Fantasy

Leading up to each and every fantasy season I struggle to decide whether or not to participate. Fantasy sports are becoming, if they have not already, an institution for American twenty-somethings. As they revolve around my two favorite sports, baseball and football, I pretty much need a reason not to participate rather than the other way around. However, there are causes for trepidation on my part. Ultimately, I guess it's a bit of a paradox.

As an adult, I most often deal in absolutes, albeit reluctantly. It's not so much the opinion that matters, it's how closely it conforms to the truth. If it's not well-informed then, quite frankly, it's stupid. Sports, to a degree, aren't like that. Being a fan provides a realm where we allow simple, somewhat arbitrary allegiances to color our interpretations of the truth. This is not only OK, it's part of the point. (One's taste for art is similarly objective but not remotely as arbitrary...perhaps a subject for another time). To fully embrace fantasy sports is to lose, or at least compromise, a big peice of that makes being a fan so great. No longer are we simply fans of teams because our fathers were or because we grew up in a certain suburb of a certain city. And no longer will this color the vast majority of the conversations/arguments we have about baseball and football. Now burdened, as a fantasy team owner, with the task of quantifying and predicting individual athletes in terms of prowess and performance in pursuit of putting together the most competitive team possible, we subsequently root for athletes as commodities. Fantasy encourages an objectivity we didn't know as kids. And this objectivity isn't what drew us to sports.

Conversely, I'm a pretty die hard fan. I take a certain level of pride in knowing what I'm talking about, and I get frustrated when people who don't know what they're talking about pretend to. Not that everyone has to follow sports at the same distance I do. I like talking shop with my delusional friends from Philly who think the Phillies and the Birds are going to reach the apex of their respective sports each and every year. I also like talking to the walking encyclopedia types that make me feel like a pussy. For me, however, before I'm a Giants and Yankees fan, I'm a fan of two games. And as someone who was never particularly good at either one, I genuinely enjoy watching and talking about athletes capable of playing them at their highest levels. Fantasy is a convenient tool for this.

.....So I took Shaun Alexander with my first pick. But when Seattle plays New York, if they do, I hope he gets the shit kicked out of him.