Can Monthly Fantasy Leagues Work?

For a brief while (2014-2015), fantasy legend Ron Shandler attempted a new fantasy baseball format: monthly fantasy leagues. They didn't take off, but what would it take to make them work?

I've recently been a bit infatuated with Shandler Park, a now-defunct site that offered these monthly leagues. I've been digging up the remnants of it on the Internet Wayback Machine, and there's lots of interesting stuff. For example, the Shandler Park leagues used pretty unique 4x4 scoring (HR, SB, OBP, and R+RBI-HR for hitters, ERA, SO, W+QS, and SV+HLD for pitchers), which strikes the perfect chord between tradition and true value.

Ron's logic for monthly leagues makes a ton of sense to me:

• DFS is too random, and a full season is too much of a slog. One month is a perfect compromise.
• You eliminate wasted seasons from injury-decimated rosters. If your team gets wiped out by season-ending injuries, you get to start again next month with a healthy team.
• Everyone loves drafts, and monthly leagues give you more chances to draft.

Those years around 2014-2015 were one of my periods of low interest in fantasy, so I admit that I didn't pay attention at the time. I'm not sure why the idea didn't take off. I guess I could ask Ron, but I have some speculation:

• If drafts are frequent, you need to reach a critical mass in order to keep filling leagues. With only a few days between each month's contests, I could imagine frustrations if leagues didn't "make."
• Drafts are fun to do but hard to schedule, especially with a low volume of drafters. Ron tackled this by giving teams a salary cap and letting owners choose pre-calculated player salaries (i.e. DFS style). But that's not really the same as drafting. You also end up with a strategy that looks for value vs. the site's projected lines. That can be fun, too, but it's more of a DFS stategy than season-long.

So, even with the beauty of the month-long format, there are some challenges to gaining widespread adoption.

Could It Work?

With those obstacles in mind, how could you make monthly leagues work?

1. Real, Live Drafts

First off, I'd go back to snake drafts or auction drafts, rather than a salary cap game. That restores the excitement you feel when you are making decisions on the clock.

The problem of live drafts is that it exacerbates the difficulty in getting them scheduled. (I can't be the only person who has had a group of friends spend 50 emails trying to pick a draft date and time.) I'm sure that's the reason Ron went with a salary cap format to begin with. So, with a small initial pool of users, how on earth do you schedule live drafts every month?

2. Bots

Each player drafts against bot opponents. Maybe you could just use bots to fill leagues that were partially human, but you wouldn't have to.

You just need to make sure your AI is decent enough that it doesn't revert to drafting against the site ADP. That's a pretty low bar to clear.

Anyone who thinks bots are no match for human intelligence needs to play in more public leagues on ESPN and Yahoo, where tumbleweeds are rolling across half of the rosters. Bots would be a huge improvement.

3. Draft and Hold

I think you could make bots that not only draft intelligently, but also make reasonable roster decisions. But we can keep things simple with a format that limits the in-season action.

With Best Ball, you're stuck with points scoring, which wouldn't be my first choice. I think Draft and Hold is actually a pretty solid compromise. It would be much easier to have bots that put in an optimal roster than to have them make intelligent adds and drops.

And no need for crazy deep benches like season-long Draft and Hold. If you get hit with injuries, you just try again next month.

4. Free Options

Shandler Park only offered paid leagues (at $9, $39, and $299 price points). I think you'd want to have some free options to get more people in the door.

Free options may not be essential to success. Ottoneu and NFBC seem to be doing well with exclusively paid leagues. But it seems like it would spur adoption for a new format, and the only cost is the server resources (i.e. not much).