Welcome back to part 2! If you missed part one go and check that out here before moving on with your league settings!
Now let’s jump into the next settings!
Scoring
Now for those scoring categories
This is how I have them in one league:
You can of course change the scoring categories however you want and, especially if you click on “Include advanced categories.” There you can see a TON of options for various ways to score things, including the scoring alternates for pitchers I talked about for starters and relievers.
Next, you’ve got your minimums and maximums for all stats. Here I would highly recommend using the prorate option for periods that aren’t normal length.
Also, be sure to consider carefully what the punishment is for failing to meet a min/max. In roto leagues the penalty of sending a team to the bottom can seriously impact teams at the top in a potentially unfair way, so be careful with that. For roto dynasty leagues I prefer a penalty to the team for failing to meet the mins that doesn’t change those standings but may change where they draft if they were trying to tank. Now – if a team doesn’t meet mins and has a 0.00 ERA because they let one guy pitch one inning, then as commissioner you need to take that into account.
Game schedule & Preferences
You don’t need to worry about it unless you don’t want some MLB games to count. Then under preferences, you can determine when stats lock for corrections (ie if a scorer changes if a play in the field was or wasn’t an error and so it impacts the ERA then that score correction will come through the system).
Finally, preferences lets you determine when you will lock stat corrections. If you’ve got a roto league you should just have this setting be whatever you want. If H2H you need to decide how long out you need stats to lock since that will potentially change past week results.
Transactions and periods
Lots and lots of important stuff here.
First – lineups and periods:
To start you have your standard who can change lineups and if you want to use the custom periods.
You should leave the league all transactions retroactive off unless you want all trades and adds to go back to the start of the season…which would be a very unique league setup.
Next, you need to decide when you change your lineups:
You have your standard weekly and daily options, as well as the semiweekly midweek changes. BUT Fantrax also offers some other lineup options. It’s important to remember that Transactions (lineup changes, claims/drops, trades) can only be executed for the upcoming Lineup Period and not the current one, with the exception of Daily lineup periods. Transactions also apply to the whole period, and can not be applied to just part of the period:
Weekly (Daily Subs): Lineup periods are weekly for claims/drops and trades, and daily for lineup changes.
What I really like with this setting is using the option to only allow injured players to change daily. If you do this then lineup periods for non-injured players will follow the same lock times as claims and trades, but if someone gets injured midweek you can change the lineup so you don’t have a player get hurt on Monday and then lose stats for that week the whole week.
You can also do Bi-Weekly, which here – since bi-weekly can be a confusing term – means every 2 weeks, or you can longer with a monthly period.
Next, you set up when a lineup locks and with what frequency – I would recommend a set amount of time before each players games, and make it as tight as possible so any last-minute changes have room for you to make adjustments.
Finally – please turn on “Ignore postponed/canceled games when determining lineup lock times.” There is no reason for a player to get locked into a slot, especially in a daily league, when the game gets postponed or canceled – especially when the call is made after the game was scheduled to start.
Trades!
This is also a very important page – well at least if your league isn’t boring and doesn’t have trades. First, set it to managers propose their own trades. Then, if you want to minimize how many trades are allowed you can set that or the team.
Next set a trade deadline – if you want one – and set it to either the same as MLB’s or, my recommendation, a little bit later ( but not too much later)
Trade voting system
This is very important to consider carefully. Your options are:
“None” – where trades process as soon as the trade is agreed on by the two managers
“Managers” – here other managers in the league have a say and you have to set the number of days managers have to vote and how many managers (or % of managers) have to object. This has to be done carefully since managers could object to a trade because it impacts their chance of winning, not because it shouldn’t be made because its unfair…
“Commissioner” – this is my preference, especially if the commissioner is NOT playing (like me in most of the leagues I run). This lets the commissioner make sure it’s legal or only possible if there is collusion and then hit approve.
Lastly “Owners & Commissioner” -This option works the same way as the Owners voting system, with the exception that if the objections are met, the commissioner still decides if it goes or not, even if the league votes it down.
If your commissioner isn’t an immoral slime then commissioner is my suggestion!
Finally, the other settings below:
- Don’t lock trades at the first game of the day
- Don’t allow trades across many periods
- I prefer to allow trades to execute even if rosters are illegal to be on – managers then need to clean up their own roster after they make those trades
- I would only use trades before the draft if you are in a dynasty/keepers league (in which case this needs to be on in my opinion)
- Then decide if you want trades to be on during the draft (depending on the voting system this may or may not work – it can 100% add a really really fun dynamic to drafts, but it can also be really annoying depending on the league or just favor the more available manager during drafts)
- Keep Trade comments visible to all managers: off as well
- Then you can decide about the draft pick trades. If you’re a dynasty/keeper league you should use this and just choose the number of years out its allowed wisely so it doesn’t get too crazy (it can go up to 10… and speaking from experience that’s a bit much)
Claims and drops
There are a ton of options here for what you can do on claims and drops (if you allow them).
We’ll cover if you don’t use waivers (my preference) first – and then we can talk about what would happen if you use waivers.
You can first set max adds per the season or a week. I don’t care much about a season-long max – but for daily leagues that are head-to-head weekly matchups, it makes sense to have a weekly max, especially if there isn’t an IP max per week.
Keep Lock claims/drops at first game of day: off if you use some of the other features I’ll use below (or honestly even if not).
The pre-draft features only really matter in keeper and dynasty leagues and they are pretty self-explanatory, just be smart about how you want to use them.
I would leave allow combined claim and drop/move off unless you understand what it means – this is a place where the ? next to the rule is very helpful.
One feature I really like to use the prevent claim for injured players feature in leagues where I have unlimited IL – that way your IL doesn’t ever force you to drop a player but also it doesn’t just become a stash list.
The can’t drop list is great for public leagues and if you have a league where you’re worried about collusion or are a more absent commissioner – this is a list that Fantrax sets to prevent certain caliber players from being dropped. I don’t use it in any of my leagues, but it can be handy.
I would set pending to be viewable only by one’s own team since others shouldn’t se what you’re bidding/who you are trying to add, but put failed to all teams, since that can be an interesting insight and help teams learn things.
Free agents:
My preferred form of adds is with free agent bidding. So set claim system to bidding and then decide when you want the bids to process. Remember, if you do a daily league but a weekly lineup, then all claims will be in effect for the following week. You can also set this to an automated priority if you would like it to be done based off standings.
Set the time to be a time when games aren’t happening – I do 3am et for my leagues, since if you have claims process when players are playing it tends to just get messy.
The auto free for all lets you use bids and then flip to a first come first serve basis. I don’t use this but if you want a balance this is a great way to do it.
Bidding settings
If you use biding you can set up your system here.
Vickery: Vickery bidding is where if you win the bid – you pay the next highest. So say I bid $250 on a player and someone else bids $215 – I would win the player for $215 of FAAB. Or if I bid $50 and no one else bids, I add the player for $0. If you want it to be you pay whatever you bid – then leave this off.
Tie-breaker: If two (or more) teams bid the same you can set this to be a rolling list, random, based off of standings, or whomever bid first.
Then set the budget, the increment, and the min bid options need to be set up and if you’re a salary league then you can set those next options.
Waivers
Alternatively if you use waivers you can set the priority system (automated or bidding), again, when waivers process, what the order is or bidding is, and then how and when those run.
You can also set up there how long a player stays on waivers. Waivers will automatically move players to be first come first serve after waivers process OR whatever your FA settings are. If you’re not going to do waivers that then flip to first come first serve then I would just use the FA bidding/claims system.
For most leagues you’ll want to use the default setup for waivers that Fantrax has for waivers– so start there and then make changes. Waivers can be a bit confusing so contact support if you need any help.
Salaries and Contracts
We’re going to skip this for now and come back to it since it adds a whole different level to the process.
Draft
This is obviously a crucial part of the league so you want to be sure to get it set up correctly.
First you pick your draft type:
Live online standard (regular and slow) is your classic round by round draft.
Auction will let you do a typical auction draft where you bid on players.
Automated will do an automatic draft based on how teams rank their players (or the system rankings if players aren’t ranked).
Or offline lets you just import the results if you don’t draft on the site for whatever reason. We’ll focus on the first two options here.
Your next option is what players are in the draft. If you’re doing a draft that only allow minors (as defined by your settings under roster for fantasy minors), you can limit the draft room to that, otherwise it will likely just be all.
Then you set your draft date, time, and number of rounds.
Normally rounds will be the size of your roster – of if a dynasty/keeper, the number teams need to add. However, you can also combine this with the “All teams will have the same # of players as the # of rounds when draft ends:” setting if you have teams not all keep the same number of players but all should end with the same. Then a team would stop drafting when the roster is full (and would then resume if they make a trade during the draft to not be full). So, in my 30 Rock Dynasty league teams had to bid keepers for the startup and so not all teams keep the same amount. In that league we have 60 man rosters and so I keep it at 60 rounds but with the setting on, so the team who only cut 5 for keepers drafts up to 60, and the team that cut 20 drafts up to 60.
Then you set the time limit – which if a slow draft (defined here as a pick time above 15 minutes a pick) – the system lets you set up a clock pause over night. During pauses a team can always pick but the clock won’t run so people can sleep.
You can also (but shouldn’t) turn on immediately pick for managers not present in draft room.
Then you can set the number of picks a manager can time out before being put on auto. Depending on draft clock I like this to be either 1 or 2 here – usually 2 so if something happens for someone and they have the turn it’s ok. If it’s a live draft don’t turn this on. Also know a manager can always turn this off if the system puts them on auto.
Fill rosters legally when drafting is usually a good idea. If you have minor leaguers allow drafting to minor league slots.
For draft order you can decide snake or not – which means does the order rotate round by round (ie the manager with the last pick in the first round has the first pick in the second round), or fixed where the order is the same every year.
There is also a draft reversal option where you can make the order of the draft flip the preset order at whatever round you set.
Finally the order can be automatic or manual – where you set it or where the system just sets it for you.
The auction is similar, but you can set when a draft ends for someone when the active/minors/reserve (or all) are full. Then set the budget, the max bid allowed, and then time amounts for each pick. At this time we don’t allow slow drafts with multiple nominations at once, but you can do a slow auction if you want.
Fees and prizes
This is a pretty straightforward part. I would highly recommend using fantrax treasurer as a great and secure way to manage money.
Right now the automated features are not out (but coming soon) in terms of payout – so that will be manual and we’ll cover that later.
But here set up the fees. You can set up premium league fee included in Treasurer fees so that if you have a premium league it comes out of that and each team just needs to make one payment (highly recommend this). You can turn on entry fee due upon joining league – if you are setting up a new league use this so you don’t have to hunt people down to pay.
Then you can set up league entry and any fees that are required to be paid for claims or other roster moves if you have those in your leagues.
Finally under prizes you can set what the prize sets are – since automatic isn’t there yet this serves simply as your guide and a note for your managers.
We’ll end here for this week and next time check out the misc options and the settings under commissioner –> all options and other settings under the commissioner drop down.
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