The Humanity of Fantasy Sports
I started playing fantasy sports as a 15-year-old high school sophomore in 2000. I distinctly remember writing down my fantasy basketball roster in my notebook and trying to figure out how I could improve my team while I was in my classes. During my summers, I would read Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster and transfer the data into Excel so I could create my own ranking systems in preparation for my drafts. My friends and I played countless hours of Baseball Mogul, a PC simulation game that allowed us to be the general manager of fictional baseball teams.
Finally, in 2015, I tried DFS for the first time and I was hooked.
Maybe my background resonates with you. Perhaps you too have an extensive fantasy sports background and have grown up with similar memories. I’ve spent the last 16 years involved in fantasy sports, which is more than half my life. If you’re a DFS player like myself, you’ve programmed yourself to a daily routine. It probably involves digging into player statistics, reviewing projection systems, and running lineup optimizers. You’re likely trained to monitor news on the forums or on Twitter in case a player is ruled out due to sickness or rest. And if you’re like me, you spend the rest of the night tilted and emotionally drained when Player X is a late scratch or Player Y fails to live up to his projections. We then dust ourselves off, regroup mentally, and prepare for the next day of DFS.
But every once in awhile, something will happen that will remind us we’re dealing with real people and real lives. In a span of five months, the sports world has lost Jose Fernandez, Yordano Ventura, and Andy Marte. We’ll stop to mourn their loss and celebrate their lives, and when the time is right, we’ll move on. There’s nothing wrong with this cycle – that’s life. But the recent deaths of these athletes made me reflect harder on this topic than I typically have in the past. I had started working on some MLB depth charts as part of a possible blog series in the future and one of the charts I completed awhile back was of the Royals. I can’t get myself to update the depth chart and delete the name “Yordano Ventura” from my chart. When I do, it’s going to be an odd feeling knowing I’m not just deleting a name that left due to a trade or free agency, but rather because this individual is no longer with us.
As DFS players, we focus so much on numbers, advanced analytics, and trends. Don’t get me wrong, these are amazing tools. My full-time job is for an analytics company, so I am all in-favor of using data to make informed decisions. But when it comes to DFS, focusing on numbers and projections causes me to forget I’m dealing with professional athletes who are actual people with actual emotions and actual lives. I spend an entire day debating whether to roster Kevin Love at $8,000 or Draymond Green at $7,900. I go back-and-forth on their projections and matchups and recent box scores. Not once does it ever cross my mind that Draymond Green has a newborn child at home. Maybe he’s tired from raising a newborn (I know I am). Maybe he has a sick family member, or is fatigued from the recent travel.
Or how about this scenario? – I end up rostering Derrick Rose and 10 minutes after lineup lock, it’s announced Derrick Rose isn’t even in the arena (this scenario sound familiar? It should, because it just happened!). My first reaction is to go to the forums and rant, or go on Twitter and throw hate towards Derrick Rose and the media for not giving me a heads up this was happening. Not once is my response “I hope he’s okay” or “If he left to care for a family member, he did the right thing.” Instead, it’s usually “This dude just burned me and cost me a lot of money.”
When a player has a subpar performance, we call it “variance.” When it happens to us at work, we call it “having a bad day.” All of us have them, it’s just most of us don’t have jobs that the public sees. When I make an error in an Excel spreadsheet or mess up a client presentation, I don’t have 20,000 people watching me fail. But when Todd Gurley has a rough season, people are Tweeting at him that they want to fight.
My point is this – would our DFS experiences be different if we all did a better job reinserting the humanity into fantasy sports? Would we find ourselves less angry for making a bad play when we realize it wasn’t the fault of our projection models or a podcast host, but the fact the players we rostered are human beings just like us who have good and bad days? (If you really need to find someone to blame, blame the lineup seller you bought your lineups from). Instead of getting angry over a late scratch due to food poisoning, are we able to sympathize with the player if we remembered the last time we ate Chipotle and got the runs? (I should’ve checked first if Chipotle was a RotoGrinders sponsor but I’ll just edit this if they reach out to me). Rather than sending an angry Tweet directly to an athlete, can we find a way to respect to each other and tone down the hatred?
Let me be the first to admit that these words I’m writing are just as much meant for me as they are for anybody. I need to do a much better job at respecting professional athletes. And my point is not to elevate the athletes, but rather to put us back on equal footing. They are flawed humans prone to fail, just like you and me. I’ve trained myself for 16 years to view them as players I roster on a fictional team rather than actual people. But if I’m able to reprogram myself at how I view these players, what kind of trickle down effect would occur? Perhaps DFS would be more enjoyable. Perhaps communication on the forums would be more civil and less abrasive. Perhaps the player-fan interactions would be improved and open up opportunities to get closer to the athletes. And the big one for me, which is the purpose of me taking the time to write this, is perhaps we’ll start to see the world and its people through a different lens.
Thanks for reading. You can find me on Twitter under the handle AllanLemDFS.