Yahoo Fantasy Baseball: A 101 guide on how to play for the 2026 MLB season

Fantasy baseball remains a staple for MLB fans, matching the everyday excitement on the field that has truly become a worldwide phenomenon. If you love baseball, if you count down the days from the end of the World Series to when pitchers and catchers report in February, this is the game for you. You’ll get to build your team through the draft, targeting a mix of stars, solid starters, rookies and role players. Then ride the highs and lows of the baseball season, from Opening Day all the way to the final out as your squad goes for the title.

If you’ve never played fantasy baseball before and want to know more about how it works, don’t worry. We’ve put together this how-to guide that has all the information you need to play and win. See why this game within the game is so much fun.

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What is fantasy baseball?

When it comes down to it, fantasy baseball is a collection of players assembled on a team, and their accumulated real-life stats get converted into fantasy points. If you’re able to score more fantasy points or win more categories than your opponent, then you win that particular week’s matchup. If you’re playing weekly matchups and win enough times throughout the season, then you can secure a spot in the fantasy playoffs and potentially become a champion.

Maybe you don’t get to celebrate like the World Series champions, with a parade through your city’s streets and thousands of fans cheering you on. But with a fantasy baseball championship comes the reward of getting to remind your league mates who the best is with some friendly trash talk during the offseason. You might even get a prize for winning it all, depending on your league style. Not too shabby, huh?

[Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for the 2026 MLB season]

There are many different ways to play fantasy baseball, and it’s easy using Yahoo’s default settings. Or, you can customize the scoring settings to suit your league’s tastes. But one thing is the same: you, as the manager, must draft your team first (more on that below). After that, you manage the starting lineup and bench, adding players to your active roster and dropping them based on injuries and performance. Players can be added from the free-agent pool called the waiver wire — you’ll usually need to cut a player in order to add one to your roster. There are also deadlines to keep in mind when making lineup and roster changes, as well as important dates to note throughout the season.

Trades could come into play, too. That’s when you and another manager in your league agree to swap players to suit your mutual needs for the rest of the season.

All this happens throughout the season as you operate as a de facto general manager. This regular dedication can mean starting the right player for a day or week (depending on whether you’re in a daily or weekly league format) to accumulate fantasy points and statistics that propel you to wins in weekly competitions against opponents.

Don’t feel that this game is being played on a computer. Enjoy watching the actual MLB games and look at how the scoring translates to fantasy as you follow your team’s progress on your personal device or through our very user-friendly Yahoo Fantasy app. You’ll see that your team compiles stats for home runs, runs, RBI, wins, saves and many other categories. As you get more experience, you’ll see how stars like Aaron Judge and Tarik Skubal help you across several categories, and thus are more valuable to your team.

Some leagues play for more than just bragging rights. They can set a monetary reward for the champion or the top finishers in the league, staggered based on final placement. For private leagues, the commissioner works with league members to determine what’s at stake and how the end-of-season awards are distributed. Yahoo can even help with holding the funds and paying out the winners for Private Prize Leagues. Some leagues even agree upon a punishment for the last-place team, and those can range from funny to embarrassing to, well, both. So don’t finish last!

What if I don’t have enough people to play?

Don’t worry if you can’t get a group together to play fantasy baseball — there are options to play for free or for cash in public leagues on Yahoo. Want to keep it casual with no monetary stakes involved? Playing for the first time and want to give it a test drive? Join a free league and have some fun without all the pressure.

If you ever had a few friends who wanted to play but not enough to fill an entire league, our feature, Draft With Friends, is the perfect solution! You can instantly invite up to three people to join you in a free public league. All you have to do is enter a free public draft room and tap the “Add Friends Pre-Draft” button to invite people to join your draft! (This feature is currently only for public leagues.)

If you’re confident and want to up the ante, join a Public Prize League by paying an entry fee. This fee goes towards cash prize payouts for first, second and third place. That means if you don’t like your team, draft again!

What are the different scoring formats in fantasy baseball?

Players on your fantasy team’s active roster put up stats in the categories tied to your league settings, and your format dictates your scoring. There are three formats in which people typically play fantasy baseball.

Try one format and see if there are any tweaks you’d like to make. Or change formats altogether. That’s what’s fun about fantasy baseball — there are different ways to play to suit what you enjoy the most. The main formats to play are:

1. Head-to-head (H2H)

This format is similar to fantasy football in that there are weekly matchups against opponents from your league.

In private leagues, you can increase or decrease the number of teams based on how many people you want to play in your league. It’s ideal to have an even number of teams for H2H leagues, but there’s an option to play with an odd number (as long as you have five or more teams).

Now let’s get more specific about the types of head-to-head scoring:

Categories or One win: Fantasy managers move players back and forth from their starting lineup to their bench on a daily basis, starting Monday and running through the final games Sunday, with teams compiling statistics in the same 10 categories in H2H Category and One Win leagues — five for batters and five for pitchers. Those categories are runs, home runs, RBI, stolen bases and batting average for batters. And wins, saves, strikeouts, earned run average and WHIP (walks/hits per inning pitched).

H2H Categories is a cumulative style where your record is how many categories you’ve won and lost in a week and over the course of the season. The goal is to win at least six of the 10 categories by the end of each week. Note: you can also consider using more or fewer than 10 categories.

H2H One Win (Private Leagues only) is identical to H2H Categories, except only 1 result is added to the W-L-T record per week.

In both formats, standings are kept for your league, and at the end of the season, a designated number of teams make it to the playoffs.

Head-to-Head Points and Head-to-Head Weekly Points: In these formats, there are point values assigned to every statistic in 17 separate categories; both the hitting and pitching point designations for each stat are listed below and account for scoring.

Batter Stat Categories and Point Values

Pitcher Stat Categories and Point Values

These two options — one with daily roster management and the other with weekly, when players lock every Monday — are a combination of Points and the H2H formats above, in that each matchup, the teams compile points.

Ultimately, teams are assigned wins and losses each week, and the standings are kept for each league. A predetermined number of teams make the playoffs, which begin Week 24 and continue until one team is crowned champion at the completion of Week 26 and the MLB season.

Default scoring in all newly-created leagues will be Head-to-Head Points. This will be the standard across all new leagues, but private-league commissioners can change their scoring settings if they so choose, while those in public leagues will also have Head-to-Head Category and Rotisserie scoring as options as well.

2. Points Only

In this format, similar to H2H Points, there are point values assigned to the 17 separate categories listed above and account for scoring. Points are added up to determine the standings — there are no playoffs in this format.

3. Rotisserie

This is the original format that was founded in the 1980s. Active players’ stats are compiled for each fantasy squad, and then teams are ranked in each category based on their cumulative numbers, with the standings determined by how highly the players rank in all categories combined — there are no playoffs in this format. These are the 10 categories, divided evenly between pitching and hitting.

• Batter Stat Categories: Runs (R), Home Runs (HR), Runs Batted In (RBI), Stolen Bases (SB), Batting Average (AVG)

• Pitcher Stat Categories: Wins (W), Saves (SV), Strikeouts (K), Earned Run Average (ERA), (Walks + Hits)/ Innings Pitched (WHIP)

So, if your team has the most home runs in a 10-team league, that would be worth 10 points. If your squad has the fewest homers, you would receive 1 point, and so on, for how you rank in each of the categories.

How do you draft a fantasy baseball team?

There are some dates on the calendar that you always circle in anticipation: Halloween, your Birthday, Opening Day of the MLB season and … Draft Day! That’s the day everyone in your league convenes to pick their respective teams. If you’re lucky to be near one another or get that many people in the same place at the same time, there are few things better than a live draft. If your league is scattered all over the country — or in some cases the world — Yahoo Fantasy has you covered. You can draft online from your computer, phone or personal device. For commissioners, we also have tips on getting your league ready to draft.

You can also practice by partaking in a mock draft to get ready for the real thing. It’s a valuable resource before going into a live setting because you want to get comfortable with the draft format (more on that below), plus get a feel for the board and where players are being selected. You can mock out of any draft position to see what type of team you can get after having the No. 1 pick, No. 2 pick and so on.

If you’re looking for a baseline expectation or range of where to expect certain players to get drafted, Yahoo Fantasy’s draft analysis tool helps understand each player’s average draft position (ADP). Some will go later, and others will go early, so mocking will provide a sense of the market value when it’s time to draft.

The Yahoo default positions for each team in a 10-team league are: a catcher (C), first baseman (1B), second baseman (2B), third baseman (3B), shortstop (SS), three outfielders (OF), two utility players (Util), two starting pitchers (SP), two relief pitchers (RP), four pitchers (P), five bench spots (BN) and four injured list spots (IL). Players are moved in and out of the starting lineup based on how managers want to deploy their teams, according to league rules determining daily or weekly transactions.

The most common way to select teams is through what’s called a snake draft. In a 10-team league, after the order is determined, teams start drafting from No. 1 through No. 10, and then in the second round start at 10 and count backward toward No. 1 again. Then repeat the process until all the teams have been selected. The default positions listed above go through 23 rounds, but that can be increased based on your league’s wishes.

If you’d like a more challenging way to draft, your league can elect to try a Salary Cap Draft, where all teams start with a predetermined budget, usually $260. Instead of going around and picking players, the managers in your league get to nominate players and assign them a salary as long as it’s within their remaining budget. While it would be impossible to roster Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto on the same team in a snake draft format (both are among the consensus top-10 players, according to Yahoo Fantasy rankings), in a Salary Cap Draft, managers can load up on stars and leave a few dollars for less-productive players to fill out the rest of their roster. It takes longer to draft this way, but there is more strategy in managing a budget to fill out a roster.

Plenty to get excited about and more to come

We’ll have some awesome new features to announce for the 2026 season soon, but here are a couple of things to get pumped up about now:

Rest easy with Start Active Players

Want to lessen the load of having to meticulously set your fantasy baseball lineup, day in and day out? With the tap of a button on the web or from the Yahoo Fantasy app, the free Start Active Players feature will set your lineup for you, filling your lineup with healthy players who have a game on that specific day/week and benching those who are off and/or injured.

If you’re ready to take things to the next level, you can get something even better …

Gain an edge with new Yahoo Fantasy+ features

Yahoo Fantasy+ premium features help you win from draft day to the playoffs. Players with Fantasy+ are 81%‡ more likely to win their league. Here are three new tools* for coming for this baseball season for Fantasy+ subscribers:

• Instant Mock Draft: Practice your draft in seconds. Test different strategies, positions and roster constructions as many times as you want, anytime, instantly.

• Draft Kits: An AI-Powered Draft Kit featuring a personalized cheat sheet with rankings, tiers and projections tailored specifically to your league. Exclusively in the Yahoo Fantasy App.

• Assistant GM: Manage smarter, not harder with the new feature that helps set your perfect lineup with one click and so much more.

*These Fantasy+ tools are coming to Fantasy Baseball. They already exist for other fantasy sports. ‡ Based on 2024 Yahoo Fantasy Sports LLC data.

After your draft is complete, the fun begins! It’s time to start your quest to win that fantasy championship. There are going to be tough decisions on who to add off the waiver wire and who to drop. You may need to pull off a trade or two along the way. Our analysts will provide top-notch advice all season long to help your chances. And for personalized advice, Yahoo Fantasy+ offers a wealth of in-season tools to give you an extra edge when it comes to roster moves — on top of that, there are also several exclusive perks with our partners valued at more than $250 with your membership.

While you’re hard at work, don’t forget to take some time to let your leaguemates know who’s the best. At the end of the day, it’s all about having fun (and winning). Good luck in your fantasy baseball leagues, and join or create a league today!