Baseball is glorious. Give me a scorecard, a pencil and an unobstructed view, and I am content. It does not matter who’s playing, whether the teams are any good, or if anything is at stake. In fact, it’s the meaningless games, the random Tuesdays in mid-April or better still, late September when we’re all just glumly doing the autopsy, those are the ones I like watching best. It’s all so leisurely. And people show you who they really are when they think you’re not looking.
Give me Cracker Jacks, bad facial hair, preposterous walk-up music, the shout of “Hoddags!” and the smell of spilled beer. A baseball game combines the best parts of a tavern, a cookout, and sleeping it off on a parkbench in the sun, and is entirely too delightful for the modern world. It’s someone’s fireable oversight that it still exists at all, and hasn’t been turned into some “sport” where people ride Kawasaki Ninjas around abandoned shopping malls and shoot each other with paintballs for money.
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Nobody knows this, but sometimes when I’m feeling blue, I’ll pee in the toilet five times without flushing. And suddenly I’m back in front of the trough at the old Wrigley.
(Gross, yes, but have you ever actually eaten a madeline?)
For my fiftieth birthday, my parents met me and my favorite Aunt and Uncle at Busch Stadium for a game between the Cardinals and the Cubs. The Cardinals lost, but I didn’t care. My Dad, who cares very deeply, about everything, was minorly appalled. “Dad, I’m just happy to be here,” I explained. “I’m happy to have made it to fifty. I happy to see Mary and David. I’m happy when Mom’s peanut shells somehow get stuck in the waistband of my boxers. I’m even happy,” I said graciously, “about your Cubs socks.”
Around that same time, Phil from the acupuncture office introduced me to fantasy baseball. I’d played fantasy football for years, but fantasy baseball scared me. Fantasy baseball is frankly insane—it’s daily, for one thing, and there are tons and tons and tons of players, some with very similar names. People are getting injured, sent down, called up, getting hot, going cold, getting second opinions, having trouble with the language, failing drug tests, their wives are having babies, their managers hate them, the front office has declared a fire sale—it’s a madhouse. But there are compensations. If you play fantasy baseball, you now have a reason to watch a Phillies-Orioles game in mid-April or late September and, because there is so much goddamn baseball on TV, that is wonderful.
In my experience, there are two types of people who excel at fantasy baseball: Wall Street quants, and the underemployed. To which I say: Finally. A game I was born to play.
So let us form a league. I’ll host it on Yahoo, and we’ll have the standard rules for a head-to-head category affair. I’ll think of prizes for the winners—first place and a runner-up. We need at least ten people to play. All those interested, sound off in the comments.
And if you’ve never played, don’t be shy—just pee five times without flushing, and it’s like you’re really there.
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