As the 2012 regular season winds down I figured I'd start a thread to maybe get some discussion going on ways to potentially improve the daily fantasy baseball games over on DraftDay.

I have a few ideas of my own, but I'd first like to tell you what kind of daily fantasy player I am. I play daily fantasy baseball games about once or twice a week and do it solely for the sweat. It essentially replaces my sports betting. I have no visions of beating the game for any sort of profit. I do, though, consider myself to be slightly more knowledgable about baseball than the average fan, but for example I'd say there's close to no shot I can beat the $100 daily games on DraftDay when you account for opponent skill and, probably most importantly, rake. All that doesn't bother me, though. Like I said, I play just for the sweat and enjoy it, so if I'm losing $10-20 in EV for every $100 game I play I don't mind at all. I've also only played on DraftDay and don't think I'd play on another site (haven't even looked at what the other sites offer). I know some of the founders/owners and would rather support them than other sites especially since I don't use the site so supplement my income or anything but just for the sweat.

Okay, I just think describing what I use DraftDay for puts some context into some of my suggestions for improvement.

I've also taken a cursory look over the fantasy sports carve out in UIGEA, and I believe most of my suggestions would be legal but am obviously not 100% sure.

1) In-game games: By far one of the funnest aspects of sports betting is making in-game plays. I'd LOVE for DraftDay to offer a game that was from the 7th-inning on a night like Friday when nearly every game is a night game (so only included stats from the 7th, 8th, 9th, and extra innings when applicable). Could call it the "7th inning stretch". The lineups would lock in when the first game of the night reached the 7th inning (not sure on if start times have to be locked in beforehand in accordance with the law). A game type like this would involve much more strategy: drafting relief pitchers (the Braves are up 3-0 in the bottom of 5th, do you draft Kimbrel even though he won't pitch if the Braves get up 4+ runs?), drafting players on how they are doing so far that night, etc. Just seems like it'd be awesome. It's also very frustrating when you fire off a game on a Friday night and by 8:30 PM EST you are basically out of it. Would be nice to have another shot to get a sweat.

2) Turbo games: Similar to the in-game markets, but for this it'd be something like JUST THE FIRST INNING scoring. Only stats accumulated in the first inning of the game count (and the game would end once all games hit the 2nd inning). Again has some cool strategy implications, but the main point of a game like this is just to get an instant sweat and then be done with it, much like a turbo game in poker. Would have to just do the EST/CST games to get the turbo feel (then could run another one later at night for the MST/PST games). I think a game like this could run every day.

3) Games with prop focused scoring. Basically replicating a player prop into a daily fantasy game. Like, having a game where the only scoring was HRs and RBIs. Or having a game where you drafted pitchers (all SP and RP are available) and the only scoring was K's. I think it'd be fun to just sweat HRs or just sweat K's from time to time. Even just once or twice a week would be fun.

4) A "big" event once a week. Obviously the most annoying law in place in regards to daily fantasy action is the fact that prizepools and payouts have to be announced before the game starts. That makes it really hard for a site like DraftDay to put on a big multi person event due to not knowing what kind of demand they will get. With all that said, I would really like to see an effort to get a regular $50 buyin game with lots of entrants once a week. Friday or Sunday seems to work best for something like this b/c of the somewhat standardized start times for teams. I know the DOCOFS did well the first time around so I have to believe there is demand for this sort of event. Could run $5 qualifiers throughout the week (even using some of those turbo formats for the satellites?). I'd love to be able to win 20-25x my buyin on a $50-$100 event once a week. I have no idea the current demand for daily fantasy baseball games so not sure how possible this is, but would love to see it.

5) Bring back showing the top few payout spots in the drafting lobby. That extra click is pretty annoying. I'd like to just open up a game and instantly see how much I can win. Sounds minor, and I'm sure you changed it to the current format for a reason (where you have to click "Game Info") but I have a strong preference for instantly seeing the payouts when I click on a game and the draft lobby opens.

Now just some random things:

-Have a DD twitter account just for baseball. Tweet cool stuff during the games. Promote some of the bigger events (let ppl know when it's about to sell out etc). I follow the current DD twitter account and while it tweets interesting stuff it doesn't do anything to enhance my DD experience. I'd like to know who's having a great night at 10:04 PM on a Wednesday if I can't get to my computer, who's in line for W's, if someone big just left a game injured, how many spots are left in the $100 game with 2 hrs from first pitch, etc., if anyone is putting up a ridiculously huge score.

-Some other daily site is advertising all over the ESPN sweetspot team blogs and other sabr-geared team blogs. I'd like to see you guys pull from that demographic of player. I think it could create a much larger regular player pool since these guys 1) love and watch baseball every night and 2) think they are smarter than everyone else (much like why poker gets big). Not going to pretend to be able to know a clue about Marketing, but I'd imagine the thing those guys want most is blog hits so maybe doing something to exchange drawing traffic to those guys for them allowing posts or banners about DD could work. I know you guys have looked into that sort of thing in the past, I just think it'd be nice to hit those 2-3 blogs per team that all the big baseball fans/nerds read daily.

-Jackpot was really cool. Definitely would like to see that back.

That's all I got for now.

Everyone should post any other ideas they might have to improve the games over at DraftDay.

I look forward to continuing to play regularly at the start of the 2013 season.

Very nice post. #1 would be hard to implement I think but I'd be interested of course

Lots of interesting ideas. I like the variety and innovation, but the reality is that there just isn't enough interest for this kind of stuff to take hold. For example, people often ask for reduced salary cap games but in reality they rarely run.

There are lots of random fun stuff that could be incorporated. One idea I had was the ability to buy certain "power-ups." For example, you pay a certain amount out of your salary cap to make Runs or RBIs worth twice as many points.

Too much tweaking too soon, though, and the site won't have enough interest for the custom games to run on a regular basis and the action will grind to a halt

player overlap.

When I'm looking at my team, and i click on an opponents team, there should be an option to grey out, or otherwise highlight players we both have.

First off, really appreciate you taking the time to type this out. Gonna post some thoughts below.

I'll address these together because they're quite similar. It's definitely in our longterm plans to continue to reduce the length of contests. We took a small step forward during baseball by offering "early games" which only include the day games. We've definitely tossed around the idea of a few innings or just a quarter or whatever. A huge factor in offering a wide array of options is having enough traffic on the site. Right now, we don't have enough people on the site to offer as many game types as we'd like. We hope that changes soon. We're working on some big marketing pushes for the NFL.

Similar answer to above. We've been offering WR, QB and RB only games for NFL and they've been pretty popular. There's definitely a lot more where this came from as we get more people.

I think next MLB season (and you'll see this during NBA) we'll look to have some "special" days where we pop off bigger than normal games. The schedule can get stale and we want to offer reasons to come back to the site everyday. We have some big plans for NBA!

We're going to have an entire rework of the draft page sometime before the end of the year. We're at a weird transition time right now where some of the site looks like the original site and a lot of it has a face lift. We'll have a new MyGames page out next week, then a huge live scoring rework and then the drafting page facelift. We'll get the payouts and other information front and center so you can easily get to it.

Great idea. We'll work to work this into our twitter account. We're also going to have live scoring on mobile soon (coming with live scoring reworking). It will have some of these features built in.


We've got a huge NFL marketing blitz coming. We're just working out the final details. We're going to push some huge games and really work to get the word out. Hopefully it will bring in a lot of people that stick around for NBA and MLB. We'll also have PGA next year which can't hurt MLB (if people come for PGA and play some MLB on side).

Jackpot is here to stay.

This will be in our live scoring update that I referenced in the last post.

We've got some really exciting stuff in the pipeline. I'm hugely optimistic about how the site will function by the end of the year.

Again, thanks for the feedback guys. It means a lot.

Thanks for the response Andrew. Look forward to the future at DraftDay.

First off, I love draftday and I'm having a lot of fun with it, especially sweating baseball!

My comment is: Since there are basically three times a day baseball games start, I would like to see lobby's or selection options to see morning only games, mid-day, or evening games. With fewer (best)players/games to choose from you could add the teams entire starting roster and really get down to who performs on that day and not just if the super stars get stats.

Another idea I had was to pic your roster and play for the entire 3-4 game series with wagers per game.

New game type: Chinese Baseball (named after Chinese Poker variant).

Put together 3 mini teams based on a salary cap.

Mini Team Tier 1: SP, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS
Mini Team Tier 2: SP, OF, OF, OF, C
Mini Team Tier 3: SP, U, U, U, U

Each player's team tier each go against each other scoring fantasy points in the usual fashion. However, each team tier is treated as a separate contest. The winner of the tier gets 1 Point. Whoever wins the most tiers wins the game.

Thanks for all of this feedback.

I don't think we have quite the following to have separated Twitter accounts for each sport (though that can change as we grow) however the topics you suggested to Tweet about are definitely something that can be added to our current content.