For Worse

1. Get a Life – You know you have a problem if you’ve said, “Gee I’d love to go to Disneyland, but it can’t afford to leave my fantasy baseball team on auto-pilot for ten days.”  Fantasy football is once a week. It does not require the daily attention that fantasy baseball requires.  You can miss a lot of your life, checking on how many southpaws Brad Hawpe will face in his next series.  Life happens.  Fantasy football can coexist with your family, educational and professional commitments.  Advantage: Football

2. Injuries – You have to contend with injuries in both sports, but football handles them more transparently than baseball.  In baseball, you can have a player injured enough not to play for a week, but still not on the disabled list.  Once he goes on the DL, he has to miss seven games, so often teams won’t bother.  That makes it a guessing game.  Think Manny Ramirez and his strained oblique last year.  Ramirez was day-to-day for nearly a month.  He missed twenty games with that injury.  If he were a football player, he would have been listed as doubtful before we set our lineups and spared us the aggravation.  Advantage: Football

3. Steroids – Is football as roided-up as baseball?  Probably so, but it is more distasteful for baseball players to abuse themselves in this way.  Baseball players that use performance-enhancing drugs are cheats.  I avoid drafting known cheats since I don’t want to root for them. In football, I don’t have the same visceral dislike for a Shawne Merriman, for example.  Since Merriman’s job is to murder a quarterback, I can’t be as upset if he fails a drug test.  Advantage: Football

4. Waivers – I prefer the waiver system used in most fantasy football leagues to the typical fantasy baseball league.  It’s a function of the weekly football cycle, which gives it more structure.   If you have an injury on Sunday, you will have time to pick up a replacement through waivers before the next game.  In fantasy baseball you might be short a player while waiting for the replacement to clear waivers.  Advantage: Football

5. End game – Most fantasy football leagues end the next-to-last week of the NFL season.  Week 17 is typically ruined, by having so many starters rest before the playoffs.  Fantasy football does the smart thing and skips it.  In baseball, September can be a bizarre world where the normal rules no longer apply. Rosters go from 25 to 40 and the September call-ups, like Daric Barton, for example, impact the fantasy standings.  Those September call-ups push a lot of veterans to the bench too.  Also, hardly anyone goes on the disabled list in September, due to the expanded rosters.  Managers will often shut down an injured veteran in September and never bother to put him on the DL. Advantage: Football