It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: baseball (Page 2 of 2)

Day 53: buy me some peanuts

April 5, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I must admit that being in two fantasy baseball leagues this year has me a bit more excited about baseball season starting than I’ve been in past years.

We’re going with some friends in a couple weeks to see the local Oakland A’s take on the Red Sox, which promises to be a gluttonous all-you-can-eat night of bacchanalian delights.

Let’s take a break in the action to sigh at the fact that one of my pitchers, Atlanta SP1 Brett Myers has already let up three home runs after recording only four outs.  Keep it up!

I also purchase 5 pairs of tickets for Katie and I to go to a bunch of other Oakland A’s games that were on their promotional $2 ticket nights.  Excepting for the fact that the ticket “convenience” and “processing” fees are more than the actual ticket price in those cases, it was a frugal way of promising ourselves five nights at the Oakland ballpark this year.  The decision was partially influenced by the fact that our house is a mere BART stop away from the stadium.

I’m excited because Matt Holliday, who is on both of my fantasy teams, plays for a local team.  Additionally, the A’s rotation – while currently in a bit of disarray – is fielding a few youngsters with huge potential.  I hope that we’ll get to see them pitch at some point this season.

Katie is always excited about going to the ballpark (and rightfully so) because you get to throw peanut shells on the ground, an activity that is not available in most of the United States.

This excitement may fade, but the anticipation of a season of drama and injuries and pennant races is something we should all try to hold on to.  I know it’s hard when you’re from Pittsburgh and the biggest story that might involve your baseball team this year is the fact that they lost a preseason game to Manatee Community College.  NO LIE.

Still, anything could happen.  This is baseball.

Day 43: draft day

March 26, 2009 / / 0 Comments

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?

Day 34: the wheres and middle infielders of outrageous fortune

March 17, 2009 / / 0 Comments

24 hours from now, I’ll be on a plane to New York.  I’ll keep posting every day, but expect updates for the next week or so to be on the briefer side of things.

Once again, I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring for another season of fantasy baseball.  This means that I’ll be spending week after week obsessing about numbers and – because our league is going Roto this year, instead of being head-to-head points-based – I’ll actually have no recourse of blaming “bad luck in the matchups” when I lose horribly.

I don’t plan on losing horribly, but my teams haven’t done all that well the past few years.  My confidence is middling right now.  We’ll see how our draft goes.  My first big decision of the year: should I give up my first few draft picks to keep core players like Holliday, Rollins, and Hamels?  I have the #3 pick in the first round, but there aren’t too many elite players that aren’t being kept this year.

I also got an email today about Script Frenzy, which sounds somewhat exciting and somewhat tiring.  One month-long writing guilt-fest might be enough for me per year.

A few days ago, I also started using FireEagle, because I got tired of waiting for Google Latitude to be released for my iPhone.  Geolocation is interesting to me, mainly because of social gatherings where most of the people involved broadcast their location.  This would make meeting up with people easier in locations that weren’t as well known.  It would also be a helpful gauge for how far away someone was, and how much time it would take to get together.

I don’t think we’ll get there for a while, though.  Part of the reason is just because the technology is not quite that ubiquitous yet, the other part being the initial hump of getting over the feeling of a loss of privacy.  As long as these applications continue to allow tunable privacy settings, I do think we’ll reach a point in time where everyone’s phones (or other mobile devices) will broadcast their locations to their specified friends.

I’m hungry.  I could go for some ribs.  Or, even better, a rib buffet.

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