How Fantasy Baseball Ruined America

                Back in the day, when they were still referred to as Rotisserie Leagues, I was in a fantasy baseball league.  We were a loose collection of friends who also played poker, golf, softball and basketball together.  We met at someone’s house once a month and drank beer and tried to scam each other in outrageous trades.  We lied and blustered and had a great time.  Bill James had only recently started writing about ‘sabermetrics,’ an idea that would lead to “money ball” and analytics.  Today, fantasy leagues are everywhere, often an online collection of people who don’t know each other and have nothing in common but the destruction of civilization.  The innocent evolution of fantasy baseball is a small part of an obsession with an abstraction of experience that destroys what it is meant to describe.

                I’m not arguing that numbers are all evil.  If you’re down to the final out and you have to choose between a pinch hitter who has whiffed every time he’s faced this pitcher or someone who has lit him up every time he’s had a chance, those would be good numbers to have.  It is invaluable to know when our perceptions correspond to reality and when they don’t, but relying on statistics instead of experience and emotion can lead to an empty and soulless life.  Fantasy baseball and analytics have turned baseball into an empty game.  Fantasy owners care less about the game than they are the statistics the game generates.  Their ‘teams’ exist in a twilight zone of numbers that are never real or realized.  There is no joy or surprise in the game that analytics has created.  Several years ago when Cabrera became the first player since Yaz in ’67 to win the triple crown, the sabermetrics folks thought Mike Trout should have been the MVP.  This was based on a completely fabricated analytic called WAR, or wins above replacement.  There is no such thing as WAR, it is not part of the game.  It is an idealized bit of statistical fluff that has never swung a bat.  It was created by people who’s lives would be at risk trying to field a routine fly ball.  But in fantasy league world it has replaced the greatest single offense season in this century. 

                If it was just baseball, which is doing a good job of killing itself off, maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal.  But this statistical infection can be seen everywhere.  We evaluate children using invalid and improperly proctored tests to determine how ‘smart’ they are.  We use numbers instead of observations to diagnose patients.  We have replaced experience with a parallel statistical reality that is neither all that accurate or exciting.  We want to know who wins instead of enjoying the game.  Sure, it sucks to lose, but games are games and humans who play get something out of it that people who measure but never set foot on a field cannot understand.

                Democracy is a relational and not a statistical endeavor.  The people I interact with every day are not the composite of their income, IQ or credit score.  In the college I used to teach at, they would occasionally put together a statistical analysis of the ‘typical’ student, based on age, background, test scores and income.  That student never existed.  That analytic never once helped me engage the actual students that were in my classes.  They were all in some way an outlier, an anomaly in their own right.  Knowing them and teaching them meant I had to abandon whatever preconceptions I had and meet them where they were.  Democracies can and should do the math on who gets what, but they can never let the numbers replace the actual people.  We still have to go out there every day and make the connections and do the work it takes to understand each other.  A statistical parallel constructed by and for an elite class of managers is not the same thing.

                The team I drafted in my rotisserie league had seven eventual Hall of Famers on it, but it never shared a warm evening at the ballpark.  It never delighted or inspired a kid to play the game or practice for hours on the off chance they could play one day in the show.  It never did anything but pile up statistics.  It’s a poor substitute to watching a game with a friend or filling your grandsons up with all that crap your parents wouldn’t let you eat.  It can never recreate the magic I still remember the first time I trudged up the beer stained concourse at old Tiger Stadium and saw that amazing green field for the first time.