Five Steps to the Perfect Family Fantasy Baseball League

I'm a dad. I'm a stat nerd. I'm the father of three boys, two of which are at various levels of baseball stat nerd-dom (the third is a baby nerd). I want to encourage this nerd-ocity, and there are few better vehicles than fantasy sports.

Fantasy baseball is also a good way to get the competitive juices flowing with the family. Nothing serious, but good, clean fun. Of course, the ultimate challenge is making the league fair. As you know, I'm a baseball genius (go ahead, roll your eyes). My eight-year-old Michael is the heir to my Nerdery. After that, my wife Lisa and five-year-old Ryan (aka Pee Wee, P-Dubs or PW) are still figuring it out.

But I'm happy to say that we are running our second fantasy baseball league and the fourth fantasy league in all for the family. And I've only won once. In fact, I've had some pretty shabby showings as well.

Go ahead, laugh. But this is good for the league. The last thing the Loomer Family Fantasy League needs is a Yankees franchise with a built-in advantage.

It's great, great fun, and several sneaky lessons built in unsuspectingly. Here are the keys to the perfect family fantasy league:

1) Simple Draft. In our house, youngest drafts first and the oldest draft last. No snake draft, we go with the same order every round. Each round, we draft the same position. This knocks off a lot of the more complicated drafting strategy. No concerns about position scarcity or any of that crazy stuff. Everyone's picking a catcher in the first round. I also provide everyone with cheat sheets from ESPN.com so that there aren't any surprises about who is and isn't good. To avoid multi-position confusion, I also assigned a single position to all players.

2) Head to Head Scoring. Come on, you can't do Roto or Points Based with your family. It's just no fun. Even if a team is having a bad season, they can always look forward to taking on their brother or kicking their mama's butt. We go with H2H Categories, but only because I haven't thought of a good H2H Points system that is simple to understand and functional. I think H2H Points is better for football or even basketball, where you can make the final score seem like a real game score. We also make it so that each category is a win. No real reason. That's just how we roll.

3) No Transactions. When I say no transactions, I mean it: No Trades, No Waivers, No Lineup moves. In other words, No Bench -- everyone drafted will play. To some, this makes it boring. But again, we're playing with various levels of understanding here. There's a five-year-old playing. And I'm the only one logging in, so no one is putting in waiver claims. And since it's casual, I doubt we'll be checking our teams during the week (although P-Dubs has already been filling out some sheets of unknown purpose, so they may surprise me). And you know allowing trades is bound to cause problems. No vetoes, no arguments, just sharing a lot of love.

4) Everyone's in the Playoffs! I know, I know. This is dumb in a competitive league. But this isn't a competitive league. It's all for fun. We only have four teams, people. Having everyone make the playoffs actually backfired last football season when I won one game the entire regular season and won our Super Bowl. Of course, this inspired everyone to request the rule to be changed so that only the best two teams make the playoffs (you know this never would have been a request had such a miracle finish happened to anyone else!). Well, Yahoo! (our service of choice) has a four-team minimum. And since we only have four teams, our decision was either everyone's in or no playoffs. We've elected to stay with everyone's in. Even if the regular season means nothing, it's good to have that exciting final two weeks.

5) Make it Fun! Own it, baby. Every Monday morning following the week of match-ups, I'll gather everyone together so that I can announce the prior week's results. Plenty of suspense, of course. Sometimes I'll print off the results and post them in the family room. Play for some sort of prize. Doesn't have to be big, just something to make things interesting (and, no, I don't mean gamble). I think the greatest way to make it fun and instill baseball in your children is to watch games together. Make no mistake, this is a baseball family. We have the MLB Extra Innings Package (greatest purchase of all time). And while we will be watching mostly Brewers games, we'll pay close attention to who owns whom.

Loomer Family Draft Results
Sunday was an awesome day here in Colorado, so we took advantage of it by holding our draft in our driveway. Sat in a circle on lawn chairs, everyone with cheat sheets and pens in hand. I had my laptop on my lap, the Brewers game playing over my speakers while I logged the results in my incredibly awesome spreadsheet (you wish you had these spreadsheet skills!). We drafted 30 players (most allowed by Yahoo!), and the draft was over within an hour.

You'll note that P-Dubs, having the first pick, almost always went with the best Brewer. In some cases (Braun and Fielder), this wasn't such a bad strategy. In others (McGehee over A-Rod), it was not so smart.

Position	P-Dubs	Michael	Mama & JJ	Dada
C	Joe Mauer, MIN	Brian McCann, ATL	Jorge Posada, NYY	Victor Martinez, BOS
C	Russell Martin, LAD	Yadier Molina, STL	Geovany Soto, CHC	Matt Wieters, BAL
1B	Prince Fielder, MIL	Albert Pujols, STL	Miguel Cabrera, DET	Mark Teixeira, NYY
1B	Ryan Howard, PHI	Adrian Gonzalez, SD	Justin Morneau, MIN	Joey Votto, CIN
1B	Todd Helton, COL	Carlos Pena, TB	Nick Johnson, NYY	Kevin Youkilis, BOS
2B	Rickie Weeks, MIL	Chase Utley, PHI	Dustin Pedroia, BOS	Ian Kinsler, TEX
2B	Aaron Hill, TOR	Robinson Cano, NYY	Placido Polanco, PHI	Brandon Phillips, CIN
2B	Clint Barmes, COL	Brian Roberts, BAL	Luis Castillo, NYM	Ben Zobrist, TB
3B	Casey McGehee, MIL	Alex Rodriguez, NYY	Evan Longoria, TB	Pablo Sandoval, SF
3B	David Wright, NYM	Ryan Zimmerman, WAS	Aramis Ramirez, CHC	Chone Figgins, SEA
3B	Chipper Jones, ATL	Ian Stewart, COL	Adrian Beltre, BOS	Gordon Beckham, CHW
SS	Alcides Escobar, MIL	Hanley Ramirez, FLA	Troy Tulowitzki, COL	Jimmy Rollins, PHI
SS	Derek Jeter, NYY	Jose Reyes, NYM	J.J. Hardy, MIN	Yunel Escobar, ATL
SS	Miguel Tejada, BAL	Ryan Theriot, CHC	Alexei Ramirez, CHW	Elvis Andrus, TEX
OF	Ryan Braun, MIL	Carlos Gomez	Matt Holliday, STL	Matt Kemp, LAD
OF	Corey Hart, MIL	Carl Crawford, TB	Ichiro Suzuki, SEA	Justin Upton, ARI
OF	Dexter Fowler, COL	B.J. Upton, TB	Jason Bay, NYM	Jayson Werth, PHI
OF	Conor Jackson, ARI	Curtis Granderson, NYY	Adam Lind, TOR	Jacoby Ellsbury, BOS
OF	Carlos Lee, HOU	Manny Ramirez, LAD	Grady Sizemore, CLE	Adam Jones, BAL
OF	Ryan Ludwick, STL	Hunter Pence, HOU	Coco Crisp, OAK	Adam Dunn, WAS
OF	Seth Smith, COL	Cody Ross, FLA	Alfonso Soriano, CHC	Andre Ethier, LAD
OF	Andrew McCutchen, PIT	Josh Hamilton, TEX	Milton Bradley, SEA	Nick Markakis, BAL
SP	Yovani Gallardo, MIL	Tim Lincecum, SF	CC Sabathia, NYY	Roy Halladay, PHI
SP	Cole Hamels, PHI	Zack Greinke, KC	Johan Santana, NYM	Felix Hernandez, SEA
SP	Dan Haren, ARI	Adam Wainwright, STL	Javier Vazquez, NYY	Matt Cain, SF
SP	Ben Sheets, OAK	Cliff Lee, SEA	Justin Verlander, DET	Jon Lester, BOS
SP	Jake Peavy, CHW	Chris Carpenter, STL	Jorge De La Rosa, COL	Josh Johnson, FLA
SP	Josh Beckett, BOS	Ubaldo Jimenez, COL	Matt Garza, TB	Tommy Hanson, ATL
RP	Trevor Hoffman, MIL	Mariano Rivera, NYY	F. Rodriguez, NYM	J. Papelbon, BOS
RP	Todd Coffey, MIL	Huston Street, COL	Francisco Cordero, CIN	Jonathan Broxton, LAD