courtesy of: weeklyfantasysportal.com
I rarely get worked up over topics I hear on sports talk radio shows. After becoming a “radio personality” myself during the 2013 fantasy football season, I enjoyed a fresh perspective on how hard it is for talk radio hosts to keep an audience’s engagement for hours on end. So when the topic of conversation coming through the airwaves recently turned to the merits of Nick Markakis and whether the Orioles should re-sign him, I smiled to myself as caller after caller seesawed arguments back and forth.
My smile quickly faded however, when one of the hosts chimed in with his opinion; the crux of which was that Markakis’ value to the team is more than what his “numbers” bear out and that it is the fault of fantasy baseball players that he is viewed negatively. It wasn’t his view of the O’s right fielder that I disagreed with; in fact I completely agree that he provides the Orioles with many benefits that are not measurable with an acronymed statistic. It was the blame directed towards fantasy owners that struck a nerve with me.
He went on to argue that baseball has become nothing but a numbers game and that people no longer appreciate the nuances that don’t show up in the box scores. He said that fantasy sports are the reason for this and that “fantasy thinking” is hurting the game.
I would argue the opposite.
Major League Baseball was long ago usurped by the NFL as America’s game and continues to ignore, rather than fight, its reputation as a stodgy, old guard full of impracticalities and irrelevant tradition. If you’re looking for a reason why baseball’s popularity continues to wane, perhaps baseball itself is where you should start. Those who choose to wax nostalgic and curse the sabermatricians who claw tooth and nail to advance the way we look at the game, should direct their venom towards the organization they seem so eager to defend.
If fantasy baseball has any impact at all on “reality” baseball, it is surely positive. It drives interest in players and teams that extends beyond hometown commitment. It provides an additional angle by which to view the grueling 162 game season. And for those who trumpet the past and hail the game’s heroes, it drives a desire in those less familiar with the sport to learn more about it.
The average baseball fan in St. Louis catches a few minutes of his Cardinals during commercial breaks of Mad Men. He checks the score, watches while his team bats, then flips back to Don Draper. He couldn’t care less that Eric Young, Jr. of the Mets isn’t in the lineup tonight to swipe a couple of bags against his team…he probably doesn’t even know who Eric Young, Jr. is. He certainly doesn’t know that the Mets’ speedster is second in the league in stolen bases behind only Dee Gordon. And whatever you do, don’t ask him who Dee Gordon is.
But put that average baseball fan in a fantasy league and watch his breadth of knowledge of the game expand like one of those spongy arcade prizes that you put in water. Suddenly he’s checking pitching matchups between the Rockies and Giants. He’s waiting for the lineup to be announced in the Yankees/Blue Jays game. He’s following beat writers on Twitter to get a feel for the weather conditions in tonight’s Oakland vs. Houston matchup.
He knows the names of every SS-eligible player in baseball, and while that doesn’t matter to most people, it matters to him. And that’s the point…baseball matters to him. Not the St. Louis Cardinals. Not the National League. All of baseball matters to him now; and it matters to the other nine guys in his fantasy league, to say nothing of the millions playing some sort of fantasy baseball game every day. To blame fantasy baseball owners for the perceived decline in the “quality” of how we value players is not only preposterous; it’s a lazy argument.
