ESPN Fantasy Baseball

I give ESPN a lot of crap for a lot of things (and, frankly, they deserve 99% of it), but I have to give them props for their new fantasy baseball engine. As someone who has used ESPN for almost 10 years, and Yahoo for the last five or so, I have to say that ESPN's 2007 version blows every other league I've used out of the water.

Depending on how you configure your free league (they're all free this year, although you can pay to play in leagues that award prizes), you can manually enter keepers before the draft, trade draft picks, customize a countless number of stats (including fielding), and have leagues of up to 20 teams (with divisions, if you feel like it). You can create league trophies and awards (for good and bad achievements), post messages, headlines, and general smack-talk on the main league page, and chat with other league members in the league chat room. You can upload your own team logo. You can dress players the same day you claim them (provided they hit your roster before the first game of the day starts), and you can set a specific number of votes needed to veto a trade, rather than leaving it in the hands of the faceless ESPN commissioner.

I realize that that paragraph was a series of incoherent sentences, but there's so much new, useful, functional, stuff that it's hard to organize it. If you're setting up a fantasy league this year, I definitely recommend checking it out.

But Baseball Tonight is still dead to me...