PARIS—Has the sportswriter’s trope of “I don’t want to bore you with the details of my fantasy team, but…” jumped the shark?

(And if you don’t know what “fantasy sports” are, it will probably take me too long to explain it to you, other than it’s when grown men get together and choose players based on which ones they think will amass the best game statistics, and then spend an inordinate amount of time hoping their players don’t disappoint them. The wife of ESPN columnist Bill Simmons offers the perfect four-word summary of the concept: The League of Dorks.)

True, fantasy leagues have been a booster for sports—especially fantasy football, which has driven a huge surge in viewership among “casual fans,” those people who don’t normally follow one team. These are folks that league head offices are always looking to attract as fans, often courting them at the expense of alienating their hardcore devotees (not that these tried-and-trues would ever stop watching, no matter what manner of travesties you dump on them). But fantasy has had a lousy effect on sports media, nowhere more apparent than the cutesy trope of columnists and pundits: “Let me tell you about how this affects my fantasy team.”

Nobody used to care about Announcer X’s imaginary squad—really, your fantasy team is infinitely fascinating to you and endlessly boring to everyone else. Just like your children! Still, it was charming when Tony Kornheiser would interrupt a Monday Night Football broadcast to let millions of Americans know that Brian Westbrook’s latest reception earned him four fantasy points, or Jay Leno bitched about how Cincinnati losing in the second round had really busted his March Madness bracket.

But it was the fantasy sports meta-stories that really pissed me off; the writers setting us up with “I know you don’t want to hear about my team, but,” and “Hey, don’t you hate it when other sportswriters tell you about their fantasy teams? Watch how annoying it is when I tell you about mine!” The problem is these commentators are acknowledging the trend, but they still want to talk about their teams. Because these teams are endlessly fascinating to them, and deep down they think, “Oh god, everybody else’s kid is ugly and boring and annoying, but mine is different. Everybody wants to hear about my kid!”

(One of my favourite sportswriters, King Kaufman of Salon, recently had a nice video bit on this topic.)

This sort of meta-meta-commentary has already passed through the bizarre world of Super Bowl Media Day. Once upon a time, reporters showed up and interviewed the relevant players a couple days before the big game. Then, some wiseasses started writing about what a farcical waste of time Media Day was. Lately, the trend has been stories about how many stories there are about the uselessness of media day. And so on and so on.

And, of course, all of this is a roundabout way of introducing you to my 2008 fantasy teams! Not that you want to hear about them, but…

As I mentioned in a previous post, late-February/early-March is the perennial sporting dead zone. However, I neglected to highlight that this was a rather zesty period for those of us who dabble in imaginary sports, with baseball fantasy drafts and NCAA bracket picking keeping us poor, pathetic souls more than busy. So it was that my week featured a double-dip of fake sports.

My fantasy baseball league has been together since the early part of this decade. I will admit here for the record that baseball is my favourite sports precisely because of 1) the statistics, and 2) the long, 162-game grind of establishing a relevant sample size (what can I say, I love math). I took a lot of heat for this growing up in Canada, where baseball was “that Yank game,” but I’m devoted to my sport. The obsession is especially acute because I’ve lived in three great baseball cities in my life: Boston, Chicago and Toronto (the last wasn’t exactly a great baseball city when I lived there, but I got three years of upper-deck season tickets for about the same price you’d pay for a hotdog and a pink Sox hat at Fenway).

But when we got together for the annual Brokeback Mountainmen draft this past Sunday (homoerotic humour is a key part of these all-male leagues), it represented the first time that I had drafted my own team. My buddy Matty and I had co-managed a franchise since we entered the 10-team league, winning a championship in 2006 (I still have the trophy, Matty!) and contributing such team names as The Old Custers (one of our favourite books), Manifest Destiny (the Canadian/American management team) and multi-layered The Ball Boys (remember the homoerotic thing?). When another owner abandoned his team midway through last season, we broke up the band (the verdict is still out on whether this will inevitably curse both of us) and this year took over our own respective teams: Matty’s EightyCourics (apparently, the Couric is some sort of feces-related unit of measure?) and my squad, Monsieur Baseball (featuring a handsome, shirtless Tom Selleck as the on-screen mascot).

The draft began at 8pm EST, which happened to be 1am in my time zone. Luckily I was able to track down an all-night cyber café full of smelly young men either playing online RPGs or watching semi-pornographic Japanese web-girl broadcasts. Lesson: do not spend the night in a cyber café, unless you have something really important to do, like drafting an imaginary baseball team.

I won’t bore you with the details of the draft or the recycled jokes that flew back-and-forth. But, I will tell you that Monsieur Baseball is looking for big seasons from Chase Utley, Victor Martinez, Ichiro Suzuki and Jake Peavy.

As for the other half of my double-up fantasy week, I spent last night watching the first two sets of games of the NCAA basketball tournament, cleverly marketed in recent years as “March Madness.” I’d prepared my bracket on my own, independent of any pool (unfortunately, Rick Neuheisel’s pool was already full when I asked to join), on a scrap of paper. Even though I wasn’t putting my money on the line or competing against anyone (full disclosure: the closest I’ve ever come in my life to winning a March Madness pool was when Kentucky won the final in 1996, crushing my hopes in my father’s office pool). Still, even without the spirit of competition, I eschewed experimentation, filling out the same stupid bracket that haunts me every year: too many underdogs, too many 4 and 5 and 6 seeds in the elite eight, leaning too heavily on my bracket Kryptonite teams (Louisville and Gonzaga let me down me every year, and yet I keep picking them).

Unfortunately for me, there were no buzzer beaters in the first two sets of Thursday games—Xavier (who I root for in support of my Jesuit-educated friend, Dave from Cleveland) overcame a second-half deficit to Georgia, and Marquette held off a late charge from plucky Kentucky, both games going the way I’d called them. Everything else was blowout city.

I almost stuck around the bar for the third set of games to watch Cornell take on Stanford (go Ivy League! Fuck up those smaht kids from Stanford!), but the Canadian bar where I was watching American basketball and drinking British beer turned a little too “frat party” later in the night, and when I returned from the bathroom to find that a large British woman had colonized my seat at the bar—the seat where I’d been sitting for 5 hours, where my full beer and notebook were parked on the bar, where my jacket and scarf were hung under the bar, directly in front of the seat—and all she could say was “whoops!” before returning to chat with her friends, I decided to call it a night. Besides, if I had stayed, she might have begun talking to me about her fantasy cricket team. Boooooooooring.

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Posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 1:59 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.