Review of Last Year’s Predictions!

First off, the order of finish. Bold = right, italic= wrong, and there are a lot of wrongs.

AL East (2 for 5)
Yankees
Red Sox
DRays
Blue Jays
Orioles

AL Central (0 for 5)
White Sox
Tigers
Indians
Twins
Royals

AL West (1 for 4)
Rangers
A’s
Mariners
Angels

NL East (3 for 5)
Phillies
Braves
Marlins
Mets
Nationals

NL Central (2 for 6)
Reds
Cardinals
Brewers
Cubs
Pirates
Astros

NL West (2 for 5)
Dbacks
Giants
Rockies
Padres
Dodgers

Suffice to say, my playoff picks were wrong.

Regular Season Awards!!

In my first attempt (in April), I picked:
MVPs: Pujols and Nelson Cruz
Cy Youngs: Clayton Kershaw and Francisco Liriano
First managers fired: whoever manages Cleveland and Houston

In my second attempt, in June, I picked:
MVPs: Jose Reyes and Adrian Gonzalez (sigh. Why did he have to go to the Evil Empire?)
Cy Youngs: Clayton Kershaw and Justin Verlander
Rookies: Danny Espinosa and Michael Pineda
First managers fired: Geren got fired, Riggleman and Rodriguez resigned, I give up.

I got Kershaw for the Cy Young (and Verlander, eventually)! I did not predict that Ryan Braun would cheat his way to the NL MVP. I don’t even remember who won the AL MVP (blech, just looked it up, and it was Verlander. Maybe I had struck that from my memory because pitchers should not win MVPs). And I went 0-for-rookies.

Better luck to me with my next round of picks, which will come eventually. And maybe this time I will stick to my guns.

Fairy Tale Baseball

First, baseball…

Spring training is in full swing. The Giants still have no offense, and they are trying to figure out how they will ever pay Lincecum and Cain (please don’t let either of them end up on the Red Sox, ever). The Angels look good on paper, and a big welcome to Pujols and CJ Wilson… but they still have Vernon Wells, and the Rangers are still the team to beat. But hope springs eternal, and who knows what might happen this year.

And hope springs eternal for fantasy baseball managers, too. I am in four leagues this year: co-managing one keeper league and then managing three other leagues that have an assortment of different scoring systems. Drafts started up on Saint Patrick’s Day, which went interestingly. Then I missed two on Monday while out for dinner for my dad’s birthday. My prerankings sucked. I have one draft left on Saturday, and it would probably be in my best interest to actually show up.

I used to be great at fantasy baseball. I started playing in 2001; later than many, earlier than many. I remember it well. I was a junior in college. I still have paper pads with player names written down–many of the players are long gone, but some were young’n’s then and are veterans now. I remember that no one knew what the heck to expect from Ichiro. Matt Morris and Lance Berkman were unknowns, too. Roy Oswalt was a midseason pickup.

I won at least one league every year up until two years ago, and now I am dealing with my first dry spell. What was the magic? I don’t know. Sometimes I drafted well, usually in the late rounds; sometimes I made huge mid-season pickups (hello, Ryan Braun); rarely did I swing trades, because I usually shot myself in the foot (including giving up Ichiro during his rookie season). Once burned… actually, in my case, several times burned. I don’t know that I have ever made a trade that has worked out, including last season’s Matt Kemp for Heath Bell/Shin-Soo Choo/Chase Utley debacle. Of course I traded Kemp the year he finally put it together, and then some. And it is in a keeper league, and my team kept none of the Bell/Choo/Utley triumvirate.

To completely change the subject…
… the NCAA tournament

I complained in my previous post about the lack of upsets to those perpetual winners like Duke, and then Duke lost in the first round. Rejoice! Several double-digit seeds have made the Sweet 16. It will be interesting to see if all the number 1s make it to the Elite 8. I hope not. My bracket is already destroyed (I told my girlfriend that she will pick for me next year). Go underdogs! Down with the status quo!

Commence the Madness

Day 2 of the 2012 NCAA Tournament… as much as I love baseball and follow other sports, the first weekend of the tournament is usually the most exciting few days of any sports’ season. So many games, one on top of another, with little to no down time for the first two days.

My love for the tournament goes back to the UNLV days of the early 1990s. I followed UNLV. I could not tell you why, other than that I was 10 and they were entertaining. And then Duke beat them in 1991, and I actually cried. And from that point forward, I hated Duke. Some habits die hard.

But it was in 1993 that I really got hooked. My seventh-grade history teacher, for whatever reason, ran an NCAA pool in which he assigned us each a team. I got Temple. I was 12. I had never heard of Temple. I had no idea where it was, or what the mascot was, or anything about it. And while my parents may have had the AOL dial-up at the time, I certainly was not savvy enough to look things up. It did not matter. It began a college-basketball obsession that is nearly twenty years strong.

That year, Temple made the Elite 8 for the second time in three years. They lost to the Webber-Howard-Rose and company Michigan Wolverines. And I became a Temple fan.

I don’t know when I figured out where Temple was. Maybe it was during that tournament. Maybe I looked it up in an encyclopedia, or my teacher told me, or something. Regardless, I had a random team to follow.

Temple reached the Elite 8 two more times while I was in college, further confusing everyone I knew when it came to the teams I rooted for. Why the heck did I follow a little school in Philadelphia? Because it was a very, very, very small bandwagon.

Enough about Temple… back to the tourney. I remember watching games on television at work a few years back. People I did not know, or who I didn’t know followed sports, popped out of the woodwork to watch the games. It was like watching a game at a pub and realizing there are other people who think and feel the same way you do. An unexpected (and mostly short-lived) sense of camaraderie builds.

Unfortunately, the results rarely end up how I would like. The teams I want to win rarely win championships. Like most people, I love upsets. I root for upsets even when they destroy my own bracket (like Norfolk State over Missouri just a few minutes ago). But the upsets I want to happen never do. When the 2 seed loses in the first round, it is never Duke or North Carolina or Syracuse or Connecticut (although UConn did mercifully lose in the first round last night). It is a team like Missouri, which I could not care more or less about, but I’d rather see them go deep in the tournament at the expense of the teams that make it every… single… year. By the time the championship game comes along, I usually do not have any teams left, and then I usually root for the team that loses. The last time I actually remember caring about the team that won was in 2003, when Carmelo Anthony and Syracuse beat Kansas. I went on a first date that night, which is probably the only reason I really remember that game.

Anyhow, I love the NCAA tourney for its early round parity–the chance for teams like Butler, George Mason, VCU, and other lesser-knowns to make it deep into the tournament. But at the same time… they never actually win.

Every year, when it is bracket-picking time, I pick all the upsets I would love to see. They rarely happen. And the upsets that do happen are over teams that I actually like. So this year, I took a different approach and mostly went with the favorites. Of course, then the favorites I pick to go deep lose early. So it goes.

There were no big upsets on day 1 of the tournament. There has been one big one on day 2, and hopefully more to come.

Apologies for another hiatus

To all three (maybe? optimistically) of my loyal readers, wherever you may be, and however (accidentally) you may have found your way here, I apologies for another long blogging break. My last entry was nearly four months ago. Since then…

The 49ers had one of the most unexpected runs to a conference title game in recent memory. For the first time since the 49ers fired Steve Mariucci after the 2002 season, I (and many, many others) were actually exited to watch 49ers games again.

I remember getting to San Diego in 1998 for college: the 49ers were still good, although past their peak, and their games were still nationally televised. Even by the time I finished college in 2002, they were still relevant. And then began the decline. By the time I moved to New York in 2005, I could not have cared less that the 49ers game were not televised on the east coast. Same feelings when I returned to San Diego in 2007. I moved back to San Francisco after the 2009-10 season, and I did not go out of my way to watch the team in 2010-11.

But then something happened. The Harbaugh magic. I went to bars to watch games. The Saints-49ers divisional matchup was one of the best games I have ever seen–mind you, I grew up watching the 49ers destroy everyone, so there were not too many actual good “games” so much as excellent results. My girlfriend actually talked me into going to a bar to watch the Saints game instead of going hiking, and suffice to say, it was a good call on her part. Then I went to another bar for the NFC championship, this time with my roommate, and while the end was less than desirable, we made several new friends and drank far too excessively for a Sunday afternoon.

Even better, the New York Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl! If the 49ers had lost, and then the Patriots had won, my take on the season would be much less sunny. Thank you, New York Giants.

Next up, basketball began almost immediately after I wrote about its demise. And, well, yeah. The Warriors are the Warriors. I am not sure anyone still cares about the NBA–unlike with the NFL or MLB, I do not have friends who casually talk about basketball outside of college and the soon-to-arrive March Madness. Several of us play fantasy basketball, but no one has been as invested this season. And thus, not much shall be written about it.

NASCAR has restarted. Last year, I was interning and joining fantasy NASCAR leagues. I was paying more attention to racing than ever before (that is, I was paying attention, period). And this year, I have to admit, I signed up for another fantasy league, because–while I won’t be watching the races–more stats are more stats.

Baseball is on its way. The season starts in less than a month. Spring-training games have begun. That will be for another post, since I have no clue what to write about. Other than: Ryan Braun, forever stained. Maybe that will be another article. My completely uninformed, all-my-information-comes-from-the-Internet, layman’s take on things.