Commentary:Fantasies meant for bedroom, not ballpark

By Casey Michel     3/27/08 7:00pm

As someone more famous than me once said, "Life has its poetry." It's a good phrase, but, being the entitled English major that I am, I'm going to fix it up a bit: "Life has its irony." Granted, I completely changed the meaning of the original phrase, but "irony" happens to be the word that captures the essence of a situation I encountered last Saturday - at least better than any Yeats ode or Eminem ballad ever could.With a brilliant afternoon beaming through my windows, March Madness was busy lighting up the faces of me and my friends. Couch sagging, eyes focused and Duke-hate-mongering all around, the holidays of hoops had arrived.

But as my gaze wandered during an AT&T interlude, I noticed my roommate perusing an article that had nothing to do with O.J. Mayo's altruism or Dick Vitale's Diaper Dandies (the awesome freshman class, not a Depends surprise). In fact, the content of the article was the antithesis of the team-first focus that college basketball has worked so hard in developing - fantasy sports, the essence of individualism and the bane of my existence.

More specifically, it was about baseball, the original team sport.

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Yes, life has its irony.

While I could insert some trite joke about fantasy sports not actually having anything to do with Jenna Jameson pitching to Tommy Lee (with Pamela Anderson as the catcher), I'm sure everyone now knows what this bile entails. During the season-opening "draft," a group of stat geeks gather in a set location to select, one by one, the best players of the league. Graphs, whiteboards and scouting magazines often litter a dank basement as the guys get dolled up in their Devil Ray emerald and Oakland Athletic yellow.

While I will always hold America's pastime in higher regard than, say, world peace, I don't know if I can ever forgive it for giving us a man who spawned such an evil: Bill James, the bearded bastion of baseball blunders. James helped introduce the field of "sabermetrics," the numerical analysis of absolutely everything baseball, whose end result was turning players into Borg entities (yes, I just pulled out a Star Trek reference).

Instead of intangibles like heart and desire, athletes have been broken down into numbers and signs, and team chemistry is thrown to the wind in favor of wOBP and DIPS (if you have to ask, it's no use explaining). And let's be realistic - who cares if Sammy Sosa's PE was higher than Ken Griffey Jr.'s? Anyone in his right mind knows that Griffey was the preeminent player of that era, even if phony, pointless statistics say otherwise.

Aside from misleading calculations, fantasy sports have also brought the greatest philosophical question of the 21st century to light: Do you root for your favorite team, or do you root for your fantasy team? In today's society, such thorny situations have become commonplace, and yet no answer is sufficiently viable. If the Mariners - everyone's favorite team - are hammering your fantasy ace Joe Blanton, should you feel warm and fuzzy or want to kick a puppy?

You know it's gotten bad when most middle-aged men look forward to Sports Illustrated's Fantasy Football issue over the Swimsuit Issue, although James doesn't look that bad in a one-piece, I suppose. ESPN often has spots highlighting fantasy dos and don'ts, and, while our indolence got the best of us, we were oh-so-close to getting a Powderpuff fantasy league up and running. But where would that have gotten us? A Jones president wearing Wiess colors, just because his fantasy running back is on the Battlesows?

James has started us down a dangerous path. It used to be that a child would grow, cheer and cherish one team over all others - again, for most people that's the Mariners. This mentality, in return, would instill the kid with the selflessness necessary in creating any successful organization.

But our children's futures are in danger. Those little sprouts are being raised in a society that is slowly lifting the importance of Manny Ramirez's HROATATDAWJ (Home Runs On A Tuesday Afternoon The Day After Watching Juno) above the importance of a team-first work ethic. Granted, communism is a bit old-school, but there's nothing wrong with working toward a common goal, is there?

Anyway, I have to go check on how my bracket's doing. Because there's nothing ironic about rooting for teams you loathe to make your Final Four. Or is there?

Casey Michel is a Brown College sophomore and sports editor.

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