6.06.2005
Black Magic?
Check the link on the right and you will find a grisly sight: the Mission Magicians are now close enough to the cellar-dwellers as to render the difference negligible.
Go back to last month and you will find that I feared as much. I was resting in first place when I last wrote about the Magicians, but it was a precarious position, with a full-participation league of relentless rotogeeks scraping and clawing underneath. Jason Lane had 5 HR and 5 SB then; he has 1 HR and 0 SB since. Brad Wilkerson, he of the hot first week, has racked up 0 HR and 0 SB in the past month. Injuries may explain his recent struggles, but little good that does me. The pitching, meanwhile, is even worse. A quick look at the league standings will tell you all you need to know on that front.
Generally the very best fantasy players make an appalling number of transactions, from waiver wire pickups to trades and so forth. I am fast learning that the converse does not hold: more transactions do not necessarily bring more success. A decidedly ugly sight is the desperate owner, going from Brad Halsey to Kevin Brown to Brian Moehler to Aaron Harang on little more than a whim, with each ensuing disaster start plunging me deeper into oblivion.
I know, I know...woe is me. But eventually controlling a fantasy team, an experience undertaken out of equal parts obsessive entertainment and obsessive competitiveness, ceases to be fun. This happens when you encounter some of the following Sticky Points:
Go back to last month and you will find that I feared as much. I was resting in first place when I last wrote about the Magicians, but it was a precarious position, with a full-participation league of relentless rotogeeks scraping and clawing underneath. Jason Lane had 5 HR and 5 SB then; he has 1 HR and 0 SB since. Brad Wilkerson, he of the hot first week, has racked up 0 HR and 0 SB in the past month. Injuries may explain his recent struggles, but little good that does me. The pitching, meanwhile, is even worse. A quick look at the league standings will tell you all you need to know on that front.
Generally the very best fantasy players make an appalling number of transactions, from waiver wire pickups to trades and so forth. I am fast learning that the converse does not hold: more transactions do not necessarily bring more success. A decidedly ugly sight is the desperate owner, going from Brad Halsey to Kevin Brown to Brian Moehler to Aaron Harang on little more than a whim, with each ensuing disaster start plunging me deeper into oblivion.
I know, I know...woe is me. But eventually controlling a fantasy team, an experience undertaken out of equal parts obsessive entertainment and obsessive competitiveness, ceases to be fun. This happens when you encounter some of the following Sticky Points:
- You start losing. This is universal across all of human history. Surely there was a point during the Battle of Saratoga when Burgoyne wanted to hit reset and blow on the cartridge. In my case, blowing on the cartridge would mean not drafting Damn KolBB, as the folks over at alt.sports.baseball.atlanta-braves have taken to calling the now-disgraced reliever. I took Kolb in the tenth round, passing up Brian Roberts, A.J. Burnett, Dontrelle Willis, Chris Carpenter...OK, this is getting too painful to continue.
- Everyone starts getting injured. Before the season started I traded Alfonso Soriano for Edgar Renteria and Curt Schilling, a deal that most agreed was a steal for me. Now Schilling occupies my IR slot, which is too bad because otherwise there would have been a place for Octavio Dotel (he of the now-infamous voluntary TJ surgery), Wade Miller, Greg Aquino, Frank Thomas, and now Chipper Jones, presumed to hit the DL soon with vague but reportedly painful foot problems that probably explain his recent swoon.
- Your league gets persnickety. This year we have a Serial Protester in our ranks, the type who will automatically complain about every accepted trade to the ESPN Review Panel. The Serial Protester, of course, is an anonymous cat, a status which doesn't lend itself to productive intraleague debate over the trades in question. This would be little more than a nuisance if the Panel didn't then proceed to actually veto a handful of the trades, for reasons it refuses to explain to the participants. The reasoning is shamefully inscrutable to me. Troy Glaus for Ugueth Urbina? Fine. Brady Clark for Julio Lugo? Fine. Foulke/LoDuca/Neifi Perez for Prior/Posada (pre-injury)? Fine, apparently. Rich Harden for Schilling? Veto. Dan Haren/Urbina for Mussina? Veto. Did I make a mistake to shell out money to labor under the ESPN monolith? Quite possibly.
The question for the Magicians, of course, is how to recover. Although we are in the first year of a three-year keeper league, it's probably too early to discuss rebuilding for next season. In that vein, though, and in all others, it's fair to say that everything hinges on a Schilling recovery: not only will he give me momentum in the pitching categories if he comes back at full strength, but a guy like that has to be valuable to the owner of a key prospect or two, should the proper situation arise. When his situation inevitably goes from bad to worse -- as it has done once already, pushing back his return to the All-Star break -- there may well be no remaining recourse but to fold like an origami duckling.
