My Fantasy Team’s Front Office Is Really Dysfunctional

Have you read this piece about the Mariners’ dysfunctional front office?

If not, you should, then come back and read this.

Because whatever’s going on in Seattle is nothing compared to the problems of my fantasy team, where the GM and the owner are constantly butting heads, and the manager is often asleep at the wheel. Like the week that he literally forgot to set a lineup. Who does that? It’s not like the deadline changes every week. It’s always the same day, and one week, he just forgot. And who did he blame it on? Me, the owner. As if I’m supposed to micromanage everything that I do and can’t trust my fingers to go to the website and click some buttons without my brain getting involved. Ridiculous.

And then there’s the trades. We have my brain going one way, my heart going the other, and who’s to know what the right answer should be? My general manager is insisting that we need to dump Mike Moustakas, but the owner says no, we need to show loyalty, we need to keep giving him a chance. Moustakas is one of our guys, he says, and the heartless executives in the GM suite up in my cerebrum can’t just argue the statistics every time they want to make a decision that they know will be unpopular with the rest of me. Clearly no one’s on the same page.

Fact is, my general manager completely misrepresented his skill set when he applied for the job. He said he had a foolproof projection system. He insisted that he knew who was going to thrive and who was going to fail, who the unexpected breakout candidates were going to be… and I believed him. I looked at his spreadsheets and listened to his conviction and I believed he knew what he was doing. Turns out he didn’t. He fooled me. He fooled myself. I fooled him. We fooled oneself. Other pronouns, all in one sentence. Yes, all of them. Turns out my GM is no better than anyone else’s, and I don’t know why I keep him around except that he is connected to the rest of me by nerves and tendons. But that’s not enough anymore.

And the budget’s been a mess. I was promised at least $50 to buy pointless magazines and other pre-season publications, and what happened? The owner said no, at the last minute. “We need groceries instead,” as if that’s an excuse. Why can’t someone else buy my groceries and I can go buy a FanGraphs+ subscription? Oy, what a joke. My team is never going to go anywhere as long as the folks in charge remain in their jobs. I need to replace them before next season if I want a fighting chance.