A Fantasy Vacation

I never really understood why girls get on a dieting kick every Spring, right before what they would call "beach season" was set to begin.  These girls come out of Winter hibernation each April and begin an annual ritual of obsessing over their bodies.  Their physical forms are no different in April then they had been in December or the preceeding September, mind you, but because Summer was fast approaching these girls were intent on reworking their diet and exercise routines.  The threat of looking unattractive in a bathing suit is a strong enough motivator to drive these girls into the gym, and I had never been sure why.  While bathing suits do make it easier to judge someone's appearance, the presence of normal clothing doesn't really hide one's form.  Instead, it was as if "beach season" and "Spring weight loss" went hand in hand, and there was no use arguing.

What does this have to do with sports, you ask?  Well, if following Major League Baseball religiously is my diet and exercise routine, then fantasy baseball is my beach season.  While there's no reason that I can't follow every inning of regular season baseball without fantasy sports implications, it's the presence of fantasy baseball in my life so far this April that has kept me glued to my TV, computer and phone like never before.  My fantasy team has been motivating me to check scores, monitor player progress and generally consume a more-than-healthy level of baseball content over the past two weeks since the 2011 MLB season began, and I've definitely become a better fan because of it.

I realize that this is completely irrational on my part.  The usual amount of baseball-watching that I've done in years past is more than enough to stay competitive in our weekly, 11-team league, and I also know that watching baseball on TV or online doesn't change the outcome of the games.  That being said, I just feel better knowing that I'm keeping tabs on league happenings.  Just like how last-minute, pre-beach season workouts usually don't help girls shed extra pounds heading into the Summer, the work I'm putting in now probably won't impact my team's success this season.  It does, however, make me feel better and more confident about myself as a baseball fan (and the self-appointed "MLB whiz"), and for that I'm very grateful.

It's been almost a decade since I last participated in fantasy baseball.  Over the last ten years, I've avoided it in order to focus more on the games themselves, rather than individual player performances.  Or, at least, that's what I had told myself.  Instead, avoiding fantasy baseball kept me further apart from the sport I love most, and I realize now that fantasy baseball can be a wonderful blessing for a true fan.  While it's not clear that following players on your fantasy team will make you a more complete baseball fan, the engagement that competitive fantasy baseball necessitates is enough to boost your Major League Baseball-related IQ and confidence level.

Defense Wins Championships - And Angers Viewers

When people find out that I genuinely enjoy watching NBA basketball, they often immediately launch into an argument against professional hoops.  They wonder with amazement how I can enjoy NBA games, how I can manage to watch lazy, overpaid players jack up deep three pointers and throw down dunks, how I can respect a sport where the star players don't play defense.  I usually argue with them for a bit, putting together a feeble argument about watching the best athletes in the world compete, and then give up.  After all, there's no point in arguing with the NBA-haters; over the last decade, professional hoops had added enough fuel to their fire to keep them going for hours without stopping.

Sometimes, I've even tried to talk myself off of the NBA and towards the college game.  I love Princeton hoops (as I covered here in some detail last month), and it's easy to assume that the history and passion that accompanies Ivy League basketball games extends to all college contests.  When you hear anti-NBA arguments often enough, they almost start to make sense.  The college game focuses on the fundamentals, so it's really a purer form of basketball.  The players play for the love of the game, not for the money.  College hoops is more of a team game; it's not dominated by a few high-priced, big-name stars.

Well, if I needed something to knock some sense back into me and recharge my love for the NBA heading into the playoffs, it was tonight's NCAA National Championship game.  The contest made me want to write letters to Jim Calhoun and Brad Stevens asking for those two hours of my life back.  While defense may win championships, it certainly doesn't make for entertaining basketball.  UConn played ugly, but Butler was abysmal, and the game looked like a two-hour-long middle school girls practice; I saw a lot of shots, but not a whole lot of makes.  Even some of basketball's most basic plays weren't executed properly - there were tons of missed layups, bad passes and dumb fouls.  So much for sound fundamentals.  I can't say that UConn deserved to win that game, but I can confidently argue that Butler deserved to lose it.

This photo sums up tonight's National Championship matchup quite nicely.

Next time you think about blasting the NBA for its lack of defense, remember how painful it was to watch the Huskies and Bulldogs combine for a meager 92 points in a National Championship game.  Next time you want to knock the NBA for letting its stars take all of the shots, think about how many ugly, contested jumpers Kemba Walker attempted tonight.  Next time you're about to claim that the NBA is all about the three-ball, cue up a tape of Butler's offensive possessions from tonight's game and take note of how many productive, fundamentally-sound offensive possessions you see.  While the NBA is far from perfect, let's not pretend that the college game is saving the sport of basketball.  The only way NBA and NCAA basketball truly differs is in the talent level, and there the NBA has college beat by a mile.

Too Bad To Be True

Earlier today, my New York Knicks defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers to clinch their first playoff berth since 2004.  I was at the gym when I checked the score and heard the news, and I will admit it prompted a little smile and a few brief moments of satisfaction.  After all, it's been brutal to watch the Knicks play over the past couple of seasons, and the playoff appearance will be a lone bright spot in a decade otherwise filled with total futility.  I was glad to see the Knicks put together a solid, complete victory (albeit against the NBA's worst team), and found myself excited to see what will happen come playoff time in two weeks.

Never could I have imagined the reactions of Knicks fans to this not-so-surprising development, however.  After the win, Madison Square Garden was rocking as if the Knicks had just earned a trip to the NBA Finals.  My Facebook news feed was filled with joyful commentary on the victory, with New York-based friends proclaiming their love for the Knicks on their status feeds, and dozens of others "liking" their updates.  While I'm glad to see the enthusiasm, I can't help but wonder how Knicks fans ever got to this point in the first place.

After all, we're talking about the New York Knicks here.  While Springfield, MA may claim to be basketball's official home, any true hoops fan knows that the game is based out of New York City.  And while the Knicks haven't historically been the NBA's most successful franchise, they represent what basketball is all about.  The Knicks have traditionally been, and more importantly should always be, a fixture in the NBA playoff scene, making all of the celebration surrounding a .500 team who had to wait until the regular season's final week to clinch one of the 16 playoff spots a little sad.

True, it's much better than where the Knicks were even last season, floundering at the bottom of the Eastern Conference and waiting for a savior to come to the Garden.  A year later the Knicks are anchored by two young stars, have a few other complementary pieces to build on, and are headed to the postseason.  Never mind the fact that the team seems to have regressed since the Carmelo Anthony trade, or that guys named Anthony Carter, Jared Jeffries and Shelden Williams are getting regular minutes, or that it took a heroic effort by Carmelo to hold off the hapless Nets at home last week.  The Knicks are better than they've been in the last seven years, and that's reason enough to celebrate.

In a way, though, I almost feel worse about how far the Knicks have fallen now that they're back to respectabiity.  Maybe I was able to subconsciously ignore the last few seasons and almost pretend like they never happened, as if my brain forced me to block out the horrible basketball I was watching.  While the Knicks were horrible, they were so bad that I wasn't able to fully process it.  In fact, it was almost funny, with every additional disaster (and there were a lot of them) a different funny joke.  Eddie Curry's out for the season again?  Why not!  The Knicks traded for Steve Francis?  Of course they did!  We used our lottery pick on Michael Sweetney?  Naturally!

Now, though, the playoff berth has forced reality to set in.  All of the pageantry and celebration surrounding the Knicks' "accomplishment" only serves as a reminder that, yes, things really were that bad towards the second half of the 2000s; it wasn't all a bad dream.  While I'm glad to have the Knicks be competitive again, any true Knicks fan shouldn't be flipping out over a dead-average team that clinched a postseason spot in a league where more than half of the teams go to the playoffs every year.  While I know a lot of the buzz comes from fair weather fans who simply tuned out the last half-decade of Knicks basketball, I hope the diehard supporters aren't too pleased with today's news.  The playoffs will be fun, but it won't really be New York basketball again until the Knicks are still competing in June, not just early April.

Making Sense of Cricket

It's no secret that, as an American, my solar system of sports has baseball, football and basketball firmly fixed at its center.  Revolving just around those three is hockey, a truly-Canadian sport which has been adopted by the U.S., and soccer, a sport rapidly growing in popularity here in the States as youth participation rates continue to skyrocket and as the U.S. men's national team continues to improve.  Outside of those, a bit further from my core, are the individual sports with worldwide appeal - golf, tennis, auto racing, etc. - which I admittedly don't pay terribly close attention to most of the year, but which I'll keep tabs on during key competitions such as the Masters, Wimbledon or the Indianapolis 500.

Somewhere at the very outskirts, in rarely-reached portions of my sports galaxy, are the strictly global (read: non-U.S.) sports including cricket, which has become an ESPN newsworthy sport this week because of the Cricket World Cup (see right: the ESPN.com homepage featured a photo from the India vs. Sri Lanka final this morning).  With what I consider the world's most confusing sport infiltrating mainstream American sports media, U.S. sports fans such as myself likely find themselves wondering how they should handle and process this new sports-related information.  Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer is.

On one hand, it's almost too easy to dismiss cricket altogether.  Not only is the sport confusing, but it's (at least on the grand scheme of all sports) fairly similar to baseball, which we already have, already understand and already enjoy (some of us do, anyway).  With this being Opening Weekend in MLB and with tons of great games to watch, why bother trying to process yet another set of players, rules and statistics?  While living in Richmond, VA over the summer of 2003, I learned the basic rules of cricket from my Indian coworkers.  Even after receiving this rudimentary lesson, I find following cricket almost impossible.  I tried to check in on the progress of the India vs. Sri Lanka final earlier this morning, and the "Summary" tab of ESPN's CrickInfo scorecard looked like the image below.  One quick glance, and I went right right back to checking today's MLB pitching probables (Hanson!  Lannon!  It's the Braves and the Nationals on MASN!)

Despite knowing more about Cricket than 99% of Americans, I can't make sense of the Scorecard.

There's a lot more to sports than statistics and rules, however, and some of the world's best sports are known more for the fan response they prompt than for the quality and excitement of the games themselves.  This summer at the World Cup, I learned to appreciate even the most sloppy and "boring" soccer matches by embracing the cultures, energy and passion of the fans.  This week, Cricket is generating a similar buzz among fans across Asia and Europe, and if nothing else that demands the respect of American sports fans.  I have friends here at school who began watching the cricket finals at 2 AM local time last night, and are still watching as the eight-plus-hour-long match rolls on.  While Americans may not understand what exactly is going on, or how a match could last so long, or why the players are wearing collared shirts, if nothing else we must respect and admire cricket for the excitement it is generating across the globe.  If, come October, MLB's World Series can generate even a fraction of the cricket World Cup's passion, we'll be in for a special Fall Classic.

Today, All Is Right In The World

For a diehard baseball fan like myself, there's no day on the sports calendar that can top Major League Baseball's Opening Day.  Every franchise is undefeated, and a win on Opening Day to go to 1-0 (which my Braves got this afternoon at Washington) can put a baseball fan in a great mood heading into April.  The sport's first day gives us some epic pitching matchups in iconic settings - today, I caught parts of Verlander vs. Sabathia in New York and Lincecum vs. Kershaw in Los Angeles, for example.  We also get nationally televised weekday afternoon baseball, which is a rare treat.  As the ESPN promo below (which I think is fantastic) accurately suggests, baseball's first day (or, more accurately, first few days) is special.

All of that being said, MLB's Opening Day isn't perfect.  While the start of baseball should signify the beginning of Spring, MLB insists on having cold weather teams open at home during the sport's first week.  As a result, instead of watching every team play in short sleeves, taking advantage of wonderful weather (like in today's entertaining Giants vs. Dodgers game in L.A.), we had to see the Tigers and Yankees battle freezing-cold temperatures in the Bronx.  The result is not only sloppy baseball, but visibly empty seats.  While watching the Yankees game this afternoon, I noticed that the majority of the high-priced seats behind home plate were empty.  Between the bad weather and the early start, tons of seats at the Stadium were unoccupied, which takes some of the air out of the otherwise high-flying Opening Day balloon.

Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed the first day of 2011 regular season baseball.  I'm also making my triumphant return to fantasy baseball this year (after a nearly decade-long absence), which I'm very excited about.  I had forgotten how fun it is to have something to watch and root for (or against) in virtually every MLB game; while the season is long and individual games can seem meaningless, fantasy baseball is a great way to generate a vested interest in even the most boring matchups.  Thanks to Jered Weaver, I find myself actively following this afternoon's Angels at Royals contest, and had fun doing it.

Soon enough, as the calendar turns into April, the novelty of the 2011 season will wear off and we'll officially begin the wonderfully-long six month grind that is the Major League Baseball regular season.  This week, though, everything is new and exciting.  Each of the first few games means some starting pitcher's first appearance of the year, or a middle reliever's first trot out of the bullpen, or a bench player's first pinch hit opportunity.  The optimism surrounding those "firsts" is what makes Opening Day so special.  Enjoy it while you can, and happy Opening Day.