What’s Your Fantasy?

I spent most of my Sunday involved in online fantasy drafts.  As I sat there, laptop in the locked and upright position, the NCAA tournament playing on my TV in the background, I came to an astounding conclusion.  The Internet has revolutionized fantasy baseball.  Pause for effect.  Still in shock?  I’ll give you another moment to gather your senses.

Before the Seamheads nation begins sharpening your pitchforks, calling for my head, and burning straw replicas of me in effigy, believe me, I know my premise is far from groundbreaking.  In recent years, the combination of the Internet and fantasy baseball has been a booming market.  With the Internet, where fantasy players once had to comb the box scores in their local daily newspapers and perform some impressive mathematical calisthenics to track the progress of their first round pick, now all they have to do is log on.  Trades once performed over the phone and, even more shockingly, by snail mail now occur at the speed of a double-click.  And, of course, the existence and prevalence of more advanced statistics like WHIP, OPS, and percentage of inherited runners scored have birthed entire generations of numbers-hungry stat-heads, who have in turn revolutionized the way Major League Baseball is run.

But you know all this.  On Sunday, as I headed into my fifth hour staring at a computer screen, looking at the tiny injury-update buttons, hoping to find something that one of my 26 competitors might have missed, I was struck by how much I longed for the bygone days of fantasy sports.  Well, maybe I didn’t miss the ever-present calculators or molasses-paced player acquisitions, but I did pine for the drafts.  There are many advantages to online drafts, mainly that people living in different time zones can participate in the same league, but like a Quest Tech strike zone, something about them just doesn’t ring true.

I work with a guy that annually devotes a weekend to his buddies, adult beverages, and a fantasy draft.  I have to say, I’m jealous.  Much like a weekly game of poker, I began playing fantasy baseball not because I was hopelessly addicted to statistics or gambling, but because I enjoyed hanging out with my friends.  Like Knish in Rounders, I will not sit down at a poker table in a casino unless people I know and like surround me.  In my opinion, a sterile, high pressure, limited chatter environment simply cannot hold a candle to the boisterous, good-natured, low stakes charm of a home game.  Ultimately, that’s what online drafts are: the low murmur of a casino table versus the high comedy and dull roar of a home game.

Granted, during an online draft, you can talk some smack, drop a few good one-liners about Cody Ransom and BJ Ryan’s disappearing fastball, and make the obligatory “I’m-going-to-take-the-best-softball-player-we-know-as-my-first-round-pick” joke, but the rest falls by the wayside.  I think back to the drafts I experienced in college.  These were marathon affairs where we would close down the back room of our favorite bar, order enough wings and burgers to keep the ranchers of Missouri financially solvent, and go through more pitchers than the 2008 New York Yankees.

We would all saunter in with various levels of research, ranging from a ratty printout of some “expert’s” rankings littered with margin notes to dog-eared copies of the Baseball Prospectus complete with color-coded post-it notes.  Whenever a pick was made, the room would be filled with the sounds of 12 pens scratching names off a page, audible obscenities, and immediate evaluations of the performance.  Did the choice make sense?  Is the player overrated?  Did you really need to take that long to pick Albert Pujols?  As the draft progressed, people would inevitably be shamed and peer-pressured into taking players they didn’t want.  Imagine if Tony Soprano really wanted you to take a flier on Ian Snell.  Bad picks were mocked relentlessly, good picks met with silent approval.

Inevitably, we would reach a lull in the action, and all look towards the owner of the next selection.  He would sit there, pen dangling out of his mouth; his lips stained with wing sauce, intently poring over his packets of information.  Side conversations would ensue; people would start to talk themselves into the dominance of their teams.  Ten minutes would pass, and ultimately, our guy would raise his glazed eyes and ask, “Wait, is it my turn?”  It never failed to bring the house down.

At the end of the day, these drafts came with their own pitfalls.  Too often, you would wake up the following morning and realize you had drafted Bernie Williams when Ken Griffey Jr. was still on the board.  You had to trust that the commissioner had diligently noted everyone’s selections and that that spill in the tenth round hadn’t wiped out the entire board.  Nevertheless, in these times of Twitter, text message-based fan polling, and social networks substituting for human contact, I certainly miss the good old days.

Now, if you’ll excuse.  I have a draft starting on Yahoo in eleven seconds.