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I swore to myself I wouldn't do it this year. I suck at it anyway. It's not
really very fun. It costs money. The payback, on the odd chance that you do
win, is slight by comparison. And who the hell has time to pore over stats
every day? Well, I guess I do, cuz I just cut the check to my rotisserie baseball league today.
Oy. Another year of watching baseball through the skewed perception
primarily reserved for player agents. Instead of rooting for my favorite
teams or players, I find myself hoping the one Dodger I drafted whacks a
homer off the local-team guy. It's just plain wrong, I tells ya!
Allegiances are rendered obsolete. It's divisive and contradictory to the
acceptably provincial nature of the sport. The players are reduced to
faceless number-producers.
And therein lies the bummer with this whole roto-racket. You just can't
feel good about being a grown man getting all worked up about the
statistical possibilities of kids who aren't just younger than you, but way richer
too. Think about it, when you were 12 years old and rattling the cages
of your local little league park, did you look at the tee-ball kids and
drool at their stats? Hell no, you'd have been hauled off to the nearest
Boy's Town for "correction."
Well just how is it different now, smart guy? I'll tell you how it's
different. Of the 30 major league general managers, a small handful are in
their early 30s. You just know how these guys got their plush jobs. They
walked right into the owner's office and said, "Check out my rotisserie
stats! I've led my league five years in a row and had the rookie of the
year twice. And all with the lowest salaries paid out." Strange as it may
sound, this isn't far from the truth.
And the kicker is, they're not doing a bad job, either. Ex-San
Diego/current-Detroit GM Randy Smith, while a product of nepotism, took the Padres GM job at the ripe age of 31. The Oakland A's have a rookie-GM find
in washed-up prospect Billy Beane. He had the good sense to know where his
true talents lay at a young enough age to make it work for him. You just
know he's a roto-geek.
So anyway, one day after the arduous cross-country drafting process (we got
11 people all across the U.S. online, so it took about five hours), I
find that my big steal of the draft — Dante Bichette — has ballooned 40
pounds over the offseason. I'm picturing the white Cecil Fielder lugging
his fat ass around the bases, trying to leg out bloop hits and getting
gunned down at first. Yeah, I coulda had Tony Gwynn, but noooo...
Guess it's time to rip up my application for the Giants' general manager job.
Kevin Chanel is the editor and publisher of Chinmusic!, a digest of baseball and Bigrockaction. He's pretty sure this season is a wash already.
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