One of the ways to play fantasy baseball is with a salary cap fantasy baseball league. Unlike a snake draft fantasy baseball league where you can draft as many top players as are available to you, with a salary cap fantasy baseball team, you have to keep within a budget. This means you have to strategize how you will use the money allocated to you to buy the players you want.
Basically, with a salary cap team, you don’t just pick which players you need to build your fantasy team. You have to make sure that they will fit into your budget. Even though in real life, major league baseball teams do not have salary caps – look at the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox to see evidence of that – most teams do have smaller budgets than them. At any rate, the way a salary cap team works is that you don’t simply get to pick all the biggest names and best players in baseball. You have to figure out how you can afford them, and how you want to allocate your resources.
Think of salary cap fantasy baseball as deciding your spending, the way you would with a household budget. If you spend a lot of money on eating out, you will have less money to go towards other bills. In baseball terms, if you purchase, say, Miguel Cabrera, Albert Pujols, and Tim Lincecum on your fantasy team, you will have less money to spend on other players.
That’s where finding sleeper picks come in, and finding the best bang for your buck. It’s a little like the whole “Moneyball” concept – you have to find the best possible value for each position, on a budget. If you see a player with a big name and big dollar sign, and you can find another player with less of a name who can do close to the same production, you can get a good deal, and have more money to spend on another position.
What some salary cap fantasy baseball players do as a strategy is spend money at a position where there aren’t all that many great players, such as catcher or shortstop, and find better valued players for spots like outfield positions or first base, where there is plentiful talent. Another strategy for salary cap games is to find some up-and-coming players that may not cost very much. Or you can find a player like, say, Lance Berkman was after 2010, who had a very low cost in 2011 in salary cap games. He ended up showing a terrific bang for the buck, hitting 30 home runs and batting over .300.
Salary cap fantasy baseball can be considerably more challenging that a regular fantasy baseball league, but many fantasy players like the challenge of trying to find low-risk, low-cost, and high-reward players. It’s a little more work, but it can also mean more of a reward.
We offer both snake draft and salary cap fantasy baseball at DraftStreet, in both free and paid games. So check out our salary cap fantasy baseball offerings, and see what you think.
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