Have you ever wanted to pick out a batting lineup like real baseball managers do? In today's fantasy baseball world you can kinda of do that by picking 9 of the best players at their position in your fantasy baseball team. However, what is lost in the experience is the setting up a daily baseball lineup order. For example, you may have David Ortiz and Mike Trout on your baseball team but you are really not setting up a daily lineup like a real manager where the order matters.
I am proposing a new fantasy baseball game called Fantasy Baseball Manager Lineup. The objective of this game is to pick the best players and to set a lineup that will score more points than your opponent. The order of the lineup matters just like in a real game. I am releasing this game spec to the general public to get feedback and ultimately so that this can be game can be built. The spec contains the rules and how scoring is done to built this game.
Picking your players
Fantasy owners will pick 9 batters for each position: 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF, C and DH. They will then arrange them in a batting lineup as to who would hit lead-off, second, third, cleanup, etc. The game log of the of the picked players will then be used to simulate the fantasy game. Fantasy owners score points when their fantasy team is able to knock in runs.
Setting your lineup
Real life baseball manager are doing it today. They are having to weigh the best batter to be the lead off man as well as best batter to hit 3rd and cleanup. In fantasy baseball that decision is taken away from the fantasy owners. The fantasy owners really only carries about stats. Fantasy Baseball Manager Lineup will give that experience to the fantasy owner.
What Fantasy Baseball Manager Lineup does it takes the at-bat of the real life baseball player in isolation. If Derek Jeter hits a double, his double is combined with the other players of the fantasy team rather than the real life team to determine the score. In order to keep track of what happens when applying the different possibilities of scoring, I am using a new system called Quantum Scoring that lays out the combination of events and how to score them.
Scoring
Scoring is simple, score the most run against your opponents and you win. The devil in the details is deciding how to score. The game spec outlines what happens when you combine your fantasy players at-bat with other at-bat. For example, a double with a man on 1B and 2B, will get scored as 1 run, as the man on second is in scoring position and the man on 1B will move to 3B. These types of outcomes are all outlined in the specification in detail.
Feedback
I am looking for feedback of the spec as well as feasibility on how to implement it. There will need to be new content management system, storage system, services layer that will need to be in place to calculate the new combinations of scoring that could happen in Fantasy Baseball Manager Lineup. However, I am hoping adding the ability for player to set their own lineup will expanded the popularity of fantasy baseball.
Please ping me with any questions or comments at rickduong@gmail.com
