REAL - Fantasy Sports...

I currently manage two fantasy teams… A football team – the ILLs (after Kim Jong-Ill, ‘cause I’m in Korea after all), and a baseball team – Rick James (‘cause that shit is just plain funny!). Along with that, I also serve as the commissioner for the leagues that my teams are in – the League Sanchez (football – yes, as in Dirty) and the Human Growth Hormone League (baseball – for obvious reasons).

The ILLs were my first go at the whole fantasy sports thing. You hear so much about it and I was a bit intrigued. I love to compete and I figured that it would be a good way to keep in contact with the friends that I’ve come to know around the way. Thus, League Sanchez was born. Mostly friends from back at Fort Knox who have since spread out to various places, some family – my Uncle and his son, and even some folks that most of us didn’t know – just to keep it interesting.

And it basically works like this – you name your team, rank the players that you want on a draft board and then have a draft. Now you have your team’s “players” filling up the requisite positions. Each week you insert who you think will have the best games of the week in to your starting line up and you receive points based off of their performances – Larry Johnson goes off for 4 touchdowns and a 200 yards – I get 6 points per TD and a point for every 50 yards (and Tom cries enough tears to fill the Nile!) or you draft Duante Culpepper as your franchise quarterback and he proceeds to single-handedly ruin your season – and so on and so forth…Each week you match-up head to head against someone in the league and in the mean time and between time you talk shit, check injury reports, scouting reports, talk shit, check defenses, and basically talk more shit…or whine about how this or that isn’t fair and bitch about why the hell they refuse to throw Randy Moss the Damn Ball!, but I digress…

ANYWAY, it’s fun – football apparently a bit more so than baseball – you have to really be FAN of the game to pay the necessary attention to the ebbs and flows that can go in to a 160-game season – which can make or break your fantasy club…football is a little less tough – less games, more time in between games, less stuff to keep track of – yada yada yada…

Now, I’ve taken many a jab or two for my new found enjoyment of the world of fantasy sports. I was already addicted to sport in general, and ESPN, and loved to compete – so I guess it was really only a matter of time…Sounds a bit ridiculous – fair enough…

However, the “fantasy” will soon become reality for the fans of the Schaumburg Flyers – a minor league baseball squad 30 miles or so outside of Chicago’s city limits.

The Flyers, an independent team playing in the Northern League, are scheduled to hand over managerial duties over to their fans – via online voting – beginning in mid-July.

YES – you read that right…in a joint venture, dubbed “Fan Club: Reality Baseball,” will be an “alliance” of sorts between the teams’ owners and fans, the production company LivePlanet and MSN.com, according to a recent story on ESPN.com.

LivePlanet will be responsible for the behind-the-scenes storytelling of the team, it’s players, family and history, while MSN.com will display “everything from the team’s day to day statistics to video highlights and eventually live streaming video of games.”

Sound Crrrrrrrrrrrrazy – sure! Sound exciting and intriguing – Damn skippy!

There’s an obvious market for this sort of thing, with millions of people already planning their days around making sure their FANTASY-fantasy teams are up to snuff – checking and triple checking to see if it would be good to drop a floundering Dontrelle Willis or if there’s any trade potential for Alfonso Soriano…

There’s a bit of a premise here as well. For the last four years a football (soccer – they’re European duh) club in Northern France dubbed the Web Football Club, has been surprisingly successful as the “entainautes,” or web-surfers, there have decided everything from starting lineups to game tactics. And each year the team has improved as well as moved up a division based on its’ success.

The interesting thing for the Flyers of Schaumburg is that they play in a minor league system that splits its’ season into two halves, with the winner of each half meeting in the playoffs…the fans will take over in time to take over day-to-day operations from game one of the second half of the season, which means that they will, in turn, determine whether or not the Flyers make the playoffs.

As for the team in France - there they now have more than 13,000 registered entrainautes from around the globe who are dedicated to “supporting the club.” The players there apparently love it due to the fact that they are being rewarded strictly for their effort and play on the field and that promotions and playing time aren’t being divided up based on things as trivial as being friends with the coach.

That being said – something of this nature would obviously not work for a major league team where contracts and money rule the game regardless of the actual effort on the field itself – BUT for the minor league squads like the Flyers it definitely seems feasible…these teams aren’t locked into million dollar contracts where certain players WILL play no matter what – they are teams filled with young up-and-comers, journeymen and others just trying to catch a break – all of whom will give their all every time they have the opportunity to hit the field…and for that – at least in Schaumburg – they will be rewarded…