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Why does it matter? So what if fantasy baseball is detached from reality of baseball? That's why it is called fantasy, right? And everyone hates Bonds anyway. Unfortunately, vastly divergent criteria used by fantasy sports world and real world to evaluate players drives a wedge between hobby and mainstream sports fandom. Fantasy players become more geeky as hobby (some would rather call it an obsession) drives itself away from real baseball. The 5x5 system demands that participants learn a new set of rules, and each new rule drives hobby further away from acceptance and relevance. Bonds is not best player in baseball. He's actually twelfth. Alex Sanchez of Detroit Tigers, a prominent starter on many fantasy teams last year with his 19 stolen bases, was cut from Tigers this spring. The list goes on, but point is, fantasy baseball is a reflection of baseball, and derives its legitimacy (if it has any) from its place as an extension of a real-life activity. Fine, a traditional 5x5 player argues, "then why was 5x5 created with these stats to begin with?"
The answer is simple. Fantasy baseball didn't start with computer age. People actually went through box scores to accumulate data necessary to play fantasy sports. Imagine effort taken after each and every game, scanning newspapers, adding hits, then dividing by total at bats, noting stolen bases for each and every player on your team. That would take a lot of work. It's obvious why traditional 5x5 stats were chosen. They were in fact stats given by box scores!
Thanks to computers, we are no longer limited by constraints of newspaper box scores and division on scratch paper. Yahoo! alone offers 54 total categories with which to customize your league. This gives you power to organize your league in whatever way you believe players in real baseball are really valued.
The most popular version of this is SABR ("saber") leagues. The popular categories are: runs, RBIs, OBP (on base percentage) and slugging percentage for hitting, and wins, saves, ERA, and WHIP for pitching. This doesn't even begin to touch value of a team's defense, but since there is no objective or standard way to measure defense, that problem has not been effectively tackled yet. The home team's scorer gives out errors, while defensive range is difficult to pin down as a measurable statistic game to game. It may be some time before Torii Hunter's spectacular home run-saving catch is a part of fantasy baseball, but undoubtedly statisticians will come up with some method.
However you plan to do it meanwhile, if Bonds isn't clear first pick in your draft, then your league is long on fantasy, short on baseball.
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