[Odds and Ends] On Fantasy Baseball

My season in a nutshell.

This spring was the very first that I seriously engaged in the hallowed ritual of fantasy baseball. It all began with a lengthy drafting process, complete with an internet connection failure scare that forced me to make my last few rounds of picks via a neighbor’s unsecured wireless network.

In the time since that fateful night, fantasy baseball has become an all-consuming pastime for me. Checking stats, matchups, tinkering with the roster. Give me a computer and a few minutes of free time and inevitably I will end up on the ESPN Fantasy site. Yet for all of the effort I have put into my team, it is not very good, 11th out of 12 in my league. Part of that is a function of my passe approach to the team for the first few weeks of the season that dug me a deep hole, and the rest is primarily an unfortunate tendency to pick up a Cinderella off the waiver wire just in time for it to turn into a pumpkin. Yet for all the disappointments, there is simply no feeling quite like claiming a newly called-up prospect before anyone else notices and then watching them succeed (I’m looking at you, Carlos Santana).

This joke is getting old, fantasy writers.

I should probably be reasonable and accept my rightful place as an inadequate fantasy owner, and yet even now I still harbour grand delusions of being able to make a run after the All-Star break and finish the year in a respectable, if not necessarily medal-worthy, place in the standings. I could say that in the end all the work put into my team is the real reward, but that would be a cheesy cop-out, because all I really want to do is to make like DJ Khaled and win.

Win-win-win.