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With all due respect, fantasy football is for babies. Pretty much anyone—your dorkiest coworker, your least informed family member, that one guy from high school that you only ever text to remind him when the draft is—can luck into winning the league. So long as you remember to set a lineup every week, there’s a path to glory—even if you don’t know the difference between Travis Kelce and Travis Scott.
The people who auto-draft, the people who don’t know how to work the waiver wire, even the people who proudly announce they don’t follow football at all (the Wario of that charming person who wins your March Madness pool based on their personal connections to the schools): any and all of them can ride the statistical prowess of two or three strong players to an improbable trophy.
But on the complete other side of the spectrum is fantasy baseball. This is where the real, incorrigible sickos reside. Where fantasy football is a fleeting parade, fantasy baseball is a long, grueling death march. During the Major League Baseball season, each team plays 162 games—roughly 10 times the number that an NFL team does. Which means that in order to triumph, one must really pay attention. Every day. For six months straight.
Without the set days of the week that the NFL schedule provides—with the exception of holidays and other wonkiness, NFL games are generally only played on Thursday, Sunday, and Monday—fantasy baseball requires its players to lock the fuck in. If you’re in a league with daily lineups (the only way to do it, in my opinion), each day from late March to early October presents the opportunity to either drop the hammer on your opposition or completely embarrass yourself. Oh, you didn’t know that your third baseman is day-to-day with an abdominal injury? What’s this, your best hitter can’t hit left-handed pitching at all, and his team faced a lefty starter three days in a row? Well guess what, I knew all of that, and prepared accordingly. That’s why I’m beating you by 200 points.
Of course, there will always be fantasy football imbeciles who let their team lapse as well. But with football’s much smaller sample size—playing once a week compared to six or seven times for baseball players—frustrating anomalies can often occur. What’s more infuriating than losing to someone who had three players on a bye week and an injured tight end just because their quarterback and best receiver combined for 100 points? In fantasy baseball, the cream has a way of rising to the top. Someone who hasn’t opened their fantasy app in weeks stands no chance against the committed stalwart who has made roster management part of their morning routine. Fantasy baseball rewards effort; its sun shines strongest upon the gardeners who actually tend to their plants.
At this stage, you’re probably wondering what my setup is. After years of swearing off fantasy football for many of the reasons outlined above, I was pulled back in by a league organized by my little cousin. It was an impossible situation to say no to, a wholesome way to connect with family members who live on the other side of the country. We don’t play for money, and there’s a tacit understanding that cross-country scheduling issues will inevitably lead to at least one person missing the draft. It is fun and mostly harmless, the type of thing that makes for lighthearted trash talk at Christmas, but not anything that will ever actually impact my mental health.
Then we have my long-running, 14-team, deeply-involved fantasy baseball league. Every March since 2021, a group of baseball writers that I used to blog with engage in a painstakingly slow draft that requires multiple days and several pages of a Google Sheet to complete. Rather than making the draft a two-hour speed run where everyone gets a minute or two to make their pick, everyone gets a 24-hour window to select their next player. (This is both because of the bicoastal time zone problem again, but also because important scientific research is going down between each pick, obviously.) The other huge part of the equation here is that this is a keeper league, and minor league players are eligible for the draft, meaning that oftentimes a prospect I’m completely unaware of ends up deciding the league, whether it’s that year or three years down the road.
In short, it’s a flourishing kingdom of baseball nerds, but it’s also a reminder that the most fulfilling things in life require hard work. Whereas fantasy football rewards those with even a passing familiarity with the NFL’s most famous guys (i.e. the ones that always have the ball), true fantasy baseball bliss comes from discovering that an obscure reliever for the Miami Marlins has an absurd strikeout rate and would really bolster your bullpen.
Why do I dedicate so much time to such a silly, intensive hobby? What is the point of fiddling with a fake baseball team every day, obsessively refreshing local beat writers’ social media feeds and MLB news services to see if my guys’ maladies are enough to send them to the injured list? Well for one, there’s definitely an element of masochism here. It’s probably inherent in all baseball fans, honestly, because even a fan’s most enjoyable baseball season comes with healthy doses of pain. But there’s also the undeniable fact that validation is a powerful drug, and in the case of fantasy baseball, that validation comes both from putting the work in, but also being smarter than everyone who didn’t draft Nick Lodolo.
I may not be the smartest man alive, but I do know ball, and my fantasy baseball standings reflect that. That alone is enough for me.