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In the last five to ten years the Fantasy Baseball Stat Service (or League
Management) Business has transformed from an industry encompassing a large
number of small, specialized sites catering primarily to an audience of hard-core
players with custom, non-standard rules into one involving just a handful of
very large, media-driven sites targeting the much larger market of casual
players comfortable with a standard, basic set of rules. This shift has
created a gaping void in the ranks of reasonably-priced providers capable
and willing to support specialized rules and scoring options required by
old-school, long-time players.
OnRoto.com was formed in 2008 by two of the former owners of TQStats with the
intention of filling that void. Our goal is to provide a platform for more
sophisticated players who prefer to play by their own rules because they're
after a Fantasy Baseball experience that's a whole lot different from the
generic, standardized (and rather bland) version offered by the multi-media
behemoths. OnRoto is looking to be the preferred resource for people who
refer to the game that we play as "Roto Baseball" rather than "Fantasy Baseball".
During our lengthy tenures in this business, we've handled (and honored)
requests for almost every imaginable custom rule -- scoring, transactions,
etc -- and we've designed and developed OnRoto.com to be as flexible and
adaptable as possible. If your leagues uses a quirky, custom rule, the odds
are good that we're already set up to handle it. Last year we built the basic site,
organizing the navigation and data display along lines that experience had
shown to be the most logical, convenient, and easy for roto-players to follow.
This year we're taking things further, adding more features and including
options for more personal, individualized customization of data display pages.
As we did in our first season, we're going to charge $99 per league in
2009 -- and we won't be accepting payments until May, which means we're
offering a rather lengthy free-trial period. We encourage everyone to give
us a look, and by all means pass along comments and suggestions.
To sign up a league, first Click Here
to create a user account, and then click on the "Create a New League" at
the left, which will become active once you're registered.
Thanks for checking us out, and if you have any questions, please contact
us at support@onroto.com.
One final note:
Generally, the less said about the demise of TQStats the better,
but there's one thing we really want to make sure everyone is aware of.
The people at Fanball who were responsible for the TQStats migration debacle
in 2007 are no longer there. They've been replaced by the people who took
TQStats over from us and had been supporting and maintaining it for several years
prior to its ill-fated absorption by Fanball. They are extremely experienced
and capable programmers with solid fantasy baseball backgrounds and impeccable
credentials for customer service and support. They're also really good guys
and friends of ours. We spoke recently with the head person there who indicated
that, as was the case with OnRoto last year, because they had to start from
scratch in re-building the service, they didn't have time to finish all of
the features they had planned to provide, and that (as is, again, the case
here at OnRoto), they are adding a great many new options this year.
We can certainly understand everyone's exasperation over what happened
at TQStats in 2007 (imagine what it was like for us!), but now that
our former colleagues have taken over at Fanball and have righted the
ship there, if you're a current Fanball client, we strongly encouraging
you to stick with them -- unless your league has some unique, non-standard
rules and options which require customized programming and support.
-- Scott and Mark
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