On The Fantasy Baseball Experiment

Long ago, when I was a desperate and unpopular adolescent, I wandered into a bookstore and happened upon a curious tome called Rotisserie League Baseball. This was in (approximately) 1986, and the first fantasy league I curated included four teams, with the statistics calculated on notepaper and diligently stored inside a Trapper Keeper, most likely with a Def Leppard logo outlined by Exacto knife on the front cover.

I've written a number of times on this forum about my subsequent disillusionment with the game of baseball, and I won't bore you again with the details. But today, I began my engagement in what I believe is an unprecedented experiment: For the first time in years, I have joined a "serious" fantasy baseball league. I did this largely for the camaraderie, because the participants in this league are some of my best friends from college, and the commissioner of this league is an enigmatic and detail-oriented savant who treats the league with the kind of reverence that belies its paltry entry fee.* Therefore, the banter of the league itself will be unavoidably joyous. But my opinion of baseball itself has not changed; I find it staid and tiresome. Any romance it clung to has been subsumed by two decades of hypocrisy. Therefore, my experiment is this: I am going to attempt to remain competitive in a fantasy baseball league without watching a full inning of Major League Baseball all season long.

Now, there will likely be some unavoidable exceptions to this rule: I may be required to attend a game or two as part of my work duties, or I may be courted by a friend in possession of Yankees tickets. But for the most part, my goal is to avoid watching more than six outs in any particular contest. I will base my fantasy strategy entirely on facts and figures, which is the way it should be, anyway, even though I apparently have little to no grasp of how many these statistics are now calculated.**I will not be colored by appearances, or by allegiances, or by emotionality, or by news/gossip, or by team standings (which I will check as rarely as possible); in fact, in the first round--it's a ten-team, five-player keeper league--I deliberately chose someone I had actively never heard of until this morning: Adam Lind, of the Toronto Blue Jays, who apparently hit 35 home runs and drove in 114 runs last year and was most definitely not in my kitchen this morning. Other than that, I can tell you nothing about him. In fact, I can tell you nothing at all about the Toronto Blue Jays, except that (I presume) they still play in the SkyDome, which was once the subject of this utterly outstanding Steve Rushin piece...19 years ago.

In that spirit, I plan on choosing Terry Pendleton with my next pick.

*A few days ago, he sent out several pages of pre-draft "News and Notes." Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we could somehow channel all the energy exerted on fantasy sports into neuroscience. And then I spend twelve minutes contemplating Mike Dunleavy's 3-point percentage, and I am jarred back to reality.
**Today I read this sentence, in the $7.99 fantasy baseball magazine I scooped up at a local bodega: "He's regressed in the counting and rate stats two consecutive years." I was worried, for a moment, that I had mistakenly purchased a copy of Institutional Investor.

On the Untold Beauty of the Mall

I love shopping malls.

Mine is a completely irrational passion, born of a childhood spent wandering the lone corridor of the Nittany Mall, in search of Orange Julii* and Gap jeans and Chess King sweaters and some material method of chasing away small-town tedium. That love of malls carried me through a dull post-college internship in Los Angeles (varied locations), and through five years in Akron, Ohio, (Summit Mall), and offset a year of supposed "serious study" in Boston (Prudential Center). There's something about a mall that crystallizes the ordinariness of modern American life: The free samples of bourbon chicken, the hirsute kiosk clerks hawking overpriced cell-phone plans with the passion of mob enforcers, the sports memorabilia mart with its overpriced jerseys and framed Willie Stargell pennants, the burbling of a half-dead fountain laden with corroded pennies, the scent of corn dogs and Sears outerwear--a mall is a uniform American experience, a confluence of the hideous (American Girl) and the breathtaking (Victoria's Secret, for the pubescent teenage male), of the decadent (Auntie Anne's Pretzel Bites) and weird (Spencer Gifts), of all the excess of our crumbling empire, of our endless yearning for that which we do not need.

And so I spent this weekend in Minneapolis, at the wedding of one of my closest friends, and I couldn't not visit to the Mall of America, the uber-mall, a mall so great that it actually became the central metaphor in one of the greatest pieces of sports journalism any human (in this case, Steve Rushin) has ever composed. I went to Mall of America expecting to be overwhelmed by the sights and scents of our national pastime. And in a way, I was not disappointed. I saw a teenaged mother screaming at the father of her child from outside the mens room as he attempted a diaper change with a high degree of difficulty; I passed at least six sports memorabilia stores, each of which had displayed dozens of iterations of Brett Favre gear; I ate lunch at a restaurant whose founders voluntary chose the vaguely sexual, mildly offensive name Tucci Bennuch (second choice: Fuhgeddaboudit), and I watched the roller coaster at the center of the mall rattle and roll and discharge the sorts of yellowish adults who would choose to ride a roller coaster at 2 p.m. on a Monday afternoon; I had, laid out before me, every chain store that has ever existed, row after row of American Apparels and Gaps and Banana Republics and Macy's and Frederick's of Hollywood (apparently, Wonder Woman outfits are the rage among trashy housewives this autumn), and somehow, despite all of this, I still felt inexplicably empty inside. It just didn't seem like enough.

But then, this is exactly what I anticipated feeling. And I suppose this is the reason why I love to visit the mall, and it is the reason why I am most happy when I leave without buying anything at all. Because if even the largest, most-hyped, most patriotic shopping structure in the world cannot satisfy me, perhaps it is a sign I don't really need much of anything at all.

*Is this the actual plural of "Julius"? Unknown. Perhaps, as with moose, the plural of "Julius" is "Julius," but I prefer to think of a "Julius" as synonymous with "Sarcophagus." Particularly the Pina Colada flavor.