The 2012 baseball season starts on April 4th, but for myself, like a lot of other fans out there, our season starts several weeks before. With my fantasy baseball draft penciled in for April 2nd, my preparation for the upcoming year is full of spreadsheets and projections, analyzing every last number to try and get a leg up on my friends. Over the course of the year I might cheer for Ryan Braun, Roy Halladay, or Fautino De Los Santos (relief pitcher for the Oakland Athletics for those unfamiliar). I may cringe when Adam Lind hits a homerun because he’s playing against me that week. Why? Because I need to beat my friends.
I first started playing fantasy sports way back in the mid nineties, and it was a hockey pool my friends started. Unfortunately I beat them so bad that I wasn’t invited back the next year, but the seed had been planted. I started playoff pools amongst my family members for everything from the NHL playoffs to the Olympics, tallying points by hand from the mornings’ box scores (this was before I had internet at home and sites like Yahoo and ESPN made everything much easier). Now I enter pools in pretty much every sport: football, basketball, golf, Nascar, you name it and I’ve competed in it… on the fantasy side of course.
I know I’m obsessed. Last year when I forwarded my friend some info on a league called “Franchball” that I had found on Reddit (it encompassed creating a full team’s roster plus up to forty minor league positions), I expected the response I got: “that’s way too intense.” Sure maybe it was a bit too much, and I passed on the idea of becoming a part-time general manager of a non-existent baseball team, but say my friend had agreed, and instead said: “that sounds awesome, I’m gonna do it!” Well of course I would have to enter also because there’s no way he can prove he knows more about baseball than I do.
A few years ago a show called The League premiered on the FX Network in the United States; it was created by Jeff Schaffer and his wife Jackie Marcus for those of us obsessed with fantasy sports but has little to do with football and is more concerned with the bonds these fantasy leagues create. Schaffer, a writer and executive producer for Seinfeld, took a hold of the idea that this little hobby many of us sports fans have is actually much more than just a way to pass the time and involve yourself in the game, it is a way to compete amongst your friends and earn the glory we all watch transpire in professional sports. In its most primal sense: it is a way to prove that you are the best, the alpha male of your group.
The characters in Schaffer’s show are not so much concerned with who knows the most about football or picks the best team, but rather who wins regardless of how. It is a survival of the fittest, a reason to stay up late watching every last game in case someone gets hurt (Tom Brady in 2008) or someone does the unexpected (Michael Vick in 2010), just so you can scoop him off the waiver wires before someone else does and then brag about it the next time you see them. It requires you to be on your game at all time lest your friend get the upper hand in a balls-out, cutthroat competition to win, even if it means being an asshole and not telling your opposing owner that his shortstop is injured (news you’ve known for a day or so) before his team locks for the week.
This past weekend our fantasy baseball league held a meeting at our local bar; the ten of us got together and discussed in depth how our league would be set up this year. For those unfortunate non-baseball fans around us it must have sounded like we were talking gibberish. We talked about OPS versus OBP, Wins versus Quality Starts, and discussed how keepers would work with an elaborate scheme that uses the draft position above where they are normally picked in the following year (free agents constitute as use of a 15th round pick). In the end we decided to switch out the traditional batting average statistic for OPS and include holds in a category of Holds+Saves, keeping a 5×5 format while giving value to players who draw walks and hit for extra bases along with mid-relievers. It was a fun night.
The work that goes into fantasy sports can only be expressed to those who are truly competitive. For those who don’t compete in sports and don’t watch them, it’s hard to understand why someone would put all this effort in something with little return, but it’s also something that connects you with the game and the players. Cheering for Bautista is a little more gratifying when he’s on your team, and having Verlander blow up for three runs in the 1st inning is much more rewarding when he’s on the other guy’s. Fantasy sports allow you to feel as if you are connected with the players, that they have become a part of your team in an attempt to prove your dominance amongst your friends.
Greg Jennings, wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers, discussed the topic with Forbes Magazine while attending a panel at SXSW a couple weeks ago. When asked about players in the league who themselves indulge in the make-believe sport he replied: “Anything that’s extra competition, guys want to be a part of it.” The competitive nature of sports extends beyond the field even for players themselves, wanting to conquer wherever and however they can. Actual players are concerned about how their fantasy performance is on any given day because they don’t want to let their “owners” down; the connection between fans and players apparently works both ways.
In two weeks my friends and I will sit down and do our fantasy baseball draft. Like The League we too have our championship trophy, named the Vaughn Costner (a combination of baseball legends Ricky “Wild Thing Vaughn” and Kevin Costner) that we will compete to win over the course of the year. No money will change hands and to the victor goes the glory of being able to call himself the champ and keep the somewhat ugly, somewhat beautiful, holographic blue award on their bookshelf for an entire year. It is a worthy prize of the uncountable hours invested into research, analysis, and cunning manipulation of the waiver wire and other teams; anything just to beat my friends.
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Nick McIsaac is Toronto Standard’s sports writer. Follow him on Twitter (for everything sports related) at @nickclass.
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