Web Sites Can Help Lead Your Fantasy Baseball Team to Majors

Dodger General Manager Kevin Malone and his counterpart on the Angels, Bill Stoneman, have spent most of the spring assessing their teams, making crucial decisions on the makeup of their 25-man rosters that will open the season next week.

But other would-be GMs also are hard at work--the tens of thousands of fantasy “owners” in the Southland and across the country who participate in the ever-growing pastime of fantasy or rotisserie baseball.

Fantasy baseball has been around for more than 30 years, but it really took off in the early ‘80s when a group of hard-core fans got together and created a newer version known as rotisserie, named after the restaurant in New York where their initial meeting took place.

The basic premise of fantasy baseball is for owners to draft or hold an auction for players before the season. Once the real games begin, your team scores points based on how the players you drafted actually perform. Players amass points for a host of offensive and pitching statistics, and there are almost as many scoring systems as there are fantasy leagues, which experts estimate run in the tens of thousands nationwide. If you had the good fortune of picking Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire in 1998, chances are you had a very successful season.

No matter what kind of fantasy league you’re in, the right information about player performances, injuries and trades is vital if you hope to draft--and manage--a successful team. And that brings us to the Internet.

The Internet is the place to go for the latest information on the national pastime, especially when it comes to the most important part of the season: choosing the players on your team. Don’t waste your money on the numerous books and magazines available. Most were written in November or December and don’t reflect free agent signings, trades and injuries.

I looked at three free Web sites from organizations with a track record in covering sports--CBS, ESPN and Fox Sports--and ranked them from best to worst.

CBS SportsLine

I had never really looked at CBS SportsLine (https://www.cbs.sportsline.com/mlb/index.html) before this season but I have since bookmarked it on my computer. It will be my primary baseball source for the coming season.

They haven’t missed much here. The news is up to date. Saturday, for instance, CBS had the demotion of Phillies outfielder Pat Burrell posted that morning. You should expect to get that kind of up-to-the-minute information from a good baseball Web site, but SportsLine delivers much more.

When I looked up player capsules, it had one-paragraph bios of the players, sorted by position. It listed 50 catchers, and went 45 players deep at each infield position.

Under team information, the first seven games of the regular season are posted, so you can see who is playing whom.

There also are these features:

* Pitching starts over the next seven days, giving you data on a pitcher’s history against the team he is playing. This is an invaluable tool when you are considering pitching matchups and figuring out your lineup.

* Detailed injury report that includes the nature of the injury and when the player is expected back.

* Seven-day weather breakdown for every team in the majors.

* Fight-for-jobs feature gives you a look at the depth chart of any team, presented in a quick, easy-to-read way with players spread out on a diamond, by position. If you’re unsure who won the starting catching job in, say, Minnesota, this will show you.

There’s very little SportsLine hasn’t thought of, and little I could find fault with.

ESPN

You’d expect a top-drawer presentation from all-sports cable network ESPN, and its Internet site for baseball (https://www.espn.go.com/mlb/index.html) gives good, up-to-date information.

One of its best features is the player rankings--a list of the top 10 players in each position, rated by five of its experts. The site applies the following criteria to ranking players, stats that only a seamhead can love: Games played, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, runs created and offensive winning percentage (the number of games a team would win with nine of that player in the lineup).

ESPN experts also give their opinions of the most underrated and most overrated players. The comments are valuable because of a particular insight or statistic you might not have been aware of.

The site also gives divisional previews, although it didn’t include pitching and wasn’t as up to date as I would have preferred.

For example, the preview of the Dodgers in the National League West listed Mark Grudzielanek at shortstop, when he has played second base all spring. And there was no mention of Kevin Elster, who was about to be named the starter at shortstop.

And when I checked out the Padres, there was no mention of the arrest of Al Martin, who two days earlier had been charged with attacking a woman who claimed to be his wife.

ESPN does list all players in alphabetical order with their team, so if you are unsure of a player’s status, you can search by name until you find the player you want. But again, beware. Two days after the Angels traded outfielder Jim Edmonds to the Cardinals for pitchers Kent Bottenfield and Adam Kennedy, all three players still were listed as being with their former teams.

What I didn’t like at all was the “Insider package.” One headline touted the top 10 rookies in each league, but when I clicked on it, I got ESPN Insider, which is a pay service priced at $4.95 a month, or $39.95 a year. When you see an icon with IN inside an orange sphere, know that it will cost you extra.

Fox Sports

Dodger fans who haven’t been happy with Rupert Murdoch’s less-than-successful ownership of the team won’t be surprised to find that one of the media mogul’s other enterprises, Fox Sports (https://www.foxsports.com/baseball/index.sml) also is striking out when it comes to the Grand Ol’ Game.

The information on Fox Sports’ baseball Web site is way out of date, and incredibly unorganized.

For starters, the latest information on each team is a week old, and the results of exhibition games were up to 4 or 5 days old.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Under team reports, there are three or four headlines to click on, but they linked to players on other teams.

For example, on a March 22 visit to the site, a headline under the Angels team report noted that Jerry DiPoto might miss the entire season. That was news, as DiPoto pitches for the Colorado Rockies. And that wasn’t the only error:

* Under the Dodgers, it reported about Fernando Tatis, who plays for the Cardinals.

* Under the Braves, it reported on the comeback of Moises Alou, who plays for the Astros.

* Under the Cardinals was an item about Rey Ordonez, who plays for the Mets.

After checking out virtually every team and finding the information not nearly current enough, I won’t visit this site any time soon.

Gary Rubin is sports editor of the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service and has been playing fantasy baseball for more than a quarter of a century. Playing in two leagues last year, his teams finished first in one (thanks to Chipper Jones and Jeff Bagwell) and dead last in the other (thanks to Mike Lansing and poor relief pitching). He can be reached by e-mail at gary.rubin@latimes.com.

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Fantasy Baseball Sites

* CBS SportsLine

The Ken Griffey Jr. of baseball Web sites.

* ESPN

Terrific analysis, but a little slow on the news.

* FoxSports

About as poorly run as Rupert Murdoch’s Dodgers.