It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: fantasy baseball

Day 194: everybody loves a comeback

August 24, 2009 / / 0 Comments

10 weeks into baseball season, I was at the bottom of my fantasy baseball league.  My pitchers were bringing up the rear in 3 of 5 categories and the league leader had almost twice my score.

It was a dark time.

It’s now week 21, with 8 and a half weeks left of regulation baseball season and my team is scrapping to stay in the top half of the league.  I’ve risen from 12th to 5th and hope to have a strong enough bout of pitching in order to finish in the top three.

It’s been exciting, these past few weeks.  I’ve watched my team overcome adversity, when our season looked hopeless at the all-star break.  The fact that they’ve managed to pick at opposing teams scores and work their way up into the top half of the league has been inspiring.

It’s now up to me to single out the categories in which I can still make up ground and take some risks.  Winning the league is probably out of reach at this point; the leading team has managed to sit atop the league since week 4 and has somehow managed to draft a team impervious to slumps and major injuries.

But this comeback has been in the making for several months.  This comeback is destined to be.  Nothing can stop this train.

Except, perhaps, my baseball players getting injured or suspended.  Or playing badly.

Day 122: skullbuggery

June 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I played video games for most of today. That was a bit much, perhaps, but nice.
Our cat (the fat one) is overdue for a vet visit. We’ll have to get on that.
I think she just ate a bug. I hope that kind of thing doesn’t make her sick.

I would very much like to do a staged reading. I think that would be fun. Perhaps I’ll make it a part of my podcast.

I’m afraid I’ll have to cut this post short, as I’m writing on a laptop that is running low on battery. In general, things are going well, except for my fantasy baseball team, which is full of scrubs.

Day 46: draft aftermath and garbled thoughts

March 29, 2009 / / 0 Comments

For reference, here’s the fantasy baseball team I drafted:

  • C Mike Napoli
  • 1B Joey Votto
  • 1B Mike Jacobs (bench)
  • 2B Brandon Phillips
  • 3B Aramis Ramirez
  • 3B Adrian Beltre (bench)
  • SS Jimmy Rollins
  • OF Bobby Abreu
  • OF Matt Holliday
  • OF Carlos Quentin
  • OF Jermaine Dye
  • OF J.D. Drew (bench)
  • DH Jim Thome (bench)
  • SP Erik Bedard
  • SP John Danks
  • SP Jeremy Guthrie (bench)
  • SP Rich Harden
  • SP Derek Lowe
  • SP Chris Young
  • RP Brian Fuentes
  • RP Chris Ray (bench)
  • RP Joakim Soria

Today, I dropped Mike Jacobs and picked up Kevin Gregg after the closer decision announcement came out.  I also picked up and stashed Troy Glaus in one of my DL slots.  I’m shopping J.D. Drew and may look to trade Beltre at some point to try and bone up my pitching (or a better catcher).  Overall, I felt that the draft went relatively well, despite my rather weak starting pitchers.

Of course, we won’t actually know how successful my season will be until the real season starts in a week.

I had a dream last night that I had built an Iron Man-like suit and was flying down the hallway of an old apartment my parents and I lived in when I was a kid.  It was quite strange.

I played Fallout 3 until about 3 AM last night.  That was too late.  I haven’t even bought the Pittsburgh expansion yet!  I do plan to, though, so that I can stand in a ruined Point State Park and shoot mutants.  It was my dream in Pittsburgh, but…the apocalypse never happened.  Oh well.  Maybe one day.

You know, I never thought I’d have one of those guy friends who’s “that guy.”  But now that I think about it, my co-worker Jerome is kind of like “that guy.”  And that’s cool with me.  Like, the movie I Love You, Man just came out.  Looked kind of funny, but would I really see it on opening weekend?  If I’m Jerome, the answer is OH YES.  That guy.  He’s great.  He and his scruffy Euro-face.

I don’t think Jerome reads these.  I guess we’ll see!

I’ve been playing the recently-released EA DS game Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, which is a great title and an addictive game, but I’m not sure how much I actually like it.  I want to keep playing because I want to see what additional powers I get, but the levels and action get a bit repetitive and dying – although there isn’t a large penalty associated with it – is annoying when it’s because I’ve been suddenly surrounded by enemies.  In other words, the difficulty seems a bit manufactured instead of natural.

It’s no Professor Layton, that’s for sure.  Here’s some Professor Layton fan art I found on the Internet:

layton

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?

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