Welcome to 2023's State of Fantasy Baseball!
In April 2023, I ran a short survey to collect data about how and where people are playing fantasy baseball. My goal is to help fantasy content creators produce more helpful information for their audiences, and to identify changes in how the game is played.
I received 344 responses to the survey. I'm pretty happy with that for Year One, and hopefully participation can increase in future years.
To be clear: This was a non-scientific survey. I posted links to the survey on Twitter and Reddit, places that clearly do not represent a random sample of fantasy players.
As a consequence, there are a few areas where I expect that the results are probably biased: Fantasy-baseball Twitter skews a bit towards NFBC players, so I'd wager the true NFBC numbers are a little lower than the survey shows. The survey also got retweeted by some prominent Ottoneu accounts, and, looking at the response timestamps, you can see a surge of Ottoneu players following those events. So Ottoneu is perhaps a bit overrepresented as well.
Think of this a sample of people who are seeking out fantasy information. If you are producing fantasy content, that's actually a pretty useful segment to know about.
Anyway, let's dig in!
First, let's look at how many leagues that respondents play in:
Already, I'm a bit surprised! I would have guessed that league participation peaked at 2-4 leagues, but "1 league" was actually the most common survey response. The data show a pretty steady decline right from the start, and this is even with selecting for those who are seeking out fantasy info online.
For a more readable chart, I've left off the league counts if there was only one person with that number. There were several people with 20-40 leagues (and one with 165 leagues!), typically drafting lots of draft-and-hold or best ball teams.
What sites are the most popular? Here are the percentages of people who have at least one league on each of the main fantasy sites:
The free sites rise to the top: Yahoo leads the way with 41% of respondents playing in at least one Yahoo league. ESPN and Fantrax are next with 31% each. That's quite a climb for Fantrax, which hasn't been around nearly as long as Yahoo or ESPN, but which boasts a more diverse set of formats (like best ball), a deep player pool for dynasty, and lots of custom configurations.
I'll repeat my caveat from the introduction: Survey respondents from Twitter probably overstate the numbers for the NFBC and Ottoneu. But, that also tells you that those are two groups who are very seriously seeking out fantasy content.
I think this is partly what's going on if you look at the total number of leagues for each site, rather than the number of people with at least one league:
Fantrax, Ottoneu, NFBC, and Underdog get big boosts for total number of leagues. Besides Ottoneu, these sites offer lower-commitment formats (best ball and draft-and-hold) that some people play in bunches. (Did I mention that someone out there did 150 Underdog drafts?) Ottoneu doesn't have draft-and-hold or best ball inflating their league counts; Ottoneu folks are apparently just very zealous.
Auctions (i.e. salary cap drafts) were the original fantasy draft format, but in the 2023 sample they only represent about 30% of the total number of leagues. Ottoneu contributes a pretty large portion of that; if you exclude people who play in Ottoneu leagues, then only about 14% of drafts are auctions.
Of course, you also have the heavy draft-and-hold and best ball users skewing the numbers back towards snake drafts. So let's look at people who only play on the traditional Big 3 sites (Yahoo, ESPN, CBS). For those users, the split is about 81% snake to 19% salary cap.
However you slice the numbers, the conclusion is clear: Snake is the dominant draft format for fantasy baseball.
How many people play in leagues with daily versus weekly roster changes?
Daily transactions are the default for Yahoo, ESPN, and Ottoneu, and I expect that is a big factor in 80% of people playing in daily leagues.
Case in point: Daily league players are 88% of ESPN-only and 88% of Yahoo-only players, but only 25% of CBS-only players.
Draft-and-hold and best ball will be interesting to watch in future years. The traditional heavyweight sites don't offer these formats, although Yahoo has best ball for football. I expect that the game is trending towards lower commitment formats and increased financial stakes, and draft-and-hold and best ball fall in the sweet spot for those trends.
Rotisserie is still the dominant scoring system for fantasy baseball, with about 53% of people playing in at least one rotisserie league. In second is the closely-related head-to-head categories with about 48%. (If you combine those two and account for the people who play in both, then 81% of respondents play in a rotisserie/categories league.)
About 53% of people play in some kind of points league (36% head-to-head points and 27% season-long points, with some overlap from people who play both).
If half of fantasy players play in points leagues, everyone should be making points content, right? Well, it's tricky. Ottoneu's points are quite a different flavor from the rest, and every best ball points format is its own snowflake.
Who plays in a league with n teams?
Most leagues are either 12-team or 10-team. No surprise, those are standard setups on many sites.
And I guess it's rare to have an odd number of teams... There are obvious scheduling issues for H2H, but there's no reason to avoid odd numbers for rotisserie. The exception is 15-teams, which is a uniquely NFBC standard, and the 17% in 15-team leagues matches up well with the 16% above who play NFBC.
Who are the other managers in the league?
About 77% of people play in leagues with friends, 42% play in leagues with randomly assigned teams, and 35% play in leagues with a mix of the two.
I don't have too much to comment about this, but it's something to watch for years to come. With the decline in baseball's market share (in real life and fantasy), my guess is that the heyday of starting fantasy baseball leagues with your friends has passed. I'd predict that leagues of strangers rise in popularity, partially fueled by increased best ball and high stakes participation.
Who plays in keeper leagues?
Redraft and limited keeper formats are neck and neck, with about 58% of people playing for a single year and about 55% playing with future considerations. Another 32% play in dynasty leagues, and 14% have some other keeper format.
There are only about 21% of people who don't play in any kind of keeper league, so it seems like most advice ought to include consideration for keepers. But there's still a lot of variation among keeper rules, so I'm not how this can be realistically addressed.
Who plays in money leagues?
Apparently, money is a big part of fantasy! About 5 out of every 6 people (84%) play in at least one money league.
I also asked how much people spent on fantasy league entries. It was an optional question, but 281 people responded. The biggest spender was an NFBC player who puts $15,000 toward their 20 leagues.
The average person spent $399 on league entries, with a median of $170.
What about fantasy resources (site subscriptions, tools, books, magazines, etc.)? There were 270 responses, ranging from $0 to $1,000. The average spend on resources was $93, and the median was $24.
How many people plan to enter a daily fantasy contest this year (or would if it were legal in their locaction)?
How many people plan to place a baseball bet this year (or would if it were legal in their locaction)?
The majority of season-long fantasy players don't plan on playing DFS or placing baseball bets.
Once again, this is an area where I expect the trendlines to be interesting. One theory I've heard is that sports betting cuts into the DFS market, which has lost its status as the primary legal option.
The data already show betting ahead of DFS, with about 32% of fantasy players saying they plan to place a bet (or would if they could), compared to just 18% interested in DFS.
So that's the data for 2023 State of Fantasy Baseball survey! Here are my takeaways and speculation:
There are a ton of flavors of fantasy baseball. Think about these divides:
Each side of those divides includes a significant number of leagues. Not only that, each one is a separate dimension dimension, so that something like 4x4 Ottoneu is a rotisserie league with analytical categories and a deep player pool.
If I were categorizing formats to target, I'd start with this:
I'm already at eight categories, but even those would need nuance. For example, ESPN leagues credit HLD, so any advice about RP in the "traditional" formats would need that caveat. Or maybe you break those out to make ten groupings; either way, there are a lot of formats.
I can't really imagine a site or podcast addressing all of those audiences. Let's exclude the best balls and NFBC. Those are smaller slices of the pie, and there's some financial disincentive to giving out advice to others. Even without those, there's still a lot of diverse ground to cover.
Maybe we need to think of these groupings as islands. We don't need an uber-site to cover them all; we really just need a few some passionate voices focusing on each island. FanGraphs does that for Ottoneu (although I'm not aware of any independent Ottoneu coverage). The CBS team does a good job representing their segments. Yahoo and ESPN are conspicuously absent in promoting their formats (but more on that in #3 below).
Really, though, in light of the market fragmentation, I'd argue that people are best served by analytical tools that are customized to their specific league settings. They need good projections fed into an auction value calculator. A good set of projections/values tells you almost everything you need for decisions around drafting, trading, and add/drops.
(P.S. I am of course biased in my opinions.)
We won't know for sure until the survey questions get asked next year, but the feeling in the air is that people want to play for money, and they want to play simpler games.
I'm not really going out on a limb with this, but I expect more people to participate in sports betting (simple + money).
I think we see more best ball leagues (simple + money). The NFBC experimented with a new Gladiator format this year—basically a best ball with no bench spots—and had no problems filling their leagues. That's what happens when you take a simple format like best ball and make it even simpler.
There could be some cannibalization among the formats. Maybe sports betting swallows up DFS. I have no clue which specific formats will win out in the long run, but I do expect a general trend in this direction.
The popularity of fantasy football has spurred on two major trends:
First of all, we have seen a lot of stagnation in the baseball games at the big sites. Yahoo and ESPN have mostly neglected fantasy baseball and pumped their energy into football. Their baseball games still draw the largest percentage of fantasy players, but I can't see that continuing if the hosts don't do more to promote the sport. (Compare that to CBS or Fantrax, which have dedicated baseball writers with high Twitter engagement and active baseball podcasts.)
I'd argue that the stagnation of the big sites has driven the passionate fantasy baseball demographic to the niches. Those niche baseball games seem to be doing well: Ottoneu for analytics, Fantrax for dynasty, NFBC for deeper, high-stakes leagues.
As long as the big sites see fantasy football as their main driver, I'd expect fantasy baseball interest in those places to wane, with baseball fans seeking out the highly-engaged niches. The decline in MLB interest in North America probably also points to an eventual decline in fantasy baseball as well, but I think the passionate fans can keep the niche fantasy baseball games going for a long time.
I'd love to hear your feedback about the survey and analysis. I want to improve the questions where I can, but also allow for some continuity to see trends.
That's it! Thanks for reading!
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Hi,
I'm Mays. I've been playing fantasy since I was in high school (over two decades ago).
My speciality has always been player valuation—converting player stats into rankings and salary values. VBD for fantasy football? Rotisserie z-scores? We go way back. In 2009, I started Last Player Picked, a site that generated fantasy values customized for your league.
You can find me on Twitter at @MaysCopeland or email me at [email protected].