Each year, millions of sports fans across the United States try their hand at owning and managing their very own professional baseball franchise. A relatively new genre of gaming known as “Fantasy Sports” has seen phenomenal growth over the past few years, mainly as a result of it’s perfect suitability for Internet play.

From it’s humble beginnings in 1979 as a contest between a group of sports writers playing for a six-pack of Yoo-hoo, fantasy baseball has boomed into a nationwide pastime where league prizes could reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. No matter whether your a high stakes fantasy player or just the average sports fan looking to play for fun, there is sure to be a fantasy baseball league as close as the nearest computer.

The Concept

Let’s start with the overall concept of fantasy baseball. In fantasy baseball, participants draft real-life pro athletes to create teams. Each team scores points based on actual statistics compiled by real-life athletes. Teams win by scoring the most points. In some leagues, participants pay entry fees and winners earn money.

Participants can watch their games in "real time" on the Internet and get up-to-the-minute results. Watching highlights and sports news takes on a whole new meaning for the fantasy player. Real-life player performances are what influence lineup and trade decisions within each league. Injury reports are scoured as to not leave a team vulnerable at any position.

Some fantasy baseball players such as James White, a 33 year-old Army recruiter in Tallahassee, Florida, can spend as much as 5 to 6 hours a day mapping out team strategies. "I get home from work, say about 5:30, and I'll look at it until 11 o'clock at night about every other day," said White in a recent interview. “It’ll consume all of your free time, and get you in trouble with the wife if your not careful,” he added laughingly.

Specific rules of the game are can be as varied as the number of leagues available. However, the basics of play are relatively consistent. The fantasy team owner begins by drafting his roster of players for the season. The two most popular draft methods are a “live” draft or a “computer aided” draft. In a live draft, each owner will select one player at a time in a specified draft order until all roster positions have been filled.

Live drafts tend to be very time consuming as each owner waits their turn in real time. Though longer, a live draft offers more of a sense of realism to the game. Computer aided drafts are conducted by having each fantasy owner rank individual athletes at each position in the order they would like to have them. Each team’s rankings are then fed into a computer program that will perform a “draft” for each owner based on the order of their selections. This type of draft is usually popular with casual fantasy players playing for fun.