Baseball By Paul

This is it, folks. This is my last and hopefully best effort at blogging consistently. Let me step back first.

I love writing. I love baseball. And I really love writing about baseball, specifically fantasy baseball. I wrote 11,000 words about starting pitchers before the season started. I wrote several thousand more about effectively using middle relievers on your team. I have nearly 17,000 posts on a fantasy baseball message board.

This isn’t a horn-tooting bragfest, rather I am merely displaying that my desire to write about baseball isn’t in question. Without researching, I think I had started or re-started blogging approximately 4,938 times. Again, that’s merely a guess. Well you know what? I’m tired of failing. So here we go.

What you can expect is baseball, baseball and more baseball. I may veer off into other topics from time-to-time, but I’m not betting on much else but baseball being found in this space. And the writing will have a decidedly fantasy slant to it as well. I’ll have player analysis, subject-specific articles like the pitching ones I referenced earlier and other hodgepodge fantasy baseball items. (I have always wanted to use hodgepodge legitimately and it looks like I just did.)

I am not getting back into blogging for any other reason than the fact that I truly enjoy researching and writing about the game of baseball. I will continue to post at Rotojunkie, but most of the article-length posts will appear here instead of over there. By the way, if you’re uninitiated with Rotojunkie‘s message board, I strongly suggest taking a look.

I’m not going to lay out a whole series of expectations that I would likely fail to meet. Instead, I’ll let you know that some days you might find 4-5 posts and then there will be days I don’t post. In order to deliver some regularity, I am hoping for a minimum of 5 posts per week.

Already, let’s get this (re)started…

I’d like to take a quick second to wish my dad a Happy Father’s Day. He is easily the best father ever with some of the finest offspring around. Without my dad’s love of baseball, I doubt that I would have developed my passion for the game. I remember going through his older baseball cards on more than one occasion as I strived to build a collection rivaling his. I remember one summer in particular that we collected the 1987 Topps set together. It’s the set with the wood bordering, the prize of the set being on the far right:

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My dad showed me his 20+ Darryl Strawberry rookies that contain more worth being sold as bicycle spokes noise makers than they do at a trade show these days, he showed me his 1961 Roger Maris, his Cal Ripken Jr. rookie, and this Eddie Matthews card from 1959 among many others.

My dad also taught me how to own my future opponents at Around the World after beating me hundreds of times in our backyard back in Michigan. It was during those games that I learned that you better call board if you’re going to use the backboard, otherwise you will be denied credit! He, of course, also took me to my first ballgame at Tiger Stadium. Thanks to the wonders of retrosheet.org, I was able to find the boxscore and play-by-play of the first game that I remember attending. At age 5, this wasn’t the first game that I ever went to, just the first one I remember.

For my dad and I, sports are a great landscape upon which our relationship flourishes. Consider that we both more or less hate talking on the phone with people, yet we’ll have regular hourlong conversations about our teams and the goings-on in sports. Living almost 400 miles away means I don’t go home much (or as often as I should my mom would say), and my dad isn’t exactly an email kind of guy so we have to use the phone.

That isn’t to say he’s computer illiterate, not by a longshot, or else he wouldn’t be able to (fiercely) compete in our fantasy baseball league. I remember when I first started getting involved in the league, usually just watching the live draft in our living room until I finally joined as a teenager. Each summer I followed the players of both my mom’s and dad’s teams eagerly awaiting the weekly update my dad would bring home from work after he and his co-workers pulled the numbers from USA Today and plugged them into Lotus 1-2-3. Could you imagine having to wait a week at a time for standings updates?

My first solo draft is still referenced at least five times a year by my parents. Finally free to choose who I wanted, when I wanted I selected Mike MacFarlane in the fifth round. I won’t bore you with full details of the league setup and keepers, let’s just say it was a bit of a reach. I believe the error in judgement occured in 1994 and MacFarlane was on the heels of a 20-HR season at catcher, so I snapped him up. In the strike-shortened season, he hit 14 home runs with 47 runs batted in and a .255 average, in other words not a fifth round pick.

Ok, enough of the nostalgia, I could tell a hundred more stories about memories I have related to my father and sports, but the point is, I love him and he’s a great, great man.