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Julio Rodriguez (Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images)
For many fantasy baseball players, much of the appeal is pretending to play the role of a real-life general manager. You’re involved in the day-to-day personnel decisions, able to shape rosters how you see fit and assess when to push your chips all-in, while also trying to juggle the team’s potential near-term success and keeping an eye on how it might impact the longer-term outlook. In redraft leagues, where each season starts from the beginning again—and where everyone is on equal footing at the beginning of the season—dynasty leagues are essentially redraft leagues that reset every year, but you still have the same players you had last year.
Each dynasty league has its own specific rules, but in general, there are two types: keeper leagues and “pure” dynasty. Keeper leagues have some variation on how many players you are allowed to carry over into the following year. In some cases, there are “contracts” (limits to how many years you can keep players) or “salaries” (where you must keep total salaries below certain caps), or a combination of all of that. Some have specific subsets where prospects have different year limits or salary increases. In pure dynasty leagues, however, one normally keeps your entire roster year after year.
Because there are so many variants—roto categories vs. points, or head-to-head vs. pure roto, open league vs. mixed vs. “only” leagues—we will only discuss the broad commonalities of dynasty leagues in general.
What Are The Rules Of Dynasty Fantasy Baseball?
The main element of dynasty leagues is that they are redraft leagues where some number of players on each fantasy team’s roster is carried over into the next seasons (with or without some sort of restrictions, such as term limits or where it becomes progressively more expensive to do so).
Whether the season’s winner is determined from accumulated points, by roto categories through to the end of the season, via a final few week’s playoff, or from standings of one’s head-to-head record against the other fantasy teams, the main element is that some subset of rosters are carried over year-over-year.
The main common elements of a dynasty league will be discussed below.
Main Roster And Bench
You will have a main roster of players—most commonly by fulfilling a positional…