Missner’s Manifesto: Back To Reality

If you have to ask yourself if an activity is fun, it probably isn’t. The same can be said of love. Fun is not to be examined, it just is and shouldn’t be judged during the experience. Lately, I have begun to question whether playing fantasy baseball is fun. Once the examination started, the fun ended. I know that I used to really enjoy fantasy baseball, but I also used to enjoy baseball. Where did the passion go?

Anyone who has read the Missner’s Manifesto series this year knows that this has been a year of upheaval in my activities. It started when I released myself from a lousy podcast experience. Later, I turned my reign of quitting to football. And my ending of relationships didn’t end there: last month, I decided to stop being the Treasurer of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association (where my main responsibility was to run the Industry Insiders’ fantasy leagues) and will not cover college football for RotoWire this fall. This past week, I gave up my team in one Prospect 361’s dynasty leagues. The two things all of these experiences had in common are that they took time and were not that much fun.

For fantasy baseball, I am somewhat surprised I held on this long. I find watching baseball extremely boring and have not tried to watch more than a handful of pitches since 2008 (when I tried to DVR a Cubs playoff game and found myself fast forwarding through the whole thing). Of the fantasy sports, I still think fantasy baseball is one of the best because of the enormous roll of numbers throughout the season. There are also interesting ways to build teams, but I had found my team-building rut (power in both hitting and pitching) that worked best for me. Since I hadn’t watched baseball in so long, my connection to the players beyond anything besides statistical abstractions was lost.

I also used to be a fantasy player who sent out volleys of trade offers. After the draft (which remains the best part of any fantasy league), trading was my favorite pastime. I enjoyed sending out trade offers, receiving counters, and trying to acquire players I liked. For the past couple of seasons, my trading has dwindled. Perhaps it is a case of just not having enough time, but it also may be a lack of competitive fire. I’ve won my share of leagues, but the thrill of winning has waned. Maybe if I had played for bigger stakes, I would not have lost interest, but I never found playing fantasy sports for money was any different than straight gambling (which I also don’t do). I’ve written before in my lack of interest in the latest wave of fantasy sports – daily fantasy, which is gambling pure and simple.

Just as preseason and spring training are the best times to be a sport fan since hope (even unwarranted hope) is in the air, fantasy drafts are the best part of fantasy leagues. I like the table talk, the strategy, and the teambuilding that go into drafts. During the draft, everyone is involved. Playing the league out is often a slog, and people often lose interest. Previously, I was not one of those people, but I have found myself decreasingly willing to put in time on fantasy leagues. When it comes to keeper and dynasty leagues (keeper leagues keep a small number of players from year to year, dynasty leagues keep essentially the entire team), the draft is limited in importance which is the opposite of what should happen. I understand that some people think that fantasy leagues should mimic actual sports leagues, but I think that is unwise and doesn’t lead to a fun league. One of my biggest pet peeves is people who think that their success in fantasy leagues means that they could run actual leagues. It just isn’t so. Being the general manager of a professional sports team may seem easy. Like sports broadcasting and officiating, it is not. Being a decision maker of a professional sports franchise does require some luck, but less than fantasy sports.

After being a fantasy writer for nearly a decade and involved in “the industry” via the FSWA for awhile, maybe I simply overdid it. I have pared down my fantasy teams in each season, but I have been doing year-round fantasy (going particularly hard in college basketball season, including my own Big Chief Challenge) for quite awhile. Or maybe I am emerging from my fantasy cocoon to become something different (and some might say better). As a fantasy writer, I often had to project into the future and make guesses on various numbers. As a writer of Missner’s Manifesto, I am not going to do that.