Rotisserie Baseball

One of the great things about the opening weekend of the basketball tournament is that it means the start of my Rotisseries Baseball league is right around the corner. Nothing like spending 6-7 hours on a cell phone with your partner back east drafting your team. You want to talk about having red ears. Jesus. Its terrible. The last two times I've been out in Vegas for this and I've completed one draft in a Starbucks, and the other one in the parking garage of the Monte Carlo. Why don't I do it in my room? Well everyone is sleeping so I'm forced to go outside. I feel like I will have to do this again. Maybe I'll force the manager to open up our Vegas office for this.

Anyway, Jon (jorgeblogsada) is my partner in this traditional auction 5 by 5 league with a couple of twists. Each player that you pick up during the auction, you get them for 3 years at the same salary. We also have a 10 player minor league system that is completed by auctions as well. It is a traditional rotisserie league, and not a week to week format, so the winner is decided by the year end totals of each category. So there isn't any playoffs and if you start out slow, the season tends to be over. Jon and I have been out of it early two times and we end up calling the season early and dump our top players with high contracts for top notch minor leaguers and keepers so we are all set for the next season. This ends of working out perfectly, despite everyone getting pissed at us. It is very obvious that nobody likes us in the league, but who gives a shit. The only reason why we stay in the league is that it is the best feeling when you kick all of their asses, knowing that they can't stand you. Ahhh.

So last year Jon and I built a very solid team, and with some amazing moves during the year, we positioned ourselves to win the entire year during the last weekend of the season. We ended up dropping all of our starters and picked up 4 crappy closers. All we needed was 1-2 saves over the weekend between 6 closers to win the league. Well what happens is probably one of the most crushing events in fantasy baseball, football, or basketball ever. Watching each game closely on Saturday, we had 4 opportunities to get a save. And game by game we saw each closer blow the lead and lose the game. 4 fucking blown saves in one day. All we needed was one save to tie and 2 saves to win the entire thing. Think about that. The entire season came down to being 1 save short. So when guys come up to me and say "Man I lost my football fantasy because player x was one yard short", I say who cares. Not a big deal. That's just one game. We lost by one fucking save over the course of the entire baseball season. Crushing.

So we go into this year with the same strategy. Pay big money for the two anchors of our team (Pujols and Santana) and then fill in with a bunch of in between players. I'm mainly the finance and minor league guy and Jon is the draft day guru for our major league teams. Its like a CEO and CFO working together during the draft day. Jon wants a player and the bidding is getting a little too high and I'm screaming into the phone the remaining money per player we can spend and how many positions we have left to fill. God I love Access and pivot tables. It make it so easy. During the bidding and it takes one second to do projections of our salary cap. That's the way its got to be. One guy with the ideas and the other to bring him back to earth at times due to financial limitations. Works perfectly.