At various times and with various levels of dementia, I have played pretty much every possible fantasy sports derivative: fantasy football, survivor pools, fantasy playoff football, football Pick ‘Em games (against the spread and straight up), fantasy college football (individual players) and fantasy college football (teams); fantasy basketball, fantasy college basketball (teams and players), NCAA pools, NIT pools, Women’s NCAA pools, and in a less than proud moment for Sean, a Women’s NIT pool; I have long-standing fantasy hockey and golf teams, and every year, 3 of my friends join me in drafting teams for a fantasy Champions League game based on the performance of soccer teams across the pond. I’ve tried fantasy NASCAR and fantasy BassMaster, picked World Cup and European Championship teams to win it all and look forward to the Olympics every two years for the sheer number of fantasy options associated. Who will win the most medals? Which country will take the steeplechase? Which athletes would you want on a team if world records were a category?
I’ve played games based on salary caps, on drafting, on auctions. When truly bored, and with some inspiration and help from my friends, I have combined the sheer dorkery of all facets of fantasy and burned hours in the process. One weekend, on a rainy beach trip with 4 of my friends, we bought a few pizzas and quite a few more beers and held the First Rehoboth Smash Brothers Invitational Tournament.
Super Smash Brothers Melee is a video game made for the GameCube, basically a fighting game with Nintendo characters. Picture Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter with Mario, Luigi, Kirby and Link. One of the modes is a 64 player tournament reminiscent of the NCAA tournament, and like its distant relative, is a great time-killer and entertainer. It can also, much like March Madness, break your heart, as dominant efforts can be overturned by one last second three-pointer, or in this case, an unlucky Poke Ball releasing some form of devastating Fire Horse just as time is about to run out with you clutching a small advantage. Needless to say, it’s addictive as hell and my friends and I carry an old GameCube and some controllers around wherever we go in case of bad weather, or a crazy case of Jiggly Puff Mania hits us. This trip was no different, and we decided to hold the tournament of all tournaments, with insane amounts of skill and luck equally rewarded.
First, we held a poker tournament between the five of us, based on an H.O.R.S.E. rotation of fixed limits. The order of finish would come into play in deciding where in the bracket each of our characters would be placed. Before that, though, we needed to pick our characters. And what better way to do so than an auction? Each of us received 100 chips to bid on the 25 characters humans would control (the remaining 39 would be computer controlled players set to the highest level). Each of us, in turn, would nominate one of the 25 available characters and start the bidding. The person who bid the highest won control of the character for the duration of the tournament.
Depending on the skill level of the human players, there are about 10 clearly superior characters in the 25, and 5-6 completely useless ones. This forced different strategies on different people. I am a middling player with most characters not named Jiggly Puff, Marth or Roy, so I decided to go all studs, devoting my 100 chips to getting those three characters, which I accomplished with 3 chips to spare (spent on Young Link, who is, in my great estimation, the worst character ever created for any fighting game in history). My best man Andrew, more versatile and skilled overall, bought 9 different characters, mostly the players that no one else wanted. Once all 25 characters were owned by one human controller, it was nearly time to actually hold the tournament.
The last step was to draw up a traditional bracket, with 64 open spaces. In order to fill those up, we conducted a serpentine draft (based on the poker tournament held earlier) where each human player would place one of his characters in the bracket. Once all of his characters were placed, the “drafter” could place a computer character at a chosen place in the bracket. As all of the computer characters were set to the highest level, it was usually best to set computer characters that you didn’t match up well against in a different part of the bracket, preferably against a friend who also didn’t match up well.
After all of these steps, the actual playing of the tournament might have seemed anti-climactic to some, and to those of my friends who were eliminated entirely in the first or second rounds, it probably was. But the hard work and sheer amount of inane steps that it took me to acquire Marth and place him in the appropriate quadrant, setting up a spirited run to the Finals…well, it was all worth it, and made the experience that much sweeter. Of course, it was even sweeter when I WON the second tournament held under the same rules and spilled beer all over my head in celebration like I was a late ‘90s Yankee. I still have the poster board where we wrote up the entire tournament, with my name circled in the middle as the winner.
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I enjoy competing, in things both meaningful and otherwise. Fantasy sports allow me to exercise that competitive streak with complete strangers in the safety of my own home, where violent outbursts and deep personal shame at losing can be contained and hidden. They also allow me to lord my victories over friends’ heads, for much longer than most would consider appropriate or, really, humane.* The sheer diversity of possible fantasy options ensures that I will never go hungry for a league or game, no matter the time of the year.
Still, fantasy baseball is my favorite. Always has been and likely always will be. Fantasy was created for baseball and baseball was created for fantasy. Fantasy baseball is simultaneously the highest quality game and the most diverse and flexible. It rewards strategy and knowledge while maintaining an ease of play and understanding that allows newcomers to compete immediately. The underlying sport is played daily, so there is always news to watch, results to pore over and moves to make. The permutations of categories possible are innumerable, and each combination can attract a specific subset of aficionado.
In short, fantasy baseball is the perfect fake sport. Much like real baseball is the perfect real sport. Symmetry in motion, or something.
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I know there are those who feel differently, naysayers who hate fantasy sports and detest or mock those who peddle its wares or consume its unnaturally delicious goods. The argument against these fogeys used to be simple: “If you don’t want to play, no one is forcing you. Why does it matter that I enjoy it if it no way affects you?”**
Unfortunately, things are not quite so clear anymore. Fantasy has permeated the sports culture, primarily in football, with that last sanctum of sports purity*** defiled by a stats scroll running along the bottom of your screen. Fantasy players and supporters have finally thrown the punch, extended their arm past the nose of the naysayers. People Against Fantasy (PAFy) can no longer simply ignore it and enjoy their sports without it.
So it’s hard to blame those who make fun of “nerdy statniks” who, in the complainer’s opinion, don’t even care about the game, or only follow players on their fake teams, because we ARE encroaching on their game, and forcing them to sit through fantasy discussions during the underlying games. Discussions that, admittedly, frequently border on drivel and are akin to being forced to listen to poker bad beat stories. So I feel for them a little.
The best I can offer is that my enjoyment of the game is probably greater than their displeasure, that I do follow the sports for reasons other than fantasy (unless it’s BassMaster) and that I would actually prefer that the “value added” from fantasy stats on the screen be subtracted. Small consolation, but so it goes. This race is not yet run, let alone won, but I suspect the tide will surge more in fantasy’s direction before it ever recedes.
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Even those that enjoy fantasy baseball have their preferences, with disagreements over which type of league is more fun, more challenging or both. When I first broached this topic on the Reader Boards here, I was not terribly surprised to find that those interested in a BJOL league wanted something a little more esoteric than a standard 5X5 rotisserie league with the old faithful categories (R, HR, RBI, SB, BA, W, K, SV, ERA, WHIP). I don’t hold it against very smart baseball fans to want very smart baseball games, but I wonder if maybe we don’t lose something in the process of smartening up a dumb game.
I have played a great many variations on fantasy baseball, including a standard 5X5 as well as a league with categories like triples, pickoffs, sacrifice flies and fielding percentage. I found that, as you standardized the rules and the categories, you (a) increased competitiveness and (b) increased the number of strategies available to participants. For these two reasons above any other, I think standard category games tend to be more fun.
Not everyone can rationalize a league based on EqA or Win Shares, or how much a particularly bad or good +/- rating might affect your team. More importantly, as you decrease the variance between ACTUAL ability/worth and worth in the game, you decrease the useful player pool. I, for one, like a world and a game where Willy Taveras is a member on a team somewhere. Strategies invoked to increase speed at the expense of power and other production are lost in a fantasy game that, like real baseball, tends to emphasize real production over athletic, fast guys. It’s a given, and unfortunate.
More than anything else, I think I like fantasy baseball because it’s NOT REAL BASEBALL. It doesn’t value players similarly (or correctly), it doesn’t keep score the same way and it doesn’t require an Epstein-like brain to succeed. There are as many different avenues to success at fantasy baseball as there are leagues to play in, and the real pleasure in the game (for me, at least) is finding those, not properly assessing baseball players’ true worth. I fully admit that I may be wrong, and it may make me a fantasy Luddite, but give me a league where 8 of the 10 categories are largely useless in real-life player evaluation over a league where the player rating reads like a VORP list from top to bottom.
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All that being said, I am nothing if not a pleaser. I know that there are plenty of options for standard leagues elsewhere, and a lot of you guys are itching for some pure SABR-toothed leagues. Thus, I am announcing the first Inaugural BJOL Fantasy League. The format is entirely to be determined by the participants, both here in the comments and, eventually, through email.
If you are interested in bringing me down, or want a shot at Dave Fleming (and perhaps some other fellow writers, if they are so inclined), drop a line in the comments or email me at
demedici@gmail.com. I will post here a running list of participants, as well as suggestions for the format of the league. While setting a time for a traditional live draft might be out of the realm of possibility, we are far ahead enough in the game to consider it, or any other possibilities. Category choices, rules setups, and possible platform choices are all in the air. So I lay down my very feeble gauntlet and will commence trash talking shortly….
* Yes, I am still referencing my 2005 Fantasy Football victory when my 7-7 team snuck into the playoffs, only to make a mad dash through the bracket and steal the fake trophy. While still an excellent inside put-down of my friends, it’s also the reason I hate fantasy football, as randomness triumphs far more frequently than in any other fantasy sport.
** You could, if you were feeling particularly pretentious/annoying that day, drop some J.S. Mill on the fogey , going all Harms Principle on him. Depending on how annoying you want to be, you could also point out that John Locke (non Lost division) and von Humboldt agreed with Mill. So shut up and let me draft.
***You know, unless you think steroids, murder and mayhem are impure.