Best Fantasy Baseball Sites for Beginners

Fantasy baseball is one of the more complicated fantasy sports to understand and succeed in. Between the 162-game schedule and the many different scoring systems, it can be hard for beginners to grasp.

There are really only three main sites for simple and accessible standard fantasy baseball: Yahoo, ESPN, and CBS Sports. These are the three most popular fantasy baseball sites, followed closely by Fantrax, which offers more complex and customizable league options suited for more advanced and seasoned players. 

If you are looking for more of a gambling experience, you can check out daily fantasy baseball, which requires less time commitment (it’s only one day/week instead of a 162-game season) but usually requires a buy-in (you also need to be in a state where it’s legal to gamble). The main two sites for that style of play are DraftKings and FanDuel DFS, but we want to keep the attention in this article to standard fantasy baseball.

These leagues can be started by a group of buddies, coworkers, teammates, family members, or other people you know in real life, or you can just hop right into a draft and join a bunch of online strangers (and hey, maybe you’ll make a friend or two — or an arch-rival). These leagues are free to join for the most part, but you can also set up a buy-in and cash prize either with the site (which is safer) or through outside means (always trust the money to the most responsible person in the group, and always collect everyone’s money during preseason before the draft). These sites have different amounts of scoring and format customization options, but most of them work well enough to give you an excellent first fantasy baseball experience.

Here are the top three fantasy baseball sites in order from best to worst for beginners to fantasy baseball.

Standard Fantasy Baseball Leagues 

Yahoo

Cost: Free

Pros: While ESPN dominates overall fantasy sports, Yahoo has maintained its place as the most popular fantasy baseball platform by offering a simple interface with updated news and info on players much more regularly than other sites. This popularity makes it easy to find a league and start a draft extremely quickly.

With Best Ball leagues, keeper/dynasty leagues, and tons of customization options, Yahoo has far and away the most variety of league styles

Yahoo fantasy baseball has been tried and tested over decades. Starting in 1997, Yahoo fantasy baseball helped take the concept from a quirky and nerdy thing done by sports journalists and die-hard fans on spreadsheets to a more broadly accessible game that average sports fans could enjoy. Yahoo has a long and rich history in fantasy sports, and that history has helped to forge a consistent and reliable product with few glaring problems.

Cons: The app interface is not great, and you may have to use the desktop version to get the full functionality and features that Yahoo offers.

Yahoo puts some AI and recommendation features behind a $7.99 paywall, but apparently, that feature is completely broken and usually makes your team worse, so it’s basically just a waste of cash.

ESPN

Cost: Free

Pros: A large population of players and a simple-to-use app that offers you a basic, entry-level experience in fantasy baseball. ESPN fantasy baseball is not complicated and offers nothing additional or fancier than just simple redraft leagues with simple features.

Cons: Its features are lacking, it doesn’t offer any variety in play styles, and it doesn’t offer many customization options. The player updates and info aren’t as up-to-date and detailed as its competitors.

In-season player rankings are broken, and there is no way to see the stats of free agents and rostered players at the same time. The biggest con for ESPN might be their lack of intuitive roster features and smaller roster sizes. The default rosters for ESPN have just three bench spots, and the site does not give you the ability to set up automatic benching for inactive players. This makes roster control less dynamic and makes it incredibly hard to find success, especially if you’re like me and occasionally go a week or two without checking your team.

CBS Sports

Cost: Free with fewer features, $150-180 evenly divided between the teams in your league for the full experience.

Pros: when comparing the free version to the other free versions, you can see that CBS has a slightly better-designed site and app than the other two, and they have three different draft rankings from three different writers, so you can see a more diverse and accurate view as to how experts see these players. For the free version, the pros kind of stop there, though. I would say CBS’ free version is by far the worst of the three, but the paid version, as you can expect, is far and away the best version of the standard league sites.

The paid version’s customization options and all the tools available are top-notch. Your league can operate in whatever format and scoring system you want, and you can even customize every little aspect, from score weighting to player positions.

Cons: The free version is pretty bad and is just about universally hated by the fantasy baseball community, so I would recommend another website if you aren’t willing to pony up the dough (it’s not much, like 10 bucks). Even if you are though, this might not be the best site to start on unless you are starting a league with your buddies (and even more specifically a keeper league) and you have one buddy who knows fantasy baseball really well to help set up the league. If you just join a random league, the chances are you may not like or even understand the rules.