Have Fantasy Sports Gone Too Far?

I love all the fantasy sports that I play. This includes football, baseball, basketball, and even occasionally soccer. I play on Yahoo, but there are numerous other sites, some have fantasy for all sports, like ESPN and Yahoo, where as others are designed for a specific sport like NFL.com or MLB.com. From what I have seen, just on Yahoo, is that fantasy is starting to be taken too seriously.

For football, there are programs (for you to BUY) that let you watch how each player is doing during the game that is going on. I find these useless, since once the game that includes your players has started, you are not allowed to change your roster to make your team better for that week. Besides watching the games on TV, which I am sure many fanatics do, on ESPN there is a FULL scoreboard of every game going on at any given time. Also, you can watch a gamecast which is almost like watching it live. Every 30 or 60 seconds the page refreshes itself showing what happened in the last play. Also, it shows the stats on the side so if you are desperate then you can look up the stats for each player that you have on your team. And fantasy has gone way past just football and baseball. There are now multiple different types of each, as well as numerous other sports including, golf, auto racing, and even fishing on some websites.

Fantasy is no longer a hobby, it has turned into a lifestyle . Almost 20 MILLION people in America play fantasy sports. Ranging from professional athletes themselves to doctors to business men to children, everyone is starting to become hooked. I can't pretend that I don't take part in this super time consuming "game." I am just as hooked as anyone else. If I have nothing to do, I go on Yahoo to see how my teams are doing. Even if i have already checked them that day, I still go on to search for new players that are becoming hot, or if I need to rotate my starting lineup based on how I think that each player will do.

There are some absolutely ridiculous statistics about how fantasy sports (football mainly) takes up our nation's workers and even money. According to a Sports Illustrated article (whose facts come from a Chicago research group) fantasy football will cost the United States approximately $9.2 BILLION dollars in lost work time this season and that is ONLY in football. That isn't even including all the other fantasy sports that take place during the year.

I am 15, and already I am addicted. My friends and I have played fantasy baseball, basketball, and football for 2 years, and we are already talking about "keeper" teams (Teams that are for leagues that stay together year after year as opposed to the singular season teams). Drafts have become full day events where everyone brings all the preseason rankings that they can find, and we all go down into one person's basement and only leave for the occasional bathroom break. I don't know how other drafts are, but I assume that they are almost as intense, if not more intense than ours.

Cubs Choke... Again

Although I don't follow baseball regularly during the regular season, once the postseason begins I start paying attention. Besides my fantasy baseball team, I don't know many players, nor do I know the stats of them or their teams. However, once the chase for the wild card becomes important, or once the battle in each division becomes more intense, then I do start to follow the sport. I am not a baseball addict like some of my friends, but I watch Sportscenter enough that I know what happens each day.

The best part of the postseason is watching the teams that are supposed to be amazing fail, and the teams that shouldn't be there do much better than expected. This year was the same as last for the Chicago Cubs. They won the division both years, although they did much better this year. They had the best record in the NL, and were only behind the Los Angeles Angels in the whole MLB. And the end result was the same, being SWEPT in the first round. Last Year to the Arizona Diamondbacks, and this year to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Time, and time again, misery has come to the fans of Chicago, and now people have even given up on them. Some of my friends (Who loved the Cubs until 2005) can't even imagine the Cubs winning in the postseason. When everyone else at school thought they were going to win the World Series, he rejected them and told them that the fate of the Cubs would be the same as the previous year. Every ignored his comments, just calling him a party-pooper, and then it ended up that he was right.

The Cubs just cannot manage to win in October. It should just become a fact. They have lost 9 (NINE!) postseason games in a row, dating back to October of 2003. Their last win came against the Florida Marlins, who then went on to win the World Series that year. And the infamous Bartman Ball can't be the whole reason for their loss. Mark Prior then walked Luis Castillo (Who hit the foul ball that Bartman caught), and on a wild ball 4 he allowed Ivan Rodriguez to get to 3rd base. Then 2 batters later, Alex Gonzalez botched a ball that could have led to a double-play that could have ended the inning, but instead the bases were loaded with one out. The Marlins then went on to win that game, and the following, sending them to the World Series.