Groundbreaking Research

There’s some interesting new research going on at the University of Madison-Wisconsin into the complex and mysterious subset of society known as fantasy baseball. I play fantasy baseball (the Yip-Yips are #2, with a bullet), so I know a thing or two about the psychological dynamics of the game. Actually, I know very little about the psychological dynamics of anything, but I do know a thing or two about how to run a second-place fantasy baseball team, and that’s a lot more than these two researchers at UWM seem to know.

If you read the article closely, you’ll see that it is mentioned that both researchers play and enjoy fantasy baseball. However, there is no mention of the names and current rankings of the teams. That means that their teams suck. The Yip-Yips are only in second place in my league, but that hasn’t stopped me from mentioning them by name and rank three times in the span of two paragraphs. That’s what a good fantasy baseball manager does, he talks up his team.

What this article does contain, however, are such insightful insights like how fantasy baseball is very popular and how, this one time, there was this girl and she played fantasy baseball even though she didn’t like baseball, but after she played fantasy baseball, she was all like, “Hey, this baseball thing is pretty swell!” If you ask me that’s not research.

Fantasy baseball is a game. Like any other game, if you want to get good at it you practice. Since fantasy baseball takes an entire season to play, practice comes in the form of research, paying attention to box scores, and always keeping a watchful eye out for the players who are performing way above their true talent level. While it might seem obsessive and nerdy, the work that goes into running a quality fantasy baseball team is no different than shooting free throws in your driveway or practicing chords on a guitar until you can progress seamlessly from one to another. It is certainly not a psychological phenomenon unique to fantasy baseball, nor does it have any real application to education.

While this Forbes article is more of a summary of the abstract of the research to be presented at the Games, Learning, & Society Conference, it seems that one of the aspects of fantasy baseball that interest the researchers (although they do not mention it on the GLSC page, so I could be misreading this) is how the players are willing to devote so much time to things (baseball, math, trash-talking within an 80 character limit) that they might have initially cared nothing about. The logical educational extension of this is how can the fantasy baseball hook, so to speak, be applied to encouraging students to find an interest in topics they might find boring. And, honestly, I think fantasy baseball might hold the solution for energizing a generation of uninterested students.

Fantasy baseball can revolutionize education and it’s so simple I’m amazed I never thought of this before. At the beginning of a class or semester, each student puts in $37. Whoever has the highest grades or point total based on a weighted amalgamation of grades, attendance, and class participation would win the pot. That’s how it works in many fantasy baseball leagues and in the World Series of Poker, so I don’t see how it couldn’t work in public education. Just think, ten or fifteen years from now, ESPN2 will be airing May Madness, the final week of a sophomore algebra class, featuring an instant classic showdown between the presumably unstoppable Chingmy Yau and the brash young upstart Lester Dingles. And you’ll have me to thank.