Day 7: Fantasy Sports and Nerds

Researching for my upcoming fantasy baseball draft I was struck once again by the way fantasy leagues have turned that most hot-blooded, jocktacular of traditions, SPORT, into one of the dorkiest. The moneyball and sabermetrics movements in baseball are well documented but at least have a real world sports function. Any tool that lets general managers get the most out of their team is fair game and at the end of the day it still comes down to assembling the best team on an actual field of play. Fantasy sports nerds are a different breed, and here’s why…

The Dream of Intellectual Conquest

Geeks of all strains have long consoled themselves with the assertion that, one day, the muscle-bound man-mountain that just shoved them into the girl’s locker room will find himself in the employ, and therefore at the mercy, of that same geek. Fantasy sports play on the same daydream. The general manager of a major sports franchise is the ultimate way to simultaneously fulfill that boss fantasy while redeeming oneself in the realm of athletics. With enough intelligence and preparation the square kid with the bad haircut and thick glasses can play puppeteer with all those who once occupied high school’s upper echelon. Getting to this point, though, requires…

Time and Pressure

Fantasy sports can quickly overwhelm one’s schedule. The research that goes into draft day can quickly pile up into a thirty-plus hour project, spread over weeks and months at the expense of little things like relationships, paying bills and meeting deadlines at work. Add to that the time spent reviewing each player’s performance on a weekly basis, checking out opponent’s teams, analyzing upcoming matchups, reading expert opinions, tedious trade negotiations and, if there’s a smidgen of time left over, maybe even watching a game or two and the entire affair can quickly become a reasonably demanding part-time job. Really, what’s nerdier than that kind of devotion to a fictitious venture? There’s little to no difference between cultivating a fantasy championship and trying to collect every single star in the latest Mario game or level up a World of Warcraft character to 80. Boredom can become a real obstacle over so long a process, though, so the task must be occasionally livened up by…

The Beauty of Complexity

My own fantasy football experience has been a brilliant example of the glorification of complexity over ease of use. We’ve developed the single longest rule book I’ve ever heard of in an effort to approximate the vagaries of the NFL restricted free agent tender system in a fantasy-friendly manner. We have our own blog devoted to debating rule changes. Arguments come in thousand-word posts accompanied by spreadsheets, algebraic analysis, and occasionally real emotional investment. We love our rules. It marks our league as a “serious” one, and we laugh and denigrate simpletons toiling through their snake drafts as they fill out rosters according to the default Yahoo! rankings. In fact, it seems that the more difficult we make our system to explain the more deeply we fall in love with it. It’s ours. Our own. Our…precious. We’ll defend it to the death because we’ve invested years of ourselves in its creation.

It’s no different for nerds and their favorite fantasy worlds. The fantasy football aficionado could not care less if you want to talk about the benefit of going running back-running back in rounds one and two in the new, more pass-happy NFL because they’ve either answered that debate long ago or, more likely, rendered it obsolete by turning to an auction draft. In the same way your average Lord of the Rings fan doesn’t want to hear your thoughts on the Legolas vs. Gimli debate. If you want to engage her you’d better come ready with a take on whether Feanor, son of Finwe, was a greater elf lord than Elwe. That’s a debate that shows proper respect for and attention to the source material, the same way having an opinion on Keiland Williams versus James Davis as the better backup running back in Washington does. I think it’s also the entire appeal of Robert Jordan’s books. These little details may seem insignificant, but they can add up in the long run, because…

Love Is All About Commitment

Slowly building a championship contender is a labor of love. The committed fantasy GM nurtures her team, week in and week out, for months. The exposure effect is the idea that simple familiarity with another leads to attraction. We like people more the more we encounter them, even if it’s just bumping into them in stairwell. Similarly, the more time spent with a group of fantasy players the more we come to love them. I’ve been won over by countless members of past teams and still find myself rooting for them years after they’ve passed on to other owners. They are still “my” guys. I followed them from the NFL draft to my league’s draft to the playoffs and they feel like (distant) family.

This became even more pronounced recently when I discovered manager mode in FIFA 10, a soccer video game. In manager mode one does not even play the games. You just research (fictitious digital) players, train them, analyze their game ratings and slowly build your team into a powerhouse. It’s fantasy sports without a real sport at its root. It’s also utterly addictive. If you’ve ever gotten involved in the managerial side of a Madden game take a long hard pause before judging someone else for investing months developing a truly imposing Dungeons and Dragons character. His obsession and yours both involve a lot of love and can climax in either immense excitement or true heartbreak. When it does you’ll both find yourselves wanting desperately to share the joy or pain, leading us to…

The Socially Tonedeaf

This is it, the ultimate hallmark of the “nerd,” wandering about oblivious to what others do or do not find fascinating. This is the guy you just can’t shake at the party because he hasn’t yet finished explaining to you the full extent of the awesomeness that is his latest captured pokemon. The apotheosis of the subject in his own life has left him completely blind to the opaque qualities noted above and render him, more than anyone else in the room, an absolute bore. It’s painful to watch. If you’ve ever listened to a four-year-old try to explain a video game you know exactly what I’m talking about. Once the faucet is opened there’s absolutely no stopping it until every last drop of knowledge has come out. It’s horrible and every kid does it…before they learn better.

Listening in on a conversation about fantasy sports is no different. The only people who care about your OPS dominance are others in your own league; even other fantasy geeks don’t care except that your commentary on your own team gives them license to talk about theirs. The resulting conversation is one of the least personal, least social, least worthwhile I can conceive. When hobby becomes obsession and begins to take precedence over real, human interaction nerdiness has reached its apogee. Fantasy sports, despite their increasing societal acceptance, can take us there more quickly than perhaps any other nerdy pursuit. Draft carefully, my friends.