Fantasy baseball: bragging and more

[Note: if you're totally unfamiliar with fantasy sports, you may want to check out this article from the free online encyclopedia.]

Fantasy sports aren't for everyone.  You need to follow a certain sport, enjoy making predictions, and have some free time on your hands.  If any of those three ingredients is missing, I'd say it's probably not for you.

If, however, you like at least one sport, cherish the fine art of prognostication, and are looking for ways to kill time, then fantasy sports -- and this blog post -- are for you.

I'd like to accomplish two things today in regards to fantasy baseball: brag about my domination in my current league of friends, and argue for the particular type of fantasy baseball we play.


1. My fifteen minutes of glory

One of the exciting but frustrating parts of fantasy sports is that you can destroy your competition all season long then have one bad week in the playoffs and finish in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th place.  So, if you're destroying your competition all season long, as I'm now doing in my league, you have to enjoy it while it lasts.  I've thus decided to brag now, in the event that I lose my bragging rights when push comes to shove.

All I'm going to do to brag is proudly display a graphic I've made to illustrate how far ahead I am of the competition.  In case there's any confusion, I am the blue dot all the way to the left.  The chart indicates by how many games each other team is trailing me:

2. Two types: Head-to-head vs. Rotisserie

While anyone can enjoy a good old bragfest (umm... now that I'm reading that statement...), this point will probably appeal mostly to fantasy baseball veterans.  But in case any brave cool person is still reading, I'll explain the two main types of fantasy baseball leagues.

In a rotisserie league, each team accumulates the stats of its players all season long.  Then, at the end of the season, you just look at where each team ranks in each important statistical category (e.g., for baseball, Runs, RBI, Batting Average, ERA, etc.).  The team that ranks highest in the most of these categories is the champion.

In a head-to-head league, you instead face off against one other team each week.  At the end of the week, each category you win counts as a "win" for your team, and each category you lose counts as a "loss."  So, if at the end of a week I've outscored Scot in 7 of the 10 categories, my team's "record" is 7-3 while his is 3-7.  In such a league, you have 1-3 rounds of playoffs to end the year, and whoever goes undefeated in those rounds is the champion.

The common aphorism about the two types is that rotisserie is more fair, but head-to-head is more fun.  This is because the best team always wins in "roto" leagues, but they mostly lack the excitement of 1-on-1 playoff matchups.  I've always accepted this principle (and chosen head-to-head accordingly, because if I'm not trying to have fun then what am I doing pretending to be a baseball manager?).  Until now.

I now think that head-to-head is more fun and more fair.

Well, "more fair" might not be completely true, but I think head-to-head definitely better represents actual sports.  Which (I think) is the aim of fantasy sports.

In real baseball, we don't wait til the end of the season and compare home run and ERA totals and crown a champion based on the numbers.  No.  We take the top teams and they square off 1-on-1.  While we'd like to think that the best team generally wins, with so many crazy factors (weather, injuries, distractions), there is a definite element of luck.

So even the undesirable parts of head-to-head -- like the seemingly arbitrary strike of a "bad week" that ends your season -- are part of the reality of professional sports.


If anyone made it this far, please comment!!!

Comments encourage me to keep blogging.

Are you currently being dominated by me in fantasy baseball?  What are your thoughts on fantasy sports?

Jon

August 2011 Grammar Tip

Homophones will get you every time.

It almost isn't your fault, right?  I mean, the words sound exactly the same, and for you to spell the correct word, you'd have to do all kinds of extra steps.  Study the context, contrast definitions, match spellings to meanings, and pick the correct one.  Who can be expected to endure 4 mental processes in a pinch?!

I expect you to.  All of literate humanity should be held to this level of communicative passability.

And while there are so many pitfalls we could address today (there, their, they're, whose, who's, Jon, John), let's go straight for the jugular.

It's and Its

I'm just going to offer you one straightforward test you can apply each time you attempt to use ITS or IT'S.  Noting that the apostrophe in IT'S stands for the letter i ("IT IS"), just ask yourself -- does this word stand for "it is"?

It's that simple, every time.  So if you're typing a slide for a song at church and see:

I'm coming back to the heart of worship

And its all about You, all about You, Jesus

You just ask yourself two questions:

1. Is this song retired into the worship hall of fame, never to be played again?

2. Does the its/it's word stand for "it is"?

In this anecdotal example, the song is, in fact, retired, and so the correct move would be to delete those slides and insist on a new worship song that hasn't been played 300 million times in our lifetime.  But, for the sake of grammar, let's move to question 2.

Replacing "it is" for "its", we get "It is all about you, Jesus."  Yes!  That's what we're trying to say.  And so, we know we need the apostrophe to represent that extra letter i; we go with IT'S.

One more example.  Let's say you're writing a children's book and you've just penned, "The cyborg blasted it's laser."  Firstly, that's too scary and futuristic for a kid's book.  Secondly, applying our ITS/IT'S Test, we get--

"The cyborg fired it is laser."

As this clearly makes no sense, we do not have an extra letter i, and thus do not need an apostrophe.  So "its" it is.  (<-- Yeah.)

It's its or it's, is it?

Thoughts, questions, stories, ideas for future grammar tips?

Jon

Sports fanaticism -- one of the weirdest things in the world

Friends,

I targeted August for my return to regular blogging, so we'll see if this entry starts the desired domino effect (hopefully a better one than the Kinetic King's).  No promises.  Just wishful hoping and dreaming.

There will be two aims to this Tangent: to think about what sports really are, and to examine how we react to them.


What are sports?

For some reason, thousands of years ago, people found it fun to compete with each other in acts of physical strength and speed.  I guess athletes enjoyed the combination of the rush of actually competing with the bragging rights that go to the winner ("I inherited better genes than you, and/or I dedicated more hours than you did to figuring out how to launch a pole farther!").

That makes some sense, but what is really remarkable is how popular it became to observe these athletic competitions!  I guess early sports "fans" enjoyed the combination of the fun of watching with the bragging rights that go to the winner's supporters ("I chose to cheer for someone who inherited better genes than the person you chose to cheer for, and/or mine dedicated more hours than yours did to figuring out how to fling a disk farther!").

At any rate, we find ourselves in a world full of sports fanatics.  Despite what I'm now writing, I am one of them.  Part of this system is that we accept descriptions of sports that culture (explicitly or implicitly) gives us -- epic, crucial, must-see, important, heart-breaking, courageous, etc.

But I'll tell you what a sport is.  Basketball, for example: two groups of people that each attempt to, within a certain set of regulated maneuvers, put an inflated sphere of leather downward through an elevated circular hoop more times than the other.

Now, I'll say it again -- for whatever reason, I looooove sports.  But let's not forget that sports are more or less meaningless, their rules are almost completely arbitrary, and they exist purely for entertainment.  Which brings us to...


How do we react to sports?

I know people whom I need to avoid for about a week if their favorite college football team loses.  I know people who have cried when their favorite college football team misses a BCS bowl.  I know people who, when their favorite NFL team's quarterback throws an interception in the Super Bowl, make an equally bad throw with whatever the nearest object is.  I know someone who cried for an hour when the Pirates lost to the Braves in the NLCS long ago...

I assume you get the point.  Our emotions are invested in our favorite sports teams at a bizarrely high level.  How can we change this (if, in fact, we're interested in avoiding sporadic fiery rages or inconsolable depressions)?


My own battle with sports

I'll share what has helped me.  It is all a matter of perspective on sports and my life.  This change in perspective didn't come easily.  It took a "crisis" moment.  [The quotation marks indicate it wasn't a real crisis.]  Here's that moment, in a timeline of such "crises":

1992: Braves beat Pirates in NLCS.  I was too young to stop and learn from my depression.  So I cried for an hour and eventually had to move on with my young life.

1996: Steelers lose Super Bowl.  I wasn't a huge football fan yet, so this didn't bother me too much.  Though it was sort of a downer that they lost on my birthday.

2007: Pitt beats WVU in football, removing WVU's sure entry in national championship game.  This was the lowest of the low, and became the defining moment in my sports fandom.
 
When WVU lost that game, I was in my apartment, one thin wall away from about 20 of my friends who were all Pitt fans.  I immedately locked myself in my room so none of them could come taunt me (none tried, as far as I know).  But as I sat there in terror, I thought about what just happened:

The group of college students I was cheering for had failed to throw an inflated leather ball to one end of a rectangular field more often than another group.  That's why I was locked in my room and hating the world.  It made almost no sense.

Then I thought further, "Other than my ridiculous emotions, what effect does this game have on my life?"  Almost none.  It was probably the difference between my watching or not watching the title game.  So I potentially missed out on 3 hours of fun.  Should WVU have won the title (unlikely as that would have been), I probably would have bought a t-shirt.  So my t-shirt count is now at 235 instead of 236.

[After much contemplation and prayer, I ended up putting on a Pitt shirt and going next door with my friends.  When I tell my WVU friends that, they usually chastise me and say they're ashamed of me.  You know what, WVU fan?  I'm ashamed of you!!  My relationships with my friends are much, much more important than my support of WVU's football team.]

And so, when sports "tragedy" strikes -- like the Steelers losing this past Super Bowl -- I ask myself those two questions.  What exactly is this sport?  Does this affect my life in any real way?


How do you cope?

Please share any thoughts, stories, questions, ideas, etc., you have about being a sports fan.

Jon