Farewell, Fantasy World.

The end of the baseball season has marked my retirement of one activity borne for Internet and which fir a few years made me an expert on American sports. I’m talking about the Fantasy Leagues that I’ve been playing without interruption since the year 2001 in the leagues promoted by Yahoo!

For those of you not acquainted with them, the fantasy leagues work like this: each player subscribes to a certain league and by draft chooses professional players to fill each position of his team. Every day, when the real players participate in the games of the professional league, they accumulate statistical points (for example in the basketball, each point scored or each rebound are positive points, each foul are negative points). At the end of the day the total points obtained by the real players is transferred to your fantasy team.

There are two types of leagues: Rotisserie (where your team accumulates points all the year and the one with more points at the end of the season wins) and Head-to-head (where every week your team accumulates points against a rival team of the fantasy league. Head-to-head leagues have a qualifying season and play-off games.

Yours truly, began his career as a fantasy player in the Rotisserie leagues of baseball and then basketball (with players of the MLB and NBA). Soon I migrated to the American football leagues (with players of NFL). Except for the NFL leagues, the other ones imply an almost daily follow up, with many hours of analysis of the players who consistently accumulate point and those that only remain on fire for short periods of time. This is key, since the teams allow changes in the list of players that permits you to dump the bad players and obtain the best ones whenever it is possible. Also, it is possible to trade players between teams.

The phenomenon of the fantasy leagues is huge in the United States and it is even considered that many sports (baseball specially) have increased the number of fans thanks to the members of the fantasy leagues. Just as an example, one the last leagues of baseball that I played these year (with terrible results, I must say) had as a ID number the 270113, which implied that at least there were 270112 additional leagues operating.

Now, with the end of the 2006 baseball season, this manager retires. My family obligations, my studies and my real career, force me to leave an activity that fascinates me, but requires a lot of time and effort, and it is no longer fun, since the lack of time forced me to finish the season leaving two teams behind and one league in which, to top it all, I was the commissioner (that is to say, the assumed coordinator of the league).

I leave behind a championship in baseball, a pair of second places in NFL and one long list of anecdotes of the trash-talking that we, the on-line players used to have, in which we made exaggerated the tales of our team and ruthlessly discredited our rivals.

And although it seems difficult to believe, I leave behind a group of crazy gringo friends, who accompanied me in a special league of baseball, that soon migrated to the football, but that maintains its links the sport of the bats and the balls. It is difficult to speak about on-line friends, which whom I never got to speak face to face, but who thanks to the camaraderie of the sport have stayed in contact by almost four years (we even founded a group on Yahoo! in order to be able to do the draft and to maintain the contact when there was no baseball).

This is how we found out about the health problems of our commissioner Dr Seabux (Clifford Harvey) who in the last years underwent two hip replacements, or the birth of the seven son of the brother-in-law of Seabuxx, Mr. Wilmintong Wombat (Thomas Ewing), the adventures of Catman (Hal Allen), or Potomac (Theo Harvey, brother of the Dr). Once the Harveys convinced their sister (Nancy) to participate in the league, so that we could have enough players. All of them, together with frightful Rainers (I’m sorry, to this date I do not know his real name, but he’s frightful because he has won the league the last three years). These gentlemen and young lady are all from Seattle, although some live now in other States. Because of them, this commentary appears today in El Cuarto in English. It is my goodbye to the craziest league of baseball ever known, so crazy that we ended up named it “The Insane Asylum.” To all my friends of the asylum, in the immortal words of Lou Gehrig: I have been the most lucky player of the world, because I could play with you.

Also, I have to give special thanks to bigDave, who invited me to participate in some of the more competitive leagues than I have known, where the trash-talking was phenomenal.

As of today, I become again a simple fan.

Or will I return? Perhaps.