All my pitchers decided to get more walks than K's, to throw at least one passed ball with a runner on third, per game, and all my hitters decided going Oh Fer was the life lived in high morality because they didn't want to be seen as "running up my score" in said Fantasy league.
And my stomach began to hurt. My neck and the back of my head, too. Dry or oily patches on my skin, which once upon a time would have disappeared without raising a flag were turning into torturous runaway magic 8 ball sized tumors in that awful place in the inner nose where you can't get at them without the deft helping hand of a surgeon.
The greatest pain of this slippage of my league lead is also the fact that those teams that are catching up with me are not really racking up the stats either. Sure, they are out performing me, but that's not saying much. The only thing holding them back from over taking me is that they are all doing only slightly better than I am and they are bunching up together for a 6 team battle for second place. Really, there are 6 teams within two points of eachother, barely five points behind me. This will end one of two ways. Either my team will wake up and sail to victory, or I will fall back into the pack and be devoured by these second rate pretenders, as a pack of hungry starving dogs would tear apart the carrot they've been chasing for so many months once they finally nip at its little orange haired heels long enough to tire it out.
What about this do I love?
Well, just as I finally began to consider the very real possibility of ending up anywhere from second to seventh place in this league that I've been leading almost all year, a dude named Ryan from somewhere in the Midwest, I think, created a Fantasy game on Flooza.com based on the Olympics. You see, we had thought about creating an Olympics Fantasy game, but had decided against it for many reasons, not the least of which is that it could be a whole lot of effort for a two week payoff. Other reasons included the problem of the entire shabang, medal wise, typically being dominated by the US, China and Russia, so the great unfairness of not having those countries on your team, well........that could just lead to a lot of people beating their computers with their wireless keypads as they get destroyed by their rivals.
Enter Midwest Ryan. He doesn't care about these problems, he just wants to play a game about the Olympics. And he has devised a way that the US, China, and Russia can be less dominant. He puts them each into an A group of countries and cuts them in half each, down the gender line. Adding Germany and Australia to the A group, we then have 8 teams who score about the same in any given historical account of the Summer Oly's.
Then he creates B, C, and D groups of countries based on typical medal counts and gives each team in a league 2A, 3B, 5C and 5Dcountries, for a total of 15 countries per team. He is a genius and he is my hero.
I wrote him to congratulate him on his ingenuity and he graciously invited me to join his league. Which I did. And now I care about 10,000 times more about these two weeks of games played half way around the world than I did a week ago with no Fantasy prospects and nothing to look forward to, seemingly, but all the hype about China's awful human rights violations and internet censorship of journalists, etc....
On the above page you'll see my team, with the medals scored so far in the last 3 days of medaling. I am pretty much kicking ass in Bronze, but points being alloted as they are, 5 for G, 3 for S, and 1 for B, I am just chillin' in second place. But then, as you can see, Canada, Greece and Poland have yet to fulfill their great promise of utter world GOLD domination, so I do not think that I have even begun to peak.
For the record, I picked Australia and Germany to be my Agroup countries just so that I could stay out of all the USA vs China vs Russia drama.......I like to keep my Fantasy and politics separate, thank you very much. Unless it is Fantasy BASED on politics......but that's a subject for future posts.
The greatest thing about what Ryan did for me and my current enjoyment of Fantasy, is that no sooner had I joined his FantOly league, than my Fantasy Baseball team came back alive. My pitchers started striking people out and shutting people down again, Xavier Nady put my team on his back, and I'm getting Saves every day in new and interesting ways I thought not possible. Like last night when KRod came into a game with two outs in the ninth, two men on base and a four run lead. He struck one guy out. Got the save. Three pitches for a Save. Does that seem right to you?
Well he's on my team, so it seems right to me.
Fantasy Olympics rescues Fantasy Baseball, who'd a thunk?
Who rescues Fantasy every day? Flooza.com of course!
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1 comment:
so fantasy olympics rescues fantasy baseball, but what about real baseball? who will rescue that? don't say michael phelps.
and, by the way,i think poland is the dark horse to win some golds.
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