In April, hope springs eternal. That is why baseball fans love this time of year. For some, like fans in Colorado or Kansas City, this is the perfect time of year. Though teams like the Rockies and Royals serve as perennial pall-bearers, lugging the hopes of their fans to be buried by May, early April gives each club a new chance.
For the fans of these paltry clubs ,there aren’t many places to turn to refocus their fandom. Enter: fantasy baseball. The 21st century’s answer to complaining about your team is actually building your own. Better yet, these leagues aren’t dominated by the Yanks, the Sox or the Cards. Instead it’s teams that go by names like IHeartDavidOrtiz, Brokeback Ballboys, and WiNnInG4Jesus who will be flexing their fantastical online muscles. And for the Royals fan who grabs Albert Pujols with the first pick in his league’s rotisserie draft, this may be the only time he gets to see his team atop any kind of standings.
But the fantasy life isn’t limited to those who will be hurting in October. The productivity lost stewing over pitching match-ups and injury reports likely costs businesses embarrassing sums regardless of their city’s favorite real-life team. By season’s end, the average IGM, Infatuated General Manager, has tracked Carl Crawford’s batting average improvement against lefties and they have Chien-Ming Wang’s ERA in humid ballparks committed to memory. Basically, by owning a fantasy baseball team, you are signing away your life to Yahoo, Sporting News and the Baseball Tonight crew simultaneously.
It’s worth it, though.
Sure, you may miss a meeting or forget about a paper while conjuring up ways to trade poor Nomar Garciaparra before his season is inevitably killed by an injury. Or you’ve wrestled so long with the prospects of Nick Johnson finally having that breakout year that you’ve almost grown an attachment to a man you’ve never met and who has never hit over 20 homeruns.
While purists see the trend of glorifying players for their individual stats, a trend made popular during the fantasy sports era, as tarnishing the team concept of America’s pastime, baseball’s popularity is based on individual statistics. Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs, Joe DiMaggio’s 56 games straight with a hit, Bonds’ 73 juicy jacks and Clemens’ 20 strikeouts are among the most celebrated events in baseball history. Personal records and stats have kept us glued to our bleacher seats, our recliners and now our office chairs because of fantasy baseball.
People are following the sport like never before, dedicating ridiculous portions of their lives to this beast. Fantasy baseball is about checking the scores at night to check how the players on your team fared, talking trash to your fellow owners and acting like you actually know something about baseball. Where else can you achieve such a sense of pride and memorize otherwise useless stats about our pastime? Reality be damned.
