For the better part
of two decades now, I have played online, fantasy sports, with my
family. We have leagues for baseball and football mostly, because
soccer (I refuse to call that thing football, I don't care how many
billions of people call it that) is boring as hell. Two hours of
kicking a ball back and forth in the middle of a field of green lawn
is mind blowningly stupid boring, and then people are okay with a
tie? A fucking tie? Win, or win not, there is no tie. Or crying in
baseball. Shit, get it together sports world. And then there's
hockey. Hockey is nothing more than soccer played on frozen water,
but with the occasional beating between two grown men, that are
undressing each other just to commit assault, and then that beating
never happens because taking off all that gear just wears them out to
the point that neither of them can land a blow. But then they bro hug
it out, go sit in a corner for a couple minutes and then come back to
the game. I don't watch NASCAR for the same reason, boredom, watching
people drive a car at two hundred miles per hour would be better if
it wasn't always a left turn, and crashes were mandatory. I used to
have a NASCAR game on my computer and after ten minutes of “driving”
I'd get bored and turn that bad boy around to see how many cars I
could demolish in one spectacular wreck. I'm sure a real fan would be
annoyed with my concept of getting bored playing that stupid game,
but turn on real looking wreckage and car parts just scatter across
the road. It was great, and probably why people think I'm a bit on
the psychotic side of the sociopath scale, to which I answer, why do
you go shooting pixalated images of human beings, huh, Mr.
High-and-mighty? At least I was reenacting Blood on the Asphalt
from driver's training, not making making a character explode while
after running through a hallway that had been deliberately set up
with landmines and I just happen to use a rocket launch from a good
spot perched above where I could see to launch that rocket at perfect
timing because some little twelve year old bastard asshole called me
a wanking twat in a southern accent after he owned me in the previous
battle to teabag my character. The little shit never saw that attack
coming, don't give an adult time to set up elaborate traps, when you
can be learning how to use swear words correctly.
Being a nerd, or
geek, which ever one deals with number and stats and shit, I can't
remember what separates the two anymore, as they both get beat on by
people bigger than them, I enjoy fantasy sports because it's much,
much like playing a quick game of D&D without the effort of dice
rolling. D&D is nothing more than stats that are used to progress
a story, fantasy sports are nothing but stats, to use as bragging
rights against someone else because you know how to pick an athlete
better than them. Horse racing, I view as the same thing, but with
even less skill involved, and maybe more broken knuckles at the end
of the week. My family is big into sports, and thus we have become
part of the fantasy sports crap that has now taken over the sporting
world. We don't play for money, just those bragging rights. And we
hardly ever break any knuckles, chairs yes, but that has nothing to
do with fantasy sports. I didn't really care about football or
baseball when I was a kid, I'd sit and watch a game or two with my
dad, mostly because someone else was on the computer and the TV was
occupied so I couldn't play any of my video games. But when my dad
started a fantasy football league, I joined just to keep him from
whining about how no one watched sports with him. I joined out of
pity. And then I got hooked on it. My dad had been trying for years
to get my interest in sports, he bought a few baseball games for me,
and Madden football, hoping that I would sucker me into his world.
The first season of football I watched, I knew all the stats I needed
so I could win. It didn't work, because I was stupid and didn't know
enough. My family was not prepared for my training. I went and bought
the newest Madden game, and played for days through the franchise
mode. In that game I made a player called Fatty McFatass, he was the
shortest you could get, under five feet tall, and he weighted well
over four hundred pounds, which was the heaviest you could get the
player to be. If this guy was real, he would have burned off all
those pounds with in a couple games or died on the field when his
heart said it had had enough and launched itself from his chest,
which would have made him “probable” for in the next half of the
game. And he simply existed for my own sadistic amusement. Try not
laughing at a short fat man running down a field carrying a football.
But, I learned everything I needed out of that game for a good draft,
and then who the new rookies were for my next attempted foray into
the world of fantasy football. All from a damn video game. That's
right, video games taught me something, I laugh at all those parents
that said this wasn't possible and video games only rot your brain. I
also bolstered this new found knowledge with Wikipedia and all the
rules of the game. Pretty soon I was talking about shit that happened
in a real game while watching, than the rest of my family knew or
understood, and they had been paying attention for years. I kicked
the crap out of everyone that was playing in our family league. It
was a good times for this nerd.
Baseball was
something different though, I have always liked baseball, and dreamed
one day I would play professionally. Not Major League, World Series
winning, kind of professionally. I kept my dreams more grounded, like
playing single A farm club type play in a small Midwestern town where
I could end up selling cars during the off season, that maybe got
called up to the big league for a game in my entire career, and then
after retirement, open a bar and brag to all the customers how I used
to play “pro ball,” kind of professional ball player. I was
always really good swinging the bat, I've always been stronger than I
look, and quicker than what some fat kid should be allowed. But the
dream was dashed when I was told that I needed to have been playing
as a kid on a team in a league. Sure, whatever, I've heard about
those undrafted players that just walked into a camp and then got
signed to a team because they had potential, I'm looking at you
Wesley Snipes's character, Willy Mays Hayes, from Major League.
So fine, most professional players have been in the game since they
were eight years old, and have practiced hitting thousands and
thousands of baseballs and throwing millions of them to each other of
the same amount of time. I'll just go back to my fantasy leagues and
video games, looks like I'll be making another Fatty McFatass with
the next Madden game.
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