With February right around the corner and my team allegedly interested in Shane Spencer, I’ve done the logical thing and turned my attention away from real baseball and started poking around the Web in search of a place to host this year’s fantasy league. If you’ve got any suggestions, by the way, feel free to drop me a line. Just make sure you don’t click on “Big K” over on the sidebar – he’s the Sox guy, so if you write to him about Rey Ordonez he’ll probably get confused and respond with a rant about Pokey Reese or some other virtually identical ballplayer.
Anyway, if you’ve indulged in any fantasy baseball recently, you’ve probably come across members of my new favorite profession – fantasy baseball guru. In case you haven’t, here’s the gist. On otherwise reputable baseball news sites, certain lucky gentlemen share space with real sportswriters and ostensibly get paid American currency to break down always-complicated box scores and take a stab at predicting which players will play well. They’re the ones who write hundreds of words on John Flaherty’s power potential and argue passionately about whether Carl Crawford’s stolen base total trumps Felix Heredia’s strikeouts per nine innings. Did I mention they get paid to dwell on these things? I cannot stress that enough.
As theirs is obviously the best job ever, rivaled only by “usher at any major league park except Shea” and perhaps “major league baseball player”, the mere knowledge of its existence has me salivating over my chances of landing it, without benefiting from some Glavine family style nepotism. I think I could handle whatever rigorous battery of tests they’d run me through. In fact, I’m damn near certain they’d be fools to question my fitness to make predictions so irrelevant to human existence they’re not just about a game, they’re about a game about a game. Seriously, what job requirements are we looking at here? Qualified applicants will follow baseball regularly. Familiarity with whole numbers a plus. I’m telling you, I could do this.
But enough talk about this under-hyped profession; it’s time to provide some examples of these able craftsmen at work:
In this column for CNNSI.com, Jason Grey points out some ‘early sleepers and snoozers’. He places our own Mike Cameron in the former category, and has this to say about him:
Cameron is a different hitter outside of Safeco (.278 on the road, .228 at home the last three years), It would not shock me to see him in the top 10 in MVP voting in the National League this year.
Jason “Bastion of Equanimity” Grey also admitted that he would not be shocked by the Devil Rays taking the AL East, the Tigers sporting two twenty game winners, or dry-humping the third rail. Cameron even that close to an MVP award? Not only would he have to have a great season, the rest of the Mets would have to be really terrible...oh. Well, regardless, that prediction embodies the free-wheeling, fun-loving spirit of the fantasy baseball guru, whose reputation relies upon ferreting out possibilities that aren’t immediately obvious, even if it means those possibilities are also impossible.
(I’d be doing Mr. Grey a disservice if I didn’t also note that right below his designation of Cameron as a sleeper he slotted Heilman in as someone to watch, citing Dr. Rick Peterson’s influence. While his confidence in Cameron borders on the absurd, I wholeheartedly support his faith in Biomechanical Science Laboratories, and will do so until I am certain our pitching coach’s nanobots have been purged from my sector.)
Now that you’ve gotten a taste of this line of work, I’d like to introduce you to the preeminent fantasy baseball gurus of our time. Ladies and mostly gentlemen, I give you the prototype: The Sportingnews Fantasy Source Experts.
How do I know that they’re experts? Well, if you look closely at the author’s picture to the left of the article’s first paragraph, you’ll note that the word “EXPERT” appears beneath his stylish mug. In fact, the word “EXPERT” appears beneath the photos of all the fantasy source writers, suggesting a level of competence in the fledgling industry unmatched by any other organization. For comparison’s sake, just think: if the Mets were manned by 100% EXPERTs, they’d be sending to the plate a lineup of, oh, I don’t know, nine Vladimir Guerreros instead of zero.
Unfortunately this particular guru, Brendan Roberts, must have been having just such a fantasy baseball wet dream when he declared that factoring in offseason additions, “[c]ombined with returnees Cliff Floyd and Mike Piazza and youngsters Jose Reyes, Jason Phillips and Ty Wigginton, this Mets lineup could be pretty devastating.” Devastating how, exactly? Are we talking devastating in terms of the 2003 Red Sox lineup’s ability to smash the ball, or devastating like their best pitcher breaking down to lose game seven of the ALCS within scent of the Series?
I’m not sure, and to be honest, I don’t know if Brendan Roberts is either. But that’s not important! Who cares if the Mets realistically project to be a lackluster offensive ballclub? If there’s a chance – and during the offseason, there’s always a chance – that the Mets’ bats could in some way be described as devastating, then we can count on fantasy gurus to step out on a limb and forecast it thusly. For real dollars. It’s their job, after all. I can only pray that one day it will be mine.
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