As Major League Baseball’s 2009 season playoffs kick off today, it’s only fitting to reminisce on a season of my life that slammed shut three days ago on Sunday night.
Real life baseball playoffs begin when the fantasy baseball playoff ends. With this coming basketball season, I will have reached my 1-year anniversary as a participant in fantasy sports. Fantasy sports is a phenomenon that arose out of, well, real life sports. When guys obsessed with sports and stat lines couldn’t get enough of just watching sports and writing down stats in their tattered steno notebook religiously, fantasy sports was birthed to create a competition out of said stats when fantasy managers draft fantasy players in fantasy drafts. I know. It sounds very cryptic like some Dungeons and Dragon-esque RPG card game. All you really need to understand is that wins and losses are based on a real life player’s performance and egos are inflated and deflated accordingly.
I consider myself an avid sportsman. I play baseball, basketball, football, tennis – basically any sport I try my hand at, I’ll do okay at based on my natural athleticism. Not your typical asian stereotype but I got started young. I also try to follow most of the major sports on television or the internet. Baseball is especially dear to me because it was the sport of my youth. Baseball brought me the most joy when I played in little league. I lived for the days I would be slotted to pitch off the wee little league mound. If there was any chance of a game getting canceled due to weather conditions, I would unceasingly pray to an unjust God to allow for the clouds to dissipate and the sunbeams to fight their way through.
So when I signed up to run a fantasy baseball league with a bunch of my non-baseball playing/watching friends, I figured I would be a shoe-in for the win. I knew the best players and I understood the nuances of the game so there was no way I was gonna let myself lose. Things started off just like that. I was at the top. I made the right pick-ups and I spoke sweetly enough to leverage at least three completely unbalanced trades. Statistically, my team was unbeatable and I couldn’t wait to prove my worth in this game of numbers.
Apparently pride cometh before the fall. Baseball is one of the hardest sports to fantasy manage because there are so many games. Every team plays 162 individual games with over 2430 games league-wide. You have to consider everything when you’re managing — which pitcher your batters are facing and how they’ve fared against him in the past, which batters your pitchers are facing and their statistical history, which stadium they’re playing at, whether or not your player has been over-played and so forth.
It’s a time consuming research process and you’ve really gotta be on top of things to be a winner. And you never know what could happen in the marathon season that is baseball. Your star player could get banned 50 games for substance abuse. Your star pitcher could pull a tendon and be out for the rest of the season. All’s fair in love and baseball and I did okay, finding myself in the championship game the last two weeks of the fantasy season. I was absolutely sure I was going to win because the guy I was playing was one of the players that didn’t even care. He didn’t update his roster weeks at a time because his laptop was on the fritz. He left his players in for weeks at a time and he barely squeaked into the playoff rounds. There was no possible way I would give it up when victory seemed so inevitable.
Well, sad to say, I am the first loser of my fantasy league. Second-place doesn’t amount to much. So as we go into this major league playoff season, forget the record of the teams. Forget which teams look like the best bet to win. Forget who has the statistical superiority and payroll. Similarly to fantasy baseball (and to my dismay), everything is up for grabs. Play ball.
