The league I play in is a daily transaction league, which means that you have to have your lineup set every day. You ride the hot hitters, and you look at the match ups that favor your roster. This "nerdball," as the wife of one of my friends calls it, works nicely with some of my OCD tendencies.
Since winning in '01, I've been in a funk ~ poor season after poor season sprinkled in with a third place finish a few years ago, and that third place finish was one that I totally screwed up. Oh hubris and sketchy behavior, how I embraced you. I could have won it all if I would have kept it together.
Nevertheless, it's another season. The Grapefruit and Cactus leagues are in full swing, and I'm doing non-academic research even though I could rationalize that doing research on fantasy baseball sharpens my critical thinking skills. We humans like to rationalize such stuff. I guess our propensity to rationalize is what makes us something more than just high grade chimps with car keys and credit cards.
But if past seasons are any indication, my critical thinking skills need some work.
2 comments:
I've read articles that cited actual scientific studies that practically all games, like RTS, RPG, MMORPG, and fantasy sports really do improve your critical thinking skills.
The theory is that the more you have to make decisions that involve multiple options, the better you get at it in all walks of life.
I think you should put your victory on your CV.
I'm just bitter that the year I won isn't in Yahoo's records. My name is on the trophy though, dammit.
Go Cards!
Ah, where there are rationalizations, there are studies to support them. But you're right, travolta. There is something to this.
There is talk about this in my own discipline--how "games" can really influence learning by turning students into active learners. When I worked in a department of marketing and management in grad school, the professor I worked with used a business simulation game that seemed to work really well. Groups of three or four students had to run a business and write documents and do presentations about their companies and their business decisions.
Likewise, the case method way of teaching writing is in fact a "game" since one asks students to act like a professional and write a document with a specific rhetorical purpose with a specific audience in mind.
But back to fantasy baseball. I guess we can both blame the folks who project statistics since draft are so important? I assume you can blame Baseball Prospectus, and I'll blame whatever mag I used last year. Now there's a nice rationalization!
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