Happy Birthday

It’s Monday, and I’m off from work, resting up from way too much tennis against way better players this weekend. My right arm is about to fall off, and I think I’ve finally stopped cramping in my feet and hips. You see, those 2 days of tennis at the O Club occurred on my last two days of year 54. Today is the first day of year 55.

To celebrate today’s festivities, I grabbed a brand new book to start, having just finished “The Kite Runner,” a phenomenal read. Thanks to my pal Arthur Fraser for pushing me on it. Today I finally picked up something I bought during the winter: “Fantasyland”, by Sam Walker.

Walker writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal. He mostly writes about the business of sports, but he’s got a go anywhere press pass, which he parlayed into a spot in the AL Tout Wars. Unlike the Pecklers, who have been playing fantasy sports since 1981, he had never actually been in a fantasy league, but decided he had insider access that a bunch of fantasy nerds would never have, and begged Shandler for a spot in the league. The book is his journal of that adventure.

I originally bought the book because he hired a fellow named Nando Di Fino, who writes for The Talented Mr. Roto, to be his “expert” assistant. I once sent an email to Nando about him making fun of some pitcher (I want to say Woody Reuter, but I don’t remember) who had gout. I’ve had gout. It’s a killer. Anyway, he wrote me back a nice reply, and in the process, took a look at my blog. So since Nando and I are about as tight as Woo and Swedgin, I had to own the book.

In chapter 1, he’s got some hilarious comments about where fantasy baseball affects real baseball, kind of like Boof’s story about 30 guys cursing Steve Traschel while he was warming up in the bullpen. Here is one about former Pickled Peckler Mo Vaughn from 2002.

I stopped to talk with Mo Vaughn, the team’s burly cleanup hitter. It had been a humbling year for Vaughn, who’d come to New York with World Series ambitions, only to become a sports-page punch line. He was fatter than a porpoise, colder than a snowdrift at the plate, and by any standard, a $12 million disaster. Up in the stands that day, the hecklers had been merciless: “I didn’t know Mo Vaughn was pregnant!”

At the moment, however, the strain of this very public humiliation was second in his mind to another, more private form of ridicule. Some of his buddies back home had drafted him on their Rotisserie teams, he told me, and like fantasy players the world over had come to regret it. The only difference was that these people had a tool more powerful than shouted insults at the ballpark. They had his cellphone number. “Crazy fools,” Vaughn miffed, casting his eyes to the floor. “They’ve been killing me all year.”

From then on, in the normal course of my reporting, I started asking ballplayers how often, if ever, they heard from the Rotisserie crowd. The answer was, quite emphatically, all the time. “They tell me to steal bases,” said Andruw Jones… “For some reason, they want me to hit more doubles,” said Mike Lowell.

That last part is really in the book. I had to quote it here for Larry Dot Net.

Anyway, the man can write. Too bad it’s about the AL, and I will have little idea who any of the players are that he writes about.

As for me, another year, another hundred grey hairs. Grey hair – better than the alternative. And taking stock of my life, I realize that it’s the 20th anniversary of when I invented internet fantasy sports. It’s a fact. I’ll tell that story soon.