Building the perfect fantasy baseball keeper league

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Not all keeper leagues are built equally. Even more care has to be placed on the construction of a keeper league than the standard redraft format. One of the default elements that immediately makes keeper leagues appealing is the greater likelihood of active owners, even after teams are effectively eliminated from competition.

Keeper leagues require attentive owners, so it's important to ensure those involved are committed. It might take a couple of years to thin the herd and replace people who struggle to stay up to date with trends, prospects, and other transactions. Once the pressure of winning is removed, the idea of building for next year becomes an interesting challenge.

Other than this immediate intrigue, how can we possibly create a keeper league from scratch? There is no magic formula, but there are some parameters to keep in mind.

Auction vs. Snake Draft

Both formats can work wonders, but I prefer auctions because they immediately set up the initial method for keeping players. With each team having a budget, it's a game of strategy and chance determining how much to spend on each position and each player therein.

Spending big on some players is almost always a given, but spend too much and your later rounds are dire. Balanced spending, on the other hand, can often result on a good-not-great roster.

Auctions also put every owner on an even playing field to begin with. Everyone has the same budget and there is no immediate advantage to being the first person to nominate a player. If you want Mike Trout, you're going to have to pay through the teeth to get him.

Alternately, snake drafts are consistent with standard leagues and familiar to novices. It's an easier adjustment from standard leagues, and is less time consuming compared to an auction, which can drag on forever the more bidding wars that spark up. It creates a minor dilemma when determining how to select keepers, but it's a quick fix.

Ensuring Turnover

I left a keeper league after a number of years because there was little structure beyond "keep x amount of players and call it a day." I attempted to introduce limitations for keepers to encourage turnover, but that's a lot harder to do in an already established league with ingrained rules and procedures.

It's especially important to put a lot of thought into your league guidelines, because they're much harder to change later on. Turnover is key, because you don't want the exact same players held by the exact same teams year after year because it limits the competition. For me to introduce sanctions mid-stream was unfair, so this has to be determined at the league's infancy.

First, decide on the number of keepers. Fantasy baseball rosters are typically larger than other sports, and can often result in a greater number of keepers. This is largely up to your league to decide, but too many keepers reduces the talent pool too much from year to year. Somewhere between five and eight is the ideal, though I tend to skew toward the smaller number.

Auction leagues determine baseline value at the beginning of the first season. Once the number of possible keepers is selected, a penalty should be implemented. One option is to require an owner to incrementally increase a player's salary from season to season. The first year you keep Paul Goldschmidt, for example, he costs two dollars more than what you won him for. The second year is four dollars more, and so on.

For snake drafts, requiring players to keep a player in an earlier round is the way to go. For example, if a player was drafted in the sixth round, in order to keep him the following year the owner would lose a fifth round pick as compensation. This ensures, no matter the format, that first-round picks all re-enter the talent pool. Further limitations can include not allowing anyone taken in the first three rounds to be kept.

Punish Prospect Hoarding

One by-product of keeper leagues is the overrating of prospects. This is fine and is part of the game. The same drafting and keeping rules should be applied, even if that means a player can be kept below market value for a number of years. A way of curbing this, if your league deems this unfair, is imposing a limit on how many consecutive years a player can be kept.

In the meantime, including N/A slots in addition to DL slots is imperative. Don't go crazy, though. Limit it to two N/A slots per team at most. Any more and owners will go out of their way to roster Double-A lottery tickets. That's their prerogative, of course, but there needs to be a limit to prevent hoarding without recourse.

Keep it simple with as few caveats as possible. A keeper league shouldn't be daunting, but a fun extension of the game you're used to with a few added wrinkles.