Death of the Fan

Are fantasy sports killing fanhood?

Your loyalty as the owner of a fantasy team is to the players on your team. And if you play rationally, those players will be selected on no other basis than their own skill and availability. In a non-biased draft, then, the players you assemble on your own team will not be the players on your favorite team, because a) if the players on your favorite team are generally bad players, you will not select them, and b) if the players on your favorite team are generally good players, everyone in the league will be trying to select them, limiting their availability.

Therefore you are faced with an inevitable, disconcerting dilemma: do I root for my own fantasy team, and thus for the players on my team, who represent a wide cross section of the league's teams, or do I root for my favorite team above all? At first, you think that these two goals are not mutually exclusive, that you can do both. To a certain extent, you can. But things get complicated pretty quickly. When you have a starting pitcher on your fantasy team who is pitching against your favorite team, what do you do? Do you sit him down? If this decision to sit him down is made for any reason other than attempting to win your fantasy league, it takes away from the "integrity," if you will, of that league. If you're going to bother playing fantasy sports at all, then you have to suck it up and start the pitcher going against your team if it is a move that will bring you closer to winning the league. So then more questions arise--do you root for your pitcher to get shelled, convincing yourself that it's a "win-win" scenario? (He pitches well, I have something to fall back on despite my favorite team being shut down; he pitches poorly, my team wins, which makes me happy, too.) Do you root for him to pitch well in a losing effort? This is the option that most fantasy owners would probably choose (A complete-game shutout in a 1-0 loss, perhaps?). While it sounds good, this line of thinking is dangerous. It's the beginning of fantasy baseball's slippery slope, which leads downhill towards the dissolution of your traditional loyalty. When you're rooting for your pitcher to do well against your team, you don't really mind so much when he emerges with the win--it's just one game, after all... If you're not careful, soon your loyalty to your fantasy team has eclipsed all your other sports loyalties in prominence.

The problem is that a fantasy team is something that is completely yours. You are the general manager, owner, manager of your fantasy team. In contrast, your favorite team is an enormous conglomeration, owned by a billionaire corporation, run by a general manager who continually frustrates you, coached by a manager whose decisions you constantly berate. You are in a boat with hundreds of thousands of other people, watching and hoping and sweating and dying from afar, with no control over the entity you invest so much of your own being into supporting. You pour money into the franchise you call your own, but that money just goes into the pockets of those behind the scenes, the decision-makers who have no intention (nor should they) of including the fan in the process of running and building the team.

All that frustration is erased when you own a fantasy team, however. Every decision made is by you alone, and the results of all of your decisions quickly and clearly show up in the standings. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You have absolute power over your fantasy team, and that power undoubtedly is corrosive. What it corrupts most absolutely is one's fanhood--the ability to irrationally, unquestionably root for one's favorite team with the utmost passion in every situation. When the responsibilities of fanhood bump up against rooting interest in the players that constitute one's fantasy squad, well... you would like to say that your motives are always pure, that with every at bat and pitch and inning you are rooting for your favorite team, but it doesn't always work out that way. Your favorite team might even change to your fantasy team, the one you actually can control, with the real team that you root for running a not-so-close second.

This doesn't always happen, of course. As in everything else, there are levels and shades of fanhood and rooting interest, complications that come to bear in different situations. But I have found that it is nearly impossible to convince yourself, to talk yourself into rooting for a team or a player or an outcome. Rooting interest, fanhood, is just something that comes to you, and you cannot, under any circumstances, coerce it to come to you in a certain way. You know exactly how you feel about it at all times, and you can't change the way you feel or the level of your passion, no matter what you tell your friends or what you scream at the TV or while in your seat at the ballpark. Thus, thanks to your fantasy team, you might find yourself wishing for an outcome that runs against your chosen party line as a fan, and despite the fact that you would rather that wish wasn't extant, there it is, and there's nothing you can do about it, short of eschewing fantasy sports.

Everybody makes their choices: play fantasy sports, or no? The decision is not an easy one, or one made lightly, because nothing is free--not even Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball. It comes with a certain price attached, a price measured in our fanhood. What that price will be, and how the course of the season will rearrange one's loyalties and interest, can never be determined before one dives into the fantasy sports realm.