Dungeons & Dragons for sports geeks

I have a dirty little secret. I'm a reasonably stable, self-reliant adult, yet my guilty pleasure involves driving 200 miles each way a few times a year to sit around a table for seven hours with a group of middle-aged men I barely know. This weekend, for the first time, I will sit around a table with a new group, traveling from New York City to Boston to meet in a bar at 10 AM on Saturday--a time when I'm almost never even awake, let alone in a bar, in Boston--to spend a day doing quick percentage calculations in my head with a group of 20-somethings I've never met.

Yup, I'm a fantasy baseball junky.

I couldn't wait to be out of high school so that I'd never have to take a math class again, yet somehow, I spend much of the winter calculating the relative value of obscure players based on even more obscure statistics (VORP, anyone?). I silently—because I would never admit this to anyone but a few friends who share this madness—look forward to the late winter days when my league mates will be ready to start preparing for the upcoming season, ready to talk trades. And I treat draft days like a holy day; I'd say it's my Christmas Eve, but I'm Jewish. (And unlike Christmas Eve, I rarely eat Chinese food or go to the movies on draft day. Who has the time?)

Why do I do it? I don't know. Part of it is that it makes following baseball a lot more interesting. I've always been a baseball fan, but being in a serious fantasy league forces you to take your fandom to fifth gear. You suddenly need to know things like, say, who the backup catcher on the Padres will be this season, or who is the consensus third-best prospect in the game right now (Doug Mirabelli and Jeremy Hermida, if you're wondering). You develop a rooting interest in late-season games between crappy teams like the Royals and Orioles—because Ruben Gotay will get his five at-bats, and Chris Ray might have a save opportunity.

There's also the element of intellectual challenge. To an outsider, it might seem easy to say that everyone knows which players are best, and then luck plays a part. But one thing that's fascinating about fantasy baseball is that there's always a deeper level to analyze the game and its statistics. There are always different statistics to prioritize, different factors that may influence player performance, different league quirks to take into account.

Sure, players have breakout years and injuries that can be attributed to good or bad luck, but is it really impossible to predict the next Mark Prior injury, or that an up-and-coming player like Ryan Howard could become a big star? Luck is definitely a factor, but good players know that track records account for luck, if you look at the right information.

What does all that hard work and research get me? Ideally, it brings the perverse thrill of outsmarting a group of lawyers who have been playing this game since I was in diapers. Of course, the way my team has performed the last couple of years, I haven't felt that way very often, but I'm anticipating that it would be nice to have that happen. Just like in the Major Leagues, every spring brings hope that this will be my year.

Maybe that's a nice metaphor for the other parts of my life. But in a world that's even more complicated and unpredictable than baseball, it's nice to know that in at least one way, I always know exactly how I'm doing.