Fake diamonds: how fantasy baseball is ruining the real game

Washington Monthly, May, 2006 by Amy Sullivan

Just one week after we started dating, my boyfriend sat me down and told me he had a confession to make. It's safe to say these are not normally words one wants to hear early in a relationship. In my past, they have been followed by bombshells like, "I have another girlfriend--do you mind?" or "I'm married," or "I'm a Republican" With ghosts of boyfriends past whirling through my brain, I braced myself for the worst. "I'm in a fantasy baseball league," he told me.

If you are a fantasy baseball neophyte, as I was then, you'll understand that I was relieved to learn that this-fantasy baseball?.--was his deep dark secret of shame. It seemed endearingly geeky, making my whip-smart boyfriend a little more human. I was charmed. And although he seemed to believe that the news should upset me--a fact to which I should have paid more attention--I thought of fantasy baseball as simply an extended version of the NCAA tournament brackets I filled out every spring. You pick a few players, you root for them to do well, what's the harm?

Oh, foolish young love. If you are one of the roughly eight million men who play fantasy baseball each year (or are one of the women married to them), you may already be shaking your head at my naivete. And you won't be one bit surprised to hear that as I was assuring my boyfriend that our relationship would survive this revelation, he interrupted me to ask if he could use my computer to check his scores.

Some baseball fans celebrate the start of the season by oiling up their gloves; others make sure their favorite baseball cap is broken in. And then there are the truly demented, those who prepare for opening day by firing up their laptops and consulting their spreadsheets to figure out whether Brian Roberts can produce enough fantasy points on steals this year to make him worth acquiring in the seventh round of their draft. Their numbers are growing, but they must be stopped before they ruin the sport for the rest of us.

The rules and structure of fantasy baseball can differ from league to league, but the basic idea remains the same: Members of each league create "teams" comprised of real baseball players whose statistics are converted into points that yield a total score for the team. For instance, in my boyfriend's league, a single is worth five points, a double 10 points, a solo homerun 30 points, and so on. Points are subtracted for making an out or striking out. So each night, you can add up the statistics of your fantasy players and translate those into a point total. It's something like being a stock picker instead of an actual businessman. The businessman, like the baseball player, has real products and manages a business; the stock picker just selects companies whose price he hopes will go up and score a lot of points for him.

I prefer to distinguish between the two simply by referring to "real" baseball and to fantasy, both of which gear up in March. Most years, members of my boyfriend's league travel south to Florida to catch a weekend of spring training games. The eight guys (who shall remain anonymous to protect their identities, pride, and jobs) live in four different cities, so the trip gives them a chance to reconnect. But it's mostly about scouting their prospects and conducting the marathon draft to assemble the year's teams. Before the draft takes place, of course, the commissioner of the league conducts an owners' meeting to discuss rule changes--and don't think for a moment that I wasn't sorely tempted to put quotation marks around each of those. I like to imagine that while this takes place, the guys are all wearing pork pie hats and smoking stogies and talking like Boss Hogg, but never having attended a draft myself, I can't say for sure.

Each of these busy men--a handful of current and former Supreme Court clerks, some lawyers, my journalist boyfriend--comes to the draft having spent an alarming amount of time over the preceding days and weeks scouring Street & Smith's Baseball Yearbook and Sporting News magazines, surfing fantasy websites for inside information, and feeding numbers into their computers. Almost as soon as the last player is chosen, the machinations begin: trades to offload that catcher they didn't really want, agonizing about the pitcher who threw out his shoulder in the opening week, life-and-death decisions about who should go in the line-up. From now until September, every day--with the exception, thank goodness, of most Mondays--is organized around opportunities to check scores, calculate points, and gather intelligence from every available baseball source.

Last year, three of the league members got married during the season, which presented a number of quandaries: Is it possible to make it through the ceremony and the reception without calling in for scores? (No, it turns out.) Is it kosher to negotiate trades at the wedding? (Yes, but for god's sake, man, at least wait until dinner has been served.) How do you manage your fantasy team while on your honeymoon? (You don't if you still want to be married by the time you return.)