BALL SUGARS: Fantasy Footballs

(It's more like Bi-Yearly, but we already made this logo and are too lazy to make another one.)


“You f***ing moron! What kind of irrational pervert leaves his phone at home?” was the question asked of me by my inquisitive and inaccurately-slanderous brother. “Where do you get off calling me a pervert?” I answered with a question. “Carlos Zambrano just threw a no-hitter and I’ve been trying to reach your dumb-ass for the last hour.” “When, in pre-game batting practice?” My dumb-ass replied. “No, against the Hurricane (Ike) displaced, (Houston) Astros, dick!” proclaimed a winded Eliaz with a Category-3 powered bad taste insult.


It was Sunday, the 14th of September. I was three days removed from making one of the most short-sighted fantasy football trades of all-time (in all of the 8 years since Fantasy football's advent, according to some dude who was writing on digg.com's fantasy sports message board). I’m in a ten-team fantasy league with a few acquaintances from work. The entry fee was $30 and all of the owners/players involved are experienced FF (fantasy football) participants, so I was looking forward to general managing my players against theirs. I felt pretty good about my team’s chances after I drew the third position in our leagues’ fantasy draft. I spent the first few rounds drafting according to CBSsportsline.com mock draft suggestions. I then made a few questionable picks later on, but none-the-less my team looked good—on paper that is (FF joke).

My team had a great opening week, wherein we won 120-60 in “pretend play“. Rather than celebrating and message board gloating, I started focusing on ways to make my team better. Glibly ignoring the old idiom of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I sought out trades among the other owners and listened to all their propositions.

The trade to which I hinted at in the second paragraph was Washington Redskins Quarterback Jason Campbell and San Diego Chargers Uber-tight end Antonio Gates for an ailing Matt Hasselbeck from the Seattle Seahawks, an unproven, third-year tight end out of the Denver organization, Tony Scheffler, and the very promising wide out from the Detroit Lions, Calvin Johnson. In my week one victory, all three of my aforementioned players performed underwhelming, to say the least. The footballers scored ten or less fantasy points a piece, which ultimately won‘t translate to a league title. The proposed transaction between my team—The Wood Sugars—and my friend Andy’s team—the Algonquin Puppies—did make little sense for me and a lot for Andy. “U know, I thought we were friends. This was before you proposed to me that horrendous trade offer that only benefits you. You tried 2 bang me in the back door and I have news for you, that unpleasant act is only reserved for those who are genetically predisposed to it, or girls who hate their fathers.” I texted Andy, or Ando as I often refer to him, in a two part text. But then I got to drinking. I mean deep boozing. Andy has been a good pal to me recently and we are both in the same holding pattern in life‘s turbulent one-way flight. We both are a couple of desolate cats staying at our mom’s house to save money for a few months before we find a scratching post of our own. (That cat-analogy was for my loyal female readers, most of whom I would surmise stopped reading after the sentence “You fucking moron!” or when they read the crass, but apt title of “Fantasy: Foot-n-Balls“).

According to my Chase online debit card statement, I purchased six dollars and thirty-three cents worth of something at a Love’s Liquor store. The libations I purchased were most likely from the Miller Brewing company. After an hour of re-watching episodes of Rickey Gervais’s Extras: Season Two on DVD, and siphoning out the contents of five domestic light beers, I decided to make sense of Ando’s low-ball trade.


My inebriated inner monologue went something like this:

Matt Hasselbeck:
Pros: He’s taken a team to Super Bowl XL, he’s played in three NFL Pro Bowl games, and he tries his hardest not to throw the ball to the other team. Moreover, that last fact is one of the most relevant in fantasy scoring.

Cons: So far this season, his top two receivers—Bobby Engram and Deion Branch—are out until week five, and his next two top receivers were placed on Injured Reserved and are out for the season. He now has three serviceable running backs, as opposed to the ineffective former MVP Shaun Alexander, which means he probably will not throw a pass further than five yards, until week six or so. Matt has now become the fantasy football version of his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Hasselback. They both were beloved by fans from 2003-2007, but will be disappointing to them in 2008. (Elizabeth is the only conservative on daytime TV’s “The View” with an audience largely composed of liberal women. She is vocal about her disdain of abortion and Barrack Obama. Jokes are much funnier when you explain them, right?)


Tony Scheffler

Pros: According to ESPN Fantasy Football 2008 magazine, the third year tight end is the seventh best tight end in the league.

Cons: I drafted Tony based completely on the fact that, according to ESPN Fantasy Football 2008 magazine, the third year tight end is the seventh best tight end in the league. I have no idea if he is any good. I do know that he is on a team where WR Brandon Marshall is going to have fifty percent of the passes targeted towards him.



Calvin Johnson



Pros: The Lions 2007 1st round draft pick showed his speed and talent in his rookie season when he pulled in 48 receptions, twelve of which were for twenty yards or more. These are average numbers, but the situation seems a little better when you factor in the fact that he is only twenty-two on a team with offensive coordinator Mike Martz (who likes to spread the ball) and Pro Bowl WR Roy Williams. Now Martz is gone, and Roy is unhappy and hence, not so likely to not play to his fullest potential. Which means Calvin will get the ball thrown to him, often.

Cons: He has to share all the passing targets with Roy. In addition, his Detroit Lions team will play in a defensive-minded NFC North division. Aside from that, he is great. However, I have a receiving core of; Terrell Owens, Andre Johnson, and week one rookie standout Eddie Royal, so if there is any position I can deplete, it is WR. What I do need is a tight end. Fuck yea, a good tight end; also, I should take a piss before I make any rash decisions.

After one and a half minutes of the expelling of urine, which my body deemed as waste, I continued to debate the trade. Enter Antonio Gates. He is arguably the best tight end in the NFL for the last four seasons. If I had Gates on my roster, I would have a complete team. So there was the proposed trade—my three players for the best tight end in football and a decent QB out of Washington, Jason Campbell. So after I finished the last beer of my six-pack, I had a glass of Manischewitz wine and decided to go ahead and approve the trade.

Fast Forward:
“Tony F-ing Scheffler, who do you think you are scoring 18 points?” I bellowed in front of my computer’s monitor. I caught the tail end of my former tight end’s game that pitted Scheffler’s Denver Broncos against the San Diego Chargers on CBS. There I sat in disbelief, in between my laptop and television, wishing I could go into FF seclusion for a couple of weeks. Earlier that day, Calvin Johnson, of the Detroit Lions, and now of my friend Ando’s fantasy’s team, scored the offensive amount of twenty-four points, on offense. “It is so disturbing how grand of a failure you are when it comes to general managing your Fantasy team. Your trade of Tony (Scheffler) and Calvin (Johnson) for (Antonio) Gates is a Magnum Opus move that will surely be forgotten” I articulately chastised myself. I continued to rip into myself with wit by saying: “F me, how could I make such a one-sided trade of this magnitude. I feel like the naive Natives Americans who were given sixty guilders for Manhattan by Peter Minuit.” (Author A.J. Jacobs humorously points out on pg. 279 of his book The Know-It-All, that the Indians got the equivalent of $120 for Manhattan, more than the $24 we have been told in the past). All Antonio Gates managed to put up was an anemic six points. After receiving three-to-six too many text messages about how embarrassed I should feel about my baffling trade, I decided to forego watching with my dad the baseball contest between the National League Central first place Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros, who were the visiting home team in Milwaukee. Because of the damage caused by Hurricane Ike in Houston to the Astros' home field (Minute Maid Park), the game had to be relocated. “Sorry pops, I can‘t take any more disappointment from the sports arena. My writing career is bad enough. I gotta get away from my phone, computer screens, and TVs,” I dejectedly told my Dad. He batted away my self-deprecation and he told me he would take a rain check on the game and that I probably will not miss much. Ugh.

The Cubs had Friday and Saturday off because of the previously referenced natural disaster, which was probably a good thing for the Cubs. The Cubs, losers of eight of their last eleven games, needed a mental break to refocus on securing the division title. This was especially true for Cubs starting pitcher Carlos “Big- Z” Zambrano, who in his last five starts, had given up twenty-four runs in just twenty-six and a third innings pitched. The first pitch of Sunday night’s game in Milwaukee’s Miller Park was at 7:05. However, by 6:50, I was out the door and on my way to corporate coffee king, Starbucks, to read for a few hours.

I had just moved back in with my parents in their two-story house in a sub-division of similar two-story houses in Huntley, Illinois. I will be migrating to Los Angeles, California, in the beginning of next year, and I had moved back with my parents to save some cash. It has taken a lot of adjusting, moving from Chicago, where I have spent the last five years on my own, to a place in the suburbs with my birth givers. It is no knock on them, but what a culture shock it is in Huntley. I have found that there are, honestly, only three things to do in the Huntley and its surrounding towns when you are my age, and they are as follows:

1. Getting a DUI after leaving some bar where every man inside has a passion for Ultimate Fighting and ultimately, fighting with their girlfriends, who’ve told them they’ve had too many Bud Lights

2. Watching every woman, thirty-two years old and younger, text messaging someone who’s not at the bar and conducting a conversation with someone inside the bar at the same time, all the while hypocritically using the noun “drama” and how much they hate it, in conversation every four minutes.

3. Going to the local Starbucks, to purchase coffee.

I am on to you, Starbucks. I know that you purposely make your regular coffee taste like tar, marbles, and ferret shit. So that way the consumer is forced to purchase the more expensive espresso drinks. What a suburban dilemma I am faced with: ingest the vile coffee because it is cheap, or digress and buy the venti, two-pump sugar-free vanilla latte with soy? “Four dollars and seventy six cents, huh? That comes with free refills right?” I asked in a perturbed manner, despite already knowing the answer. “You can save thirty cents on a refill if you use the same cup,” explained the equally annoyed barista. “Alright... Killing two trendy birds with one recyclable stone, going green and saving green at Starbucks.” I quipped. The same awkward expression you have after reading that bad joke is equal to my coffee making counterpart. Yikes.

I wanted to read a book that was devoid of competition or victory, or any themes related to it.
The book I chose to read was about a porn star and her ambitious attempt to break the gang-bang world record. The novel is called Snuff, penned by the same man who back in the late nineties forced Fight Club into the pop-culture ring, Chuck Palahniuk. I’m a big fan of all his work and have recently, found myself, defending the man’s art because most friends, fellow Palahniuk readers, claim that he is just merely a ‘shock writer’. I am not going to argue with the validity of my friend’s criticism in a sports blog, but I will say this: there is nothing shocking with novels about copulating on film for cash and fame nowadays. See Also: Paris Hilton.

Four-fifths finished with my latte and fifty-nine pages deep into the book, I decided to call it a night. Although it was only two and a half hours, I was so relieved to not be surrounded with my technical vices. I packed up my dictionary, book, and I pod and left Starbucks vowing never to come back unless I am with my mother, who always picks up the tab. As I am about to pull into my parents’ place, I change the dial of the radio station in my car from 93 XRT to A.M. radio powerhouse, and home of Cubs games, WGN 720. Just as I tuned in, an excited caller of the Cubs post game radio show stated: “I’d never thought I see the Cubs do this in my lifetime!” I immediately tuned out the radio and thought in my head “It’s September. The World Series is in late October. What could this man possible be talking about?” As I snapped out of my pensive state, 720 had gone to a commercial. I parked my car in my folks drive way and ran up the stairs to the computer room which servers as a comedy office to my brother and I. My brother is watching Cubs’ highlights as he looks at me and says: “Do you have any idea what you‘ve missed? I tried texting you fifteen times” “I have no clue what happened; I left my phone in my bedroom. I just wanted to get away from sports. I was at Starbucks for the last time in my life, read Palahniuk’s new book about a porn star gangbang. It is not as sexy as you think a book would be that tells about degrading sex for money. But it’s funny.” I rambled as my brother stood in shock.

“You fucking moron! What kind of irrational pervert leaves his phone at home?” ……

So I missed the biggest Cubs moment of my lifetime. Why? Because I let a shallow area of the sports milieu, (Fantasy Football) affect my rational relationship with fandom, (watching my beloved Chicago teams play.) Playing fantasy versions of any sport is merely a numbers game. Statistics do not cover the intangibles of the sports fan experience. It robs sport of the moments and adventures you will hold on to for the remainder of your life. As a sports fan, one is inclined to discuss the merits and memories of the teams which the fan holds dear to their contemporaries and younger generations. It is safe to say that twenty years from now, I would not tell my as-yet-to-be-born child “Devin Jordan Rodriguez, (tentative name based on Chicago sports icons), you should’ve seen me in my twenties.” “I was one of the best Fantasy owners of the Chicago northwest suburbs. Nobody made trades and wavier wire pick ups like your old man. What a life. I would spend seven hours sitting in front of a TV and a computer screen just watching my teams move towards victory. Boy did your pops neglect your mother like champ, all because he had to catch every minute of Direct TV's Sundays’ NFL Ticket package.” I would tell my kid. “Also, I know I only see you on alternating weekends due to divorce court mandates. But in two weeks, the guys and me are having our fantasy soccer draft at some dive bar, and they said no kids allowed into their establishment. Sorry,” I would further tell my youngster.

As absurd and hyperbolic as that tangent was, parts of it ring true. Obviously, there are participants of fantasy football who do not let their team’s performance affect their personal life, but I am trying to make a point. There is a good chance I would have told my kid about watching Carlos Zambrano’s no-hitter, the year the Cubs had the best record in their league. (By the time you read this, the Cubs will have already blown it, once again.) Sports are a form of entertainment. Men will aimlessly sit and view the boob tube for hours, just as women will watch reality TV shows on the VH1, Bravo, and Oxygen channels. A major difference is that, although women watch the producer-controlled, scripted, and contrived reality shows with as much fervor as men watch sports, they do not lose touch with reality. Your girlfriend will never blow you off because she has to go to “Rock of Love ’” fantasy league meeting. My point is that fantasy taints what sports fans love: distraction from life’s routine. We enjoy sports because it takes us away from the mundane motions of the day-to-day grind. But when you are tracking your fantasy team's progress daily, stressing over your win-lose record, and subsequently taking it out on the things you enjoy, it’s pointless. After the Cubs lost a tight game in July, I was a little bummed out. We were heading to a bar and my friend asked me why I care. I said, “I’ll get over it in like ten minutes” but that “it was just disappointing to see them lose.” He said, and I paraphrase “It’s not like if the Cubs win or lose a game, your rent will be paid. Sports are a waste of time, unless you bet on the games or have a fantasy team that can win you a shit ton of money.” “Those athletes don’t get bummed out if you have a bad day at work, get over it.” I watch sports because it elicits emotions and lends itself to bonding experiences with your friends and family. Although I will still participate in the remainder of my leagues’ fantasy season, I don’t think I’m going to play again. Even if I win my fantasy league, which I most likely will, it still will not ever feel as good as watching Carlos Zambrano strike out that last Houston Astros batter, for his first no-hitter...

To rip-off and manipulate a phrase from an advertising beer campaign, an ad that plays during commercial breaks of most sporting programming: Please watch sports, responsible.