Fantasy baseball is the longest and most time consuming fantasy sport because of the lengthy season (162 games) and how statistically driven the sport is. You need to pace yourself and not burn out early because it is a long, DAILY battle you're fighting to try and win your league.
 
The other difficult part of a baseball season is managing two completely different aspects of the game - offense and pitching. Where all the players on your fantasy basketball or football roster are contributing to the same cause - yards, touchdowns, points, rebounds, assists, etc. - a star like Alex Rodriguez or Johan Santana can only contribute to less than half of your scoring. Balancing all of these elements is tricky, and it's impossible to master all of them.
 
Scoring and league format vary, so it's important to know what categories count and how your roster is built. For example, if you can only have one first baseman in your starting lineup, it doesn't make much sense to draft four of them in the first 10 rounds. Or if there's a premium on stolen bases, you need to consider how to apply that fact to your draft and free agent strategies.
 
The most common formats for baseball leagues are rotisserie and head-to-head. In both instances, you're trying to rack up as much production in a variety of categories, the most common of which are: Batting average, runs scored, home runs, RBI, stolen bases, ERA, WHIP (number of walks and hits allowed per inning pitched), strikeouts, saves and wins. Some more sophisticated leagues can get into other percentages (slugging, on-base, OPS), walks, doubles, triples, and a host of others, so again, be absolutely certain what you should be looking for on draft day.
 
A rotisserie league is a season-long race to accumulate the best stats possible. Points are deduced from your production based on how your totals stack up to the other teams in your league. In a 10-team league, a 10 is rewarded to the team that wins each category, while a 9 is rewarded to second place, an 8 to third place, and so on. Your overall points total is found by adding all of your categories together. If your league features the 10 most common categories and you win every single one of them, you will score a 100 and learn that you might have been in the least competitive league on the planet.
 
Head-to-head leagues function the same way, but totals are calculated on a weekly basis. You play against one team at a time, rather than every team simultaneously, but you do so over an unpredictable week rather than a whole season. You earn a certain win-loss record against an opponent based on how many categories you win or lose. If you win 6 of them and lose 4, then your record for the week goes down as 6-4 and you're ranked accordingly in the league.
 
Where a rotisserie league names a league champion based on who has the most points on the final day of the year, a head-to-head league determines a winner by using a playoff system. You should understand that fantasy playoffs begin before the regular season is over since when actual playoffs begin, the majority of teams are no longer playing. The last team standing in a head-to-head bracket is your league champion, so upsets are more common than you'd like and untimely injuries can ruin your chances.