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Free Fantasy Baseball

© Greg Spira

Fantasy baseball has become huge on the Net over the last several years. Stat services abound. There are many sites, a few of which now successfully charge subscription fees, dedicated to providing information and analysis to the fantasy player. Many leagues post their league happenings on the Web just to show off. And many sport sites, such as ESPN Sportszone and Baseball Manager, offer to sell you fantasy baseball of their own design.

Recently, however, free fantasy baseball has popped up on the net in a big way. A firm called Small World is the leader of this trend and is poised to become a leader in the field. The company has been involved in sports gaming since before the Web took off, but only in the last year has it embraced free fantasy games. And that direction appears to be inexorably bringing the company towards profitability. The company only has three full-time employees working on the games but it expects to have as many as 300,000 participants in its baseball game this year, with 130,000 already registered. The company is in good financial shape because its users create most of the content and come to the site for millions of page views which web advertisers will pay for access to. As Bernie Hou, Director of Technology at Small World says, "The beauty of Small World Baseball is that while we build and run the software, it's the users that create the game." And Small World also profits by selling the use of their game to the huge media conglomerates that run the Fastball and CNN/SI sites.

Small World's baseball game is a simple but not simplistic points-based game that awards a certain number of points for statistical events achieved (such as doubles, RBIs, and saves, for example) by each team's hitters and pitchers. Each team owner drafts a team of players who fill all the needed positions and whose assigned (by Smallworld) salaries do not put the team over the imposed $50 million salary cap. During the season, teams can change players but must stay within the salary cap and there is a limit of 75 trades. Every Smallworld owner does compete with every other Smallworld owner for the grand prizes, but participants have the option of forming leagues of 10 teams with their friends and associates.

Overall, the Small World fantasy baseball game has been successfully designed so that both experienced fantasy players and newcomers can enjoy the game; this is probably of the most important acheivement of the game's designers. I have a team registered in a Small World league competing with some friends' teams, so the game certainly comes with my recommendation. But there are a few other free baseball fantasy games on the net that are of note. One, Major League Market, has little in common with most fantasy baseball. Instead, players and teams are bought and sold during the season based on supply and demand, and the aim is to increase the value of your portfolio, though traditional roto stats are used when the stocks are delisted at seasons end.

The copyright of the article Free Fantasy Baseball in Baseball is owned by Greg Spira. Permission to republish Free Fantasy Baseball in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.