Advertisement 1

Lessons learned from fantasy sports

Article content

Many, many years ago, when I was a wee lad of no more than 12, my older brother and his group of (self-described) nerdy friends decided to form their own fantasy baseball league.

Advertisement 2
Story continues below
Article content

While they enjoyed watching baseball (not so much playing it), every last one of them absolutely loved statistics more. They were all acolytes of Bill James, who was kind of this uber-nerd of baseball statistics in the eighties. Every year, James released textbook-like tomes about strange, new baseball statistics and novel ways of measuring players’ worth. These ideas were ahead of their time, and eventually James’ ideas were taken up and used successfully by people like Billy Beane, as documented in Moneyball.

In any event, forming a fantasy sports league was much more challenging and far more time-consuming before the internet. It required dedication, determination and an extra dollop of nerdiness.

Article content

For one thing, there were no computer programs that would automatically run the league and track statistics. Nope, every day, the poor sap running the league (usually called the Commissioner, though the title was always uttered with sarcasm) would have to get up early (our daily newspaper was delivered at the crack of dawn), pore over the box scores in the sports section and compile the relevant statistics by hand (gasp) onto a pad of paper. God forbid that a game went into extra innings on the west coast, because those box scores typically wouldn’t be in the paper until the following day, messing everything up badly. Long story short, it was tedious work that probably took a good half-an-hour of labour every day throughout baseball’s protracted 162-game season.

Advertisement 3
Story continues below
Article content

Another problem with running a fantasy sports league in the eighties was that information was hard to come by. Sure, there was the sports section in the newspaper, baseball periodicals, sports on television (TSN was in its infancy) and nightly newscasts typically broadcast the highlights of certain games. But if the starting second baseman from say, the Pittsburgh Pirates, got a torn anterior cruciate ligament, you probably wouldn’t know about it for days, if not weeks. And you would start to wonder why this schmuck wasn’t hitting home runs or even if he was alive. No Twitter gossip or 24-hour news cycles back then – information travelled (relatively speaking) as slow as molasses, as my grandmother used to say.

Advertisement 4
Story continues below
Article content

Despite these obstacles, my brother and his friends had a blast running these fantasy baseball leagues, and I always dreamed of joining a fantasy league myself.

My dreams weren’t realized until the late nineties/early naughts, when the internet made fantasy sports a more popular affair. Statistics were compiled automatically and detailed information about every single player on your team would be sent instantaneously to your inbox. No more wondering whether your second baseman was injured or lying lifeless beside the Allegheny River.

In my twenties I met a large group of other baseball/statistic lovers at my work and we decided to start our own fantasy league. For five years we’d do the same thing – study multiple baseball magazines/books during preseason, enough to basically become baseball scholars, met to carefully draft our players, follow our teams on the internet while trash-talking other owners, and finally award a plastic trophy and a rather insignificant monetary prize to the winners of the league, again at some sort of drinking establishment.

Advertisement 5
Story continues below
Article content

While I wasn’t as much of a baseball, I knew enough about teams and players that I thought my fantasy team would finish near the top, pretty consistently. Boy was I wrong.
Each year my team would finish either mid-table or at the bottom. Why? Because I liked baseball.

Instead of simply picking the best players and putting them on my team, I allowed my biases to enter into team picks. I hated the Yankees and absolutely REFUSED to pollute my team with any Bronx Bomber for five consecutive seasons, even though the Yankees were the most successful franchise in baseball history and happened to win four World Series during my tenure as fantasy baseball mogul.

Instead, I populated my fantasy team with players from teams that I liked – the Expos, the Blue Jays, the Phillies, the Mariners – teams that could be charitably called ‘hot garbage’ at the particular juncture in time (well, the Expos and Mariners were alright).
Year after year I would be humiliated by my peers, finishing last or next to last, often winning the ironic plastic trophy for worst team of the year. I loved cheering on the players in my team, but they just couldn’t get the job done. So after years of suffering indignities at the hands of more successful fantasy owners, I stopped playing and vowed I would never again get involved with fantasy sports.

Advertisement 6
Story continues below
Article content

Then about 10 years later, I was invited to take part in a fantasy hockey league. In spite of knowing even less about hockey than about baseball, I signed up. It was only a $20 investment. I waved my money goodbye and then dispassionately started drafting my team with little enthusiasm and no expertise.

Just for your information, this fantasy league included a large group of hockey fanatics as well as several future sports reporters.

Aside from my beloved Ottawa Senators, I didn’t know squat about who the best players were, who the best teams were or even what kind of players I should be drafting. Other than having a mild dislike of the Toronto Maple Leafs, I also didn’t have many biases against teams and/or players in the league. So I just drafted whomever I thought would get me the most points.
I ended up winning the league. And it wasn’t even close.

The main lesson is that if you want to ‘win’ something you have to be completely dispassionate and utterly ruthless in making choices. Rather than allow my bias to shape which players I chose for my team, I just picked them like they were a bunch of mercenaries.

But in winning my only fantasy sports title, I also realized it wasn’t fun triumphing in this particular manner. Although I gloated long and hard, I was empty inside. So like some fantasy sports Floyd Mayweather, I again retired and am now content being a casual sports spectator rather than a heartless and fantasy sports mogul.

Article content
Comments
You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments.
Join the Conversation

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.

Latest National Stories
    News Near Tillsonburg
      This Week in Flyers