FANTASY BALL?...FANTASY BAND!
By Joel Arquillos
If you are anything like me, and you wish you were, you've probably become quite enthralled by the daily activity of baseball players, their hitting streaks, averages, DL status, ERA, WHIP (still can’t conceptualize that one unless of course it’s me handling the WHIP), and overall stats. Does this sound like you? Have you become a Fantasy Baseball Junkie too?
It all started a year ago when a good friend, now a rival, asked me to join his Fantasy Baseball league. I thought heck, what’s the big deal, I’m married now, not really keeping in touch with the bros, fuck it! It took one day and one roll of the stats and I became a full-fledged user. I had an amazing team with the likes of Pedro Martinez, Piazza, Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera, Barry Bonds, David Wells, Jeter, ...Mind you, I completely loathe 75% of the aforementioned players, but it didn’t matter, I was making points! POINTS!
The truth was I was losing allegiance. I’ll proudly admit it. I grew up a devout Yankee fan. Fantasy Baseball changed that. I have since become an individual player fan. When I go to a game these days I don’t root for teams, I cheer for my stats. People don’t know what to think of me when I’m cheering for Tim Hudson to get a strikeout (2 points) and at the same time I’m cheering on Magglio Ordoñez (who’s at bat), to hit a homer (4 points). But the funny thing is that I’m not the only one. I’d say 20% of attending baseball fans are Fantasy fans! Is there a Fantasy psychiatrist in the house? Trust me, this can escalate into an obsessive-compulsive disorder, if you don’t already have one.
I obsessed for weeks. I’d ask old men at bars if they knew about this and they’d say, "Oh I don’t touch those computers, I keep my own stats by following the paper." It boggled my mind! This Fantasy thing has a history, but there’s no way I’d ever pick up a paper every day to annotate my Fantasy teams stats! Nonetheless, I continued spreading the gospel, making trades, dropping players, picking up shitty players the day before just to pick up points. In the end I came up last, but shit did I have a ball.
This year I put together my own league. I use YAHOO! because it’s easy to understand. I’ve heard about other leagues where you buy and sell players based on their worth. I get the picture. I’m not naïve, it’s all a conspiracy; some subliminal plan by the maker of E-TRADE* to get my generation hooked on "day trading." The way it works is you first become a member of a private league (aka New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ) get set up with a team (portfolio) of high performing players (stocks) and you devote every daily second of your meaningless life to making trades and dropping low performing players. The next thing you know you begin hallucinating about going postal and actually attending a ball game with the intention of throwing off Roger Clemens’ game by running out onto the field with a Piazza t-shirt, a bloody forehead, and waiving and taunting him with a broken bat. You do this for the sole purpose of putting another team from your Fantasy League, who has Roger Clemens on their team, behind you in strikeout points.
My league features teams run by friends all over the country. My friends back east have created a sort of allegiance against me and the friends I have here in the western U.S. A recent post by a good friend, whose team is called The Havana Bananas, is my case in print:
"You dumb fucking West Coast-Jamba-Juice sipping, Birkenstock wearing, the Generation of Love was just an afternoon of me at your mama's house taking ‘bong-rippers’ while she knit me a new pair of pajamas....Your team sucks and so does your mama, real good too."
How do you respond to that? Childish, but to the point.
Nonetheless, this whole Fantasy Baseball thing got me thinking. Why not create other fantasy-like leagues? Fantasy-Marriage? Fantasy-Meal? Fantasy Island- (oh wait!) Fantasy-Drug Concoction? Fantasy-Night-Out -With-Fantasy-Friends? But after serious thought I came up with a "league of my own". What about a Fantasy Band? This could give every music fanatic out there a chance to experience the power of God. It would also keep us informed of all the happenings in the lives of those musicians we love and completely want to kill. Perhaps it could distort our love of music but it might also open new doors that we were simply too embarrassed or ashamed to open before! Just think about it! Of course, there would be a draft. Rankings would be based on the following categories:
I’ve already got my team of living musicians:
1. Lead Singer: Morrisey (I’m counting on some depressing lyrical pointage here) hopefully no suicidal end to this one, but heck that would be 50 points!).
2. Drummer: Tommy Lee (I’ll score some beatings and hot ‘other’ points here).
3. Bass: Les Claypool (ok, here I’m hoping on a "Behind the Music", hot girlfriend, broken instrument, makes it on a listing or two, and definitely fits the ‘wack-ass’ category).
4. Guitar: Keith Richards (this is my point man! He will dominate 90% of the above categories).
The Fantasy Band lists could be endless. I’d have my own web page! I’d make millions with advertising by Virgin Records, Sony, Philip Morris, you name it. Because all this Fantasy Band stuff would trigger people to go out and buy more music, t-shirts, drugs, drugs and drugs!! I’d be a fucking millionaire! Oh, it’s just a fantasy.