Sparking the Conversation

[MGrage]

This just started less than a week ago, but is anyone else getting double e-mailed with the daily results too? It's just a minor annoyance though.

In case anyone was waiting with baited breath for my thoughts on the subject, I'm OK with TQS. I've been in a football fantasy league with CBS Sportsline and the customizing of my home page is pretty cool, but I like the old school feel of our current situation too. I'm not really adamant either way and can easily be swayed into both camps.

I doubt there wil be enough support to pay more for our stat service though. We can't even raise the prize pool by $5 every other year. I've been voting for that every time it gets put on the ballot but it's never passed.

Well, take it easy guys. Hope you had a great weekend. I had an excellent fire Sunday after midnight. Mahalo

Matt

[Copperfields]

Many of you have very graciously said you'd be happy to use whatever stat service makes my job as Secretary easiest. While I appreciate the thought, I was always quick to poo-poo such concerns.

Until now. I just read a description of what's involved with entering a free agent acquisition at Sportsline - something I wouldn't relish taking on:

www.rotojunkie.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74036

I'm still open to discussing a move, but this is something I'd seriously have to take into account...

David

[Copperfields]

Here's another topic I thought was worth bumping for further discussion.

Way back when this discussion started, it seemed as if owners who had used other services (such as Sportsline) were open to changing (and some were even strongly in favor of it).

It's hard for us with TQS-only experience, especially at this time of year, because there aren't good demos out there where we can check out what the other services have to offer.

The subject of stat services is one that's always hotly debated on the various message boards -- if I can find some discussions that provide good info/input, I'll post links here. In the meantime, does anyone have additional thoughts on this?

David

[redhots]

I am not positive about this fact.....but.....I believe most of the other stats sites would have trouble with our unique scoring categories. That may have changed over the last several years but definitely something that would have to be determined ahead of time.

Secondly......I'm all for moving to CBS, USAStats, ALLStar Stats, or whatever would work best for the league as well as being as flexible and easy on David......but again, for the money I think TQ is right for us. From what I've heard the league fees increase of $5 every other year (or is it every year?) gets voted down.......other sites are definitely more expensive and some considerably so.......

Ideally TQ has the option of owner's entering own moves and bids with the commish reviewing all moves before being official. I believe this is an option and would probably be a necessity with our in depth rules.

Just a couple of thoughts to add to the fire.....

[Copperfields]

redhots said:

From what I've heard the league fees increase of $5 every other year (or is it every year?) gets voted down.......other sites are definitely more expensive and some considerably so.......

Just as an aside, I'm pretty confident that concerns over paying more money is not the reason the prize pool increase keeps getting voted down. At least not he main/only reason. (I know Matt mentioned this earlier in the thread). I think that if we identified another stat service that would fit us well and it was a matter of an additional $5 per team, there wouldn't be much problem. Now if you're talikng USA stats, which is about $50 per team[/], as opposed to $7 per team for TQS, that might be a different story.

In terms of other services handling our categories, I'm not sure it would be that big a deal. We're definitely not the only non-standard league out there, and not all of the weirdo leagues use TQS. Free sites like Yahoo might be limited in their offerings, but I'd imagine any service charging in the $100 per league or more range would be able to handle our stats.

David

[bh9244]

:)Hi Guys,
Hope it's ok if I insert my comments on this thread, I am the commish of a 12 5x5 AL Only Ultra League in the NYC Metro area. I have been a big admirer of the structure of your league and have occasionally exchanged emails with Dave on several occasions and he has been more than helpful with my queries. Anyway our league has used TQ for the past 4 seasons and prior to that we used "Center Field Stats", the league has operated since 1991 with the same core group. The football league I am in has always used CBS Sportsline. I think TQ is the way to go on several counts, as commish they do a spectacular job of setting the league to operate according to our rules which are quite similar to yours, the site correctly handles our FAAB bids with it's myriad of alternate picks bids etc, like your league we also employ a separate waiver wire. Prior to TQ owners would phone or email their transactions in on Mondays this often led to obscure moves that were subject to interpretation or a return call to clarify intent. We use the automated TQ transactions and they perform flawlessly. As many of you have mentioned the price is more than competitive but I have found their strongest advantage is accessibility to support staff, I have never had occasion to call them without being able to speak to someone capable of understanding and correctly addressing any problems that came up. The area in which they seem less attractive is the look and feel of the website which is bland to say the least. Sports line does a much better job in this area, but there is no means of contacting anyone directly when problems arise and they are slow ( although they seem to have improved lately) to address problems, in summation although they present a attractive package visually they core product behind it is lacking especially for a league with a complex rule set.

Cheers
Bill Heaney

[Copperfields]

bh9244 said:

...the site correctly handles our FAAB bids with it's myriad of alternate picks bids etc, like your league we also employ a separate waiver wire.

Hi Bill,
Thanks for dropping in and sharing your thoughts and opinions!

Just to confirm the comment above ... does this mean that TQS does allow you to have some kind of hybrid approach where some owners in the league submit their FAAB bids and active/reserve moves via the TQS automated commish site, and other owners submit their bids and moves directly to you via traditional means? Then you pull it all together and approve/submit the final, official set of moves to TQS?

Thanks in advance for any clarification!

David

[bh9244]

Hi Dave,
No it doesn't allow for that it's either everyone enters their own or the commish can do it manually ( as I guess you presently do ). I was referring to it's ability to handle contingency bids, ie. I'll Waive Player A and replace him with Player B at 20, if not player C for 10, if not player D from Waivers etc.

[Copperfields]

Thanks for the clarification, Bill. If that's the case, I guess it's an all-or-nothing proposition rather than the hybrid approach we were hoping for. That's not to say we can't make the move to owner-entered transactions -- it just means getting buy-in will be more difficult, since everyone will need to commit to doing it.

I poked around the TQS site and was able to find some instructions for entering bids:
baseball2.tqstats.com/scripts/autocom/autoInfo.pl

Any thoughts?

David

[Copperfields]

As noted in the newly-posted report, Sportsline has opened registration for their 2007 baseball stat service. Unfortunately, they do not appear to have sample league to look at (something I seem to remember from mid-season last year), nor even any details on what's available or, oddly, what the cost is.

I went ahead and set myself up with an ID and spent a little time quickly setting up the shell of a league - just to see what they had to offer.

Some initial findings (in no particular order, just as I think of them):

• They seem to be able to handle our scoring categories. I had to set HoSv and K:BB as custom categories, but it seemed to work.
  
• The do not appear to have a mechanism for waivers, which astounds me. That's been a basic element of Rotisserie since the beginning. As far as I can tell, when you acquire a player via FAAB, you simply drop a player to make room and he then goes right into the Free Agent Pool. You can specify a number of days (minimum of 1, maximum of 3) that must pass before the player can be bid upon by another team, but the max. of 3 means we wouldn't be able to even simulate a week-long waiver period.
  
• It's unclear if they allow a Swing position (either hitter or pitcher at Utility). I think they do, but it's hard to be sure. It's certainly not explicitly stated.
  
• The transaction deadline for free agent bids can be specified for a certain day and time. The transaction deadline for active/reserve moves however, will change from day-to-day and week-to-week as it is based on the start time of the first scheduled game for the day. Note that this would apply only if we allowed owner-entered moves -- if we go with commish-entry, we could, of course, enforce any deadline we want.
  
• The set-up allows you to specify minimum AB and IP levels, and your progress against them is then tracked on your team page. Nice.
  
• The price appears to be $129.95 for the season. I can't tell if that includes the $20 earlybird discount (in which case, the regular price would be $149.95).
  
• I went ahead and added the team names and assigned one player to each team, just to see how it worked. It never prompted me for player salaries - it could be that that's done in a separate step somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

If you'd like to check it out, here's the url:
cfcl.baseball.sportsline.com
You will probably be prompted for a User ID and Password. I don't want to post that info here, so look for it in an e-mail. You'll be taken to my team page. If we used this service, of course, you'd have your own ID and password to take you to your team's page. Please don't change anything in the "Setup" area (though feel free to look at the various options).

Some things to look at (again, a preliminary list):

• The At-A-Glance standings on the main page gives a snapshot of where things stand. For some reason, I show up with 10 points, while everyone else is zero.
  
• The little cap is a logo I designed on the site. You also have the ability to upload a separate graphic for your team logo (contact Nick).
  
• Use the tabs near the top of the page to navigate from area to area.
  
• Click GameCenter under the Scoreboard tab to see what their live scoring looks like. Note that it shows updated standings as well as stat totals for the day. I don't know whether the stat totals will show our custom stats or if it will be just "standard" stats like at TQS.
  
• It looks like you will be able to seen linescores/boxes of MLB games from the GameCenter as well.
  
• Under the Stats tab, click Sortable Stats. Then in the Custom Reports section, select Custom... in the Stat Categories drop down to see the impressive reporting power that would be available. Wow. It looks like you can generate stat reports with dozens of possible stat categories, then save your custom report set-ups so you can run them weekly if desired.
  
• In clicking around, I think I found the spot to enter salaries and contract values. It's on the Teams > Lineup page.
  
• The Lineups page, where you'd make your transactions, lists each player's upcoming schedule, which is cool.
  
• If you go to the Add/Drop page under the Transactions tab, you can see the interface for entering free agent bids. It certainly seems simpler than the method described at TQS, but there doesn't appear to be any way of specifying contingent moves. At all.

That's a start at least. All in all, some very cool features. But at the same time, there are some limitations that would give me serious pause (the waiver thing still baffles me).

Let me know what you think...

David

[Copperfields]

copperfields said:

• The do not appear to have a mechanism for waivers, which astounds me. That's been a basic element of Rotisserie since the beginning. As far as I can tell, when you acquire a player via FAAB, you simply drop a player to make room and he then goes right into the Free Agent Pool. You can specify a number of days (minimum of 1, maximum of 3) that must pass before the player can be bid upon by another team, but the max. of 3 means we wouldn't be able to even simulate a week-long waiver period.

After a little more poking around, I discovered that Sportsline does allow waivers. Here's the thing though - you apparently can't have both waivers and FAAB. There's a drop-down box for "Add/Drop Process", with one option being Waivers and the another being FAAB. You've got to select one or the other, you can't choose both (which is why I missed the waivers option the first time around -- I selected FAAB without looking at the other options.

Anyway, it appears you can either do FAAB, but then just release the guys you're replacing outright. Or have the cut guys go through waivers but just have a straight pick-up from the Free Agent Pool (no bidding). Even if we did go with the waivers option, we'd be limited to a 3-day waiver period for some reason.

If we wanted to go to Sportsline, I imagine we'd have to eliminate waivers and have the cut guys just go directly into the FAAB.

[Copperfields]

Input on this thread seems to have petered out as well. In an effort to scrounge for more information before the EC digests it all and makes a recommendation, I posted a query on Rotojunkie's Bullpen forum -- specifically asking Sportsline users for clarification on some of the questions/concerns I came up with while setting up the sample CFCL league.

There's only one reply at the moment, but this may be worth keeping an eye on during the next week:
www.rotojunkie.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78956

Also, I've received additional input on this via e-mail. Two Three CFCL owners wrote to say that while there were some nice features at Sportsline, they think sticking with TQS is preferable. I also got an e-mail from someone outside the CFCL who has read this thread and thinks it would be a tragic error for us to leave TQS for Sportsline.

David