The Real Fantasy Baseball

So I'll be the first to say that no fantasy sport is better than fantasy football. With one head-to-head game a week and every game in front of you, complemented by plates of wings and fries and stale beer and Southern waitresses who by 7:00 p.m. look like Heidi Klum serving you, life is perfect.

But baseball remains my true love. And being an avid fantasy player I've always given baseball a crack.

But for years I had a problem. When I would take Mike Piazza with my first pick every year, I would get stressed hoping he would get the RBI instead of Fonzie hitting before him.

Or I would hate myself for having Derek Jeter as my SS.

Or worse, to have a player playing against the Mets for three straight days and feeling compelled to root for him. I just couldn't handle it.

I wanted the Mets to win, but I wanted my team to perform.

So last year I solved the problem. I wanted the Mets to have no effect for or against me, and I wanted no Yankees on my team.

That is when I introduced the AL-Only No Yankees Fantasy Baseball League.

With 12 of us in the league and 13 AL teams to choose from, the talent pool was ridiculously diluted. The draft was fucked from the beginning because one of the kids not there autodrafted every Yankee on yahoo.

So we ended up drafting in an AOL chatroom, a draft that took us roughly 7 hours to complete.

Still, the experience was the most educational fantasy experience of my life.

We weren't playing with All-Star teams. Instead, me and cousin Jason went nuts discussing Danny Haren for Erik Bedard after each had had 3 career starts.

Scott Podsednik became a god.



All of a sudden the Royals quad squad of Andy Sisco, Mike MacDougal, Jeremy Affeldt, and Ambriox Burgos found themselves actually impacting the starting lineups of our fantasy teams.

I knew every player in the AL and I loved it.

I watched every Mets game stress-free and had no reason at all to not completely root against the Yankees.

The league was perfect!

So this year we discussed. Should we do it again?

That would be too easy.

So my good friend, Jon Zimelis, former defensive stopper and the agent of Y2K, came up with an idea with a few strippers in hand at a friendly Gentleman's club in lAs Vegas.

"Sip, how bout we play with the teams from the bottom half of the league's payroll?"

I thought for half a second. I was buying the shit out of it.

It worked. There would be no Mets, no Yankees, I could stockpile my team with Indians and Brewers and I would learn more about baseball.

Of Yahoo's top 100 ranked players, only 34 came from the bottom 15 payrolls.

So Garret Atkins and Chris Capuano, here I come. Jhonny Peralta, I'll see you in the 2nd round. And of course T Haf, you will be the 1st player selected in this year's draft.

To all you fantasy baseball players out there, I really recommend some sort of a creative league or at least a league where the talent pool is shrunk.

Who cares who has a better season between Gary Sheffield and Vlad Guerrero? They're both really good.

But give me Doug Davis vs Joe Blanton... now at least we are thinking. We are learning our game, learning its players, and discovering that there is more to baseball than the top 3 free agents available in every offseason.

VCD,

SM