Tomorrow evening is this season’s fantasy baseball draft.  It starts at 6:30 and I’ve spent a few hours of the past few days cobbling together a spreadsheet that I think will help guide my decisions come draft time.

For those of you out there that have never experienced a fantasy draft before, it’s one of the most exciting things in the world.  I’m not a huge baseball fan; if I didn’t play fantasy baseball, I probably wouldn’t even follow the season too much.

For me, half the fun of the entire fantasy baseball season boils down to draft day.  The time pressure, combined with the fact that you are making decisions that will affect your team’s well-being for the next half year, makes every second important.  The adrenaline rush is one that I imagine similar to fleeing a wild animal.  Or more accurately, a wild animal forcing you to pick a team of professional baseball players.

I ran a fantasy movie league a few times to mixed degrees of success (the balance of the league is thrown off because there are certain blockbusters that do too well in comparison to other movies), simply because I believe that everyone can find fun in a fantasy draft of some format.

It should be something that is on everyone’s bucket list, although the pinnacle of this experience – the live draft where all participants are together in the same room – has become less common with the rising popularity of online leagues.

Just like I’m no real baseball expert (although don’t tell my opponents that!), you don’t have to be a <subject> expert to have fun in a fantasy <subject> league.  Can’t find one you like?  Come up with your own!  See if you can find scoring for random types of fantasy leagues online!

Just create a situation where a group of friends end up together in a room with sequential picks from a limited pool of things or people or something.  With a time limit.  And some stake in it – most often a scoring system.

The rest, as they say, is silence.  The trading, the weekly lineups, the waiver wire watching – none of it adds up to the excitement and preparation leading up to a draft, nor the instant joy and crushing defeats felt at each pick.

Speaking of which, would anyone be up for some kind of unconventional fantasy league with live draft in the near future?