I am not an athlete. I have never been an athlete. Barring a few injections of "flaxseed oil" in an Oakland bathroom, I will never be an athlete. The most athletic moment of my life came in high school when I, the sacrificial 119-pounder on the wrestling team, beat a kid with a huge tattoo. (A side note: if you're a wrestler and you're going to get a huge, tough-looking tattoo that everyone is going to see when you wrestle, don't let someone like me beat you).
But I digress. What I'm trying to say is that I love sports, but that love is tested when I'm called on to actually play sports. My little league career was like asking Pauly Shore to play Hamlet. You get the idea.
But there's a place for people like me, a place where fans can interact with the sport they love and live vicariously through the athletes they wish they were without the hassle of restraining orders. It's a place where the disparate worlds of sports and nerd shut-ins collide. Not surprisingly, that place is on the Internet.
Welcome to fantasy sports, the fantasy in which I'm not afraid or ashamed to involve Junior Spivey and Coco Crisp. Fantasy sports leaves in everything that I love about sports and takes out everything I hate, specifically playing them.
For the uninitiated, fantasy sports are online games where you are the general manager of your own team, drafting and/or signing players to compile a team that competes against other fantasy teams. The players' actual, real-life stats are accrued and totaled to see which team is leading which statistical category. For example, if your fantasy baseball league uses the "unnatural head growth" stat and you draft Barry Bonds, you're in good shape.
For me, the appeal is obvious: there is no better way for a nerd to appreciate sports. Fantasy involves everything we sports nerds are good at -- researching, crunching numbers, formulating strategies and sitting in front of the computer for hours without any substantial human contact. It's perfect.
My particular poison is fantasy baseball. I've always found baseball to be uniquely gripping. The tense moments are the static ones, unlike the kinetic tension of football -- I call it the potential energy of sports. The marriage of the team sport and the individual pitcher-versus-batter duel is seamless. The game's evolution has been so vast since the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional team in 1869 that if anyone were to watch one of their games, they might not think it was baseball. Yet many rules and terms have not only withstood the test of time, but also integrated themselves into our vernacular. We at Hopkins have a "three strike" policy. We take "rain checks" when we have to cancel dates. We're on the "home stretch" if we're reaching the end of a project. Some of us have even gotten to "second" or even "third base" with a member of the opposite sex.
And the stats. Baseball has been stat-obsessed since Henry Chadwick, arguably the first sportswriter as we know them today, invented the box score, earned run average (ERA) and batting average. Since then, baseball has endeavored to answer a question that pervades not only baseball, but nearly every profession: How do you quantifiably measure talent? People in the last 25 years have devoted their lives to devising new and more telling baseball statistics. Ask any baseball fanatic about VORP or Win Shares and you'll see the impressive science and methodology behind the stats.
Fantasy sports give even the most casual fan the opportunity to answer that same question and do exactly what his favorite team and every other team has to do: with the same available parts, make the best finished product. It's a goal that speaks to our engineering, innovating spirit, channeled through the sports we love. Just about every professional sport (yes, even bass fishing) has a corresponding fantasy game with the same goal at heart.
Fantasy sports also teach important skills that can be implemented in the comparative horror that is real life. Each league operates like a market. Starting with nothing, I run my fantasy team like I would run a business. I determine which characteristics I value (e.g. power hitters, strikeout pitchers, etc.), which characteristics are overvalued in the market and which are undervalued. With making trades, I have to get inside my trade partner's head. What does he value more than I do? What do I value more than he does? If I have the better business model, I'm going to get the better end of the trade. I constantly refine my model and force myself to make tough decisions, practices which have allowed me to win most of the leagues I've participated in.
Which brings me to the next thing I love about fantasy sports: macho posturing. Put-downs are such an endemic part of the game that my host site of choice, Yahoo!, has added a "recent smack talk" symbol that can appear next to your team's name.
I get to act like a big, tough man while being neither big nor tough and approximately 75 percent of a man. With that in mind, and with pitchers and catchers starting to report to spring training, I challenge anyone, anyone, to take me on in my fantasy baseball league. E-mail me at ZGoodNJ@hotmail.com for instructions on how to join, sign up and come baseball season, I will beat you. Even if you have a tattoo.
