Muppetface in Wonderland

A fantasy draft is one of the happiest and most stressful two hours for me. Reading through the lists of available players is like looking at old yearbooks from schools I only wish I attended. Getting the player I want is like getting asked to dance at an 8th grade gymnasium soiree.

But the time between turns inches by excruciatingly slowly. The minute and a half each team gets to select their next player seems to last forever. The horrendous buzzer counting down the seconds until my turn is up must have been invented by a disgruntled Yahoo! employee bent on making everyone else miserable as well.

An unnecessarily dramatic description? Sure. But this group of hypothetical guys will be with me for the next 6 months, 7 if I'm really lucky. So it's important, to me at least, that I like them. In the middle of an incredibly stressful week, this cyber draft brought me a much welcomed distraction and a much needed smile. And at the very least, now I have 19 more reasons to look forward to the season opener (ON FRIDAY!!).

And those reasons are:

A motley crew, yes. But the start of a very exciting make-believe season.

Adventures in Baseball: The Superfan

I love baseball. It is one of the things that makes me happiest in the world. I get as much joy from watching the Tigers beat the Royals by 20 as I do from watching a Red Sox/Yankees grudge match go into the 15th inning. And my love of the game has only grown since I came to college. In my freshman year, I was lucky enough to earn school credit by taking a class called The Business of Baseball. For three hours every week I got to sit around with fellow fanatics and talk about everything from the 2007 Indians' playoff hopes to KenesawMountain Landis' bow tie. It was in this class that I was first introduced to a unique specimen, what I refer to as the superfan.

A superfan, for those who've never met one, is a baseball fan of a different color. S/he doesn't just watch the game, s/he eats, sleeps, and breathes it. A superfan has not only heard of every player, but can tell you his batting average (both career and from the last month). I cannot stress enough how impressive I find these people. For awhile, I tried to emulate them. I joined a club that analyzed baseball statistics, I studied every article Nate Silver ever wrote, and I memorized names like DIPS and VORP like they were going out of style. I loved it, but then I started getting tired. As I struggled to learn acronyms, the superfans were already discussing the crop of perspective players for next season. And by the time I had learned all of the prospects' names, the superfans had discovered six new metrics with six bizarre new acronyms to commit to memory. What I tried to learn came naturally to the superfans. They were in a class of their own and I just couldn't keep up. But like a kid standing patiently above the dugout for hours, hoping for an up-close glimpse of her favorite player, I loyally followed the superfans and listened to their conversations that I could barely understand.

I will forever admire those superfans I met four years ago. They discussed intricacies of my favorite game that I didn't even know existed. Their fancy stats and bizarre acronyms gave me a new way to appreciate every at-bat and every pop-fly. They gave me a new way to enjoy baseball and a set of guys to admire off the field as well as on. I was fully reminded of my admiration for them today, when I joined my new fantasy baseball league. Hopefully their collective teachings will help me compete with the new crop of superfans waiting for me within the universe of Yahoo Sports Fantasy Baseball.

Embracing the Blog

I'm in a fickle relationship with the internet. One day I love it and want to share my writing with it while I read about other people sharing their writing with it. The next day I delete everything I wrote and pull out a pen and paper, determined to catalog my thoughts the old fashioned way. But inevitably the shiny new notebook I've bought myself falls by the wayside, and I'm back perusing the internet again. Well this time, I'm foolishly telling myself, it'll be different. This time, I'm embracing the blog.

I've always liked the idea of blogs. People with specific interests and knowledge create spaces to share all of that with people like me, who are experts in nothing. And people who have nothing specific to say are shockingly open and provide great accounts of everything from family fights to news about Justin Bieber. Seeing as I have neither specific knowledge to share with the world or the courage to detail every moment of my life on the world wide web, I was always hesitant to jump on the blog bandwagon. I didn't think my desire to write and lack of defined subject matter combined to form anything deserving a place in the blogosphere. But my fear of boring the internet and my affinity for writing on a regular basis just couldn't get along. So I'm trying to reconsider the blog.

The stack of half-empty journals filling my bookshelf have shown me that I'm never going to keep the traditional diary I've tried hundreds of times to start. And the millions of 13-year-old girls who start blogs every day have shown me that there's room on the internet for everyone. These two realizations have led me here. So I've created this, a space to play. I'm embracing the internet, embracing the blog, and seeing what kind of bizarre result I can produce when I force myself to sit down and write regularly.