Fire Joe Morgan! Fantasy League

So baseball season is on! Let my ulcers begin. The fantasy draft for the pay league I’m in went down over the weekend and after having a look at my roster, I placed an order for a 2-month supply of Zantac that should last me until May.

Our league is called "Fire Joe Morgan!" — I came up with the name myself (genius, right?) — and as you can probably assume, things did not go according to plan. Truth be told, they went down the shitter the second the draft began. ESPN let me in the warroom but wouldn’t load any buttons – a few other members of our league were victims as well but it was terribly vexing because it’s not like I didn’t take precautions. I’m such a psycho that I entered 7 mock drafts earlier in the day just to make sure my computer was in working order and then I restarted my computer just before draft time to make sure it was fresh and ready to rock. Needless to say, the malfunctions made little sense but I don’t know what more I could expect when dealing with ESPN. As much as I bash them, this was probably a little karma coming back to kick me in the ass. While struggling to load and re-load the applet, I auto-picked Johan Santana (I can’t complain) and later (ESPN magically decided to stop acting like the devil) squeaked into the room within 5 seconds of auto-picking again in round 2. I took the first player I saw – Chase Utley. If you were around here last year, you remember my pain when I picked up Utley as a sleeper only to see him platoon half the season away with Placido Polanco. Anyway, I made a decent go of things for the next few rounds — Oswalt, Cantu, Giambi, Sizemore, Peralta.. things weren’t great but they were solid. Then I realized I only had 1 outfielder, 2 pitchers, no catcher, no relievers – you get the idea – and things immediately went south. After a brief panic attack, I realized that everyone I wanted, everyone I needed was gone, and if a desired pick hung on the board long enough to excite me, the bleeding rotter two spots ahead of me would take him. And even though he was completely unaware that he was spinning me out, I cursed him anyway. The whole process was absolutely maddening and by the time the draft was done, all I could think to do, well, was find free agents and scour other rosters to think up trades.  I didn’t want a beer, I didn’t want to relax, I didn’t want to kick back with my man. Actually, I did, but my needs were secondary to the issue at hand. Being an obessive-compulsive, anal-retentive neurotic means that I’m mentally incapable of doing anything other than behaving like a cocksmoking tool when a task is at hand… this is a 6-month task… At least I’ll have my Zantac.

By the way… Am I the only one who thinks Michael Wilbon looks like Zacarias Moussaoui of Al Qaeda?