In-Season Fantasy Baseball Tips For the Dog Days of Summer

Managing a Fantasy Baseball team is unlike that of any other sport. It’s a daily grind that drags on for seven months and requires commitment, patience and discipline. Through all of your overtime work days, family vacations and sinus infections, the fantasy baseball season trudges on.

Maximizing your point potential day in and day out from April to October is the key to staying atop the standings and there are some simple ways to efficiently manage your roster without costing you your marriage, your promotion or your sanity.

The first thing to do is to start following some baseball writers on Twitter. The Twitter feeds of Buster Olney, Jayson Stark and Tim Kurkjian from ESPN are a constant flood of information, analysis and insight.  Fantasy Baseball Cracker Jacks provides a list of other helpful Twitter accounts to follow for all of your Fantasy Baseball needs and many of those people will even answer your questions and give advice on your lineup. (You can also find Gonos’ 99 favorite Fantasy Baseball Twitter accounts here.)

The second thing to do is download a Fantasy Baseball app on your phone. There are a number of good ones out there and they eliminate the need to surf the internet to get all of the day’s transactions, injuries and so on. Often you can receive the news as it’s released from the team, so you’ll have it on your phone before a sports news site even has it up. Plus, some apps go even deeper to provide statistical breakdowns of the day’s matchups, tell you who’s hot and cold and more.  Verizon Wireless gives the skinny on a few of the best Fantasy Baseball apps.

Next, check on the weather conditions for each city your players will be playing in that day. A baseball does not fly as far in cold weather or at sea level as it does in warm weather or at elevation. There’s also wind direction and speed to consider. This is not as tedious as it sounds however.  Baseball-weather is a site that provides live weather conditions and wind direction for every big league stadium.  The Washington Post printed an in-depth article about a similar app and how certain weather conditions impact the flight of a baseball.

Another simple thing you can do is to set your computer homepage to your fantasy league’s site. This will ensure that every time you sit down at your computer, updating your lineup for the day will either be the first thing that you do or at the very least it will remind you to do it and put it fresh in your mind.

Fantasy Baseball is all about information, statistics and projections and the more of it you can get the greater your advantage. There are a number of weekly and even daily webcasts and podcasts dedicated to Fantasy Baseball.  CBS Sports conducts a daily webcast with all of the latest news, notes and trends that could impact your players and team. The webcasts are typically less than 10 minutes long so it’s not a huge time investment.

In Fantasy Baseball, any slight edge you can find is worth it. And the easier it is to find that edge, the greater the odds are that you’ll keep your sanity.