I spent most of my Sunday involved in online fantasy drafts.\u00c2\u00a0 As I sat there, laptop in the locked and upright position, the NCAA tournament playing on my TV in the background, I came to an astounding conclusion.\u00c2\u00a0 The Internet has revolutionized fantasy baseball.\u00c2\u00a0 Pause for effect.\u00c2\u00a0 Still in shock?\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll give you another moment to gather your senses.<\/p>\n
Before the Seamheads nation begins sharpening your pitchforks, calling for my head, and burning straw replicas of me in effigy, believe me, I know my premise is far from groundbreaking.\u00c2\u00a0 In recent years, the combination of the Internet and fantasy baseball has been a booming market.\u00c2\u00a0 With the Internet, where fantasy players once had to comb the box scores in their local daily newspapers and perform some impressive mathematical calisthenics to track the progress of their first round pick, now all they have to do is log on.\u00c2\u00a0 Trades once performed over the phone and, even more shockingly, by snail mail now occur at the speed of a double-click.\u00c2\u00a0 And, of course, the existence and prevalence of more advanced statistics like WHIP, OPS, and percentage of inherited runners scored have birthed entire generations of numbers-hungry stat-heads, who have in turn revolutionized the way Major League Baseball is run.<\/p>\n
But you know all this.\u00c2\u00a0 On Sunday, as I headed into my fifth hour staring at a computer screen, looking at the tiny injury-update buttons, hoping to find something that one of my 26 competitors might have missed, I was struck by how much I longed for the bygone days of fantasy sports.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, maybe I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miss the ever-present calculators or molasses-paced player acquisitions, but I did pine for the drafts.\u00c2\u00a0 There are many advantages to online drafts, mainly that people living in different time zones can participate in the same league, but like a Quest Tech strike zone, something about them just doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ring true.<\/p>\n
I work with a guy that annually devotes a weekend to his buddies, adult beverages, and a fantasy draft.\u00c2\u00a0 I have to say, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m jealous.\u00c2\u00a0 Much like a weekly game of poker, I began playing fantasy baseball not because I was hopelessly addicted to statistics or gambling, but because I enjoyed hanging out with my friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Like Knish in Rounders, I will not sit down at a poker table in a casino unless people I know and like surround me.\u00c2\u00a0 In my opinion, a sterile, high pressure, limited chatter environment simply cannot hold a candle to the boisterous, good-natured, low stakes charm of a home game.\u00c2\u00a0 Ultimately, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what online drafts are: the low murmur of a casino table versus the high comedy and dull roar of a home game.<\/p>\n
Granted, during an online draft, you can talk some smack, drop a few good one-liners about Cody Ransom and BJ Ryan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disappearing fastball, and make the obligatory \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m-going-to-take-the-best-softball-player-we-know-as-my-first-round-pick\u00e2\u20ac\u009d joke, but the rest falls by the wayside.\u00c2\u00a0 I think back to the drafts I experienced in college.\u00c2\u00a0 These were marathon affairs where we would close down the back room of our favorite bar, order enough wings and burgers to keep the ranchers of Missouri financially solvent, and go through more pitchers than the 2008 New York Yankees.<\/p>\n
We would all saunter in with various levels of research, ranging from a ratty printout of some \u00e2\u20ac\u0153expert\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00e2\u20ac\u009d rankings littered with margin notes to dog-eared copies of the Baseball Prospectus complete with color-coded post-it notes.\u00c2\u00a0 Whenever a pick was made, the room would be filled with the sounds of 12 pens scratching names off a page, audible obscenities, and immediate evaluations of the performance.\u00c2\u00a0 Did the choice make sense?\u00c2\u00a0 Is the player overrated?\u00c2\u00a0 Did you really need to take that long to pick Albert Pujols?\u00c2\u00a0 As the draft progressed, people would inevitably be shamed and peer-pressured into taking players they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want.\u00c2\u00a0 Imagine if Tony Soprano really wanted you to take a flier on Ian Snell.\u00c2\u00a0 Bad picks were mocked relentlessly, good picks met with silent approval.<\/p>\n
Inevitably, we would reach a lull in the action, and all look towards the owner of the next selection.\u00c2\u00a0 He would sit there, pen dangling out of his mouth; his lips stained with wing sauce, intently poring over his packets of information.\u00c2\u00a0 Side conversations would ensue; people would start to talk themselves into the dominance of their teams.\u00c2\u00a0 Ten minutes would pass, and ultimately, our guy would raise his glazed eyes and ask, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wait, is it my turn?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 It never failed to bring the house down.<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, these drafts came with their own pitfalls.\u00c2\u00a0 Too often, you would wake up the following morning and realize you had drafted Bernie Williams when Ken Griffey Jr. was still on the board.\u00c2\u00a0 You had to trust that the commissioner had diligently noted everyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s selections and that that spill in the tenth round hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wiped out the entire board.\u00c2\u00a0 Nevertheless, in these times of Twitter, text message-based fan polling, and social networks substituting for human contact, I certainly miss the good old days.<\/p>\n
Now, if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll excuse.\u00c2\u00a0 I have a draft starting on Yahoo in eleven seconds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent most of my Sunday involved in online fantasy drafts.\u00c2\u00a0 As I sat there, laptop in the locked and upright position, the NCAA tournament playing on my TV in the background, I came to an astounding conclusion.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}