The worst fantasy baseball season I ever had, in 2009, came following a draft I conducted in Santo Domingo, where the power went out in a large part of the city while the draft was in the ninth round. I had carefully been listing guys I had my eye on as possible late-round flyers, and when the auto-draft kicked in after I disappeared, those were the guys I got. Remember Kansas City utility man Mark Teahan? He was unstoppable that spring, and I thought he might be worth a roll of the dice in the final round. Yeah, he was my ninth round pick … and it painfully went on from there.
But I’ve heard much more colorful stories than that. I’ve managed all but my first fantasy team from my current home in Italy, and my two regular leagues have a healthy mix of U.S.-based and ex-pat managers, so I hear stories. There’s Paul Stinson, who moves around so much that he’s conducted each of his last three drafts from different continents — first from South Africa, then Germany, and this season in Texas. Or Ezra Fieser in the Dominican Republic, where in making small talk with a baseball fan he casually mentioned that he had Robinson Cano on his fantasy team — prompting the young Dominican he was speaking to believe Ezra was claiming to be in some kind of gay swinger group with Cano.
But the two best stories I’ve heard are from Pete Graff, a veteran Reuters war correspondent who has managed teams while embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Arnie Schultz, a United Nations technician based in Kenya, who has braved wild animals to set his roster.
You’ve probably guessed this isn’t a typical column with strategies to consider or hints on the latest waiver wire pickups (though I will make a couple of suggestions at the end). But I hope it’s OK to tell a few stories that, if nothing else, will make you realize that no matter how much your middle infielders under perform, and no matter how many guys you have on the DL, it could be worse.
Pete has become an expert with the quick use of satellite phones during off hours in order to set his lineups. He’s done it scores of times in war zones, but he says one time sticks out: embedded with British soldiers in a hostile area in Afghanistan, he had a favorable start coming up for Orlando Hernandez, “El Duque,” and he had to get him into his lineup. That meant logging onto the Internet from the shot up roof of a hotel on a battery-driven satellite phone at 5 a.m. local time. “I got it done,” he recalls. “And so of course ‘El Duque’ got shelled that day.”
Arnie’s a computer technician, so he’s never far from a computer when he’s working. But on weekends out of Nairobi it’s a different story. On a safari on the Serengeti plains in northern Tanzania the promise of a phone signal at the camp turned out to be false. “They told me that on a ridge, around four or five miles away, there was a pretty reliable phone signal,” Arnie says. “I had just made a trade for Zack Greinke that put him on my roster that day, and he was starting. So I had to get him into the lineup.”
He announced he would walk to the ridge, but the safari organizer would only let him go if he took a guide and an armed guard. So he walked across the Serengeti with a local tribesman and a soldier who kept asking him if he knew Barack Obama personally. “We got there, it worked, and we started back,” Arnie says. “And soon the ground started trembling underneath us and a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon.” It was a herd of hundreds of antelopes heading their way. “We jumped behind a big rock and dozens of antelopes jumped over us and came around us as I coughed dust with the other two guys glaring at me.” At least his story has a happier ending than Pete’s: Arnie recalls that Greinke threw a complete game three-hitter.
There are some advantages to managing a team from abroad. In Italy, the midnight west coast transaction deadline for Yahoo! leagues comes at 9 a.m. the next day for me, meaning I’ve usually already had my first cappuccino before making any last-minute lineup decisions. Paul, the frequent mover, says that not being able to watch many games on television can also have its advantages: “I find I’m less seduced by the visual aspects of the game and I rely more on numbers, which can help,” he says.
But the biggest advantage is probably the cool stories foreign-based managers get to tell. Pete, the Reuters correspondent and a life-long New York Yankees fan, recalls working in Sudan in 1996, when he heard on BBC radio that the Yankees has just won their first World Series in nearly two decades. Overjoyed, he set out for that day’s work and hours later he met an 80-something year-old nun named Sister Mary. She had been living in Sudan for most of her adult life, but she was originally from Mineola, Long Island. Pete was giddy that he’d be the one to tell her the day’s big news: “Sister Mary,” Pete announced with pride, “the New York Yankees have just won the World Series.” Sister Mary didn’t miss a beat: “Those bums?” she asked.
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I promised something practical, and so I bring you the name of Jeff Baker, the Texas Rangers 1B and OF owned in exactly zero percent of Yahoo! leagues. His connection with this column is that he is one of a very small handful of major league players not born in a baseball playing country (Baker hails from a small spa town called Bad Kissingen, in what was West Germany). And his relevance to fantasy baseball teams is that he’d be a Hall of Famer if he could get enough at-bats facing only left-handed pitching. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get to the plate often (only 40 times this season, as of Wednesday night), but he’s still put up better than Miguel Cabrera numbers when facing lefties: hitting .367 with a 1.320 OPS and a home run a little better than every 8 at-bats. And it’s not a fluke: for his career he’s got an .864 OPS against southpaws.
It doesn’t have to be Baker. There are plenty of players with lopsided splits: Pirates 1B and OF Garrett Jones is nearly as lopsided on the other side (his OPS is more than 500 points higher when facing righties). Or take Astros starter Bud Norris (2.30 ERA at home; 7.71 on the road) or the even more extreme Joe Saunders (0.94 ERA at home; 12.54 on the road). There are pitchers who prefer day games, hitters whose batting average is much higher after a day off, and pitchers who pitch better when working with certain catchers. If you can stream those guys when circumstances are right, it might even help compensate for drafting someone as ill advised as Mark Teahan in the early rounds.
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