NFBC Message Boards

Okay, it's time to talk some baseball again on these boards and get some opinions flowing from you folks. Tom and I have also been buried behind the screens here getting all of our live events finalized and Slow Drafts set up and running smoothly. It's time to come out of the dark and talk baseball!!

We didn't get a lot of questions last time around, but let's try it again. Feel free to post your questions anytime before the Live Chat tomorrow and we'll jump in when we can. Then tomorrow we'll stick around for an hour and take your live questions. But feel free to load us up before then. We're probably less educated on the rankings and projections than you folks are since we no longer produce a magazine, but we can look up the ADP or draft data of any player from our Slow Drafts and give you some useful facts. So ask away and we'll investigate and answer fully.

Let's talk and let's get some guest Live Chatters!! I've asked Shawn Childs to kick off our Live Chat session, but he's buried in his own work right now. I'll reach out to Todd Zola and BaseballHQ and Scott Engel and Jeff Erickson and a few other industry guys and see if we can't get one per week starting next week. Who wants to be first? Todd, are you up for it yet? Shawn??

Bring it on!!! I'm ready for your questions now.

Greg,

Any chance of a Rick Wilton chat?

Joe Sambito wrote:Greg,

Any chance of a Rick Wilton chat?

That's a great idea. I haven't talked with Rick for a bit as he had some back problems and wasn't in Arizona this fall, but I'll gladly reach out to him and see if he can do one. Excellent idea.

Dear Greg and Tom:

A few questions for you if you don't mind and thanks in advance,

1-What round(s) do you see Adam Dunn going in this year?

2-Out of the current fantasy baseball magazines on the shelf this season, which one would you recommend the most? I've always liked Fantasy Sports magazine of course , but after it folded I liked the content of the Professional Edition, but I haven't seen it on the shelves yet. This magazine I think relates to the NFBC player the most out of the ones I have seen.

3-Will you ever consider holding the NFBC/NFFC drafts in Orlando, FL?

4-What would you set your KDS this year for the Main Event if you had to do it today?

Thanks!

Greg,

Will there be any enhancements to the live scoring this year?
Is IT enhancing anything else for the site? Thanks in advance


Jason

Greg,

Any future plans of working with STATS to create an app for smart phones? (Something basic that would allow lineup setting and live scoring) I realize this won't happen overnight but it would be tremendous in the future.

Jason

1. When will you offer the LAST of the 50 round slow drafts?

2. How many spots will you pay in the overall slow draft championship if we reach 50-60 leagues?

3. A few years ago you offered some 12/13 team pay top 3 AL and NL only snake draft satellites; will you be offering them again this year? If so, sign me up.

this is such a good question I want to give Gregor a chance to sleep on it while sugarplums dance

there has been talk of OAK & SEA batting 2 Judys in the 3 hole if both teams actually did this, how would it affect Ichiro & Coco's ADP?

Both guys are far from true Judys in that you can reasonably expect at least 6 or 8 hr's in a normal yr. If they were to bat 3rd I'd think both are capable of even more, perhaps 10 or dare I say in Ichiro's case at age 38 - half his age would be sweeeeet....and a dream, but thats what Feb is for

Red Sox Nation- wrote:Greg,

Will there be any enhancements to the live scoring this year?
Is IT enhancing anything else for the site? Thanks in advance


Jason

These are great questions and I'd like to add that I feel the live scoring enhancements should be first and foremost for the IT group. I had to say that because I'm a live scoring junkie!!!

Thanks guys, the NFBC/NFFC is the only place to play Fantasy Sports!!!

Tom or Greg,

Could I get your detailed analysis of how Brett Anderson, Jake Arrieta, Scott Baker, Daric Barton, Nick Blackburn, Dallas Braden, Michael Brantley, Jonathan Broxton, Clay Buchholz, Joba Chamberlain, Shin-Soo Choo, Jose Contreras, Zack Cozart, Allen Craig, Johnny Cueto, Jorge De La Rosa, Andre Ethier, Johnny Giavotella, Franklin Gutierrez, Travis Hafner, Cole Hamels, Josh Hamilton, Tommy Hanson, Brad Hawpe, Jason Heyward, Jair Jurrjens, Ryan Kalish, Adam LaRoche, Brett Lawrie, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Joe Mauer, Mitch Moreland, Logan Morrison, Charlie Morton, Daniel Murphy, Mike Napoli, Juan Nicasio, Magglio Ordonez, Hunter Pence, Placido Polanco, Josh Reddick, Clayton Richard, Brian Roberts, Scott Rolen, Freddy Sanchez, Jonathan Sanchez, Luke Scott, Grady Sizemore, Denard Span, Mark Trumbo, Juan Uribe, Rickie Weeks, Brian Wilson, Kevin Youkilis, Joel Zumaya, Tim Hudson, Carl Crawford, Kendrys Morales, Nick Markakis, Stephen Drew, Adam Wainwright, Ryan Howard, Johan Santana, Ike Davis, Hanley Ramirez, Buster Posey, Justin Morneau, and Josh Johnson will come back from injuries?

Just kidding of course, but it does seem like this is a fairly heavy year for having to make injury assessments, or is that just me? Also, all injuries cause concern, but which type of injury or body part impacted makes you really hesitant to take a chance on a player?

Red Sox Nation- wrote:Greg,

Any future plans of working with STATS to create an app for smart phones? (Something basic that would allow lineup setting and live scoring) I realize this won't happen overnight but it would be tremendous in the future.

Jason

Okay, I asked IT for this answer first and just got it, so it deserves posting. From IT: "We have the development of an iPhone and Android app in the plans for NFBC this season. They won't be available at the start of the season, but should be coming in 2012."

NOW THAT'S EXCITING!!! Thanks for asking. I learned something today as well. GREAT NEWS for NFBC owners.

Red Sox Nation- wrote:Greg,

Will there be any enhancements to the live scoring this year?
Is IT enhancing anything else for the site? Thanks in advance


Jason

We have already announced that we created a toggle so that you can much more easily follow all of your teams within Live Scoring. This should be a HUGE enhancement and allow everyone who has multiple teams to easily toggle from team to team.

I don't know of any other major changes within Live Scoring. Some people said that it was slow to update on our site, which seems odd since STATS provides the live scoring data to all sites. We can certainly look into how we make it faster on our site, but I'd suspect we're displaying it as fast as we can.

What other enhancements to live scoring is needed?

We should be rolling out a few things shortly. One is the ability to copy your rankings for all NFBC Online drafts. So you'll be able to update your player default list and then copy that list into any future NFBC online draft. That will be a HUGE addition for people who do multiple Online Championship Leagues or Satellite Leagues. It's also going to be a great addition for the Slow Drafts going forward. Next year you'll be able to rank your 1,000+ players, save them, and load them before every NFBC draft. And you can update your list in one spot and just tweak it before your next draft. That will be a nice addition and I think it's coming soon.

We also hope to unveil our most important addition to the NFBC in years: A landing page with remaining spots for every single available NFBC product. This will be tied into our Registration page and will automatically update remaining spots in every live event, Online Championship and Satellite League. We'll also be able to keep these leagues open longer and run KDS within hours or even minutes of the league closing so that we can hold on and close these leagues out even on the day of the online draft. This landing page will be critical to us growing our online games and will give everyone an update on remaining available spots in each city's auctions, Main Event and other events. This is a very crucial tool for us going forward in the NFBC and NFFC and is our main focus right now.

We are also enhancing a lot of items on our back-end software that you can't see but that is critical to Tom and I in running credit card charges, updating leagues, changing payments or leagues, etc. That is being done now as well. Believe it or not, there are 73 items on our NFBC To-Do list, many of which involve accounting procedures and back-end software updates. We might not get to all of them, but we're working on many of them now.

Hope this helps a little. Everything is being touched a little and each enhancement will make our site better. We're glad we own this because each off-season we can tweak it to make it better. Thanks for asking and if I get anymore updates from the IT department I'll pass them along here.

Cornhusker wrote:1. When will you offer the LAST of the 50 round slow drafts?

2. How many spots will you pay in the overall slow draft championship if we reach 50-60 leagues?

3. A few years ago you offered some 12/13 team pay top 3 AL and NL only snake draft satellites; will you be offering them again this year? If so, sign me up.

1. I really think we need to cut the Slow Drafts off around March 5-6. I don't want these going too late into March and interrupting the live drafts. Last year we kept them going a little longer because of the Fanball sale and we had no new Slow Drafts from Jan. 4-Feb. 16. But by early March, we'll have had 50+ leagues and that will be enough. So definitely the first week of March is it.

2. I really don't know yet, but yes we need to expand the total number of winners because we now have 700-800+ teams. Crazy good, but let me look at that when all is said and done and get it to Top 15 or 20 or 25 with at least money back. I know that's not much, but if you finish in the Top 20 overall among 700 teams, hopefully there's something there for you. Again, let me look it all over and make sure we keep growing the top 5 prizes with some love over for others.

3. No, we don't have the draft room set up for that and as I said above, we have 73 other items to get through this off-season already. This draft room is not fully customizable; it's built for our NFBC games we have now. So maybe in future years, but definitely not in 2012 for AL-only or NL-only drafts.

Thanks for the questions.

ChiScottieBaseball wrote:Dear Greg and Tom:

A few questions for you if you don't mind and thanks in advance,

1-What round(s) do you see Adam Dunn going in this year?

2-Out of the current fantasy baseball magazines on the shelf this season, which one would you recommend the most? I've always liked Fantasy Sports magazine of course , but after it folded I liked the content of the Professional Edition, but I haven't seen it on the shelves yet. This magazine I think relates to the NFBC player the most out of the ones I have seen.

3-Will you ever consider holding the NFBC/NFFC drafts in Orlando, FL?

4-What would you set your KDS this year for the Main Event if you had to do it today?

Thanks!

Adam Dunn has an ADP of 206 and is going mainly in the 14th-16th rounds. The last 4 NFBC drafts he's gone 211th, 208th, 223rd and 254th. He says he's healthy and ready for a new season, but NFBC owners aren't buying it. He looked completely lost last year and was just guessing at some pitches. It was like he had no clue how to hit a curveball and was too slow to hit a fastball. Yeah, he might be worth the gamble in the second half of the draft, but wow, what a bust last year. As I said in last week's column, I'M NOT BUYING HERE!!

I haven't seen a magazine yet, but I'm looking forward to getting Rotowire.com, Rotoworld.com/Beckett, and the Fantasy Baseball Guide from Peter Kreutzer and our Mastersball friends. Why? We have ads in each one and a mention about Lindy Hinkelman in each one!!! I'm hopeful that all of their readers say "I want to be the next Lindy Hinkelman!!"

Probably not. We used to host them in Tampa and then moved to Orlando one year and found out that flights to Orlando in March were so high that it made it tough for out-of-staters to get there reasonably. I should have known that. Now, would I ever like to return to Florida during spring training? Sure, but it would probably be on the Gulf side, probably in the Tampa/Clearwater area. But nothing imminent, that's for sure.

I look at all of these preferences and personally I'd start with 3, 2,1 because I'd love to start my team with any of those guys. If Braun's suspension goes away (hopeful thinking, I know), then it would be 3,2,4,1. After that I see where 11 and 10 can be a really good spot. So I'm not sure, but those are nice landing spots for me.

Red Sox Nation- wrote:Greg,

Will there be any enhancements to the live scoring this year?
Is IT enhancing anything else for the site? Thanks in advance


Jason

A couple of things I found frustrating about live scoring last year was that we could not see all 10 categories. I think it had something to do with decimal points and that should be an easy fix.

The other one was the failure, once or twice a week, of pitchers loading. I have no idea why this happened.

One thing I'd like to see with live scoring is the situation of the game by each player and our player highlighted if he is pitching or up to the plate.

Edwards Kings wrote:Tom or Greg,

Could I get your detailed analysis of how Brett Anderson, Jake Arrieta, Scott Baker, Daric Barton, Nick Blackburn, Dallas Braden, Michael Brantley, Jonathan Broxton, Clay Buchholz, Joba Chamberlain, Shin-Soo Choo, Jose Contreras, Zack Cozart, Allen Craig, Johnny Cueto, Jorge De La Rosa, Andre Ethier, Johnny Giavotella, Franklin Gutierrez, Travis Hafner, Cole Hamels, Josh Hamilton, Tommy Hanson, Brad Hawpe, Jason Heyward, Jair Jurrjens, Ryan Kalish, Adam LaRoche, Brett Lawrie, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Joe Mauer, Mitch Moreland, Logan Morrison, Charlie Morton, Daniel Murphy, Mike Napoli, Juan Nicasio, Magglio Ordonez, Hunter Pence, Placido Polanco, Josh Reddick, Clayton Richard, Brian Roberts, Scott Rolen, Freddy Sanchez, Jonathan Sanchez, Luke Scott, Grady Sizemore, Denard Span, Mark Trumbo, Juan Uribe, Rickie Weeks, Brian Wilson, Kevin Youkilis, Joel Zumaya, Tim Hudson, Carl Crawford, Kendrys Morales, Nick Markakis, Stephen Drew, Adam Wainwright, Ryan Howard, Johan Santana, Ike Davis, Hanley Ramirez, Buster Posey, Justin Morneau, and Josh Johnson will come back from injuries?

Just kidding of course, but it does seem like this is a fairly heavy year for having to make injury assessments, or is that just me? Also, all injuries cause concern, but which type of injury or body part impacted makes you really hesitant to take a chance on a player?

I'll make this an easy read, Wayne:
1. Drug/alcohol problems -- worst injury to plan around
2. Concussions -- these are serious and you can't rehab the brain
3. Back -- if you have a back injury, there's no way you can pitch or hit effectively
4. Blood thinning procedures in Germany
5. broken legs after a walkoff home run -- sorry, I can't evaluate when Kendry Morales will return anymore
6. Tommy John Surgery -- isn't it crazy that we're all less worried about Adam Wainwright making a full recovery than we are Kendry Morales from May of 2010??? That's how far medical technology has come with these elbow and shoulder ligament replacements. Just amazing. I'd take Wainwright without a problem this year after seeing how so many other pitchers have returned with full velocity and control

Hope this helps, in my own Wayne-like way.

DOUGHBOYS wrote:

Red Sox Nation- wrote:Greg,

Will there be any enhancements to the live scoring this year?
Is IT enhancing anything else for the site? Thanks in advance


Jason

A couple of things I found frustrating about live scoring last year was that we could not see all 10 categories. I think it had something to do with decimal points and that should be an easy fix.

The other one was the failure, once or twice a week, of pitchers loading. I have no idea why this happened.

One thing I'd like to see with live scoring is the situation of the game by each player and our player highlighted if he is pitching or up to the plate.

I'll gladly send these and any other enhancements to IT and see what we can do. We definitely want Live Scoring to be the best it can be. I'll wait for any other suggestions and send them all at once.

I think we did look at the layout of Live Scoring at season's end and felt that the MLB scoring tracker on the right was squeezing in the categories as you say. That's a display issue that can easily be resolved and should be. That we can definitely resolve.

I'll ask about the pitchers loading. Again, that should be fixed or looked at for sure. It's not a programming enhancement, it's something that needs to work every time and everyone in IT would agree. We can look at that.

The third suggestion sounds cool. I certainly never brought that up with the IT team. I'll see if that can be done. Makes sense. Thanks.

With the explosion of slow draft leagues I remembered how difficult it was to scroll through the 23 reserve players last year. They were listed alphabetically. Have you looked into changing the order of the reserves and how they are viewed when setting a lineup? I'm not positive but I think the consensus was to list by position.

Secondly, with the pending 50 day suspension of Braun and the departure of Fielder, does this enhance the value of Morgan in the Milwaukee outfield? He's a bit of a head case. Can he be trusted? Will he hit at the top of the order and return to his running ways?

Thanks.

Money wrote:With the explosion of slow draft leagues I remembered how difficult it was to scroll through the 23 reserve players last year. They were listed alphabetically. Have you looked into changing the order of the reserves and how they are viewed when setting a lineup? I'm not positive but I think the consensus was to list by position.

Secondly, with the pending 50 day suspension of Braun and the departure of Fielder, does this enhance the value of Morgan in the Milwaukee outfield? He's a bit of a head case. Can he be trusted? Will he hit at the top of the order and return to his running ways?

Thanks.

The listing of the 27 reserves is one of the items on our To-Do list. I don't know where it fits in the priorities, but I do know that IT is working on the game setup features now so that we can start displaying rosters soon. Finished Slow Draft Leagues don't have access to their rosters or to Set Lineup yet because we are enhancing the back-end software now. I don't know if this feature will be available right away, but I know it's on the list.

No. He is what he is. Sure, he has to hit at the top of the order because their lineup is weak, weak, weak this year. They need to play good defense and pitch lights out to reach .500 this year.

Just to add to my previous answer to Doughboys, IT said that "There was a bug we found last year that cut off pitching stats in some browsers." That has been fixed, as has the width of the space we had for the MLB Scoreboard. Hopefully that display in Live Scoring will be better for our users.

As for the speed of Live Scoring, we provide Live Scoring for Sportsline and most every other fantasy site and we use the same feed. So there's no way our feed should be slower. If anyone has any issues this year with the speed of the data, let me know and we'll try to replicate what you're seeing and get more info on your browser, broadband, etc. We'll definitely look into it once live games are rolling and make sure everything is good to go. But yeah, we're providing the Live Scoring for the industry, so the NFBC feed should be just as fast as everyone else.

Greg or Tom:

Lineups lock every Monday at 6:55pm (EST). Yet, when we have a special game such at the Patriots
Day game in Boston the ONLY players that lock on that Monday are the two teams that are playing in the game. If
you can do it here????????

Would it be possible to extend that lock on Monday nights to the West Coast teams and allow final
decisions on those players when we can look at the lineups for those particular teams? Same extends to the
Friday period. If you have the technology for Patriots Day, wouldn't it make the NFBC a better product in helping the player make
important lineup decisions at the latest available time without giving anybody a decided edge over the competition for the other 52 deadlines? Thanks.


I compare this to the NFFC and the NFL. We don't have to make a decisions on players that start at 4pm, Sunday or Monday night when they kick off at 1pm. Why in baseball, must me limit ourselves to the East Coast starts? The same limitations for football will apply. If you have a player that is starting at 7pm on a Monday HIS decision must be in place
at 6:55pm. (est)

Greg - Is it possible to improve the waiver wire (FAAB)?

1. Rather than click on conditional bids (players) to move them up one at a time. Could it be setup so that all you have to do is click and drag a player up and down on the bid list? This would make the FAAB process much faster

2. Also for Football it seemed like during peak FAAB hour the site slowed down considerably. To the point where you couldn't access FAAB quickly or if you made changes to bids or added players to a bid group it took a while to load. Can anything be done so there is not that much of a delay?

3. Any chance that lineup deadlines could be set for the time of that specific player's game? Example: Players that play at 7 EST on Monday would lock at that time, but if you have players that play at 10 EST they would not lock until 5 min before their actual game. (Sack pretty much beat to it)

4. Live scoring was definitely slower than other sites. It's strange, but CBS updated much faster. I like all of Doughboys ideas/questions

Thanks

Sack wrote:Greg or Tom:

Lineups lock every Monday at 6:55pm (EST). Yet, when we have a special game such at the Patriots
Day game in Boston the ONLY players that lock on that Monday are the two teams that are playing in the game. If
you can do it here????????

Would it be possible to extend that lock on Monday nights to the West Coast teams and allow final
decisions on those players when we can look at the lineups for those particular teams? Same extends to the
Friday period. If you have the technology for Patriots Day, wouldn't it make the NFBC a better product in helping the player make
important lineup decisions at the latest available time without giving anybody a decided edge over the competition for the other 52 deadlines? Thanks.


I compare this to the NFFC and the NFL. We don't have to make a decisions on players that start at 4pm, Sunday or Monday night when they kick off at 1pm. Why in baseball, must me limit ourselves to the East Coast starts? The same limitations for football will apply. If you have a player that is starting at 7pm on a Monday HIS decision must be in place
at 6:55pm. (est)

This is something we looked at as well. I don't think this is hard for us to do. I'll ask again, but yes this is something I think we can do on Mondays for the later starting teams. And if a team didn't play at all, those players would be part of that last lineup setting among West Coast teams. I mean, they have to be locked at some point and that last Monday lineup change would be it.

I'll ask again, but we did review this one.

Greg- What is the relationship between NFBC/NFFC and Stats? Specifically is NFBC/NFFC a stand alone business owned by whoever and contracts with Stats for the software, scoring, IT and such? or does Stats own everything? I'm asking for no other reason than to just understand it, espeically with the Failure of some high profile Fantasy companies/services the past 2 years.

thanks

Mike

Sorry if this has been asked and answered, but what about an overall live standings? I know the response to this in years past was it would be too taxing on the system. Still true with Stats on board?

Emmett