Norman Einstein's
ISSUE 08 (01/10)
"A Lonely Pursuit"
by Ted Walker
[Ted is based in Seattle. With Eric Nusbaum, Ted blogs the sublime and the tragic in baseball at Pitchers & Poets.]
A fantasy team isn't a team at all: it's a one-man show. For all of the shuffling of players, all of the rosters annotated with personal and personnel data, all of the group chatter, the rule making and debating, the shit talking and preparation... for all of that, the fantasy sports lifestyle is a solitary one.
During draft time - the season's definitive strategic shuffle - a team owner maintains confidences and holds big moves close to the vest, grading sequences, probabilities, and tendencies like a professional poker player, that burgeoning stereotype of the brilliant but obsessed madman who doesn't know the value of the dollar.
Each fantasy team owner - what does one own, exactly? - silently strategizes, reading a few columns from the experts, maybe, or scanning the message boards if really desperate. Ultimately the fantasy owner walks alone and suffices with his own internal monologue. He directs the monologue - secretly like a diary entry - toward the ballplayers, asking for their best, that they might on this one day hit a double instead of a single, to give him a tic or two in the slugging percentage column. Success? It means one or two miniscule talles in the column, counting base hits like they were diamonds in a pile not grains of sand on the beach.
Credit: laura padgett (Flickr)
This has gotten off poorly. I sound bitter. It's not what I'm getting at, to decry fantasy sports. I love them, after all. And I antcipate each new season gleefully. Why is my outlook so, well, if not grim, then at least so guarded? I'll tell you because I already know: this fantasy sports year I, for great swaths of each respective regular season, dominated a) my fantasy baseball league and b) my fantasy football league. With balance and brashness, with gambits and pay-offs, with luck and insight, I was a force in each league, cashing in aggression and observation for wins and points. In short, I fielded the best team in each league for the longest time.
In each of these leagues I also a) lost the baseball championship in the last two days of the season and b) lost in the first round of the football playoffs. Months of work, of diligence, of good timing, and, more than anything else, of great expectations heightened by months of good results all slid out of the pan a minute before dinner time.
I'm not here to argue that my life is a tragic life. I have plenty of food to eat. I have cable TV. But the jaw rattling roughings up that I've taken these recently concluded fantasy seasons - the discombobulating stingers that can only come from coming close without closing out - give me cause to ponder the nature of these fantasy sports, to take stock here at the New Year. To look back, to look ahead, and to look at.
There you have it, my modus operandi, a puzzled fantasy sports wanderer searching for some suggestion that the whole is greater than the sum of its cruel parts.
What I keep wandering back to is this idea of team, a term employed relentlessly in reference to fantasy sports. A fantasy owner manages his team, but what is a fantasy team save a superbasic data set, simple enough to support the imaginative projection of the fantasy onto the sports? The fantasy part of fantasy sports is a brilliantly curated illusion, a blank zone of imaginative potential created with all of the higher level visualizations and design tricks of an Excel spreadsheet. The data doesn't go anywhere. It's not reinterpreted into 3-D imagery or used to calculate tax returns. Fantasy leagues are a collection of lists.
By means of comparison, the Strat-o-matic game, which uses dice and cards to simulate baseball games, is at least a means of reverse engineering the baseball experience. The cards are a means to imagine that actual baseball is being played. Fantasy sports, however, seem less a means to imaginative exploits than they do the ends themselves. Counting things that happen then comparing them to other countings threatens to reach the simplicity of the card game War, where you turn over one card after another against your opponent, high card wins and the only guiding factor is the luck of the draw.
In fantasy sports, obviously, far more than chance guides the counting. This is where the term team does start to take on significance, as the fantasy owner is called upon to gather a collection of players whose column filling ability complements those of his teammates. More importantly, the team owner must intuit which player will outperform the expectations the league and the rest of the fantasy baseball community have established for a given player. Every fantasy owner has the chance to play Billy Beane from the famous scenario created by Moneyball, outthinking other managers, playing one hand to find the twelfth round pick who will play like a second rounder, folding another to pass over the second rounder whose value outweighs his ability.
To wit, one reason I felt so grand about my baseball team was the fliers I took that paid off. Raul Ibanez, more vibrant in Philadelphia than Seattle, carried my team for the entire first half of the season. Bobby Abreu, so solid even as myriad owners left him to sour on the vine like the real Astros did in the expansion draft of 1997, stole bases and hit for average and hit... and hit...
So there you have it, me here talking about my list like it was a real team, with Abreu hitting behind Ibanez in the order. But dammit I picked those two players when no one else did. I do have some claim to their performance. Or at least it feels like I do. I was invested in my little list because it massaged my ego in a particular way, rewarding hunches and creating positive results from risk taking. (Another symptom of the fantasy enthusiast - and the entrepreneur and the dreamer and the gambler and the madman - is to ignore past failures and play up past successes, the way I'm doing right now as I willfully overlook the drafting of Milton Bradley and Oliver Perez and the dropping of home-run monster Mark Reynolds three weeks into the season.)
So I like my fantasy because I pick them. That I assemble a team - that I conjure it with will and agency from the void - forges the bond of allegiance between myself and a data set.
That's simple enough, that control engenders allegiance. It also happens to be the exact inversion of the real professional sports model, in which fans pledge their hope and faith and time and a decent portion of their paycheck towards a team that is assembled by a group of sunglasses in secluded desert fortresses, without meaningful input from those who are in theory the most invested partners. Without even a hint of democracy, allegiance is expected in this capitalism-run-amok model. Brands received not just loyalty but worship and unblinking lifelong dedication, to say nothing of the free publicity. Sports fans aren't just spectators; we're speculators.
What we have, then, is the age-old culture play, in which the peasants and paupers evolve scaled-down models of the power structures that actually drive their lives. The lowly play out their meek scenarios with the same gusto that the real players do, such that the mock-ups begin to take on the same emotional conviction and political power that the originals do. Take, for example, the MLB Network, which now features traditional baseball stalwarts at their holographic desks going on about fantasy drafts and sleepers when only a few years ago they would have had nothing to do with the imaginary game. The edifice has embraced the artifice. In this way the edifice attempts to absorb into itself what is essentially countercultural. The empire buys out the rebels. The line between fantasy and real sports blurs ever further while the power concentrates.
I don't know how to feel now, with this gift of revelation I've given myself. I am either, according to this framework, a sellout or a supporting actor in a community theater production of Frost/Nixon. If fantasy team building is a way to counteract the sense of helplessness that can accompany standard baseball fandom, then I am a helpless sot. If fantasy team building has been absorbed by the powers-that-be, then I am a cog in their wheel.
Moderation in all things, including over-involved ramblings about fantasy sports. In response to myself, to alleviage some of this tension, I say: fantasy sports are fun.
The other idea that I keep coming back to is that of the team. A team is a group of people working together towards a common goal. In the pale glow of the computer monitor, though, as I checked the final doomed results of both my baseball and football teams, I realized: there is no team. In this I am totally alone.
It's a grim realization, I know, so I'll step back a bit and come at it from a historical perspective, a look to the roots of my fantasy sports career.
In 1995 or so, back when AOL was my whole internet, I joined my first fantasy baseball league. Forty bucks bought me into the league. I don't know how I learned about it, or how at age 14 I knew that I'd enjoy it, but soon enough I found myself in your standard AOL chatroom with a bunch of strangers, auctioning off National Leaguers. Exhilarated with a sense of illicitness, a sense that we were a consipiracy of exotic animal traders bidding for Burmese pythons, this was what the internet was for: bringing strangers together to make deals and bargains, to crouch behind screen names and throw out figures. I didn't know who I was working against. Yet it hardly mattered in that new age of avatars. The stream of data couched as a conversation was the new currency. And fantasy baseball fit right in.
Since that first entirely anonymous venture, my fantasy sports life has evolved into a series of only slightly less anonymous associations. My leagues in question this year involve a) a group of fellow bloggers, none of whom I could spot in a police lineup, and b) a family of dudes from Wisconsin, out of whom I could spot one, my buddy Dave (it's his family). The one baseball league I attempted to form from good friends was the worst I've ever been a part of. Years from that first league, I still haven't lost that sense of solitary entrenchment, of silent plodding on, of the team internalized in fantasy sports.
Credit: Joey James Dio (Flickr)
Why do it then? Why pretend a team to life facing only competitors without confidants?
We all need our lonely pursuits. With all the time we spend building communities, navigating the lives of others, negotiating time and space with a thousand other souls, careening between speeding trains and speeding automobiles, there comes a time when the brain needs to depend on itself alone. Thoreau knew that a soul needs some time alone in the woods to exercise the weakening muscles that control intuition and self-dependence lest they atrophy completely. In an age of interconnectedness, loneliness - a fertile creative ground - is the new leprosy. Just ask anyone who doesn't own a cell phone.
We act alone in fantasy sports. We make decisions and we defend them, answering only to the data. We make deals with other loners and watch the results unfold. Rare is the chance today to act as an alliance of one, and given that chance, we manipulate the game's pieces like gods or children.
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