need help with formation of new league

[moetive]

Thank you in advance...

A group of friends and I have used yahoo for the last seven years and this year we finally want to get serious (but remain free) with our league. We bounced around between 8 and 12 teams over the years and now we have 8 solid owners all of whom track their teams daily.

Every year preseason we have a rules meeting to discuss stat categories and most years we count around 22-25 total stat categories. About 12 on position players and 12 on pitchers.

This year we want to step it up a bit and adopt a keeper league, and would like some help on ideas for the groundrules on keeper leagues, and everything that goes in to it, including draft rules, etc.

Also we would like to get off of yahoo and take our league elsewhere.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[RDD15]

If you want a free league, ESPN is your place.

[Trojan Pony]

I second the endorsement of ESPN... I've made the switch from Yahoo, it's much better.

As for keepers, I have a couple recommendations based on my own experience. In my 12-team H2H keeper league, the rules allow each team to keep 4 players from their previous season's end-of-year roster who were taken AFTER the 4th round of the previous season's draft. Setting things up this way, I find, prevents the problems of a lot of keeper leagues where the really good teams keep their stud players and remain really good while the bad teams stay bad. For starters, it's only 4 players, so if you have, say, a 26 man roster, that's still 22 players that you're drafting. Also, it keeps most of the elite players (last year's Top 48) in the draft pool, so a lot of the big talent is recycled, keeping things more fluid.

Leagues with more extensive keepers settings can be fun but if most of the managers are having their first experience with a keeper league, I think you'll find doing things similar to the way I described to be more fun.

[Trojan Pony]

Oh, and I forgot to add that each player can be claimed as a keeper for up to 3 consecutive seasons, regardless of trades. After 3 straight seasons of being kept by one or more teams, the player must be released to the draft. This prevents someone from drafting a rookie in the 10th round who turns in to a Top 20 player and then having exclusive keeper rights to him for his entire career.

[Bloody Sox]

Funny, Trojan - we do something slightly different in my league, with the same effect. We didn't want the best players to be hoarded, so we prevented Top 4 round players from being kept. The way we went about it was to make you forfeit a draft pick that is 4 rounds earlier than where a guy was drafted or kept the previous year. So to keep my 13th round draft pick this year I'd have to forfeit a 9th round pick. To keep him again the year after would cost me a 5th round pick, and so on. Similar concept - just throwing it out to the guy starting his new league. We like it.