Can you live this fantasy life?
I've played fantasy sports for a little over 10 years. No great stretch, mind you, but I've tried to make up for my relatively brief tenure by participating in as many sports as possible (and doing barely well enough to justify the expense to The Wife). From NFL and MLB to PGA and World Cup soccer, I've tried just about all of them. Whether it's because I'm easily distracted or due to some pathological need to gamble I leave as an exercise to the reader.
For example, right now I'm in Peenman's Bracket Challenge on CBS SportsLine (thanks a lot, Georgetown and Pittsburgh), a baseball league (more on that later), the Hollywood Stock Exchange (my handle is "pete_vh"), and I've been screwing around some with Fantasy Congress.
Like I said, I've generally done well enough at this that I can still play (mostly) guilt-free. I've never won any of them outright, but have mostly my money back. Mostly.
Except for those goddamned NCAA brackets.
The technology available today on places like ESPN and Yahoo makes me briefly nostalgic for my first fantasy football league, when our commissioner still got stats from the Chronicle sports page and faxed us all our results on Tuesday morning. Before faxes, I guess they phoned everybody (and before that, I imagine you could get the rushing yards for your favorite Racine Cardinals RB via telegraph). Don't get me wrong, career/projected stats at your fingertips and up-to-the-second injury reports are great, but I'm still not convinced leveling the playing field so much that guys like me who - quite honestly - don't follow the games all that closely is a good thing. Unless I win this year, in which case it's a great idea.
Anyway, baseball season started this week, and like the lazy idiots we are, my league is just holding its draft tonight. I'm not sure how we're going to work everything out, but most of us are pretty casual about it. Andit's a keeper league, so I've already got Brandon Webb and Jose Reyes, which helps.
Anybody else? Surely I'm not the only roto dork out there.
UPDATE: Here's my roster...
C: G. Soto, CHC
SS: J. Reyes, NYM
1B: N. Swisher, CHW
2B: C. Utley, PHI
3B: R. Zimmerman, WAS
OF: A. Rios, TOR
OF: C. Hart, MIL
OF: J. Francoeur, ATL
DH: J. Hamilton, TEX
SP: B. Webb, ARI
SP: J. Verlander, DET
SP: J. Vasquez, CHW
SP: J. Maine, NYM
SP: A. Pettite, NYY...I know, I know
RP: B. Jenks, CHW
Wow, that's a lot of Mets.
Wow, that’s a lot of guys who play ball in Chicago.
I’m smart enough to limit my exposure just to fantasy football. I don’t think I could hold down a job if I was that unproductive more than three months out of the year.
that’s a helluva team, Pete. How many teams are in your league?
I’m in a 15 team league - - tough to have an all-star roster like yours. for your consideration, here is the starting roster of OilCanShotTupac:
C: AJ Pierzynski
1B: Mark Texiera
2B: Mark Ellis
SS: Edgar Renteria
3B: Ty Wigginton
OF: Fukudome, Francour, Sizemore
DH: David Ortiz
SP: Felix Hernandez
SP: Cole Hamels
SP: Rich Harden
SP: Kevin Millwood
SP: Tom Glavine
RP: Francisco Cordero
RP: Matt Capps
My bench looks pretty good……but I need the young arms to produce.
Fantasy player of more than 10 years? That’s awesome. I’d like to invite you and your blog readers to join FantasySportsMatrix.com, a vibrant social networking community for passionate sports fans. We would be delighted for you to join us and let us know what you think of the site.
We believe that fantasy sports is more than just about leagues, stats, and drafts, but about the social phenomenon that drives it. From the sharing and mining of online sports content, to the discussions at the water cooler, fantasy sports have re-defined today’s sports fan. I look forward to seeing you in the ‘Matrix,’ feel free to send me a message. I’m ‘Dr. Mike Pick’ on the site.
Cheers,
Michael Vu,CTO
www.fantasysportsmatrix.com