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Kyle Bishop ponders how many fantasy baseball teams should be considered excessive in this edition of The Friday Meta.
This existential question has plagued perhaps dozens of people since time immemorial (otherwise known as the 80’s).
When I posed it on Twitter and Reddit earlier this week, the answers ran the gamut from, “According to my wife, one” to a perhaps-rueful “17.” About 400 votes came in on the poll.
Several commenters pointed out that I neglected to include two as an option in the poll. While I'd have preferred to do a full range from 0-9+, Twitter polls max out at four response options. Surely few fantasy owners would consider having two teams - the minimum amount of teams it is possible to have and still be said to have multiple teams - to be excessive, I thought as I fired up my ninth draft of the spring, idly scratching my neck for no particular reason.
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Okay, so I'm in too many leagues. We've covered that already. One Twitter user wryly suggested that we were merely observing people adding a digit to their own maximum, an assertion which, if not the truth, is at least within range of it Still, the number of fantasy monogamists took me aback, and it probably shouldn't have.
Once You Pop, Then You Stop?
What are the benefits of having just one fantasy team? The most obvious is being able to focus all of the resources you've budgeted for this game on one roster. Not everyone has the time or inclination to juggle a bunch of fake baseball teams. We're all busy! I certainly wouldn't be in this many leagues if I weren't in the biz. Until a couple of years ago, my max in one season was five. And it's not easy to manage a large number of teams, especially when they're spread across several platforms.
A common rationale I heard from the one-teamers was avoiding conflicts of interest. They didn't want to have to root for multiple disparate or contradictory outcomes. This makes all the sense in the world; there is enough cognitive dissonance in everyday life right now without inviting it via our hobbies. Some already find it difficult to balance rooting interests of their fantasy squads with their personal fandom. I consult for an owner who refuses to draft any player from his team's most hated rival. He just barely lost in the finals last year. That kind of principle can work, but the more leagues you have the more difficult it would then become to adhere to, if not outright impossible.
To Thine Own Self Be True
At the end of the day, unsurprisingly, it comes down to personal preference. I may have strong feelings about auctions versus snake drafts - and if you're one of those people who plays with fielding percentage as a category, I'm not quite sure what to say to you - but even I know there's no one right way to play the game. That encompasses the rules, the strategy, whatever.
There is, however, a right way to play the game for you, specifically. I absolutely need to scale back on the leagues next season, and think that engaging in some best ball will help due to the format's lack of an in-season commitment. But I can't fathom cutting down to just one. There are simply too many players I'm interested in each season for me to ever assemble them all on a single roster, and I like being able to have enough bites at the apple to get most if not all of my targets. I also enjoy drafting too much to settle for only one that actually counts. Competing in different formats and with different opponents both also have intrinsic value to me as an analyst as well as an owner.
Perhaps the biggest motivator to having a cadre of fantasy teams is increasing your odds of a championship. Sure, overextending yourself can lead to a bunch of mediocre performances, but you've also got more attempts. I may not get this year's Juan Soto in every league, but I'll probably get him in at least one and ride that transaction, if not some other good and/or lucky move, to the promised land. If you only have one league, you're pinning all your hopes and dreams on that roster, and there's too much variance risk in that for my taste. But most importantly of all, if I only have one team and they're out of it in August, what in the damn hell am I gonna do with myself until April?
You may feel differently, and that's completely fine. As long as you're having fun and not harshing anyone else's buzz, the rest is noise. Keep that in mind as we enter a new season. Best of luck to all who are not my opponents.
The Friday Meta is Kyle Bishop's attempt to go beyond the fantasy box score or simple strategic pointers and get at the philosophical side of the game. It is hopefully not as absurd, pretentious, or absurdly pretentious as that sounds.
