March 31, 2006 - 5:03 PM

There's No Lucking in Baseball!

Wishes of good luck to Providence Pam, who is headed down to NYC this weekend to try out for VH-1's Pop Culture Trivia tournament. Since that girl has a better, deeper grasp of pop culture and all its inananities than me, she should do exceptionally well. We are also in deep envy about her getting a widescreen flat panel HD TV recently. Very very drool worthy.

Also wishes of good luck to Y (who is always so excited [perhaps to a disturbing degree] to be mentioned here), who is getting close to securing a job in DC this summer. This is good on two levels: 1)it gets her out of her misery in NYC where she has to suffer through P Diddy parties on her block and Gloria Estefan performances at fundraisers next door; 2)it gets her closer to her macdaddy who is also working in DC; and 3)(yeah I'm adding a third thing, even though I only said it was a two-fold goodness...what're you gonna do about it? stop reading my diary because of my shoddy counting? joke's on you, my friend, because there's nothing worth reading here anyways! HA!) she can be closer to Mark and Nick, so that they can all gang up and bitch about how people suck whenver they want.

Finally, send me wishes of good luck, since I will be participating in my third fantasy baseball draft this coming Sunday, and it's a big one. I had my first draft Tuesday of last week in a league with Phil and some of his friends where the entrance fee was $40- It's a fairly small league with only 11 teams, but I think first place gets around $200. My draft for that league didn't go as well as I'd hoped, but I learned a few things from my mistakes, which I then applied to the draft from this past Saturday.

Saturday's draft is the one put together by Tony, and this year we have Phil, Nick, Matt, and one of Soph's friends as participants in the 12 team league. The kick-in for this one is $50 with first place getting $350. With this one, I had a game plan for picking players, and I stuck to it pretty tightly, much to my own surprise. I acknowledge that I am prone to picking 1st and 2nd year guys who have a lot of potential, which often proves to be my downfall, because usually, it isn't until they get PAST those first couple years that they really start to blossom, by which time, I've moved on to the next crop of young promising players. This year, I balanced things out across the age spectrum and I made sure to hold off on pitchers since there seem to be a glut of quality guys there.

Now, this coming Sunday is a big time draft. The associate producer for my show knows that I'm a baseball freak, so he invited me into his league which had 2 openings. It's been around since 1989 and consists of 15 teams, many of whom are producers in the entertainment industry. The fee is $550 (that's right, five hundred and fifty) with first place getting $2000. I asked Tony to help me co-manage a team, and he immediately said yes. The reason for his eagerness is that this league is done a little differently than the ones we are used to.

In the other leagues, when we have a draft, an order is randomly selected for people to pick players. The draft starts and each team picks one player per round, beginning with team 1 and ending with team 12. The next round of selections kicks off at team 12 and runs back to team 1; round three goes from team 1 to team 12 again, and so on, in a snake-like fashion. While this gives a sense of parity in the drafting process, it is disheartening when you realize, as the number 8 pick, you won't get a chance to draft the best players in baseball (Albert Pujols or Alex Rodriguez, who always go to the first two teams).

With this producers league, drafting is done by an auction process. Each team is given a fake budget of $260 dollars for the draft to work with in order to build a team. An order is chosen in which teams can throw out a name to be bid upon, but the order isn't that important, because once a name is mentioned with a starting bid price, anyone can then bid upon that player. So that means, team one says "Albert Pujols for $10" and anyone thereafter can raise their hand and offer a counterbid, raising the price until no one else outbids them. Everyone has an equal chance to get every single player; you are only limited by how much you are willing to pay for any one player.

It seems complicated. To be honest, it's driving me a little batty, since I've never done it before. Trying to figure out dollar values for players based on last year's stats, their position (good second basemen are a LOT more scarce than good first basemen, so their dollar values must be adjusted up to compensate), and what you think they will do this year is pretty arbitrary, although there seems to be general consensus among websites and magazines about how to value them. You can go the route of getting 8 star players for 30-35 bucks each, then filling out the rest of your team with 13 scrubs at 1 or 2 dollars per player. Or you could balance things out with 10 really good guys at $20, 5 decent guys at $10, and 6 scubs at $1. But which team will produce better numbers at the end of the year? And what if, everytime you bid on a guy who would work with your team profile, he gets bid up out of your range by someone else? A team of 21 mediocre guys all at $12 will get you a mediocre finish.

If you've read this far, you are either in one of my leagues, or you are really bored. So I'm sorry for getting too geeky about this baseball stuff. I can't help it. It's so much fun. And the anticipation for Sunday is killing me.

Now Listening To : Ani DiFranco-Imperfectly
Random Thought : Amazon says it shipped my iPod today. Estimated arrival date: May 1st. WTF?!

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