This one can go in the category of “I used to walk uphill (both ways) 3 miles in the driving snow every day to school” category of rants. My son hasn’t started playing fantasy sports yet. And he probably won’t for several years. But when he does, I have a filing cabinet full of old USA Today sports sections with pages and pages of YTD stats for every NBA player. I have notebook after notebook of hand-compiled tallies of 8 statistical categories for every active player in our fantasy basketball league… for every week for an 82-game season…. for several seasons in a row. How could one possibly consider these to be the glory days of fantasy sports when there are now thousands of web sites devoted to crunching these numbers for you? Primarily, I miss the in-person draft nights. There were no online drafts when you could haul your laptop around the house trying to draft a good player while simultaneously doing the dishes, putting your kid to bed, and arguing with your spouse. (Not that I ever argue with my spouse or have ever argued with her while doing the dishes, putting our son to bed, and hauling my macbook around waiting for the loud bell sound that signified my turn in the draft – that was purely hypothetical for storytelling purposes). No, you had to show up at someone’s house, sans kid and dishes and wife, with beer and fantasy draft magazines in hand, and be ready to focus 100% of your attention over the next 3 hours on nothing but players and insults. Then there were the countless hours sifting through pages and pages and pages of the USA Today Sports Section, compiling stats, and writing them all down on pieces of paper with a pencil. (I don’t think my forearm has ever been as strong since). Finally, there were the awesomely archaic methods of distributing the results. (You’ll notice that Yours Truly placed first in 1994′s competition). There were the sophisticated vehicles for up-to-the-minute news updates (and pictures of awesome NBA hairpieces), awkwardly-formatted online insults, and pre-digital camera photos of your future wife and Charles Barkley in the same frame. Honest, they are both in that picture.
In short, I have always loved participating in fantasy sports leagues. The modern-day tools available to see up-to-the-second statistics and league standings play into the ever-increasing need for instant gratification. But they also make me wax reminiscent for the days when fantasy sports leagues were really little more than a good excuse to get together with friends.
Posts Tagged ‘internet’
The (D)evolution of Fantasy Sports
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010The Day I Fell In Love With The Internet
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010I remember the day I fell in love with the Internet. It was sometime around 1990 or 1991 (okay, so maybe I remember the circumstances of the day but not the exact date), and I was in San Jose, California, hanging out with one of my cousins at the home of one of his friends. We were watching the Cincinnati Reds play the San Francisco Giants on TV, and about 20 minutes after the game my cousin’s friend emerged from his room with the box score from the game that had just ended in his hand. I was amazed – life would never be the same.
As a lifelong sports geek, I have a love for box scores, statistics, and records. One of the cherished daily rituals of my youth was picking up the morning paper and looking at the box scores from the previous day’s action and using their acronyms and numbers to try and reconstruct what happened in those games. Box scores were magical to the younger me, but they could also be a source of frustration, mostly because I had to wait until the next day to see them and I often missed out on some of them because West Coast games would end after the local papers were printed. This info that I cherished was only available to me via an imperfect system.
So on that fateful day when the friend of my cousin handed me a copy of a box score from a game that had ended just minutes ago, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. How did this happen? He told me that he had printed it via his Prodigy account, and once I understood what that meant, I knew that I needed access to this new (to me) online world. I eventually got online, and was able to take part in the information revolution that ensued, particularly in the world of sports information. I and others of my sports-inclined ilk now have immediate access to every piece of information we could ever want – instant box scores, in-game box scores and gamecasts, archives, real-time fantasy sports – and that’s not even taking into account live online broadcasts of games.
So here I am with access to more info than I ever could have imagined – but something’s missing. I don’t know if it’s just a function of getting older, or if it’s just information overload, but I don’t read box scores anymore, either online or in the newspaper (which I still get on weekends). The charm is missing – they used to look like this, now they look like this, they used to seem special, now they just blend in with the rest of the information noise. I wouldn’t want to go back to the pre-Internet days, mind you, but I do sometimes long for those days when the little bit of info that was given to me somehow meant so much more.
2112 is the greatest album of all time
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009I have been known to sneak Rush album titles into whiteboard presentations. Just about every password I have ever had was in some way influenced by Rush. Hearing Subdivisions 27 years after its release still sends me into a vortex of teenage angst. And, as we all know, 2112 is the greatest album of all time.
Rolling Stone doesn’t agree. And actually, neither do I. But someone suggested I insert this in a blog posting, so there it is.
What I really want to write about isn’t entirely far from the topic of 2112 being the greatest album of all time. Just as Rush and their 1976 epic masterpiece inspired me to learn more about music, the Internet inspired me to share what I was learning. And after just 42 short years on this planet, I am finally a rock star just like Geddy, Alex, and Neil.
But it wouldn’t have happened without music sharing pioneers like mp3.com (a site originally devoted primarily to allowing independent musicians to share their tunes) and garageband.com (which was really the second iteration of mp3.com). The current versions of these sites in no way resemble their 1990s counterparts. This was pre-Napster and pre-lawsuit, and it was a blank technological check for anyone who had a computer, an ultra-fast dial-up connection, and a few songs to share. These sites combined with the ability to create reasonably-sized high-quality compressed digital files of cheaply-recorded analog music and my own website hosted at a fantastic local ISP enabled me to reach an audience of fans that could only have otherwise been accomplished by touring 300 days a year. Like Rush did to promote the greatest album of all time.