Running a new league this year, need advice

[Clippins]

I decided I wanted to run my own league this year with friends and need some advice on what works best. I want to incorporate a keeper element in the league and let that evolve as the league matures. I also want to run where it's weekly head-to-head where you have several stat categories for hitting and pitching, but haven't decided if each week you gain 1 win by winning the most categories against your opponent or if each week say you win 6 categories and they win 4, you get 6 pts and they get 4. Which do you find is more effective? Also how many categories do you find is most effective between hitting and pitching and which categories? Do you try and have an odd number of categories to prevent ties? If so do you have more categories on the hitting side or pitching? Also what site do you use? I was thinking Yahoo, but I can't figure out how to make it a keeper league. As you can see I have a bunch of questions, but really want this first year league to run smooth to keep the guys interested all year and looking forward to coming back next year. Thanks!

[JBird]

yahoo is actually really easy. under the commish tools you can set it to be a keeper but it wont really play into effect until next year. the 2nd year of the league you will be setting a keeper selection deadline everyone selects who they want and you as the commisioner have to approve of them and apply them to the draft however you want.
If you want to do H2H categories i would make it so that each category is a win or loss. Don't worry about ties week to week. i ran my league this way for 3 years and by the end of the year never had 2 teams end in a tie. if you make it unbalance you will find teams stacking up on whichever group has more categories. i personally switched to a points (i.e. single 1 point, double 2pts, triple 3, etc) based system in which you can have fractional points. 15 categories for each hitter and pitchers. which ever team has the most points at the end of the week gets the win. the thing you need to watch out for if you run it this way is pitchers can out weight hitter in a big way. for instance in my screwed up system (which i fixed) trout put up 507 total last year, Kershaw put up 545. Seems ok but when you really look at it trout played in a total of something like 1,200 innings. Kershaw pitched 198 innings. therefore the points dont really match up and we had guys not filling an entire roster of hitters to stash pitchers because by ratio it made more sense to hold onto 18 pitchers and maybe 6 decent hitters.
ok theres the info i have for you hope it helps and doesnt confuse the crud out of you.

[Clippins]

yahoo is actually really easy. under the commish tools you can set it to be a keeper but it wont really play into effect until next year. the 2nd year of the league you will be setting a keeper selection deadline everyone selects who they want and you as the commisioner have to approve of them and apply them to the draft however you want.
If you want to do H2H categories i would make it so that each category is a win or loss. Don't worry about ties week to week. i ran my league this way for 3 years and by the end of the year never had 2 teams end in a tie. if you make it unbalance you will find teams stacking up on whichever group has more categories. i personally switched to a points (i.e. single 1 point, double 2pts, triple 3, etc) based system in which you can have fractional points. 15 categories for each hitter and pitchers. which ever team has the most points at the end of the week gets the win. the thing you need to watch out for if you run it this way is pitchers can out weight hitter in a big way. for instance in my screwed up system (which i fixed) trout put up 507 total last year, Kershaw put up 545. Seems ok but when you really look at it trout played in a total of something like 1,200 innings. Kershaw pitched 198 innings. therefore the points dont really match up and we had guys not filling an entire roster of hitters to stash pitchers because by ratio it made more sense to hold onto 18 pitchers and maybe 6 decent hitters.
ok theres the info i have for you hope it helps and doesnt confuse the crud out of you.

Thanks for the info. So then the concept of each category being a win and a loss is the same as the example I gave above where for instance there are 10 categories and 1 team wins 6 of them 1 week and the team they play wins 4 of them, after that week essentially the team that won 6 would have a record of 6-4 and the team that won 4 would be 4-6. If that's what you meant, then that's sort of the direction I was leaning. It sorta lessens the blow of losing the entire week if you come up 1 stat category short.

[JBird]

Yea that's correct. I think I had 6 or 7 categories for each when I formatted my league that way.