An Important Note On Fantasy Baseball

No, not that kind of baseball nerd

Nobody actually wants to listen to you talk about your fantasy team.


This holds true regardless of whether you are some total rando cornering someone at a party in order to tell them how frustrated you are with Jarrod Saltalamacchia's slow start or a columnist for an internationally famous web publication. To put it simply, your fantasy team affects nobody but you and the other players in your league, and as such there is absolutely no reason for anyone else to be interested in it. This will not change if you go on about it endlessly; independent studies have shown that the ability to feign interest in whether that Jedd Gyorko trade worked out for you or not decreases at an exponential rate if the conversation with a non-league member passes the two minute mark. An additional study suggested that fully 1/3 of the unsolved homicides in the greater Chicago area were related to fantasy league owners loudly bemoaning Anthony Rizzo's early season power outage*.

In addition, any attempt to take the travails of your fantasy team and attempt to use them to generate A)some sort of universal lesson about fantasy B)some sort of paid content or C)some sort of paid content about how your team's travails unmasks a larger truth about fantasy sports is what the psychiatrist types call "denial", which is sort of like the denial you wallow in when you're three weeks into the season and your deep reserve list outfielder has more home runs than Troy Tulowitzki, Derek Norris, Aramis Ramirez, Brandon Belt, Matt Holliday and Nick Markakis combined.  

Also: Do not delude yourself into thinking that being good at fantasy sports would make you good at running a team in real life. It is acceptable to crow to your buddies that you managed to snag two of the top five prospects in the National League for your team's farm system. Just be aware that doing so is the result of your league's relatively uncomplicated rules system, as opposed to the byzantine labyrinth of regulations and procedures (not to mention the generally non-turn-based actions of 29 other teams) regarding draft position, contract offers, potential international litigation and more. So, a little perspective, please.

And if you read all this and still can't keep from telling every passing stranger about how you nabbed Jason Grilli in your league just after the Craig Kimbrel trade, the only advice I have for you is to start a sports blog and write effusively about your fantasy team there - where you won't be bothering anyone when you do it.

*This may not actually be the case.