And I had to clean up the kitchen myself...

On Monday night there were ten guys crowded into my kitchen, eating pizza and chicken wings and chocolate donuts and ho-hos. After everyone had eaten their fill, cluttered up every available space with empty plates and chicken bones and ho-ho wrappers, and finished setting up their laptop computers, it was time for the fantasy baseball draft. I’d already started worrying about the draft a week before, when Rick asked me what my “strategy” was going to be. Strategy? I was supposed to have a strategy? He followed that up by asking, “you know why they asked you to join the league, don’t you?” Well, of course I know why they asked me to join the league – because I am the goddess of baseball, and I demand offerings of leather gloves and Louisville Sluggers. “Yeah, because they think I’ll be easy to beat,” I answered. To which Rick replied, “you’re not as naïve as I thought you were.” Greeeeaaaat…

So apparently expectations were not very high for me, the rookie. As I nervously awaited the announcement of the first pick and the official start of the draft, I shuffled through pages and pages of players, watching their names run together in a giant conglomeration of baseball mumbo jumbo. I had no idea what I was doing. The only thing I was pretty certain about was my first pick – Alex Rodriguez, third baseman for the New York Yankees. Not only is he listed as a top pick in many fantasy baseball magazines, but he’s a Yankee. And I HAD to have at least one Yankee on my team. And everyone in the league figured the first few picks were already set in stone – Pujols, Santana, Carpenter. And then me, at number four, choosing Arod.

So imagine everyone’s surprise when the guy with the first pick turned around to face everyone, said, “I just can’t pick a Cardinal,” and took Arod as his first pick. The shockwave traveled through the kitchen as we all realized that every subsequent pick would be influenced by what had just happened. So much for my star Yankee. I ended up taking Chris Carpenter, which might turn out to be better, anyway. From what everyone in this league keeps saying, “pitching wins the league.” So I guess we’ll see about that…

The rest of the draft turned out to be not as confusing and nerve-wracking as I’d expected. Once I got the hang of it, I was able to start researching my next pick in advance, while everyone else was calling out their choices. By the fifth round, my team seemed to be shaping up nicely, and I was pretty happy. Carpenter, Ortiz, Ichiro, Lidge and Jeter. And I was already getting some preliminary kudos from the guys who I’d been certain, only a couple hours earlier, would be making fun of me from the get go.

By the end of the draft, when I started making picks based on darts thrown at random names (no, not really – but at that point I really DIDN’T have much of a clue who I was choosing), I was fairly confident that I might actually be able to pull off this fantasy baseball thing. My friend Nick used some kind of projection software that calculates where a team might end up by the end of the season, and it predicted Nick would finish in first place, and I would be second. And since Nick has fifteen kids and probably needs the first place money more than I do, I’d be perfectly content with second place.

But baseball is an unpredictable game, so who knows what will happen over the next six months or so. All I want is to be doing a halfway decent job at some point during the season. To NOT be in last place. Because if I had a bit of a lead over a couple of these guys, then I would feel I had the right to change the name of my team to something more appropriately competitive. I’m thinking it’s gonna be, “Yer Gettin’ Beat by a Girl.”