It's not the real thing

A Billy Joel quote! Anyone reading this blog would have the most distorted sense of my musical tastes. I know a lot of Billy Joel lyrics because I was alive during the 80s, but the only person that I know who still listens to Billy Joel is my sister-in-law Theresa. This blog entry title is for you, T.

I have not posted in a while (almost two weeks) and although it might have been because I had nothing to say, the truth is that I always have something to say. I generally write posts late at night, but lately I've been spending those late-night hours obsessing over the at-bat by at-bat performances of my baseball fantasy team's west coast players.

Oh yes, I am in a fantasy league.

Last year, Mark coaxed me into joining a fantasy league with him. Mom always told me to stay away from friends like him. I had always suspected that I'd enjoy participating in a fantasy league because I am a huge baseball fan, I love stats, and I can be as OCD about something as the next guy. But I resisted joining one in the past precisely because I was afraid that the OCD in me would take over. Little did I know.

So Mark and I joined this league last year where, among the other 11 team owners, two of the guys are producers for a major networks sports' programming (yes, we are competing against guys who do sports for a living). Mark and I literally did not know what we were doing as draft night approached. We did not have a full grasp of how rosters were slotted, how the salary cap worked, how the scoring worked, how the free agent pickup rules worked...hell, we didn't even know how much the league cost. And yet we were steamrolling into the draft like we had a chance. The draft took place in a bar in midtown, but Mark was at a medical conference in Baltimore and so we communicated by cell phone for two hours until my phone battery died. In a straight draft situation, this would have been an abysmal setup; matters were made worse by the fact that our league has an auction draft, and so by the time I had communicated to Mark what player was on the board for bidding and we had decided whether to bid $5, the bid would already be up to $8. And so on. We compiled a terrible team and by May it was clear that we were far out of the running. We spent the remaining four months of the season trying to trade for "keepers" (you get to carry 12 guys over to the following year's roster, and so we were trying to get good players with low salaries). We set a record in the league for lowest number of points in a season (the league is scored in four offensive and four pitching categories).

This year, armed with the knowledge of, oh -- the rules -- we began our research on players during the winter. By January we were reading articles and top ten lists, and by February I was spending my entire lunch hour on baseball and sports websites. Mark and I sent dozens of emails back and forth debating the merits of keeping this player over that player, whom we should be targeting in the draft, etc.

I am, at heart, a competitive mother. I'm not a claw-your-eyes-out-so-I-win kind of guy, but I do not like to lose. It is why I loved debating in high school, it is why I still love to play ultimate frisbee, and it is certainly part of what I like about lawyering (preventing my client's eviction is rewarding, but beating the crap out of that landlord attorney in oral argument is its own reward). Now that I'm playing a lot less ultimate (and almost no truly competitive ultimate), fantasy baseball is where I can get my competitive jones up.

The draft this year was a far better experience than last year. Mark missed the first half because he was teaching his meditation class, but he was there for the end when my brain was beginning to melt (the draft is a four-hour experience). The draft did not go entirely to plan (and we had spent many an email and phone call hammering out an overall strategy), mostly because I was a little gun-shy early on to spend big bucks, but we put together a reasonably-balanced team. Two weeks into the season and it is unclear exactly where we stand. The baseball season is, as they say, a marathon, not a sprint, and so I can't read much into the fact that we went from 3rd place to 10th place over the course of this past weekend, though I can be concerned that we're not getting stolen bases and our pitchers can't seem to record any wins. But we're in it. Oh yes, we're in it.