Hello, friends. Hello, enemies! It’s Bryan, and today we are talking about dynasty fantasy sports. Also on other days.
I love dynasty fantasy sports. From now on I will call them just “dynasty sports,” but just so everyone knows, dynasty sports are fantasy sports where you have the option to keep your players “forever,” rather than redrafting players every year. There are drafts — you draft the incoming rookies (and, in baseball, international signings) to whatever league in which you’re playing — but you’re under no obligation to part with, say, Patrick Mahomes, should you have been smart enough to grab him in the first place. You could, if you so chose, ride out Mahomes’s entire career and annoy the everliving poop out of your leaguemates, though it doesn’t usually end up that way. The most fun thing about dynasty sports is that players generally get traded at a breakneck pace, because it’s a year-round hobby at the sweet spot of low-stakes gambling, sports fandom and digital addiction. If you’ve got nothing else to do, you can always look for a deal. I sure do.
I entered my first dynasty league four years ago , a 24-team baseball affair called Scout Wars Dynasty, knowing nothing about dynasty sports except the basic conceit. I have learned quite a bit since then and, largely with the expansive pool of owners and friends thereof from that single league, have expanded into dynasty football and basketball, all of which present unique challenges and are fun. I have made many new friends from these leagues, though I’ve met a grand total of two of them, as we are spread scattershot across the country. For this reason, outside of the delays in the baseball and basketball seasons, dynasty sports were a welcome refuge of normalcy during the COVID-plagued 2020. The conversations, and deals, never stopped. It is one of the rare things that nearly always makes me feel good.
It is also one of the rare things about which I am constantly trying to learn more, and, happily, for the reasons denoted above, the games are exploding right now. While there are still some traditional fantasy sports players in their “redraft” leagues — every player available every year to everyone — people who take this stuff seriously enough to dip a toe into dynasty have largely come to realize how much more fun it is than the year-to-year game. The biggest fear I’ve heard from redraft players is that players would get stuck on some teams ad infinitum, and while that does happen occasionally, it’s the exception, rather than the rule. Most players are usually available for the right price. You just have to find it.
As dynasty sports have expanded, so have our ideas of what it means to “own” players, and the language of fantasy sports has started to reflect, ideally, a better way to talk about “possessing” athletes, which is a semi-permanent, fraught condition of the hobby. It’s also a permanent condition of actual sports, wherein team owners, particularly in baseball, have effectively colluded to keep down the price of the game’s rank-and-file players. While I intend this newsletter to be about strategy and rankings and whatnot, this aspect will never go away, because fantasy sports will never go away — they are too popular. Even the wags who tease fantasy sports players for talking about their teams too much, and I’m thinking of those at the former Deadspin/current Defector, people I like and respect, tend to play, I believe. It’ll always be low-hanging fruit, but, like low-hanging fruit, it can grow into something new if you bother to nurture it.
Which you don’t have to do, but I have. What I don’t have is a job, and at this point I’d hug and kiss poisonous snakes to make some money. I’m not yet asking for any, and won’t for a while, but the exercise of writing can’t help but point me in that direction, as I’m a writer and editor by trade and need to start increasing the reps anew, so to speak. Rather than pick a topic on which I struggle to find topics, I’d figure I’d start with something on which I have too many thoughts to keep bottled up. Unlike many in digital media, I’ve never simply just tried to write about what I liked and let the chips fall where they may. Until now. I don’t suspect too many people will read this first edition, but in the weeks and months to come I hope we can build a little community here. What else are we going to do?