Sweet, Sweet Fantasy, Baby: It's Good To Be King

You'll have to go here if you want to see the Tom Petty video, because I need to allocate my space properly in this post where I inevitably gloat about my recent dominance in these fantasy endeavors that I probably swore I'd never take too seriously. And believe me, what follows is about as thorough a recap as I can offer for my recent accumulation of small victories. (I know, I know: I can't believe I'm having this much difficulty getting laid either.)

Anyway, to complete the update on how those three seasons finished from that last fantasy update of mine, you might notice that I've got two nice little trophies there from first place finishes in both the fantasy hockey leagues. Again, one was scored using an overall points total (six different offensive categories and four goaltending) while the other was head-to-head throughout the season with a tournament to determine the champion.

I wish I could say there was more suspense involved in the head-to-head tournament games, but most every week seemed to see my team get out to an immediate lead and then the question inevitably became whether they could hang on—and quite obviously, they did. 

For the record, I'm still not entirely certain what the tiebreaker was that determined how third place was decided in this league—although it might have been goals? All I know is I also had the luck of Ovie playing one more game than Sid the Kid for that final week, so hooray me.

What's that? Those other fantasy sports listed there? Well, I think you know what the story with that football league was, and well, I'm still coming along in basketball, I suppose. Keep in mind that my previous finishes in the 500-person March Madness tournaments were 366th and 451st, so this year's 288th is a drastic improvement—although I'm still quietly sorta pissed about having three of my predicted Final Four alive the weekend of the Elite Eight only to see none of them advance.

And so where three or four fantasy leagues have ended, I'll leave you with this screencap of the one thing that will keep me checking into Yahoo over the summer: Fantasy Baseball, where I'm currently atop the leaderboard.

There's two things to note about why the baseball team I've got is different from the other fantasy leagues I've already bored most of you silly with: As I mentioned before, this team marks the very first fantasy team that I myself can actually say I picked. Every other time I've participated in fantasy sports has seen the computer auto-draft for me, but now I can't blame anybody for assembling my squad but myself. So suddenly, I'm not as eager to drop players since I feel compelled to believe that I'm going to look like a genius for picking each and every guy on my club—even if I did take J-Hey way too early.

The other item worth noting here is that this is a rotisserie league—meaning that in all likelihood, my little lead is most certainly short-lived. Whereas I can see how a points-based system allows someone to pad an early lead, the rotisserie scoring system makes your rankings in each category count and you'll need some balance instead of relying on just a couple categories. I'm not sure how this will affect my strategy as the year progresses (we're not even a month into the season yet, obviously), but so far leading in runs, hits, batting average and total bases seems to me like good categories to be in control of.

I'm still learning these things, I guess, but damned if it doesn't seem like I'm learning them real good great well.