By A.J. Hayes
My name is Tony H. and I’m a fantasy baseball player.
There I said it.
Actually I haven’t been an active participant in fantasy ball in more than a decade, but sometimes the urge to seek out “post-hype sleepers” and under-the-radar bargains in fantasy publications is so strong that I have to leave Barnes & Nobles immediately
Apparently, I will be a fantasy baseball player for life.
Evil?
It all started innocently enough back in 1993, when a co-worker introduced me to his in-house league. Figuring it was another way to put my absorption of all things baseball to use and earn some pocket cash at the same time, I showed up at the “draft” – held in a clandestine conference room on the Saturday morning before the start of the baseball season – with a rough idea of what I wanted my team to look like and three crisp twenties from the ATM.
I felt like a real big-league general manager at the draft, and the blueberry bagels weren’t so bad either.
Being a Giants fan, my goal was to select as many San Francisco players as reasonably possible and then flesh out the rest of the squad with pre-inter-league play American Leaguers. That way, there would be no conflict of interest with my team and my team.
That first season I managed to land Barry Bonds to play the outfield and selected fellow -Giants Robby Thompson and Royce Clayton as my keystone combo. The rest of the squad was filled out with the likes of Joe Carter, Mo Vaughn, Lance Johnson and Paul O’Neill. I made one or two exceptions to my rule, selecting National League players such as catcher Joe Oliver, outfielder Bernard Gilkey and a couple of senior circuit pitchers including a youngish Curt Schilling and Steve Avery of the Braves.
When the season began I became ensconced in baseball like never before – raising in the early – pre-internet — hours to scour the morning boxes and tabulate “my guys” total bases, their RBI output and stolen bases.
It made going to work a bit more fun, especially when I would pass one of my fellow fantasy players in the hall after Chuck Finley threw one of his league leading 13 complete games that season – that’s a lot of extra points – or Tom Henke racked up another save.
But by mid-season, the fun turned into serious business. I blew a gasket when Felix Jose failed to live up to the hype with another 0-for-5 game and when Ben McDonald hit the skids after I inserted him back into my starting lineup.
The real life Giants meanwhile were having an amazing campaign in ’93.