Nerds on Sports

I spent 4 hours at my computer on Saturday, drafting a fantasy baseball team.  The Monster League, populated by NoS posters Willis and RJ and frequent commenter Angry Ed, is a beautiful mix of friendly and competitive.  During our Winter Meetings (a once-yearly gathering for pizza and rules adjustments) and our Live Online Draft, we throw playful jabs between orders of business, mocking our own fantasy management inability as often as we make fun of the skills of others.  It’s not a bad situation; in fact, it’s been the best league I’ve ever been in.

Sixteen teams, twenty-five rounds, twenty-five roster spots (including minor leaguers).  Roto league with five offensive and five pitching stats.  Thousands and thousands of players to choose from.  The Monster League is big compared to other fantasy baseball leagues, but not that much bigger.  All fantasy baseball is that unwieldy.  Compared to fantasy football, basketball or golf, putting together a baseball team is a bear.  Too many combinations of players, too many positions, too many scenarios in which you are suddenly without a viable starting catcher.  It’s a rough game, and it’s a complicated one, and therein lies the joy of it.

Fantasy baseball drafts are big enough that you can’t plan for it all.  You have to draft based on instinct and knowledge.  You get better with experience – eventually you begin to understand the opportunity cost of waiting to draft certain positions in favor of others – but in the end it is complex enough that it really does tend to separate out those that manage well from those than don’t.  In fantasy sports, luck becomes less important as the roster size goes up.  You may hit the jackpot in fantasy hockey and have two hot hands carry you into the playoffs.  But it takes a thoroughly deep team to survive a roto baseball league.  And teams like that come together when you have encyclopedic knowledge and a good sense of value.

The season, the real season, is days away.  Right now, all the fantasy baseball owners are undefeated.  Enjoy it while you can, because we’ll soon discover how good we are at all of this.

So Boston College Basketball got bounced in the first round of the NCAA’s, squandering a 7 seed to those surfing long-hairs out of Southern California.  About an hour later, the BC Hockey team coughed one up to those Phish-listening  train riders out of Boston University.  Crappy night for me.

The BC spring football game is about a month away, and I wish our baseball team the best but can’t possibly sit through collegiate baseball more than once every six years.  As such, I need a new college sport to follow.  It’d be preferable if it was Boston College related.  So here’s a mission.  If you’re a current BC student, start an intramural league of some sort and apply sabermetrics to it.  Then, e-mail them to me and let me analyze them and right snarky stuff about it.

Go, time’s a wastin’!

After a week of conference championship games, Selection Sunday swept into our lives and delivered the NCAA Tournament field to us.  Like kids on Christmas Eve, we waited to see what came down the chimney.  We speculated, audited in our heads how our years have gone.  Were we naughty or nice?  What’s Santa’s track record been in the past?  Does Daddy not having a job affect my odds of getting that pimp Lego Castle?  You talk yourself into believing in the most beautiful possibilities.  You think and hope and pray so hard that they become real.  Such is human nature.

Accordingly, life is filled with disappointments.  There are always more stories about vacations falling apart or an expensive restaurant being overrated or, say, your team getting ignored for the Big Dance than stories of unexpectedly perfect situations.  We as sports fans accept this.  We know, deep down, that our sunny predictions born of baseball’s spring training or football’s draft won’t be fulfilled.  But despite this, every so often the Gods of Sport give your team a gift.  Perhaps an entirely unexpected gift, a wholly undeserved gift.  But a gift.  And a beautiful one.

The Arizona Cardinals got one this past year – making it to the SuperBowl with a one dimensional offense and a terrible defense.  The Kansas City Chiefs got one in the form of a discount Matt Cassel.  And my beloved Boston College Eagles just picked one up in the form of a 7 seed in the tournament.  Granted, I think BC’s unexpectedly generous seeding isn’t on the same level of “holy flying God are you lucky” as the Buzzsaw’s run into the playoffs or The Last Cassel’s new home in KC, but it hit me close to home.  So I’m going to talk about it.

BC beat Duke at home and UNC on the road.  We won the first game of the ACC tourney and played the Blue Devils to the final seconds in the next one.  We had the resume for a 9 or 10 seed, considering we dropped ugly games to St. Louis (road) and Harvard (home, in front of me).  The season proved that Boston College has the legs to either run into the Final Four or drop in the first round – in other words, they’re the perfect 9 or 10.  Just high enough not to be a Cinderalla, but just low enough to fly under the radar until the Sweet Sixteen.

Then the 7 seed happened.  I learned about it on a basement computer in the green room of my comedy theatre.  “Wow,” I said aloud.  “I think that’s a little generous.”  That right there is a rarity in sports.  We’re so used to disappointment, so used to our teams being disrespected, that when something so fun and unexpected happens, we have no idea what to think.  How often in the history of your own sports fandom have you had a “we don’t deserve such good news” moment?  You’ll probably think about thirty different “we got hosed” moments trying to come up with one.

So between now and Friday’s game against USC, I’m going to do my best to appreciate the sports equivalent of finding a $20 bill on the street.  Go Eagles, YOUR tournament 7 seed!

My girlfriend and I have been to a Boston College basketball game three times this season, and we (and the team) have compiled a 2-1 record. We saw wins against Providence and Georgia Tech, and a shameful loss against Harvard.

I realized, reflecting upon this the other day, that I am lucky to have witnessed multiple wins, but even more so to be in a relationship with an honest to goodness sports fan.

I firmly believe you shouldn’t date someone just because they like the sports that you do, but if it just so happens that they’re big into football or baseball or anything else, it is a tremendous bonus. It’s like finding a gold bar in the truck of a car at a police auction – you expected something good and you got something awesome. If you’re dating someone who is a sports fan, buy them tickets to things. Tickets are like flowers. Unexpected and lovely. If you’re not, it’s ok. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of friends who’d like that extra Bruins ticket.

First off, if you haven’t put in your nominations, do that now.  You’re the Academy, people, and it’s a serious responsibility.

Alright, moving on to football matters.  The Patriots said goodbye to Mike Vrabel and Matt Cassel, shipping them off to Kansas City for a second round pick.  At first blush, it appeared as if the Pats somehow fleeced new KC Bürgermeister Scott Pioli into giving the 34th pick for a 35 year old man who can, at this point, only sort of run and tackle.  But then Cassel was revealed to be part of the deal and the response from Boston (“Our team is run by fools!  Fools!”) was not entirely positive.

That’s why I’m here.  To tell you that it was for both parties.  The NFL is not like fantasy football.  You can’t hoodwink other teams in the NFL with the ease that you can hoodwink some fantasy greenhorn in his first season.  Especially when you’re dealing with a guy (Pioli) who knows everything about you and you know everything about.  The Patriots dumped a heck of a lot of salary and got an incredibly valuable early second round pick.  The Chiefs acquired a guy who can throw a football and another guy who has played long enough to be another coach in the locker room.  That’s a net win for both teams.  The Patriots don’t make their living on getting early first round picks, like the Chief’s third overall that some fans up here were salivating over.  Unless you were lucky enough to acquire Matt Ryan (let’s go Eagles… errrr Falcons), you’re overpaying for people who haven’t played a down of pro football.  The Pats don’t build their teams around early 1st round big guns – rather, they make sure every position is filled with guys that can hurt you.  If you’ve noticed, they won a bunch of  Super Bowls doing this.

The Patriots are picking 23rd, 34th, 47th, and 58th.  Four of the top 60 picks.  I’d rather have that than a 3rd overall, since you’d be paying the same amount of money for those four players than you would be for that single theoretical superplayer.  The Pats will always take the warm bodies, as opposed to the one hot one.  And, given the system that they work under, everyone gets really good at doing what they’re supposed to.

Look forward to the draft, Foxboro Faithful.  And look forward to a better year overall, Kansas City.

“BC didn’t look too good this weekend,” said a BU-alum co-worker.

“Yeah,” I replied, “but we’ll make the Dance.”

Boston College beat Duke at home and UNC on the road this season.  A couple of thrilling games against top competition.  As part of any NCAA Tournament portfolio, they’d be those “well, now we have to let you in” type games that guarantee an 8 seed.  But in this baffling season in which the ACC beats up on each other more than usual, nothing is certain.  After beating UNC, my beloved Eagles returned home and got clobbered by Harvard, a team with slightly more athletic talent than my high school’s.  I was there at Conte Forum when it went down.  If you dig up the ESPN highlights (I won’t, since it hurts), you’ll be able to see me in the background with my head in my hands and my girlfriend being a good soldier and trying to make me feel better.

The road to March Madness reminds me a lot of the road to the Oscars.  Way too many people using way too much specious reasoning to determine the future.  “Mickey Rourke won some support when he thanked his dogs during the Golden Globes, so that puts him in a great position.”  “Texas Tech is only at .500, but with their strength of schedule being what it is, maybe it’s enough to get some looks.”  Pundits of all types are weigh in, using the same information in different ways.  Interesting things happen when “news”casters need to fill two hours on one subject.

Like the Oscars, when the Tournament actually happens it is cause for a massive party, drinking games and friendly wagers.  But darn if the trip there is agony.  I’m not here to say that going to daily RPI trackers or Perez Hilton for gossip is wrong, but I am here to say that anticipation, when too bloated, invariably leads to letdown.  People love setting themselves up for disappointment.  I’m sure that some of you who braved the seven hours worth of the Academy Awards spent a lot of it wondering why your Lead Pipe Locks didn’t win their respective awards after you spent days in advance researching their roles and figuring out who actually is in the Academy.  I just trust you don’t make the same mistake with the NCAAs.

I’m still upset about this A-Rod thing.  The past few days haven’t done anything to ease the frustration of having Bud Selig, who watched the biceps of his best players swell along with average attendance, declare that Rodriguez ’shamed the game.’  Is the act of putting performance enhancers in your body to compete with the hundreds of other players that put performance enhancers in their bodies any more shameful than turning a blind eye to it until memories of the baseball strike faded?  Is that act more shameful than faking outrage once he realized that the fans were back?  The men that returned the crowds to baseball were coursing with banned substances.  People knew.  Staffers knew.  The commissioner’s office knew.  They must have known.  They’re not stupid – far from it.  They’re smarter than all of us.  Think of it this way: we’re all disgusted, but we’re talking about it.  I’m talking about it right now.  Heck, I just set my keepers in my fantasy baseball league.  We’re complaining about this steroid issue the same way we complain about U.S. foreign policy.  We’re disappointed, but we’re not going anywhere.

When will it end?  When will the stories about baseball be about baseball again?  I wish I had an answer for that.  I think this season is shot.  The hundred plus names on that report that mentioned A-Rod is coming out this year, no doubt about it.  There will be a lot of outrage and the season will essentially be a washout.  Right now, we’ve got a whole spring training, regular season, and postseason that will be absolutely, totally dominated by talk of steroids first and play on the field second.  So prepare for that.  And be angry.  You have every right to be.

We’re really got two options for this upcoming season.  We can view it with a bit of distance and skepticism, or we can ignore it totally.  I don’t know of any real fans that are doing the second.  So in that respect we’re as much to blame as Selig or BALCO or anyone else.  We’re not going to boycott.  We’re going to pay $100 for tickets like always and then, if we have time, make up a clever sign with a syringe on it that might get up on television.  We’re part of the monster, so we better feel bad as we keep tuning in to SportsCenter to track allegations.  As a sports fan, you owe it to the Gods to feel bad.

So we’re angry and we’re guilty.  Let’s just make sure that’s taken care of before we even think about talking about the season.  Maybe next week is when I start hoping that the Yankees pitching staff is healthy.  Maybe the week after is when I think about my fantasy draft.  I’m not ready for any of that yet.  I hope I will be soon.  I hope you all will be too.

I’m going to use as few words as possible so that the ones I use will carry a bit more weight.

When it comes to baseball, assume that every record broken in the last dozen years is tainted. Assume that the greats of yesteryear are still the best and that no one born after 1970 can hold a candle. Assume that the best and purest days of baseball are behind us and will never come back.

If you want to go to the ballpark after you think through all of that, then go.