Since I cheer for the Minnesota Twins from my apartment in Illinois, the amount of actual baseball I see over the summer is limited. It requires either a trip to the South Side or the rare occassion WGN chooses a Twins-White Sox game for me to see my hometown team. While I'd like to say I'm a fan of the sport itself, I don't love it quite as much without a rooting interest.
That's why this year I'm going whole hog into fantasy baseball. I have two teams, one points-based team I drafted at the beginning of spring training and one head-to-head team I drafted at the end of spring training. Since baseball is the longest sports season (basically the end of March until the beginning of October plus the playoffs) and there's very little competition for my attention, I don't believe this is going overboard. I'm just augmenting my enjoyment of the sport by giving myself a rooting interest in guys on teams other than the Twins.
Here are my teams. You can tell at first blanche which league I got the first pick in and which one I picked eleventh.
Morneau4MVP,eh? (Pre-Spring Training Team)
Miguel Cabrera (Det - 3B) Ryan Braun (Mil - 3B) Lance Berkman (Hou - 1B,OF) Brian Roberts (Bal - 2B) Chone Figgins (LAA - 2B,3B,OF) Hunter Pence (Hou - OF) Vernon Wells (Tor - OF) Édgar Rentería (Det - SS) Bengie Molina (SF -C) Jeremy Hermida (Fla - OF) Stephen Drew (Ari - SS) Conor Jackson (Ari - 1B) Aaron Harang (Cin - SP) Javier Vázquez (CWS - SP) Matt Cain (SF - SP) Phil Hughes (NYY - SP) Dontrelle Willis (Det - SP) Matt Garza (TB - SP) Mark Buehrle (CWS - SP) Chad Cordero (Was - RP) Heath Bell (SD - RP)
BatterThanYrBatter (Post-Spring Training Team)
Álex Rodríguez (NYY - 3B) Brandon Phillips (Cin - 2B) Derrek Lee (ChC - 1B) Bobby Abreu (NYY - OF) Brian McCann (Atl - C) Rafael Furcal (LAD - SS) Dan Uggla (Fla - 2B) Jeff Francoeur (Atl - OF) James Loney (LAD - 1B) Kosuke Fukudome (ChC - OF) Justin Upton (Ari - OF) Coco Crisp (Bos - OF) Jake Peavy (SD - SP) Mark Buehrle (CWS - SP) Pedro Martínez (NYM - SP) Francisco Liriano (Min - SP) Adam Wainwright (StL - SP) Dontrelle Willis (Det - SP) Billy Wagner (NYM - RP) Kevin Gregg (Fla - RP) Heath Bell (SD - RP)
I should point out that I'm heavily invested via my fantasy team in Mark Buehrle, Dontrelle Willis, Heath Bell and the Arizona Diamondbacks. I'm ready to reshuffle my roster as necessary and I won't have the sentimental attachment like I did to last year's Hunter-Mauer-Cuddyer-Neshek team the computer drafted for me. Still, I'm putting my eggs in those same baskets.
I'm also jittery about the seasons Phil Hughes and Francisco Liriano, my sole Twins player, will have. If Hughes (the player the Twins could've had in a Santana-to-the-Yankees deal) has a breakout season and Liriano goes into the tank, I will probably cry myself to sleep. Add on that I'm gambling on my hated rival's top pitcher in both leagues and this could the fantasy season that pushes me into literal insanity. If it does, please take me to the new ballpark when it opens.
Since today is, y'know, Good Friday, I took the day off from work. I've worked really hard of late as one might expect from someone whose job includes filing tax reports. Pair that with not taking all of my vacation last year and I'm going to space my personal days out a little better this year. So when my friend Dave suggested taking a half-day yesterday and the full day today, I was onboard.
Then the weirdest thing happened this morning. I slept my usual five to six hours and then got out of bed. I'm just used to sleeping that long and then going about my day. The weird part is it was 5:30 am when I woke up. Eventhough I would've liked to sleep more and get 8 hours of sleep, apparently I was rested enough. Normally when I've been up for six hours it's 1:00 in the afternoon. Today it will only be 11:00.
So I'm sitting here on the couch, typing this entry and waiting for the first set of games to come on. The game I'm most interested in won't be on regular broadcast TV here in Chicago. I'll probably chill for a bit, watch the game that's going to be on instead and then take the train into the city after halftime to watch basketball the rest of the day. Not a bad plan for a day off.
Now that I'm emerging from the deep, dark hole from which I've been filing premium tax forms since the beginning of the year, I'm getting back into the regular swing of my life and hopefully that means more posts for you sweet reader. Things were literally crazy around the office and I was starting to look a little like Edward Norton in "Fight Club" and feel a bit like Captain Willard at the end of "Apocalypse Now." Not good times, bad times.
But my "rebirth" coincides with the rebirth of Mother Nature and the semi-annual period when my life as a sports fan is awesome. In the fall, when the leaves are coming off the trees, baseball is ending and basketball is just beginning. Then, almost half a year later, basketball is ending just as baseball is commencing. Just like that extra paycheck you get when you get paid bi-weekly instead of twice a month, this cycle continues five-months-then-seven-months as a straight line through my life. There's never a time which isn't filled with either enthusiasm for the playoffs or hope for a new and approaching season.
The NCAA Tournament is approaching and you know what that means. It means I'm going to fill out a bracket based upon what I've off-handedly read through most of the season about college basketball. It sounds like it shouldn't work and it doesn't really. It does however work better than actually paying attention the entire season and then fashioning myself as some kind of expert. I'll admit to following college basketball closer this year (I even went to the Golden Gophers' game at Northwestern.) on the account of needing to know whom I should be enthused to see trimmed in evergreens next year. Yet I remain a casual fan at best. If any college basketball star not named Beasley, Gordon, Mayo, Rose or Hibbert walked into the room and beat me up right now, the best description I could provide is "just a really tall dude with fists." Jerryd Bayless, do your worst.
My fellow sports fanatics wonder how I can survive without seeing the actual sport events I swear allegiance to. Since I only go to games and read about them online (sometimes I'll see nationally televised games like the Super Bowl or Sunday's Rockets-Lakers tilt), I'm somewhat a version of the sportsfan of the past. I've heard more often about LeBron James than I've ever actually seen him play. I can give you scouting reports for Adrian Peterson more readily than I can describe what it's like to see him run. I get most of my sports news from the paper except the paper is a computer which can play highlights. It's both disassociating and engrossing.
Perhaps if I lived at home, then I would be more conventionally plugged into the local teams than I am here in Chicago. The distance between myself and the teams I actually care about (except in the case of their demise) means I am off the pulse of the community. My heart beats to a different drummer than those around me and I feel detached from that sense of unity sports can breed. This leads me onto the Internet to getmynews in its obsessive, neurotic variety. When members of the mainstream sports media blast bloggers, they're just admitting they can't keep up with the research necessary to commit yourself to this form of journalism. The bi-product of reading only this kind of media is I end up sounding like I know a lot more than I do. All I really know is where to go to find people who do.
So as I was constructing my tournament brackets, I thought two things. The first was I was going to put my brackets together and with only a little bit of logic necessary (some lower seeds over higher seeds, no "all four #1s" make the Final Four) and almost not research. I was only going to trust what I'd heard from actual experts and only the stuff which actually stood out enough for me to remember. Second, against that backdrop Tennessee was vastly underrated by the selection committee and will probably have a chip on their shoulder. Seriously, they had the #1 RPI and strength of schedule this year. They beat the last undefeated team in Memphis before they got sucked into a trap game against Vanderbilt who made the tourney and then lost to also tourney-bound Arkansas in their conference semis. I guess losing to two other tournament teams in Kentucky and Texas were what really turned the committee off. Somewhere Chris Lofton is focusing his anger and storing it for later use in bracket destruction. Anyway, here's the link to my bracket this year. I also did an NIT bracket but I picked it the same way most people do their money brackets and chose a final four of my alma mater (Minnesota), my brother's alma mater (Arizona State), my friend's alma mater (Illinois State) and Virginia Tech because then I got to make their square-root-looking symbol three times on my bracket.
This year has been a wash for the Timberwolves. I guess that happens when you trade the greatest player your franchise has ever known away for a handful of prospects and an expiring contract. I did get a chance to see the Timberwolves in person when they visited the Bulls at the United Center. One of the the principles of our agency knows I'm a Minnesota guy and knows I'm a die-hard basketball fan. I've been following the Minnesota Timberwolves since their first year in the league and their best player was Tony Campbell. I was nine and I used to sit under a blanket fort listening to the great Kevin Harlan giving the play-by-play. So when I nonchalantly asked him what he was doing with his season tickets for the T'Wolves game, he was gracious enough to turn them over gratis. The bittersweetness of no longer cheering for KG (the only athlete other than Kirby Puckett whose passing will cause me to weep) is offset some by the hope and the enthusiasm for growth of the Al Jefferson-Randy Foye-Corey Brewer-Ryan Gomes-Rashard McCants core the Timberwolves will be adding an aforementioned top pick to this spring. Some of which is, of course, dampened by the same guys being in charge now as were before when we ended up needing to trade away the greatest player the franchise has ever known.
The Wolves' season has been offset two different ways. First off the Western Conference has been bonkers this year. At the beginning of the season it was really good. The Lakers were back, the Warriors were still good, the Hornets were going from good to great, the Blazers exceeded expectations, everyone else from last year's playoffs was staying at the high level they'd been the year before and noone else was falling off. The Garnett trade has flipped this switch in the back of the minds of GMs all of the league. Nothing is as contageous as success and the tear the Celtics began the year on changed the popular mode in the NBA from "Let's wait and see what we've got," to "Fonk it. I'm going for it." First, Pau Gasol was traded to the Lakers. Then Shaq went to the Lakers. Finally Jason Kidd went to the Mavericks. Now the Rockets of all people are on a 20+ game winning streak and they're extending it without Yao Ming. Basically there are ten teams playing for eight playoff spots meaning the regular season has even more meaning as it comes to a close than in any other year and the level of basketball has ratcheted up to an elite level from a month ago until the end of the season. Even if your team isn't in the running, as a basketball fan there is a lot to love this year.
The second part is my brother organized another new fantasy league with other people who read FreeDarko and it has been fantastic. The level of competition has been the right balance between being knowledgable and having fun. We're also playing a head-to-head league which means the key to winning is weekly matchups, not gross points. Though I have been the benefactor almost as many times as not, the scoring in our old league lead to one person jumping out way in front and then never relenquishing the post. That has kind of happened in this league. But there's always something to play for, some reason to tweak your team just a bit instead of letting it fester. I thought I picked a pretty solid team at the beginning of the season. If Gilbert Arenas hadn't been injured, it actually might've been pretty formidable. As it was, I pieced together a .500 season strong enough to be the last team into the playoffs with just this week left to finish out.
Johan Santana wasn't the greatest player the Twins organization has ever known nor was he the greatest Latin player either. He may not have even been the finest pitcher the franchise ever knew, certainly if you extend back to the Washington Senators days. That doesn't change how much the Twins will miss him. Of all the starting pitchers in the years I've followed the team it's pretty much him, a large space, Frank Viola, Brad Radke, Scott Erickson for that one World Series year, another large space and then everyone else. I would often plan to go to the Twins game simply because Santana was going to be pitching. I would count starts and everything. Susie doesn't really like baseball (she tolerates it) and even she would get fired up to see him pitch. So I'm not going to act like everything is okay with the Twins who also lost another thrilling player to watch, Torii Hunter. We'll be lucky to finish with more than 70 wins this season and 60 isn't completely unreasonable. Being in the same division as Cleveland and the Tigers meant playing for third place and when Carl Pohlad talks about the Twins being a small market team, he means there's a small market for a team which isn't going to the playoff. Also these things just happen.
There's an ebb and flow to Life. Anyone can ask the fans of the Cincinnati Reds or Oakland A's or, in an extreme case, the Florida Marlins about being successful in spurts. There are some teams like the Yankees and the Cardinals who hang near the top and some teams like Tampa Bay or the former Expos who hang near the bottom and somewhere in between are all the rest of us pining our hopes on youngsters and guys finally getting it together. Things never get so bad as to be hopeless. Things also never get as good as when you're winning. The most recent Twins renaissance coincided with my return from college in Green Bay and carried me into my first year in Chicago. The last game I saw in the Dome was with my girlfriend of coming up on three years and my grandfather who died shortly thereafter. Chances are it will be the last game I see there since the new stadium will be up by the time Susie and I move home. Like the way things are sometimes, the Twins lost the game at the hands of the Cleveland Indians and C.C. Sabathia.
Finally, here are the best of the best movies from 2007.
In 2007, The Top Five Movies stood apart from the rest of the bunch. I'll again type a few paragraphs about each which is why you might be reading this in March. In reverse order...
5.) Once
When I was 13, my childhood epilepsy returned for one isolated incident while I was away at summer camp. Chasing down the theory that I had the seizure because of a lack of sleep and exhaustation, I stayed up with my dad overnight the night before I had a CT scan. We watched two movies, "Terminator 2" and, more importantly, "The Commitments". It was the beginning of a family tradition of non-traditional musicals.
Now, more than half my life later, the guitar player from The Commitments is the male lead in a quaint, non-traditional musical. It's a romance through music but not in the way "Moulin Rouge" is, more the way it actually happens in real life. The circumstances aren't ideal. There are things which hold you back. But in the end you find a way to be with that person. "Once" is about what you love in its many forms.
4.) Lars and the Real Girl
"Lars and the Real Girl" is also about love in the real world. It's just about not knowing what you want yet. Though Ryan Gosling's character takes the road otherwise untraveled, it's a different shade of the journey most of us take to find the person for us. In a roundabout way, it's about chasing after the ideal person.
However anyone who has been on the journey knows it's really about finding out what is lovable about you. This movie could've been a freak show about a guy who has a relationship with a RealDoll. It's more about a man out-growing his damaged past and into a full and heathy adult. For him, the journey is about finding where and how he fits in the world.
3.) Hot Fuzz
The best satire comes from deep admiration. When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg made "Shaun of the Dead" in 2004, it was from a place having seen and loved the old masters of the genre. It was spot on as a zombie movie eventhough, as a comedy, it was meant to also expose the quirks of the genre. It is a case of using the tools of the master to lovingly deconstruct the masters' house.
Then they returned last year to take on a genre even more ripe for satire, American action movies. Yet they took a different tack to lampooning the largest of Hollywood's movies. They made them very small. It's comedy is the comedy of inversion instead of adoption. By scaling down (but not toning down) the violence, the absurd hilarity was increased exponentially.
2.) Michael Clayton
I've been a fan of George Clooney for a long time. My admiration springs from his willingness to do projects which are difficult and on the fringe. Compare to his close friends. Could you see Brad Pitt in "O Brother Where Art Thou"? Or Matt Damon directing "Good Night and Good Luck"? Clooney has attained a level of being able to do the projects he wants and follows through on doing them.
"Michael Clayton" is another project with some teeth. It's part Grisham-esque legal thriller (without the courtroom) and part morality quest for the titular character. What sets the movie apart is the ending. I don't want to give it away. I will say that it was one of the rare times where the ending was set-up well throughout the movie to conclude at a point instead of just ending.
1.) Knocked Up
One year, two excellent movies about unwed pregnancy and in both cases they keep the baby. Hollywood has a liberal bias? Like the other movies I was drawn to this year, I enjoyed this movie because it was a reflection of the contemporary world. There are people who get pregnant out of wedlock and DON'T have their lives descend into ruin (despite what health class teaches us).
I also really like both Seth Rogan and Katherine Heigl. One of my constants of romantic comedies (even of the Apatow variety) is I have to like the girl and see myself in the guy. Now I don't see myself as an adrift stoner trying to set up a celebrity nudity site. But there is something about getting to a point in your life when you have to decide to switch from being someone's child to being an adult. For some people that's when they have a child of their own and, instead of being angsty and mourning their childhood, growing up a lot in a short time.
Finally, as I mentioned, it was an Apatow comedy. As a fan of "Anchorman" and "Forty Year Old Virgin", I'm glad to see the dual success of "Knocked Up" and "Superbad" solidifying the place for movies like this in the market. As I mentioned in my "Hot Rod" blurb, there's a different paradigm in movie comedies now. Ten years ago a comedy was based around a funny concept. You took a swinging 1960s superspy, put him in the post-AIDS 1990s and all of the jokes flowed from the "fish out of water" situation. Now it's sped up, more YouTube-ized where the what matters isn't a concept which can grow stale and wear thin quickly. You have to bring the jokes. This style where the plot is a starting point, not a teether, means there are no throwaway jokes. It's all in there because it's all funny.
Last year around this time I received an e-mail from a friend. It said there were special discounted three-day passes to Lollapalooza for sale in a very limited quantity. By the time I got to the website they were gone. Later on that day, however, I overheard a co-worker talking about how she HAD been able to get the discounted passes. I commented about my envy because I had wanted to get passes of my own.
This morning that same co-worker showed up at my desk and said, "Was it you that I was talking about Lollapalooza with last year?" After I confirmed it had been me, she told me, "Go to the website right now. They're on sale again." Thus I will be attending all three days of Lollapalooza 2008 in Grant Park with my brother for the low, low price of $60 a piece.
