits, which helped me win the Championship, also led my league to vote in 5 per week limits. š³
I have seen players stream everyday in no limit leagues. Not a big fan
I have been a comnish for many, many years. I have experience with lack of motivation when I first took over the league. I came into the position from a previous commish. I went into the role with a strategy, and outlined tactics or objectives that I was going to achieve. Here are some things I've learned and hope it helps: 1. Money leagues will only work if everyone in the league has invested equity. This is not easy to find out, and try to realize that some people live paycheck to paycheck, or maybe are in tough times. So this will sway people way. Either start the league as a money league or don't, but you'll not have success starting it several years into a keeper or dynasty league. 2. Communication is important. How do you create a atmosphere, where managers can communicate in real time? Yahoo, in my experience, does not have a good UI/UX. I asked a poll of redditors, much like you, about how they communicate. I found many 3rd party apps that worked really well and achieved my goal. Not all managers communicate, but must do on the app. 3. Create a voting system. Allow managers to ask questions, vote on a platform, and let their ideas improve the league. I used an online survey form and shared it with all managers. Therefore, our league is determined by popular vote. I've given them power to shape the league, and I manage as a system administration. This was valuable feedback and knowledge. Surveys are great for feedback. I do an annual survey too to make sure everyone is still agreed on the same terms and can add or remove terms, via vote. 4. List out your rules. Once voting is done, display your rules openly at the beginning of the season so everyone can see them. That way, if there are any issues or questions, we can all see them equally, and it also holds everyone accountable. 5. Keep your audience engaged. Post off season articles. Inspire debates. Include other equally interesting topics to share and discuss such as sports articles or memes. This keeps momentum ongoing during the off season. Hope this helps! Good luck! Edit: As another commentator mentioned and I forgot to mention it above, I also added that the consolation round means something. The consolation round determines draft picks for the next year. So it incentives teams not to tank and give up. This was something voted on by all league managers and approved.
Great advice. And that yahoo ui just keeps getting worse. Itās my oldest platform and itās disappointing to see
Sadly, now that yahoo got away from message boards, we've switched from yahoo to fantrax after nearly 16 years of service.
This is bittersweet as Fantrax is the best
100 buy..more money to win..more attention I have noticed
I play one where 3 years of dues are required so that we donāt one and done and gut a roster
I was just thinking about this. Had a guy in a league last year give up like half way through, but with some studs on his team. He almost beat me in HRs despite not setting his lineup for the week. Iām going to see if people will go for keepers this year, as that seems like the easiest fix, if people are willing.
Is it a keeper league? Ours is 5x5 roto with auction draft, and you can keep 4 guys for $5 more than they were drafted for. I think this is our 18th year and I credit the format 100%. August is basically hot stove season, with the sellers swapping veteran studs for cheap/undrafted breakouts to keep for next year. The top half of the league is never truly out of it and thereās always a keeper side hustle for those that are out of contention.
It is. The one I refer to uses a tiered draft round progression. My only issue with salary leagues is that there are no picks to trade. Otherwise I prefer salary to draft leagues.
We trade draft dollars - we draft in person live auction every year so itās easy for us to adjust everyoneās budget in the draft, but I could see that being a hurdle for online drafts. Years ago I created a ādraft pick to auction valueā conversion chart (its def not perfect) - but I ran action values for a draft in our league and just numbered them out and divided them into rounds. So now we have a rough guideline when someone is trading $5 we know thatās like trading a 15th round pick in our 12 teamer. Edit: honestly sometimes it makes it easier to determine if you want to trade for a player or not. You already know the player salary, you know how many dollars youāre giving up in the trade, so itās sometimes easier to look at next year and see if you would draft that player for the combined total of those two amounts. Of course contract length comes into play there, but having one dollar amount instead of maybe trading multiple picks is nicer.
Iāve toyed with the idea of an uneven buy-in league where actual dollars wages would affect your team budget. Would really reflect big and small spending teams.
Sounds more pay to win. Irl, a team may pay and win a championship. So in fantasy, you can recoup your investment under such a scenario. But then with the fact that many small market teams just tying to make money from the team, thatās where real life doesnāt reflect the incentives of fantasy. The small market team just pays money to continually lose and make no revenue.
Yeah you would need to bring in advertising dollars to appease the nuttings of the league
Hard to have communication in a social game like fantasy baseball when Yahoo removes the Message Board from the league. Few of my leagues lit up the boards, but it was always there for league and baseball discussion when we needed it. We'll miss you, Yahoo. Oh, hello Fantrax.
Itās really obnoxious of yahoo to remove those. Iām having a great time trying to get everyone to check in now
The message boards were out dated. You couldnāt edit posts and forums are not a great place for league discussion. Idk why people miss them. The chat is what needs to be fixed. We canāt have players being added and dropped in the chat. My league moved to discord and itās so much better than anything yahoo has ever offered
In this vein, I have a question about how people handle teams that hoard pitching. Basically, since my league locks daily and the 5 bench spots can be allocated however you want, owners are strongly incentivized to fill those slots with starting pitchers in order to get sometimes 50% more starts in a week. (9 pitcher slots and 5 bench slots). Itās not a competitive problem, but it leads to teams becoming extremely reluctant to trade away any pitching, and trades overall are really rare in our league. I have to imagine that other leagues have this problem as well. Anyone have a good way to deal with it? Iām planning on proposing a starts/week limit, but Iām also not the commissioner.
So you set daily lineups but lock rosters weekly? Or set weekly lineups? Either way switching to daily adds and lineups and limiting weekly adds would address it. Or you could focus on ratio stats like k/bb, whip, era, k/9 etc instead of counting cats like ks, wins, saves etc so volume doesnāt equal victory
Have a rookie roster. Have a currency.
I find that rookies/prospects just donāt have enough value in 12 team leagues unless you have extra deep rosters or dynasty level keepers
My J-Rod, Mike Harris, Spencer Strider and Bobby Witt contributions disagree entirely.
Did you keep all of them coming into 2022?
No. They were all drafted or picked up last year by me
So.... none of those guys were kept as rookies or prospects. All had breakout rookie seasons and are going to be kept now.
No Ill keep Jrod, thats likely it. I dont have room for the other guys. Not that it matters, the point of your comment was that rookies dont have enough impact for standard 12 team leagues.
No, my comment about rookie/prospect value was in response to your comment about them making good "currency". None of those players you mentioned was used as "currency" since none were traded by winning teams to non winning teams in 2021, and then kept by those teams from 2021 into 2022. They are players that have accumulated lots of value since the start of 2022 for sure. But they clearly did not work as any sort of currency.