Fantasy Fantasy Baseball

Presenting Fantasy Fantasy Baseball: Because you’re more than an expert!

Fantasy baseball getting boring? Too easy? Feel like you’ve mastered the strategy and if only the players would stop getting injured… well, look, we’re all with you, and we know it’s time for an even bigger challenge. Presenting Fantasy Fantasy Baseball, the game where you manage an imaginary roster of other people’s fantasy baseball teams and compete against opponents to see who can best predict the performance of other fantasy players.

That’s right: you and your fellow owners each draft eight fantasy teams, following these strict positional requirements:

(1) At least one team on every roster must be owned by someone who does not subscribe to either MLB.TV or Extra Innings
(2) At least one team must be owned by a minor (under age 12 as of April 1)
(3) At least one team must be owned by a bickering partnership of no fewer than 4 people who can never agree on anything
(4) At least one team must be owned by someone who still has an AOL e-mail address
(5) At least one team must be owned by someone who is scheduled to go on an Internet-free vacation at some point during the season
(6) At least one team must be owned by you
(7) At least one team must be owned by someone you are competing with in a plain-old regular fantasy league
(8) At least one team must be owned by a Pirates fan who can’t resist owning at least 5 of his “favorite players” on his sad, sad team

Your roster will be ranked against your opponents in the standard Fantasy Fantasy Baseball categories:

(A) Overall league position– hitting categories
(B) Overall league position– pitching categories
(C) Quality of trash talking
(D) Quantity of trash talking
(E) Fewest number of days missed adjusting lineups
(F) The all-important BP-MRC (Beneficial Pickups minus Meaningless Roster Churn)
(G) The even-more-important Ratio stat: how many times a player’s family demands his time versus how many times the player actually closes the web browser and stops researching minor league translation coefficients

Where Fantasy Fantasy Baseball truly tests your skill is in uncovering “sleeper” fantasy players who no one expects to bring home the prize. It’s impossible to emerge from the draft with an All-Star roster, exclusively filled with stars like Ron Shandler’s “Shandler Bings” or Nate Silver’s “Five-Thirty-Greights.” Sometimes you end up with your Uncle Hank’s “Hapless Happs,” and it’s only if you’ve done your research that you know if this will finally be the year Hank realizes that A.J. Burnett hasn’t been good in half a decade, and Rickey Henderson is no longer in the major leagues.

Some off-season tips for putting together your fantasy fantasy draft list:

(1) Watch your friends carefully. Even if they’ve proven themselves to be lazy owners in the past, ignoring trade requests, punting on the season in May, and drafting Brett Cecil just because they know someone who went to high school with his third cousin, maybe this will finally be the year they rededicate themselves and put it all together. Watch for stacks of pre-season fantasy magazines, check for fantasy websites in their browser cookies, see if they’ve recently created any new documents in Excel. Maybe they’ve been laying on the couch, watching the MLB Network, tracking off-season trades… or as we like to call it, playing winter ball. You may know a sleeper candidate without even realizing it.

(2) Check message boards. No one ever said you had to know the owners of the teams you’ll be drafting. Maybe someone asks a particularly incisive question in a fantasy chat, or demonstrates some clear trash talk potential. Add them to your list, even if it’s just for the minor league rounds of your reserve fantasy fantasy draft.

(3) Careful with your keeper decisions. Did you ask to see your friend’s medical records before you gave out your fantasy fantasy contracts? In most leagues, you’re out of luck if he dies — that’s a row of zeroes, week after week, for years. Even worse if he gives up his team and you’re stuck with the twenty-yard penalty (expert leagues only). Choosing keepers in fantasy fantasy baseball requires only slightly less information than choosing a surrogate to carry your child– and, of course, the variation between the best fantasy team and the worst makes the difference between potential homes for a growing fetus seem extraordinarily tiny.

(4) Recognize that we’re all still learning. The appeal, of course, of fantasy fantasy baseball is that strategies are still being developed. Don’t forget about the International Plan (pick foreigners, likely to be cheap in your auction, due to your opponents’ lack of familiarity, combined with current exchange rates), or the No Mustache Plan. Some strategies will work, and some will prove to offer no significant gain– but that’s the fun of Fantasy Fantasy. If we wanted to already know how to optimize our draft selections, we’d still be playing plain old fantasy!

Above all, as you enter the 2012 season, remember what we all love about Fantasy Fantasy baseball — there’s simply nothing like the awkward rooting situation when you want your fantasy team to move into first place, but realize that if it does, it will displace the team you own in your fantasy fantasy league, and drop you out of the lead. Especially in head-to-head leagues, when your fantasy team is up against a team you own in fantasy fantasy– and most especially if your fantasy fantasy opponent owns your fantasy team at the same time as you own his. It can almost cause a tear in the space-time continuum.

And by the time we wrap our heads around that one… Fantasy Fantasy Fantasy Baseball, coming soon!