My Actual Fantasies Do Not Involve Chipper Jones

Nobody cares about your fantasy team.

Well, if you’re in a head-to-head league, the other guy you are playing might care. But even that isn’t lasting more than a week. Seriously, if you want to suck the lifeforce out of people just tell them how you dropped Chad Gaudin right before he became SP eligible so you could pick up Jason Hirsch on a 2-start week only to see him get pounded twice.

I am now a less interesting person simply for having written that sentence.

I am also guilty. I am obsessed with checking my teams’ scores as they update. I watch gamecasts to see if Micah Owings can pitch out of a 2-on 2-out jam. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Micah Owings six weeks ago, or if I did, I probably thought it was some brand of cookware. These aren’t even actual games I am watching, they are just dots that appear on a web page that show where a pitch crossed the strike zone. I’m an Ecclesiastical fence-sitter (read: agnostic), yet I believe those dots to reveal something true about the world. It’s not healthy.

I want to talk about my fantasy players but I want to do it in a way such that I don’t lose my friends and don’t chase away potential girlfriends. So I will attempt to use the only idiom that will not engender hatred.

I will condemn or praise my players in haiku. So, for the week ending May 20, 2007, here goes installment number one.

Derrek Lee

You missed a whole week
You injured yourself sliding?
Oh yes, you’re a Cub

Daisuke Matsuzaka

Go, Mister Sparkle
I have joined you over death
I could do no less

Eric Bedard #1

Unheralded ace
You might be Canadian
But I still start you

Manny Ramirez

Brad Hawpe, Khalil Greene
Dave DeJesus, Aaron Hill
Have all outscored you

Eric Bedard #2

If you do not want
To napalm your relievers
I’ll do it for you

Rich Harden

Your MRI’s back
That’s a pussy instead of
A rotator cuff

Eric Byrnes

Twenty points a week
You hit, catch and steal bases
You went undrafted

Okay, so some are less inspired than others. And I feel a mild amount of shame for suggesting that Rich Harden has female genitalia where his shoulder joint should be, but dude has missed a month of work with “tightness.” So, it’s not totally implausible.

Anyway, feel free to leave your own fantasy thoughts in 5-7-5 time if you so desire in the Comments. Better there than to your friends.