Hi all,

New to fantasy baseball, not new to fantasy or baseball. I'm looking to join a league for the first time since I was a kid next year, and so I was brushing up on the basics. Unfortunately, I'm not crazy about the traditional scoring mechanisms...a HR is not the same as an RBI is not the same as a Walk, and simply winning points on those grounds is busy weird to me.

I'm a scientist and a big fan of Sabermetrics. Unlike other sports, there's no simple "gain yards/shoot baskets" way to measure points...But also unlike other sports, we have robust statistics that can interpret the various out comes intelligently on a pitch-by-pitch-by-position basis. It seems to me like we're missing an opportunity to try a more realistic scoring mechanism.

Day by day, you start/sit/schedule 8 position players of the 26 you have on the roster, with pitchers/DH available for NL or AL only leagues. You can schedule guys up to a week in advance so you can choose to take a day off for a player who doesn't have a game if you want. Each position has WAR calculated over the prior few years - with the ongoing season getting mixed in after the all-star break. You publish the formula for each position. Your starting player's stats for the days you start them add to the position's overall stats. Since WAR is based on a nominal 1350 innings, you then scale stats to 1350 innings at the end of the season (eg: 110 hits in 1500 innings becomes 99 hits in 1350 innings). Each position would need at least 1458 innings (162 games) to qualify, so that you make sure nobody has a hot month and then just sits their players for a position. At the end off the season, the WAR for each position is added up to determine how many wins (above replacement) you get. More wins = better, obviously.

Even better, you can use advanced stats to get fielding WAR and directly compare players with pitching WAR. Instead of comparing only pitchers to pitcher categories, you can actually score them all together.

Advantages:
1) More realistic representation of wins. 2) More involved sitting/starting decisions.
3) You can choose to play every day or once a week or just let it ride all season - as long as they get 1458 innings at a position, all is well.
4) It makes injuries less devastating for new players, because you can optionally just sit a position until someone good comes on the market as long as you're above the minimum.
5) Late season advanced strategy may mean sitting players to not dilute your excellent position already, if you make sure your early season gap days are a bit extra.
6) You eliminate perverse benefits in trading.
7) You now can compare different aspects of the game to each other directly.
8) You score in wins.
9) Can be implemented easily over top of existing programs.

If there's something like I'm describing already out there, please please link me. I'm completely new to this, and twenty minutes of googling didn't bring up anything worthwhile, so I'm probably using the wrong search terms.