Fantasy Baseball Draft Formats

While Drafting your fantasy baseball team there are many ways that a league can go about this. Since the introduction of the Internet as a way to easily play fantasy baseball leagues have been drafting with software using a certain website. These sites have software that allows a commissioner of the league to set up the rules, and then allows the other teams to pick there players in a snake draft format.

Snake Drafting is when fantasy baseball drafters select there team in picks. Each team gets one pick per round with the total number of rounds being equal to the number of roster spots on each team. Each team gets one pick per round with the team that picks first in the previous round picks last in the current round. This is what is called a snake draft. The advantages to a snake draft are that league parity is fairly easy to obtain.

Auction Drafting is when each fantasy manager has a set amount of money to use for there fantasy baseball team. There is then an auction of baseball players where fantasy managers can use this money to purchase the players to use for there team. A player is usually named and then teams make bids on this player according to how much they feel he is worth. The team that bids the highest gets that player on his team. This continues until all roster spots are filled.

There are also many ways in which to conduct a fantasy draft. The funnest is to get together with your friends and hold a live draft with all fantasy managers in the same room. This works especially well for the auction format. However the downside to all this is Fantasy baseball draft software needs to be purchased, otherwise it can get quite confusing.

The most widely popular and easiest by far is to hold your fantasy baseball draft online. You can do a slow draft in a forum. These take a long time and need to be started as soon as possible but they work quite well because everyone can be there. Snake drafts can be held online as well using a hosting site such as yahoo, or ESPN. These services work quite well and best of all are free.

Its not the format of your draft that matters, its how you draft. Having a strategy and understanding the draft format are essential to being king of your league.