My friends and I have just been doing leagues from scratch every year but we are starting a keeper league in the fall for football and then next spring for baseball...how do people usually set them up? How many players is standard in both football and baseball to keep? We discussed giving up the draft pick for the player you are keeping...like if you drafted Hanley or LT in the 1st round this year, and you wanted to keep them, you would give up your first round pick next year...or if you took a flier on a rookie late in the draft you'd only have to give up that late round pick...is there a better way?

I prefer auctions for keepers. Are you guys in different cities so that's not possible? Maybe a few on speaker phone? Then keep five players and their salary is inflated $5 each year. If you want to do a snake draft, I would do five and have the players round lost like you said with Hanley. I don't think a snake draft works as well for keepers though.

Ya we're pretty much all over the place for locations...I'm betting that we will probably end up going with the snake draft and losing the pick you kept for the player because I don't think some people will want to get into auctions...the only problem I see with the snake draft is that won't pretty much everyone's first round pick be kept? and therefore the draft would be like starting after that

If you drafted David Wright with the 1st pick this year, would you keep him at one or throw him back? I'd throw him back. Lots of top picks will be kept, but not all.

Would you make it so you could only keep a player for like 2 years and then he went back into the draft...or could a player be a lifetime member of the squad?

If you're doing lifetime, then you need to have inflation. So in an auction every year the player's cost goes up by say $5 or in a snake draft the players move forward a few rounds. For instance, if they move forward three rounds then the fourth round becomes the first round and anyone drafted in the first three rounds gets put back in. If you were to do a limited amount of time on the keeper, I'd go with three years max.