Mar 24, 2021

DEFEND YOUR MOVES OFF-SEASON 2021 #7 - FANTASY BASEBALL!!!!!!!

What’s up Special Ed?!

We are just one month away from the NFL draft, so we’re transitioning back to the classic Fantasy League content that you all crave. But since this week is also the Grand Finale of DYM’s March Madness Celebration we did something really weird - something we never thought we would ever do - a FANTASY BASEBALL DRAFT!!!!!

THAT'S RIGHT!

FANTASY BASEBALL!!!

We got the COVID vax last Friday which had us passed out for most of the weekend. We briefly woke up early Saturday afternoon and got a text from DOUGY TACOS!

He said somebody dropped out of his Fantasy Baseball league and they needed a replacement. And the draft is in 6 hours.

Fuck it. Say no more, we’re in. We did one mock draft then went back to sleep and sweated for four more hours. Doug tried to reassure us with platitudes like “Dude, I did ZERO research this year!” Which was nice but surely we couldn’t tell him at this point that not only have we never played fantasy baseball before, and never done an auction draft before, but we have hardly even WATCHED any baseball since 2018. Couldn't tell him that. We just laughed and wrote off any missteps as being due to the COVID-brain and edibles.

There’s no way Doug truly understood the depths of our discomfort.

For decades, the DYM staff has privately derided the entire institution of Fantasy Baseball. DYM Readers will have noticed that Fantasy Baseball has never been mentioned on this blog which, of course, is the greatest insult we could ever give it. We have never fucked with Fantasy Baseball in part because it seems way more complicated than Fantasy Football; plus it seems like mostly nerds and weirdos are into it; and most importantly - because it involves following BASEBALL, which just seems like the worst way to spend your summer.

Let us know if you guys start a Fantasy Going to the Beach League.

BASEBALL IS FUCKING BORING AS SHIT

We like the Mets, but we really don’t like baseball at all. Don’t like watchin it, and don’t like playin it - and not for lack of trying. To be honest we've spend a lot more time around baseball than anything else we enjoy as little. Like we’re DONE with golf right now. Haven’t set foot on a course in at least two or three years, but for some reason we keep giving baseball another chance. As a kid, we played little league for 6 years and hated every one of them. In high school we did a bit of Little League umpiring, which was even worse. Then from 2010-15 we were the fourth outfielder on the worst men’s softball team in Union County NJ.

Every summer we watch the first dozen or so Mets games, then we tune out once they hit a losing streak and turn the page to football season.

Over the last 7 years or so we’ve basically only watched games that Yoenis Cespedes played in. In 2014 and '15 we actually did watch a lot of baseball, but almost none since.

Nevertheless we were pretty psyched for this fantasy draft.

When we get a couple gummy bears in us we feel like we can draft just about anything. So we hopped on that ESPN Fantasy App and got it poppin.

First we established a solid poker face by drafting the first three guys who we had heard of and we know are good. Then we saw Doug bidding up Kris Bryant, who we’re not entirely familiar with, so we put an extra dollar on him.

At that point some people mighta thought we knew what we were doing, which meant it was high time for a little MARCH MADNESS!!!

TEBOW TIME BABY!!!

We’re not sure if we won this draft but we definitely had a huge early lead.

We would need it too - cause the draft got real dicey over the next couple rounds. The pool of non-Mets-that-we’ve-heard-of dried up completely after our 11th pick (of 23). We had to make some tough calls that mighta been a lot easier if we’d familiarized ourselves a little more with MLB player personnel:

We wanted to have heard of at least 50% of our team, which forced us to draft the Ultimate Metsy Homer Squad - as it stands now, we're gonna start at least 5 Mets on opening day.
We only got 1 of Fox News' Mike Tobin's sleeper picks (Ty France - $1). Trey Mancini was popular but in retrospect we shoulda paid up for him cause we ended up with a few dollars left at the end.
We knew that one of the Astros middle infielders was good in 2018 (mighta been AL MVP?) but we couldn’t remember if it was Correa or Altuve. We ended up getting both just to be safe, but the fact that both combined cost less than Kris Bryant was a little unsettling.
We drafted Mike Yastrzemski, cause for just a second we thought he was in the Hall of Fame already.
Although we're pretty happy with DeGrom and Tatis (who is NOT injured 🙉. No no no no no he is NOT!!!), if we had had a day to think about it we woulda just spent that first $100 on Shohei Ohtani.

Needless to say we've got a lot to learn over the next few weeks.

We're trying to dig into some research but it's not been fun so far. We've already read more articles in USA Today than we're really comfortable with, and we still haven't found a baseball podcast that's less boring than baseball itself.

Right now we're just making a list of "baseball terminology" and a few questions that we need to google sometime before next Thursday:

“Low BABIP-against”
“Quality starts”
“Orioles”
“Exit velocity”
“Hitter’s league”
"Juiced ball"
+ Where do the Blue Jays play?
+ Is Cleveland just the "Cleveland Baseball Team" now?
+ Is there a DH in the National League this year?

One might say that we're "The Abby" of this league, but that would be pretty unfair to Abby. We have NO CLUE what we're doing!!! But if nothing else at least we'll be able to get into some more DYM-Classic-Style content for the baseball league throughout summer.