Sports Leagues Score Big
TQ Stats Online
Baseball was the first sport to embrace the "fantasy league" concept. Football, basketball and others followed suit, but the actions of several thousand overly committed baseball fans in 1984-1987 created the phenomenon of fantasy leagues. Their gospel was a breezy read called Rotisserie League Baseball, and their idols were a group of New York based professionals who concocted the scheme where people create teams from major league players and then keep score based on the players' actual statistics every day.
The entire concept is like a drinking game for the statistically obsessed.
Way back then, in USA Today's infancy and before the advent of Baseball Weekly, much less the web, statistics were gathered by reading The Sporting News or calculated daily from newspaper boxscores. The problem was that newspapers sometimes have misprints, and all the manual calculations were driving folks batty.
I remember our league (established 1986) spending hours checking the math and statistics from the other teams. Back then, we kept spiral notebooks and Lotus spreadsheets full of data. Tracking roster moves was a hideous process that usually resulted in multiple errors. The fact that some leagues (I respectfully refuse to answer the question) actually play for money, and a lot of it, made error-checking a significant part of the process.
Three of our early owners had accounting or financial backgrounds, and quite frankly, the other seven were driving us batty. We knew how to add and subtract, for example, as well as make sure our work footed. I remember a call sometime during our first season with an owner who had a financial background.
Wouldn't it be a great little side business, we wondered, if we could collect the stats for other leagues, organize them, print out reports and fax them to someone? Who knows — get enough teams to generate some economy of scale and you could have a tidy little margin.
Shame on us for never following through because the global communications revolution was about to occur. The web, email and instant communication allowed for tracking stats and team performance an hourly or even real-time task, rather than a weekly manual process. And the start-ups that got in early locked down a big chunk of the repeat business in this tiny but affluent market.
I hate not following through on a business plan.
Streamlining The Statistics
Our league has used Total Quality Stats to track our baseball league for three seasons. The feature-rich site started out as a barebones operation, much like the one my friend and I envisioned starting. For the last 18 months, however, new features are regularly being added.
I will review the features in a minute, but let me first floor you with the pricing: $99.
For the average league of 10-12 players over a six month season, that's less than $2 per month per team. Simply collating the statistics is worth much more over that period. With TQ Stats, however, you get to slice and dice your team and your league's numbers in many different ways. You can check by category, by day, view a live feed of stats by team that looks just like a box score or even use forecasting tools complete with scenario editors.
Statistics and league standings are updated daily, but using the live stats feed feature lets you monitor your team and anyone else's during the day or evening. Those of you who do not participate in fantasy leagues are now beginning to understand the true level of obsession encouraged by fantasy sports leagues.
Perhaps the most significant feature I can tell you about TQ Stats is that they don't upcharge or hide fees. A flat $99 buys you and your friends a wide range of features and historical archiving!
Feature Rich — And Getting Better All The Time
When we first began using the site several seasons ago, its best feature was a message board for the league, daily updates and the ability to link to data on individual players. There were also sections to post your league rules and constitution, some basic accounting functions and the most horrendous Java applet ever written that the commissioner struggled with to track roster moves. The site has since grown into one of the web's best resources for fantasy information.
Registered leagues now receive the following:
Reports, Reports, and more Reports — You can pull data by team, by free agent player, by day and team and historically. That is just scratching the surface, but only true fantasy league fans are reading deeper than this anyway. But the neat thing here is that the reports are published in a variety of HTML and flat text formats. There is more than enough here to satisfy anyone's data needs.
Player Information — TQ Stats links to The Roto Times for player data. This an excellent strategic move that allows the site to concentrate on its core competency of gathering and presenting data rather than creating its own. Player news flashes appear on each team's home page and is stored there in an event log. The best part is that a player's name appearing anywhere on the site is a link back to the player's detail at RotoTimes.
Roster Tracking — The Java applet has gotten much better and now makes entering data much easier than in the past. Roster moves are tracked for all of baseball (along with constantly updating depth charts from RotoTimes) and for your league. Your league's contact information can also be safely stored here because team information is password protected.
Projections, SWAGs and Graphs — A section called toys now includes a forecast tool based on rosters as they are today or any other previous day, another model that determines the impact of proposed trades and a graphing tool that plots each team's standing in each category over an entire season. One of this tool's nicest elements assigns the same color and symbol to each team regardless of which graph is displayed. My team's line is cyan with an asterisk symbol this year, which allows me to tell at a glance how my team is doing on a chart with more than 500 data points.
Live Stats Feed — I mentioned this already, but this feature is cool and powerful enough that it bears repeating. TQ Stats lets users assemble a live, up-to-date boxscore, a nifty utility that increases the site's usefulness throughout the day rather than simply being a morning destination. Imagine — live boxscores. As I edited this one Sunday afternoon, all my players' teams were in action and most were halfway through their games. The hitters were a combined 9-21 with two home runs and three RBIs. Meanwhile, Kyle Lohse is pitching his guts outs for the Twins and is carrying a one hitter into the fourth. Think of this feature as the Roto-stock ticker for the truly obsessed.
Reliability, Pricing and Other Sports
I can not remember the last time that statistics were unavailable on at least a daily basis from TQ Stats. There may have been one day last year — maybe. The live stats feature is down every couple of weeks for a little while, but that's certainly not a big deal.
For the simple pleasure of enjoying your league, the average team is assessed less than the salary cap imposed on teams in most leagues. Do what we do: split the assessment straight down the middle. Since you will not have to pay extra unless you want some truly customized services (e.g., statistics mailed to you via the US Postal Service), each team can be assessed $10 or so at the beginning of the year, and everyone can pay attention to the game rather than tracking the results.
Basketball, hockey and football leagues are also available at TQ Stats. I have not tried either yet, but one of our league members tells me the football league functionality is improving as fast as the baseball section.
The verdict? None other than industry bible Baseball Weekly endorsed TQ Stats this year among dozens of other services. With that kind of publicity, more than three thousand leagues and a loyal fan base, this site is the best place for fantasy sports leagues to call home.
