My buddy Tom and I co-manage a fantasy baseball team in a high-stakes, 5x5 standard-scoring league with a bunch of strangers. For the sixth-month baseball stretch he's basically a second girlfriend. It's mostly amusing and mildly pathetic. Ok—it's pathetic, but at least we're good at it. We constantly scout, strategize and scheme to rip off quality players from impatient owners.
By mid-season, with some solid free-agent acquisitions (i.e., we picked up Liriano two weeks before his call-up and Brad Hawpe when he was dropped after a power outage) and some timely trades—(swapped a semi-injured Magglio Ordonez straight up for Brian Roberts when we had no speed at second base and a full outfield)—we had built a legitimate juggernaut.
Fast forward to the final day of the two-week championship game. It came down to the last day of the Major League Baseball regular season. Our game was knotted at 5-5 with our opponent holding a narrow but comfortable advantage in the ERA tiebreaker category. Our lead was solid in Runs, Stolen Bases, Batting Average, Saves and Strikeouts. Entering the last day of play, Tom and I needed to come back from a four RBI deficit to win or tie the category for a 6-4 or 5-4-1 win.
A survey of the land: our number one pick, Matt Holliday, was shut down with a bad back on a non-contender. Same for Hawpe. Rollins was resting. Chipper Jones…was Chipper Jones. Even our stalwart catcher Pablo Sandoval took the last day off. I was just relieved Kaz Matsui was playing. You read that correctly. Earlier in the week we had to deal with the absences of two of our outfielders—Jason Bay and Andre Either—because their wives gave birth to children. Needless to say, our lineup card looked like a Rorschach inkblot.
Now, earlier in the day, we decided to pick up a couple players in the Red Sox/Yankees double header to try and get some extra at bats. Enter rookies Jed Lowrie and Brett Gardner.
In the afternoon game Gardner and Lowrie combined for a slightly-less-than-impressive 1-8 and one run. And by the end of the afternoon games I had drank eight cups of coffee and managed to sweat through my lucky windbreaker. We squeezed seven RBI out of Angels' catcher Mike Napoli and utility-man Felipe Lopez leaving us one RBI short of the title, down 65-64, entering the last game of the day, on the last game of the entire MLB season.
I sat on my couch in quiet desperation as my girlfriend watched me with obvious pity. Her and I have an understanding—I let her watch Gossip Girls on Monday night and she lets me ignore her long periods of time to watch baseball. She even knew most of the players on my team. (I feel compelled to mention that Gossip Girls is downright awful. I can't decide what's worse, that it's over-the- top catty or painfully predictable. At least there was a gratuitous underwear scene last week). Tom sat on his own couch a couple hundred miles away.
"One RBI…ONE RBI!!!" he yelled.
"Not too much to ask, right?"
"Well, Lowrie and Gardner and should both be in."
And they both played in the night cap…sort of. Lowrie left the game in the fifth with nothing to show for it. Gardner saw the game through, all the way into extra innings.
"I cannot believe our season is coming down to Brett Gardner and one RBI."
"Don't you have Jason Bay?" my girlfriend asked, as if I had forgotten.
"Yeah. He's not playing. But we've got Brett Gardner."
"Who's that?"
...Exactly.
Gardner got back up to the plate in the top of the tenth inning. No doubt, he was completely oblivious that some random guy like me was hanging on his every swing in a meaningless game at the end of a 162-game season. To this point he had left three men on base. For this 10th inning, 11th hour at-bat, there was a runner on first and third. A single would score a run. A groundout would score a run. My heart was pounding. A fly-out--I would settle for a sacrifice fly-out.
He struck out looking. My heart dropped. I felt like Nancy Kerrigan circa 1994.
Tom couldn't speak. He sent me a text message instead: "I hate baseball."
Me too. So you see, it's taken me a while to get my heart into the fantasy football season. I just needed to get that off my chest.
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