Blah, Blah, Blah: Another obligatory fantasy update

Your author is hard-pressed to think of something that can cause an immediate loss of interest quite like hearing about someone's fantasy team. Having friends and co-workers recite their rosters with no real purpose other than to gloat about conquering leagues you're not involved in seems quite banal and pointless, no?

That said, the author knows full well that you the dear reader probably also couldn't give two shits about whatever fantasy team he's gone and created after so many years of taking that road less traveled where non-participation seemed cooler. Now the author has multiple fantasy teams, and while he tries mightily not to bring those into the other posts here on BMC that you might actually read, every once in a while, if for no other purpose than to help him remember who he had on such teams in a given year, he likes to keep a recorded entry of how he's done.

This is one of those times. Your non-interest in the remainder of this post is understood.


With less than a month to go in the fantasy baseball league my bro-in-law started, I went from a slim lead to a now nearly insurmountable, almost 30-point lead with just weeks remaining. I'm fairly certain I'm also the onle manager in the league that could max out all of his positions, so that should give you a fair indication about how much effort the other, ahem, "participants" put into this competition. Still, a trophy would be a trophy, and I'll gladly take another first place finish for the Yahoo trophy case. I'll have a longer recap of my roster at the end of the season.

I guess I suspected maybe there'd be a little bump in activity with presumably some of the same crowd in that pool also being in bro-in-law's fantasy football pool, which is also run through Yahoo. As you might recall, in my very first fantasy anything endeavor, I finished dead last, 12th out of 12. According to that last screengrab I found from that season, it was a truly pathetic 3-11 record.

So the good news to start this season would be that I opened with a win. I suppose there was some decent suspense going into Monday night with me holding a narrow lead and my opponent having three players that evening to my one, but considering my player was Philip Rivers (a QB who earned 23 points) and his trio was a receiver, a tight end and a defense that earned two points between the three of them, we instead ended up with the result you see there.

The main lesson I've learned about fantasy sports in that first season is not to waste time holding out hope for a player to turn it around when he's dogging it—at least most of the time that's the case. So unlike last year's initial run where I had pretty much an entire squad of dudes letting me down every single week, I'm not wasting much time making constant revisions to my roster. In this Yahoo league, a bulk of my moves seem destined to come at wide receiver, since Rivers is a pretty solid starting QB and I've got depth at running back—what with Michael Turner being picked first for me (AGAIN) and LaDainian Tomlinson also being on both my fantasy teams.

Oh yeah, I say "both" because a fellow over on Tumblr also started a fantasy football league, which I of course had to sign up for immediately. And well, what do you know—I won over there last weekend too.

That one's run through NFL.com, but the idea isn't all that different. Like I said, I somehow end up with Michael Turner being picked first for every pool I'm i I guess, but I suppose my team feels a little more solid overall in the Tumble league because of there only being 10 teams as opposed to the dozen in bro-in-law's Yahoo league.

The waiver wire takes a bit more patience in the Tumblr league, however, so my immediate glee in thinking I could add Michael Vick from my phone in the bar on Sunday ended up being all for naught. As a result of winning my first game on Sunday, I moved into the top tier of winners who thus become the latter half of waiver priorities. So this morning, I found that I had to settle for two new tight ends to replace a running back and a wide receiver. Then I made another change at backup QB and WR. Again, I'm not going to be shy about making changes in either league, and in one week of fantasy football—albeit two leagues as compared to last year's one—I've won nearly as many games as I did all of last season.

Oh, and there's of course more winter sports on the horizon. Another Tumblr started a league for fantasy basketball that I'm guessing will be totally tits (we're drafting for that next month), although a fantasy hockey league invite has yet to surface. I expressed interest in joining a rotisserie league on Yahoo and heard nothing, so I don't know that I'll remember to look more into that—although the leagues I got into last year (and won [!!!]) didn't draft until after the first puck was dropped.

Right now, I'm still getting back into the swing of things here, but more thorough updates about more meaningless matters forthcoming, I'm sure.