Calling All League Members (A Fantasy Draft Retrospective)

Well, before I start calling: Thank you, Peter, for another splendid hosting and feeding. I hope everyone slipped him some ‘support’ for the meal. Also, don’t forget to slip me ten for league fees. Don’t remember who did and didn’t. Well, there you go.

And now the (!) message. I don’t make a list of teams as we draft, so it would make the BCL’s life a lot easier if you sent me a list of your players. I’ve entered my team and that great sucking sound you hear is ….

Some first draft thoughts: I don’t have a sense which teams should be favored. It strikes me that for a newbie Ed collected a strong pitching staff. It strikes me that there were some great bargains in pitching, but I didn’t get any of them. It strikes me that maybe Berger should be favored simply because he spent his money often and early and should therefore (I conclude) have gotten more value because so many of us were throwing money at the better players at 1b and 2b simply because we had it.

Great fun, though. Next year Bob will be tanned, rested and ready. I have no doubt that Larry (Bubbles) Brown will make his long delayed debut. And, of course, we yearn for the banquet.


Today I count my blessings, and I have so many, even though I did not acquire any new ones at the draft yesterday.

The BCL

Charge of the Light-hitting Brigade

Image via Wikipedia

Saturday is draft day for my fantasy baseball league. It is our 27th year, and I am the only member who has been there since Day One. For about 15 years -- through the 90s and into the zeros -- I was a league power, possibly *the* league power -- winning money about two-thirds of the time, about twice the rate chance would predict.

But I've been out of the money for three years in a row, which suggests it may all have been chance after all. Or maybe the Internet has caught up with me in just this sense. I have a little mathematical way of ranking players that seemed to give me an advantage back in the day. I was very good at finding bargains, getting players for a price lower than their actual value. If that was indeed an advantage, the Internet has undercut it, since the Net is filled with up-to-the-minute evaluations and draft lists and even suggestions of how much you should pay for players, given your league parameters.

I've tended to ignore the Net, fooling myself with the notion my pen-and-paper methods could beat the Net. And in recent years, pressures of the job have cut into my prep time.

Like this year.

Sigh.

Yet the draft itself is such great fun. There is much what some people would call horseplay and perhaps a certain amount of the sipping of adult beverages. I guess that's what I'll have to settle for, the process and not the result. Because tonight and tomorrow I am surely going to go online and Google "draft list" and "sleepers" and "injury risk" and hope for the best.

Oh I will keep you posted, frequently and proudly or seldom and rueful.

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Confessions of an Absinthe Drinker

Oh. Last Night We Had Our Baseball Banquet.

I had grappa and absinthe the way one is supposed to. Didn't get it on video, though.

Putting It Out There for a Climate Treaty

At the Time I Thought It Was a Good Idea

Was just prowling around the computer looking for pictures that commemorate the history of the Patrick Finley Memorial Poetry salon and stumbled on this from another place and time. I'm thinking of asking all the members of the Patrick Finley Memorial Fantasy Baseball League -- a different thing; a men's chorus -- to produce similar photos from the 60s and 70s.

The thing is that this is the way we were, and we loved ourselves. The remarkable thing is that there were women who loved us, too, as is (or as was, anyway).

Code Talking: The BCL (Beloved Commissioner for Life) of the PF Finley Memorial Fantasy Baseball League Sends Out His 'News and Notes'

Image via Wikipedia

I could be posting. Instead, I josh with 'the boys' in an act of manly bonding.

BCL and his lady went to the A’s fireworks game last night to see Cahill, his backup P, pounded, but the fireworks were great, and the crowd did the wave for an entire half inning, which might have been a record….Russ and Bob doing well early, Russ riding N. Cruz (6 dings) and A. Hill (5 dings) while Bob’s got three no-name pitchers (Romero, Davies and Gallaraga) who are smoking (something?)….Brad is deeply in the toilet awaiting A-Rod’s return, but the question is how deep is too deep? But that team B.A. of .227 is going to adjust up, A-Rod or not….Paul is changing his team name to the Decompositions….last year’s champion J. Pressman is holding his Maine League draft today; BCL missed phone connections yesterday because of the A’s game and thus the BCL’s brain remained unpicked, so Good Luck, JP….Peter is leading the league in K’s, everything else on his team a crapfest…who did Berger actually pick in the final whiparound? Somebody in the minors; I’ve already forgotten who; I’ll get back to you on that…before you push Matt down and try to take his candy, recall that Sabbathia always looks lousy in April and then rules the world…Tola is clam-happy as Masterson gets the starts in Boston while Dice-K heals, but Escobar has had a setback, so that may be a wash…league still undecided about what kind of plant to get for Chef Peter; he prefers outdoor evergreen while Russ and Bob prefer stolen-from-the-cemetery…Paul has five guys on the DL; I’m going to have dinner and drinks with his future mother-in-law to see what can be done

The Fantasy Draft is Over.

Brigid of Kildare, the Patron Abbess of Irish Whiskey/Image via Wikipedia

Started at 10am and went to about 5pm, with a short break for lunch.

I had a little Irish in a flask to spark my morning coffee. Then Tola dragged out the bottle of tequila -- very good; sipping quality.

(Over there on the right: Brigid of Kildare, Patron Abbess of Irish Whiskey.)

Then at some point Peter, who works for Kermit Lynch, started opening red.

Like the baritone bee, I was flying most of the day with a low buzz.

I won't bore you with my drafting strategy, since the only people who care about my drafting strategy were at the table and know its knots and wrinkles first hand. Suffice it to say, I followed it, buzz or no, so any failure will come from preparation, not execution.

This is the league's 26th year. Of its founders, only I am left alive -- in the sense of having been in the league every year since its founding.

I can see me at the Pearly Gates explaining to St. Peter why I should slip inside, mentioning my loyalty to the league.

"Back in 2009, you should have paid the extra quarter and drafted Jermaine Dye," Pete will say, letting the line back up. "But getting Orlando Cabrera for a buck -- that was nice. Those relievers look a little shaky, though. Let's just say you've passed Go and here's 200 bucks. I'm sending you back to try it all over again. Only this time: more kindness to strangers, more speaking truth to power and *definitely* more steals -- ten here, ten there; they add up. Capisce?"

On Saturday at Peter's We Hold the Fantasy Baseball Draft in Memory of Patrick Finley, Whose Life Was a Fantasy

But that, as they say, is another story, and not one I have the energy to write. When you are young, you think you will see everything twice, but Patrick is the only person (not including relatives; that goes without saying; that circus never leaves town) whose self-destruction I witnessed close enough to see the pain, the fine grain of it, and not merely hear the reports and appreciate the distance.

Patrick founded the league in 1984 because he figured -- rightly -- that he was clever enough to win the small cash prizes often enough to turn a profit. And he was. Everything was always a bit of a scam with him, but he made it fun.

He was a poet, you know, and I do like to put up bits of poetry on this blog, and I have hundreds of pages of his poetry upon which to draw.

But I don't put any of his poetry up. His magic was in the presentation of his work -- his salons made money, of course -- and you were never able afterwards to read the poem and think it as good as it seemed when you heard it. He had raised the words up too high. They hit the page and lay flat.

And that's confusing to a susceptible reader. (It does, however, explain how the fact most poets read their work so badly may, in fact, serve well the later appreciation of their work.)

Patrick. He was an actor, a performer, a manipulator, a bit of a cad, polyamorous, polymorphous, not that stringent in keeping his accounts -- but he paid us back the money he owed us the week before he died.

I'm sure he was setting us up for something later, a real score, so he died at the right moment, at least for the sentimentalization of his memory.

I actually meant to write about the league, but I have wandered off. I was talking with E. the other day about that 'seeing everything twice' thing, about how when we were younger part of the pleasure of any new experience was the notion -- spontaneous; not cultivated; just there -- that this was just the first of many, at least of several, visits to place and moment, that if Venice was wonderful or Crater Lake deep or the flood of lightning bugs filling the valley gorgeous to the point of confusion as we came down the mountain that night in North Carolina, all of this was the thing itself and also a reference point for future experiences that would both extend and retrace the past. We always had one foot in the future, it seemed.

Oh well. I know you are supposed to live in the moment, I just don't know how to do it, not entirely. We thought there would sooner or later be more of everything that was good -- if not exactly identical, similar enough to resonate.

Patrick was a good thing. He was a rascal and possibly a genius -- certainly at something, at the conning, anyway, and making you love it -- and we were pretty sure we would hang a dozen like him on the walls of our life. But we haven't, no sir, we haven't.

No point feeling bad. It's like the Heisenberg uncertainly principle, maybe. If we had stared too hard, concentrated too much, not let it play out in our peripheral vision, it would have been work, and we would have been court reporting our own lives, attentive but apart.

He was just there until he was gone. What? What happened? I don't quite ....?

So perhaps we lived in the moment after all.
Damn, he looked like a poet.

Gee, Thanks, Say My Buddies

Image via Wikipedia

It's always entertaining to return next day to a late-night post -- particularly those written on fumes -- since such posts really do exemplify the iceberg nature of blogging, your ideas sitting there low in the water with all those dangerous implications inevitably lurking below.

A reader approaches and then: Crunch! Ouch!! That wasn't nice!!!

It would appear that I said in my previous post that I enjoy my league buddies because they odd, strange, borderline weird and off the chart. That's what I do mean, actually, but the hidden part of that statement -- the iceberg part; back to the metaphor! -- is that I was raised up in a fundamentalist home in the High South, and there was such a white-bread sameness to what I did and the people I knew.

And god help me, then I went to Whooping Jesus Bible College and damn that was tedious and grim. Graduate school was slightly more interesting, but my nose was in a book. My first teaching job -- that was better, but too many of my colleagues wanted to "talk bibliography."

It was only after I lost that job and we moved to the big city of Atlanta and I got into journalism that I began to bump up against folks who were so very different from those folks I had known before, and I began to relish the spectacle, to almost regard myself as a minor character in a novel -- Dickensian? George Eliotish? -- and to really enjoy life as a spectator sport.

See, the point is that if you were born bland, so many things add spice to your life. It's subjective, of course. At times it's overwhelming. And it's limiting. One is perhaps too content with small successes in one's own life, partly because one is so dazzled by the lives of others, by what seems to be an essential sophistication one can only dream of.

But back to my league buddies. Time to set the record straight, to adjust the lens. They are all good guys, regular guys, definitely okay guys, relatively solid citizens all living under their real names and not under indictment or otherwise on the lam. I find them fascinating, though. I'm still just a country mouse, easily impressed and quickly delighted.

Here's one of my favorite passages from Byron's 'Don Juan':

Thrice happy he who, after a survey

Of the good company, can win a corner,

A door that's in or boudoir out of the way,

Where he may fix himself like small "Jack Horner,"

And let the Babel round run as it may,

And look on as a mourner, or a scorner,

Or an approver, or a mere spectator,

Yawning a little as the night grows later.

That's an attitude I only aspire to. I'm not a mourner, scorner, a "mere" spectator or a yawner. I'm not precisely an approver, either. I'm everyone's ideal audience, amazed I've been let in the door and endlessly intrigued by the "otherness" of others, their exuberance, their wonderful quality of not being me.

Feasting with Panthers

Image via Wikipedia

Just home from the fantasy baseball banquet. Were I a trendy type of bloke, I would twitter the result. But "trendy bloke" is not a category I occupy. Let me just say this. When the delicious dessert came out -- thank you, Brad -- I keep shouting,"Liqueur! Liqueur!" at which point host Peter Moore brought out some St. Georges absinthe.

I had ... a taste. It's not the way one is supposed to drink absinthe, since I believe there is a rather elaborate ritual, involving filtering into water and sugar cubes. But there's something to be said for sampling the raw material, which really is a liquid licorice stick. Yet it was all elegant and de riguer, if I'm not abusing my French idioms.

Pretty damn interesting to have someone roll out a bottle of absinthe, some good stuff made on Alameda Island, which is of interest only to locals.

The lady E. was talking recently about some personality index that asked you if you would prefer loyal friends or interesting friends. I said, of course, loyal, but E. didn't think so. She said that you really can't count on loyalty, as friendship decays. But, she said, "interesting" is something else. "Interesting" endures in a way loyalty cannot. I conceded her the point. That's why I love my baseball league. I've lived my whole life yearning to be next to people worth writing about even if I lack the talent to do them justice.

Oh you wonderful eccentrics, you mute inglorious Miltons,
Walt Whitman would have enjoyed you, and I mean that in the nicest way possible,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)


Postscript: Peter posts the menu.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Saturday February 28, 2009

Leftover Chicken Sandwiches

League Banquet
BCL, Mike, Russ, Kevin, Paul, Brad, Matt, Bob
Redwood Hills Farm Goat Cheese in many forms also stuffed in Peppadew Peppers and in Medjool Dates w/ Kumquat Zest
Short Ribs
Pappardelle w/ Parsley & Olive Oil
Asparagus
Brad's Pistachio Cake

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Bob Wieder: Still Funny After All These Years

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Tonight is the glorious annual banquet in celebration of yet another year of existence for the Patrick Finley Memorial Fantasy Baseball League, which I once stood astride like a living god but around whose higher echelons I now skulk like a beaten dog.

At last when I say that I am a modest man, I can also add that I have much to be modest about. (Thank you, Samuel Johnson.)

It's a wonderful time. It's quite a feast because we have it at the home of Peter Moore, Cook of Cooks, who lays out as good as grub as you are gonna git, my deft alliteration limning the seamless excellence of the food experience first to last. Also, Peter works for a wine importer, so the stuff he brings out of his cellar -- which, to be honest, is actually at knee level -- is ummmm-ummmm good, as an oenophile might say.

League members are exchanging emails about who might bring what, though mostly no one brings nothing because what Peter already has is so good. A good guest might bring a bottle of wine -- and now we round the last turn into this post's straightaway -- but as I wrote to Peter and the league I would never dare do that because:

The best bottle of wine in our house, except for the bottles that Peter himself has brought into our house, Peter wouldn't use to give his dog an enema.

To which Bob replied:

Damn. And I just laid out $6.99 for a 2006 bottle of Pupflush chenin blanc.

Well no joke. The 2006's are particularly fine.