Fantasy Baseball Dynasty League Ideas

A fantasy baseball dynasty league is one where…shoot, let’s just cut to Wikipedia, the source of all truth:

"Any fantasy baseball pool that “rolls over” into other years is called a “Keeper” or “Dynasty” league. The leagues can be run each year in any of the above formats with a winner declared at the end of each season. At the end of the year team managers decide which players they wish to protect (the number varies – from protecting and keeping all players, to keeping just one player)."

I would like to add that a Dynasty league differentiates itself from a standard fantasy baseball keeper league in that you’d typically keep many more players for a dynasty league and they also often include some sort of mechanism for keeping minor league prospects.

So what if you want to start a fantasy baseball dynasty league or convert your current league into a dynasty league? I can take a little break from killing zombies with plants on my iPhone so I’d love to spitball a bit. Listed below are 6 off-the-cuffs thoughts, ideas, or suggestions for you to consider if you are thinking about a dynasty league, in no particular order:

1. It’s important to make sure you have a stable group of owners to play with. Dynasty leagues don’t function well if you have a carousel of frequently changing owners. (Click to Tweet this.) Who wants to take over another guy’s dynasty?
2. Don’t use ESPN as your fantasy baseball host. ESPN lags behind Yahoo and CBS Sports in terms of the flexibility of comprehensiveness of features. Maybe even consider being a hipster and going indy on a site like Dynasty League Baseball Online.
3. Have fun with salaries. Consider having your fantasy baseball players be “contract based.” A players kept have contracts based upon how many years you signed them for. Half of the challenge is making the numbers work to stay under your league’s salary cap. It also creates scenarios where trades are pure salary dumps.
4. Speaking of salaries, another system could be escalating salary increases. You can keep a play but their salary goes up X dollars the first year and X dollars the second year, and so on.  The structure is easy to figure out because you just and the increase to the salary you paid the guy the year before. It also eliminates the need for keeper year limits, because it self corrects in that eventually a player become so expensive after several salary increases that it benefits your team to throw him back.
5. Think about having a large roster with only a certain number of those roster spots being available for active players. The rest of the roster spots are reserved for prospects or reserve players that aren’t eligible to be played unless “called up.”
6. Consider having a second draft during the season. Call it your Minor League Farm Draft. It could be a snake , determined by the previous year’s standings, or in reverse order of the current standings. Players eligible for you Farm Draft are players who have not lost their rookie eligibility (equal to or less than 130 ABs, 50 IP). A farm system player can be kept until the season he is activated by his MLB team.

Again, just spitballing here. There are a myriad of ways to manage a fantasy baseball dynasty league. I do hope these few ideas ignite your thinking as to how you can implement your own dynasty league rules though. Dynasty leagues can be a lot of fun and allow you to get your GM on.

Now back to killing zombies with plants.