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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Zantac Fantasy Baseball League, A Finale

Someone tell me what's wrong with this picture of Johnny Damon. If there's a valid explanation, I'd really like to hear it...

So not only did I lose sole possession of second place in my fantasy league on the last day, I finished tied for first loser. Since it was my first fantasy baseball year, I never expected to win and was mentally prepared to finish 5th or 6th. But when winning became a possibility, my inner-psycho came out and I began obsessing about the actions of other players and those actions left me more than a little steamed. I took particular notice of Plainville Penguins, the league leader. Early in the season, I lead the league in roster moves, trying to make up for the bevy of draft picks like Eric Gagne that went on the DL or simply didn't live up to expectations (I'm looking at you, Adrian Beltre). I made thirty-some roster moves, as I tried to find the right players and made one rookie mistake after another. And while I toiled in 8th place with a score total somewhere around 40, Penguins was in first. His score? Somewhere in the 90s. He lead every statistical category save 1. It was completely out of control. But by the All-Star game, I'd made some trades, settled on a roster, and things were looking up. I started a slow and steady climb up the rankings but noticed Penguins' number of roster moves going from the 40s to the 60s and into the 80s even though no one was threatening his 25 point lead. But then he pulled a ChiSox. His 25 point lead, insurmountable for nearly 4 months, began to dwindle. As Goliaths and I crept closer, he picked up more and more free agents, until finally, we were within 1.5 points. So Penguins unloaded all of his starting pitchers and picked up closers to prevent Geiger from catching him in saves. Once that lead was secure, he dumped his closers and cycled through 5 starting pitchers a day - this time, to try to catch me for the lead in wins. He tied me at one point and that's when I followed suit. Adding 5 pitchers the next day, hoping that my 5 would beat his. The counterattack worked for a couple days. Then Penguins started adding and dropping pitchers in the same afternoon for no other reason than to put any available pitchers on waivers. This made the hot free agent starters unavailable to me for 4-5 days - usually the day after they pitched..... Oooooh if I could only strangle him!! How bush league is that? If he wants to cycle through his pitchers, fine. If he wants to make 124 roster moves, go ahead. But when you pick up and drop players just to place them on waivers and make them unavailable, that's wholly unacceptable. He should be ashamed of himself.

I planned to make my feelings known in the message board but blew it. After the results came in, he had the nerve to say, "Nice run at the end by the Goliaths and Isotopes, made it a fight right down to the final weekend." All I could manage was calling him a tool and saying, "Maybe if you'd tripled our amount of moves instead of only doubling them, you wouldn't have had to sweat it out." It was a total lack of class and showed that I'm nothing but a bitter, poor sport... I wish I knew where he lived so I could kick him in the face. Bastard.