Living in a fantasyland

Anyone who knows me knows I love many things...

Kristen - I get extra points for putting her first. Come on over sometime and we'll show you the scoreboard.

My family - even though I question their sanity because they live in Rochester where there's two months of warm weather a year.

Florida - beaches, Disney World, sun, what's not to like.

Eating - so does my waistline.

Sports - Yankees, Syracuse basketball

Dave Matthews - the 200+ shows I have of them should prove my disease to you.

And...

Fantasy sports.

It came so casually. Back in 2005, I participated in my first fantasy baseball league. Some friends and I were fantasy connectors through the Internet. I was very nervous during the draft. I wanted to make sure I didn't draft a player who's ACL's were blown off his body during the offseason and my baseball magazine didn't reflect such a change to that man's physique. When that happens, and it usually does at least once in every draft, guys are laughed at mercilessly. It doesn't matter if you draft online. You can hear the cackles, states away.

We played with ten owners and if memory serves me correctly, I won that league. Beginner's luck for the first couple months. Then, nervously watching with one eyed closed, every night, for the last month. And if you think this doesn't happen most of the time to someone who wins a league, you're fooling yourselves on how important this game is.

Ask my father. Up until two years ago, he was a normal man with a normal job and a normal lifestyle. Now, he goes to work, stops by the Little League park and comes home to meet up with his mistress...his laptop computer. From there, he logs onto espn.com, or mlb.com or yankees.com or whatever dotcom he can find to give him the most up to date stats on "his family". He studies his "sons", agonizes over at bats, wonders if one of his family members only has a couple hits in a week, if he should give them their walking papers and pick up a foster child. Every once in awhile, Mom has to remind him to eat his dinner.

And Dad is like most Americans playing fantasy anything. It's a land all to our own. It's like for a couple hours everyday, living in Vegas. Put aside work...stress...taking out the trash. We focus on one thing. And, since we're so one track minded, there could be smoke coming out the back of the house, and we'd wait to leave, hoping our pitcher gets out of this bases loaded jam.

I play fantasy baseball/football/basketball. Three sports, that take me year round. I don't invest my time anymore in college basketball. Never participated in hockey/golf/bowling volleyball/cricket/polo/horse racing/speed eating, but with a little convincing I could see myself doing any of those. Especially the speed eating.

We all want to feel part of a team. That's why so many of us played sports when we were younger. We like the competition. In guys, there's a hormone called ego, where we feel the need to beat everyone, regardless of what it is. For example, if we get into a different supermarket line, at the same time as another guy, we want to beat him out the store. We get so into it, we start internally yelling at the 75 year old woman in front of us, slowly pulling out her coupons for laundry detergent, while we see the "other guy" getting to the cashier before us. I mean, how long does it take to pull out coupons? Oh, NOW SHE'S WRITING A CHECK!!! And she can't find a pen. Fantastic!!! Now, the guy's done and he's dusting me as he walks out. And he's thinking the same thing, "I worked that guy."

Fantasy baseball is six months out of the year. So much time is involved that shortly after the season, I write good bye and good luck letters to all my players, as they head into the offseason. If they only knew how much I loved and yet hated them during the season.

Right now, I have 11 fantasy baseball teams. Some might have more, most have less. During the two weeks leading up to the season, I had what some psychologists like to call a "Fantasy Baseball Draft Addiction". What?!? You mean, I shouldn't get so much joy out of just picking players. But, all the endless possibilities I could have with them. I could drop them from my roster, I could bench them for the day, in my mind I could wash celebratory champagne over them as they had the game winning hit. So many things. And who cares if it takes me a solid hour to manage those lineups every couple days? Will I get sick of it? Probably. Does my head need to be examined? DEFINITELY!

So, I say to you David Wright, and Kendry Morales and Tommy Hanson, I'm not going to stalk you. I don't have the money to fly all over the country and hand you out some "I Represent Brian Bachman" t-shirts with my smiling face on them. But, aren't you a little jealous of Kristen, who got that same shirt for Valentine's Day? I thought so.