Scott Desgrosseilliers

Fantasy Baseball Drafts Are Like First Dates

A fantasy baseball auction has a lot in common with a first date that involves drinking.  There is some awkward conversation at the start and nervous tension fills the air.  A few comments that are kind of funny get over-laughed at.  And a few people are over eager.  Fortunately (unless you have a high school aged daughter) there is alcohol to smooth out the inhibitions.  You start feeling good about things due to the alcohol-impaired judgment.  But in the sober morning reality you realize your date/team was not as good as you thought.  Let me explain further.

At the beginning of a first date, things don’t always flow smoothly.  People are still in their own heads and unadjusted to the social interaction of a date.  You size up the other person's appearance, facial expressions, tone of voice, its a nonstop judge-fest.  At a fantasy baseball auction, owners are groggy from the night before, or dealing with wives or girlfriends that need care and explanation on why we all are off with our buddies drinking for 14 hours one day a year.  All of us are older and haven't spent enough time doing our cheatsheets so we are kind of anxious.  Not in a public speaking anxiety kind of way, more of a "I didn't do my homework and the teacher decided to collect it today" way.  So both a date and a fantasy auction have the initial jitters.

As the date starts to unfold, a lot of small talk is usually made over drinks or dinner.  A person might start speaking on a date and find themselves staring in shock and awe at the words that are coming out, thinking "why the hell am I saying that, I can't stand Hillary Clinton!" while their mouths are telling their date "I totally agree with you, its about time we had Hillary in 2008".  This foot-in-mouth disease strikes fantasy baseball auctions equally fierce.  Your mind will wail in agony as your mouth makes the words "I bid 20 on Barry Zito".  Its almost as if there can be 3 different "yous" on a date/fantasy auction - Your mind, your mouth, and then the independent 3rd observer (drunken fantasy buddhism).  The disconnect between mind-mouth-self is a universal occurrence, and it happens both on dates and at fantasy baseball auctions.

Sometime during a first date that involves a few beers or cocktails, the participants relax, jokes fly, and a bond is formed.  Perhaps you notice that your date is more attractive than you initially thought.  You may even entertain thoughts that "this could be the one".  The same damn things happens with your fantasy baseball team!  You are 8 beers deep before the sun goes down, you think everyone's one-liners are hilarious, and you LOVE how your draft is going.  In fact, you think that you will probably win the title this year!

The morning after the first date reality sets in.  She had an annoying laugh or said nothing intelligent for 3 hours.  Or you wake up and realize you still have horrific garlic breath and probably spew noxious fumes all over her when you talked all night.  You wince as you realize the date was probably not that great and you turn on your computer to check email and search for new candidates.

After a fantasy baseball auction, the next morning you wake up with bad breath from all of the nasty junk food and draft beer from the night before.  You look at your team on paper and realize it is not nearly as good as you thought it was.  And you get on the computer to  look for new players to add to your team.

Forest Gump once said that life is like a box of chocolates.  He could've also said fantasy baseball is like a booze-filled first date.

RotoExpert.com

I am part-owner and weekly columnist in the fantasy sports advice site www.rotoexpert.com that launched earlier this year.  The site aims to fill the void of fantasy sports advice on the web.  Most sites are not willing to take risks with their opinions and suggestions on how to run your team.  We got frustrated by the occasional emails from CBS Sportsline’s fantasy sports site telling us to watch a hot rookie for a few weeks before making any decisions;  In our leagues you need to have scouted and acted on any future stars months and sometimes years before they actually start contributing at the major league level.

People aren’t as unique as they think.  What’s true for one person is usually true for many others.  We realized if we thought Sportsline.com’s advice was a joke, many people in other sportsline.com leagues felt the same way.  Www.rotoexpert.com offers expert advice from playing fantasy sports for over 2 decades.

I write approximately 2 columns a week.  “The Rant” is a sports-focused column relaying my highs and lows of owning a fantasy sports team, gambling, cheering for my Boston teams, or running a fantasy sports league.  The other column I write each week varies.  Sometimes it is hard-core roto junkie advice on how to crush your opponents.  Or I might take out my frustrations at something pathetic the media is making into a controversy and call it “Ridiculous Link of the Week”.

Here are some links to the articles (you gotta love my white-man afro on the picture):

The RotoExpert.com home page

>How to deal with February, the worst month for a fantasy sports addict

>How to choose your fantasy league keepers

>Hallucinating that Manning out-dueled Brady at the Super Bowl

Football Chaos

Every September during football’s first Sunday, I have the same realization that I have probably got in over my head with football mania.  And I love it.  This year it hit me during the 3rd quarter of the Patriots-Jets match up.  Randy Moss of the Patriots caught a long touchdown pass.  I was elated.  Then I checked one of my many fantasy football teams…damn it, my brother had Randy Moss going against me in our game.  The Catch-22 of football season had begun to bite me 2 hours into the season!  Fantasy sports vs. my real team allegiance vs. my betting, the no-man’s land of football fandom.

In my exuberance for football, I ended up signing up for 4 fantasy football leagues.  This creates a decent amount of chaos for me, because whenever there is a highlight reel of a touchdown or other big play, I rush to the computer to determine if that play was a good thing for all of my teams or not.  Compounding the difficulty is my fantasy football diversification rule.  I will do my best not to have more than 2 players alike on each team.   That way I am (hopefully) covered from the risk of having a bunch of crappy teams if I make a mistake with one team’s roster.

You would think that 4 fantasy football teams would be enough for me.  It’s not.  I also tend to place a few small wagers on the NFL contests of the weekend.  I love the challenge of looking at two teams and trying to figure out who is going to beat the point spread.  But by adding in gambling, in addition to the 4 fantasy sports matchups I’m trying to follow, I need to not only root for certain teams to score points, but for only specific players on those teams to score points. 

Wait, it gets more ridiculous.  The Patriots have been and will always be my favorite team.  Their performance trumps everything, I think.  If I were forced to choose between the Patriots making the playoffs and my fantasy football team winning its championship, I am not sure what I would do.  It is like choosing amongst your children.

The enjoyment/chaos was in full effect this past Sunday.  Randy Moss scores a touchdown, Yea for the Patriots, boo for fantasy team #1.  Adrian Peterson scores a touchdown for Minnesota, yea for fantasy team #2, boo for my gambling.  And on and on it went, until I had created a virtual 3-dimensional emotional matrix in my head of all the outcomes.  It got pretty hectic, I was forced to take a nap mid-day, although that also had something to do with Paco flying in from Denver for the weekend.  What I have decided to do for the rest of the season is to only bet on games where I am also rooting for the team to help my fantasy teams.  Of course, if the bet looks like easy money is to be made…

Fantasy Baseball Auctions in Maine

Hours and hours are spent perusing baseball news websites for an inside edge.  Meticulous positional grids and roster charts, often designed and calibrated with a protractor, are constructed with the utmost in care.  20+ hours spent on a powerpoint whose sole purpose is to make fun of the other team owners.  Draft day software purchased and setup.  All of this effort and time is spent, as a labor of love, for one reason:  the fantasy baseball auction, or "Christmas in March" as it is known to the league owners.

The fantasy baseball auction has become a day for the owners of the league to revel in past glories, display superior or inferior linguistic wit, and create new memories.  League pioneer Jason Agren created a draft day MVP award, complete with instructions on what criteria to use when voting for our draft day MVP at the end of the day:

1.)Alcohol consumption - "The more the better...no smirnoff ice"  Verne, picture below as draft day MVP of 2006 in a landslide, shows some of the criteria for alcohol consumption and comedic value.

2.) RIP Factor -  "This is the real reason we get together on draft day.  To creatively rip on each other."  Draft day host Agren took this to an entirely new level this year with the inaugural draft day powerpoint.  Download roto_draft.ppt  This is pure genius.  I was bawling with laughter to the point I had to look at the wall because any more comedy perception was going to cause me to leak urine.

Runner-up on the RIP factor was Lee.  The sheer audacity and shock factor could've won him draft day mvp in a lesser-contested year.  Lee is obsessed with his blog to the point he routinely goes on paragraph long email rants about it being "self-aggrandizing".  However, he went through over 200 blog photos to find one for this t-shirt he made...I don't understand why, if a blog bothers you so much, you spend that much of your free time on said blog.  Still, when Lee revealed the t-shirt in wrestlemania-like fashion, I was speechless.

3.) Quality Draft -  This is difficult to quantify.  Everyone thinks their team is great at first, except Agren, who gives out the traditional bemoaning of "My team f*cking sucks" at 11am each year.  Draft prep usually leads to draft success.  In the picture below, Umel's professional-bound cheat sheet report is shown.  That is pretty tough to beat.

 

4.) Overall comedic value - This one is pretty self-explanatory.  Damain wearing a ski hat for 12 hours indoors is a fine example.  Powerpoints that cause near-blackout laughter hysteria is another example.

5.) Intangibles - Paraphrasing from jason's instructions, "people that are not working too hard to win the MVP, but are not holding back either".

You never know year to year which criteria will weigh most heavily in the voter's minds.  Agren had a runaway lead with the powerpoint, but it was so good, it transcended the MVP voting...he will probably need a lifetime achievement award next year for it.  Last year's winner Verne, who earned his title by drinking 30 beers and making hilarious ludricrous statements non-stop, seemed determined to fly below the radar this year.  Lee had his hailey's comet moment with the unveiling of the blog t-shirt, but like the comet, the hype was short-lived and fizzled out quickly.  That left Damian.  The ski hat, the heroic efforts of assembling a team with 70 pages of stenopad notes, the round-trip drive from Loonyburg Massachusetts, graciously donating his money to poker as he does every year, and a strong desire to see him struggle into the green jacket...all this culminated with Damian taking home draft day MVP 2007.