Column: Tips to win your fantasy league

Due to the peculiarities of interest group democracy, online fantasy baseball is legal even though online bets on games and futures propositions are not. High-stakes fantasy baseball, however, requires a different set of skills than wagering on games. As the real baseball season approaches and fantasy leagues begin, I want to share some strategies that are useful for “contests” that are fully consistent with internet gambling measures bizarrely inserted into the SAFE Port Act of 2006.

The first and most important rule of fantasy baseball is that it is possible to quantify player value. Player value is particularly easy to quantify in fantasy baseball because most leagues have a rotisserie scoring system; these leagues have a very limited set of categories in which you want your team to excel.

The team that has the best result in a category — for example, the most home runs or the lowest ERA — gets a number of points equivalent to the number of teams in the league. The team with the second-best result in a category is awarded points equivalent to one less than the number of teams, and so on. The team with the most points across all the categories, generally eight or 10, wins the league.

One good way of quantifying player value is to evaluate how many standard deviations a player’s projected statistic line is above or below the projected average in each category. There are more than a few free projection system available on the web, including CHONE and ZiPS. You can then add these standard deviations together to get a new number. You can then sort players by position and find the replacement level at each position. Players can be ranked according to how much better they are than the replacement level players at their positions. If calculations in Excel seem too complex, one free website, lastplayerpicked.com, does all this for you. Just make sure that the projections the site uses are reasonable.

A second guiding principle for fantasy baseball success is that league format dictates strategy, so identifying undervalued players is important but not enough.

Leagues with just eight categories and a low innings pitched minimum, for example, tend to make starting pitchers less valuable; a successful player can exclusively draft — or buy, in auction formats — hitters in early rounds, grab decent closers in bulk and dominate seven out of the eight standard categories. In leagues with deep benches and weekly lineup changes (which are very common), use the bench to stock up on mediocre starting pitchers and rotate them according to pitching matchups. Any start against an anemic offense is likely to be a good start.

The importance of trading is often overstated, but a good trade or two can result in a win in a tight race. Generally, the best way to significantly upgrade your team through a trade is to address an issue of scarcity for your trading partner.

Ideally, you can offer the other owner desperately needed help in one category for players of higher quality. If you are persistent enough, the trading market can become fairly liquid, so don’t be afraid to acquire players who are talented but have similar skills to those of the players you already have. You can always ship premium talent for need.

If you follow these rules, you will likely increase your odds of winning your league. You will also have spent far more time developing your team than any league prize could possibly justify. So don’t play for the money; try to enjoy the thrill of victory. Just remember to report your winnings to the IRS as taxable income.