For those of you participating in this year's as-yet-untitled Viva El Birdos CBSSports.com league—and if you were one of the first eighteen people to say you wanted in, you are—I've sent an invitation e-mail out over your VEB registration address. If you didn't get it, or need it again, let me know. 

As ever, the Viva El Birdos League, which I'll be talking about like this maybe once or twice a month once the season starts, is free for all parties concerned. But if you'd like to start your own Commissioner League on CBSSports.com for 50% off, click through this link. With 12 people, it'd end up running $7.50 a head, and for the level of granularity you get in terms of settings and features—I'm actually a little overwhelmed by it all—that doesn't seem so bad. 

I'd like to use this post, and some of the others like it, to see how it is other people play fantasy baseball, and also to figure out how, well, I should play it. Scoring is always the first question. There are some weird options here—there's OPS, in addition to the usual stats, but also triple plays turned(?) and a spot for custom formulas. And I plan on taking advantage of all of them. 

Some age-old questions about fantasy scoring after the jump—

• How do you avoid overrating stolen base guys without taking them out of the game entirely? CBSSports.com helps a little; it offers Stolen Bases-Caught Stealing, which will, at least, penalize the players whose stolen base value isn't even valuable. Now that I have the opportunity I'm tempted to use something like Power/Speed number, which might keep one-dimensional players off the board a little longer, but even in a scenario like that you wouldn't need to get power and speed from the same guy. 
• For pitching, does it make sense to include both FIP and ERA? Whoever picks Javier Vazquez is not allowed to weigh in on this question. But it seems like it might make for interesting draft-day decisions, and I'd love to see, at the end of the season, that somebody has created a Fantasy Dave Duncan team of guys who are successful for no apparent reason. 
• And, finally, the big one: RBI and W-L record, in or out? Personally, and I hope this doesn't do anything to my Basement Writers Association of America membership, I like having them around. They don't say much about how good a player is, but they describe something, and they center the game, a little, in its long history. 

Say you were a commissioner. (Of a league that was 50% off! At this link!) You've got four to six hitting categories and four to six pitching categories to make your ideal head-to-head fantasy league. What do you do? That is, after you append the necessary disclaimer to the end of your sponsored blog post—CBSSports.com is an SB Nation partner and paying sponsor of the SB Nation baseball communities. This post is one of a series of sponsor-endorsed posts related to the CBSSports.com Fantasy Baseball Commissioner League.