Saturday, April 09, 2005

What's Your Fantasy

Last weekend, while Mark and Stacy were here we laboriously created teams and filled out our rosters for Fantasy Baseball. If you're not familiar with Fantasy Sports, it's basically created on the premise that statistics should have some regular application towards the destruction of the joy of sports. Why not take something that verges on art and reduce it to math.

In all honesty, I found fantasy basketball really fun. So I figured I'd give this a try. I am getting hammered. Just demolished. I played baseball for a long time, I pitched and caught for about a decade, so I figured I'd have some advantage over Mark in this. I also assumed, very erroneously, that defense and pitching mattered. Nope. Growing up a National League guy (Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, Barry Larkin, Chris Sabo, and the lot) I believe in defense, pitching and small ball. Turns out fantasy is to real baseball what porn is to real sex. Oversized people, oversized numbers, no compromise and no sacrifice--oh and there is some annoying designated hitter who seems to only be there to add to the output. There's no love, no moving the runner into scoring position. It's all about the home run, the run scored. THere's no points for hitting it to the second baseman so that the runner advances to third. It's just about the money hit. Sorry this analogy is getting stranger by the second.

Long story short, I'm obsessed with this stuff. It has data, baseball...and seems to nearly justify watching a lot of baseball. Today was the first day where my time started to play well (How can Pujols go this far into the season without having a 3 RBI game?).

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