No one has complained about a trade in that league since. (And despite dealing Warner, I still managed to win the league that year, thank goodness. Otherwise I’d still be in therapy over it.)
I’ll say it again. As long as both teams feel the deal helps their team, regardless of whether you agree, it must go through. I especially can’t stand the people who block a trade just because it doesn’t involve them or because it’s part of their “strategy” to block other teams from improving. That’s the coward’s way out, and you’re a scummy, spineless punk if you do that.
Win on the virtual field, not in the bureaucracy.
If every person adopted this attitude, you wouldn’t have crazy email flame wars or message boards blowing up, you wouldn’t have hurt feelings or worse, and you wouldn’t see stories like Joshua’s where you just shake your head.
In the spring of 2004, I had a similar “what the hell just happened here?” falling-out related to fantasy when I was fired from Rotoworld.com.
Starting in 1999, I was a three-sport guy for them, writing my “Talented Mr. Roto” column once a week during the season for fantasy football, fantasy basketball, and fantasy baseball. Apparently, the readers must have thought I knew what I was talking about, because early on the owners told me the column had become the most popular on the site in terms of traffic. They eventually gave it prominent placement and called me their senior writer. I was doing national weekly radio hits promoting Rotoworld on Fox Sports Radio. I contributed to their draft kits and magazines. I represented them at industry trade shows and public appearances. I had started working for them for free but for all that I was now up to the princely sum of $100 a week. But I was doing it because I truly loved it.
Now, at that time the dot-com bubble had burst, Internet advertising wasn’t prevalent, and people were still figuring out exactly how to make money online. As a result, Rotoworld wanted to cut some costs, so I got a call. They wanted to pay me $25 a week or let me go.
Actual conversation:
ME: Wait, after writing for you for four and a half years, you want to cut my pay 300 percent?
BOSS: Well, when you say it that way it sounds bad.
Sigh.
Throughout my life I have tended to react very poorly when I think I’m being treated unfairly. I am a very black-and-white kind of guy, and for whatever reason, fairness is a huge issue with me. The majority of problems I’ve had with authority figures, from childhood to twenty minutes before I wrote this, stem from something happening to me that I deem to be unjust or unfair.
So it’s pretty surprising that I didn’t just scream at the guy for 10 minutes, burn the bridge, and never speak to him again. It’s not that $25 or $100 made that much of a difference in my life. I obviously did this job for the joy of it, not the money. But it was the principle. I had done really good, high-quality work for them, built an audience, promoted them on radio, never missed a deadline, and now this? I was pissed. Really pissed.
But for once, I bit my tongue and did something smart. I said . . . Let me think about it.
I then quickly started up a Yahoo interest group. I made mine a “fan group.” It’s an online community that anyone can create—they are free, down, and dirty. But the key is that to join the group you need to give an active email address. In creating the group, my whole goal was to suck as many email addresses out of Rotoworld as I could before I left. This was before the days of Facebook or Twitter, so I had no real way of telling people where I might be going next unless I had an email address. And while my bosses thought I was “thinking” about their pay cut, I was actually putting a link to this Yahoo group into my columns. That way, when I went to a new website (or if I wanted to try and sell them a RotoPass), I’d have some emails to tell fans where to find me. I started talking to other popular websites about writing for them, and I came close to joining my friends at Rotowire.com.
But before I decided what website I would start working for, the Yahoo group exploded. I had over 6,000 members in two weeks and a very active message board, which in those days in the fantasy sports universe was a really good number.
As all this was going on, Rotoworld’s owners eventually discovered the link and fired me outright. And I was sad. I had loved writing for Rotoworld, loved most of the people I worked with, and frankly, was kinda bummed it took them so long to discover what I was doing. Didn’t anyone there read my column?
During this time the Yahoo group kept growing. People would leave messages and questions for me, and before I could answer, other people would answer them and then post their own questions to me. It quickly developed into a fantasy sports community, and its fast growth led me to think, Hey, instead of joining another site, why don’t I just start my own?
I quickly developed a plan. My cumbersome nickname proved to be lucky again. The URL for TalentedMrRoto.com was available. So I grabbed that, hired a cheap designer, and threw up a down and dirty website.
If I am being honest, my thinking at the time was this: I didn’t care if the site was any good, I just needed some sort of content. My grand plan was that the TMR site, as it came to be known, would be one huge advertisement for RotoPass. I would get them to the TMR site with my writing and radio appearances, but then I would try to upsell folks to buy a RotoPass. That was the entirety of my genius business plan for TMR.
So I went to the Yahoo message board and looked for guys who were responding to posts in an intelligent manner. When I found one, I would send him a note saying I couldn’t pay him anything, but would he like to write for me as a “fantasy expert”? I also asked a few Hollywood writer friends who played fantasy if they wanted to do something on the side, and voilà, I had a writing staff. I created a content plan, taught the writers how to post their columns, slapped a message board up there, and bingo, bango, on March 19, 2004, the site was live.
I then spent all my energy on getting RotoPass off the ground, promoting it and improving it, and basically left TMR to its own devices for a while. My management style has always been to hire good people and get out of their way. The TMR site was no exception.
After about three months, the TMR site was actually . . . not terrible.
Very not terrible, in fact. TalentedMrRoto.com, the “throwaway” site, was producing some great content.
Many of the writers I hired over the years would ultimately become some of the best-known names in the fantasy industry, including some of the stars of Yahoo, CBS, NBA.com, SI.com, AOL, and, of course, ESPN. We were drawing more and more fans, and suddenly I was spending just as much time on TMR as I was on RotoPass. Even though it had taken almost a year of work, it still seemed very quick. By the summer of 2004, I was no longer a guy who took a couple of hours a week to write a fantasy column—I was the CEO of two burgeoning websites.
I had traded a small job at a big website to be my own big fish. And I started trading off more and more of my movie-writing duties to my partner to concentrate on the two sites—thinking about how we could improve the sites, fixing things, calling or emailing people, and trying to negotiate deals with bigger sites. Things were changing very quickly.
Which shouldn’t have been a surprise. Fantasy players are always looking to trade. My “career” at Rotoworld, such as it was, hadn’t turned out like I had hoped. So I was doing what came naturally. I traded. One site for another, one disappointment for a new challenge, one focus for two more.
It was a heady, confusing time, and I was excited about the path I was on, even if I had no idea where it led.
Trying to make the best decision when there is no clear-cut answer is exactly what Curtis Black found himself facing. Curtis is an original member of the 23-year-old Fantasy Basketball League (“the FBL, no points for creativity”).
It was the 1994–95 season, and one of their owners (who insisted on being called J-Smooth) owned Houston Rockets superstar center Hakeem Olajuwon. Back in 1995, you
had to pay for email, and the league was filled with poor college kids, spread out all over the country. As a result, “most of the league business was done over voice-mails and through actual mail. In order for a trade to be legit, both owners involved had to phone ‘The Ern’ [the commish] with the details of the trade,” Curtis explains.
So J-Smooth was working the phones, trying to deal Hakeem, leaving voice-mail offers for the UCSB Slackers and the Atlanta Dixie-Rebels. Curtis continues: “This was all done over winter break. Winter break left some of us away from our college voice-mail.” And as the story goes, J-Smooth later left a message with the commish something to the effect of “I traded Hakeem tonight, the deal is legit.”
Here’s where the problems start. After the J-Smooth confirmation, both other owners called in to confirm their deals for Hakeem. Basically, J-Smooth had offered Hakeem, over voice-mail, to two different owners. Both agreed to the deal and called the commish to confirm. J-Smooth, obviously, had not been specific in his voice-mail about which team he was trading Hakeem to.
Adding to it all is that they played two games after the trades, and since the commish had not called to deny the deal to either party (he was also away from his voice-mail over winter break), both teams were counting Hakeem’s stats in these games. “In January, when we all returned to school—there was chaos.”
Both teams insisted they had been offered—and accepted—Hakeem in a trade and had made other moves based on having Hakeem. As a result, there was lots of discussion about what to do. Could it be erased? Reversed? Who would get Hakeem and who wouldn’t? What do you do with the team’s lineup that didn’t get Hakeem?
Nobody, it seemed, was worried that J-Smooth (a perennial bottom-dweller) had gotten two sets of players for Hakeem. Each owner was screaming that Hakeem was his, so in its infinite wisdom, the FBL did what they thought was fair. “We created a second Hakeem.”
So they let both owners use Olajuwon’s stats for the rest of the year, and I’ve decided that, if I ever start an indie rock band, I’m calling it The Second Hakeem.
The two Hakeems gave new meaning to the term “Twin Towers,” but the idea of dual athletes in a fantasy league reminds me of Maurice Jones-Drew. As many people know, Maurice is not just a star running back for the Jacksonville Jaguars and a perennial first-round pick, but he is also an avid fantasy football player himself, hosting his own fantasy football radio show on SiriusXM. MJD is the first active NFL player to be both an athlete and a huge advocate for fantasy.
So the fact that he plays in a lot of fantasy leagues and, as an athlete, is a first-round pick has led to situations where, because of where he’s picking, he doesn’t have the chance to draft himself. Normally, people in the league are understanding and let MJD draft himself. But not always.
One year, in order to promote fantasy, the NFL Players Association had a fantasy league with a bunch of NFL players, including MJD and Chicago Bears running back Matt Forte. And who did Forte select with his first-round pick that year? Maurice Jones-Drew.
It was a good pick, as MJD was going in the top three in fantasy drafts across the country and Maurice had a low draft pick in the first round. Naturally, he tried to trade for himself. And Matt Forte was having none of it.
As the season went on, MJD put up monster numbers, making his fantasy owners happy. And making it impossible to get himself back in a trade. “Come on,” Maurice texted Forte one week. “You gotta trade me to me.”
Forte texted back. “Hell no. I’m gonna beat you with you.”
Speaking of texting trade offers, “Chris in Indy” is in the same ESPN league with his wife, Jen, who has always loved Fred Jackson. But in 2011 Chris managed to draft Jackson before she did. “All she could talk about is how she wanted Jackson on her team. Meanwhile, she was sick of having an injured Arian Foster sitting on her bench.”
It was week three of the 2011 season, and while Jackson was going off for 21 points, Arian Foster was inactive, as his preseason hamstring injury had acted up. So sitting downstairs in his “man cave” watching football, Chris texted his wife, who was one floor above him in the kitchen.
“Needless to say, Fred Jackson wasn’t the only one who scored that day. Arian Foster resumed being himself in week four, and I’d consider this the best trade I ever made.”
Lorne Bilesky’s AFLB League is based in Spokane, Washington, and has been around since 1983. They’ve shared in births and deaths, marriages, divorces—and now most of them are grandfathers. And in the almost 30 years they’ve been together, one trade stands out more than any other.
In 1998 the league was taking its annual road trip to a Seahawks game, crammed into a van and drinking heavily, when Jim, owner of FUBAR, started trade negotiations with Tim, owner of the Brain Dead Dick Heads. Both were complaining about how bad their teams were, and they started tossing around names.
Lorne remembers, “They could never agree on which two players to trade, so it began to escalate to include more and more player combinations. Finally, very late in the night, Jim said, ‘What the hell, let’s just trade teams.’ Tim agreed, and it was the source of high comedy for the rest of the night.”
After a night of heavy drinking, it’s perfectly normal to regret decisions you’ve made, and apparently Jim was no different. The team he had dealt included Dan Marino, who had gotten off to a slow start (for him). Jim’s fears were well founded: “A couple weeks later, Marino erupted for five TDs,” Lorne tells me. “The rest of the squad started playing to their expectations, and this vaulted Tim to the top of the standings, while Jim and his new squad languished near the cellar.”
Tim won the league that year and has won four other titles since. And since that night, Jim has never known what it is like to be champion of the AFLB.
Jim’s last title was 1984. I’m pretty sure that’s a fantasy football record. Can someone send a shaman to Seattle? Or at least bury a Dan Marino action figure with some beads and a quick chant for Jim?
While it is usually not to the extent of Jim’s regret, having post–fantasy trade remorse is as old as Jim’s winless streak. You know how they say, “Every time you hear a bell, an angel gets its wings?” Well, every time you see a player get injured or lose his starting job, realize that someone, somewhere just traded for him.
Among the events that got mentioned the most were trading for Manny Ramirez just before his (totally unexpected) 50-game suspension, trading for Priest Holmes the day before he (again, unexpectedly) retired midseason, and trading for Plaxico Burress just before he (hopefully unexpectedly) shot himself in the leg at a nightclub.
In 1997 I was flying across the country on trade deadline day in my fantasy hoops league. I should have just left well enough alone. But instead I spent $90 on an airphone to try and win a league with a $50 prize. The centerpiece of the deal was David Robinson, who had missed a good chunk of the start of the season and had only recently come back to play six games. The day after our deal, my first with The Admiral, he reinjured himself and missed the rest of the year. Good times. But here’s the thing. Spending an entire flight getting dirty looks from fellow passengers and spending almost twice as much money as I could win just to do a fantasy basketball trade might seem over the top, but that’s nothing.
From stories like Josh G.’s to smaller ones where people dropped all the players on their team in protest of a bad trade (to try and screw the whole league up), to getting the host website to block someone’s IP address (essentially locking them out), or to one time when I got a phone call at 3:00 AM from someone screaming at a trade I had pulled off . . . I’ve heard every extreme trade story.
And while I don’t agree with it at all, I get it. Because fantasy sports is more than a hobby. It’s more than a friendly pastime. It’s an obsession.
9.
Going Above and Beyond to Play
or
“This Is Our Third Kid. I Only Have One
Title.”
We have all been there.
We have a good team.
What we don’t have, however, is a great team.
We study rosters. We scour the waiver wire. We mull over a million different moves. All we need is one more stud for the stretch run. Just one. Getting him, however, isn’t always easy.
In 2011, Troy M. was in just such a situation in his Melbourne, Australia–based 12-team keeper league, The Inner Circle. Even better, his buddy Marc was in a rebuilding year. Even better than that, Marc had an unkeepable Calvin Johnson, the number one WR in fantasy that year, and he was ready to deal.
So the week of the trade deadline, Troy offered all sorts of deals. Back and forth they went, but they still hadn’t been able to work something out. So desperate was Troy that he had even spent a good portion of his buddy’s bachelor party on the phone, but nothing got done.
And so, on the final deadline day, Troy went to the wedding with the sad knowledge that his deal was dead. Troy remembers, “It was a traditional church service, and so it was reaaaaaally long. But about halfway through the service, my iPhone vibrates in my pocket. So . . . as carefully as decorum would allow, I snuck it out.” It was a message from Marc! The text read: “Stafford, Cruz and 4th next year for Megatron. Final Offer.” Excited trade talks were back on! Troy countered: “Cruz fine. Staff No. Cam and 2nd?” And incredibly, the iPhone vibrated again. “Okay. I’ll go offer.”
Troy can’t believe it! A week of negotiations later, Calvin Johnson was his! “I rushed to accept on my iPhone app before Marc changed his mind,” when suddenly Troy felt an elbow in his ribs.
And noticed the entire church staring at him.
Because he was the best man.
And the priest had asked him, YET AGAIN, if he had the ring!
Fantasy Life: The Outrageous, Uplifting, and Heartbreaking World of Fantasy Sports from the Guy Who's Lived It Page 10