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.

The second aspect of the broadcast that bothered me was the large, angular status bar at the top of the screen. Now I’m not a status bar hater. Even though it covers up part of the playing field, it provides useful information and, assuming the production crew is doing its job, the camera should be able to follow the play without letting the status bar get in the way. But the NFL Network’s bar is just ridiculous. It’s all jagged edges and too much unused space. It looks like something out the ridiculously bad title pages I would make using the Word Art feature in Word for my AP Bio lab reports. God, I was such a douchebag.

The third, and most bothersome element of the NFL Network’s broadcast was the line of scrimmage line. It’s red. Red means stop, making it wholly unsuitable for a marking that denotes the starting point of a play. And why is there even a line of scrimmage line anyway? The first down line is understandable and awesome. Football fans around the world sat in stunned disbelief the first time the simple yellow line made its appearance. And, more to the point, the first down line is incredibly useful for a fan. The line of scrimmage line, not so much. Before the play starts, the teams line up at the line of scrimmage, so I don’t need a line to tell me where 20 really big dudes are obviously lining up. After the play begins, the line of scrimmage really doesn’t matter, unless you’re only concerned about getting sacks for your fantasy football teams. In short, the line of scrimmage line is a waste of a perfectly good computer-generated line. It should be banned from all televised football games, as should all the children of the broadcasters. Nothing against Troy Aikman, but damn, he’s got some ugly kids.

Now I don’t know much about soccer and I’m watching many games on the Spanish station, but I’m actually starting to recognize certain aspects of a sport I once thought of as little more than a glorified 90-minute jog. For instance, even though Ghana won the match, I didn’t need a coherent announcer to realize that the Slovak goalie is quite good. And during the Brazil-Australia match, I even learned to tell the difference between Ronaldo and Ronaldino. Ronaldo is the fat slow one, Ronaldino is the retarded-looking fellow with the greasy ponytail. Also, the sexy Brazilian ladies in the stands are no match for the fat Korean guy in the stands. I love that fat Korean guy.

I’m even a little disappointed that I won’t be around to watch tomorrow’s US-Ghana contest. US goalkeeper Kasey Keller is a relation of mine (he’s my mom’s aunt’s daughter’s son) and I always root for family. If the US loses tomorrow, Kasey will have failed not only his team, not only his country, but he’ll have failed me. That I cannot forgive. If the US loses to Ghana, I’ll never speak to Kasey Keller again. Not that I’ve ever met or spoken to him before, but he blows it for the US, he’ll be just like the rest of the offspring of my maternal Grandfather’s 21 siblings: dead to me. With any luck, the Ghanaians will be more proficient than the Italians at kicking the ball into their own goal, giving the US a good chance to not lose a match.

As if adding insult to injury, mlb.tv also decided to flashify everything. It’s 2006, who the fuck uses flash? Flash is garbage. Flash has always been garbage. Flash makes the Internet unbearable. But it does allow for a little “Boss” button on the mlb.tv page. What is a “Boss” button, you might ask. Well, it’s a little button that you click on and the baseball game window changes into a fake Word document. What kind of Word document? A fake nomination letter to bestbossever.com That is–pardon the expression–gay.

This might come as a surprise to the nerds who code mlb.tv, but not everyone needs a “Boss” button. Not everyone sits in a cubicle all day, surfing the Internet and wanking it to celebrity nip slip sites. Some of us work in places where the only Internet access is the Starbucks next to the movie theater. And I would never watch a baseball game at a Starbucks. Starbucks people are not my people. I have no need for “Boss” buttons. All I want is to get what a paid $80 for, to get what I got from mlb.tv last year and last month.

Sadly, it seems that all media outlets seem more concerned with stopping piracy than providing content to honest customers. I might download music, video games and gigabyte upon gigabyte of Japanese gangbang porn, but that doesn’t make me a criminal. Yet Major League Baseball wants limit the ways I access content that I paid good money for. They also want to stop me from giving my own name to my own fantasy baseball team. I mean, who uses character count limits on a fantasy baseball team name? All I wanted was “The Sun Is Just Around The Corner” but instead, due to the character count fascists, I get stuck with TheSunIsJustAroundTheCorner. Lame. It’s almost enough to make me give up on corporate media entertainment altogether. But then I remember that I have a 37 second attention span. So I guess it’s back to sitting through unbearable load times in a $70 Xbox, Again? games and possibly even getting a cheap Mac, just so I can watch baseball games again.

In conclusion, Major League Baseball and mlb.tv can kiss my ass. I’m going to write them a strongly worded email, but I doubt it will have any effect. Also, in honour of the baseball season, I will not shave or cut my hair until my beloved Seattle Mariners win the World Series. Or until they are guaranteed to finish at .500. Or until either Ichiro!, Richie Sexson or Felix Hernandez get hurt. Regardless, I will be rather fuzzy for the summer. And the itchiness of my facial fuzz will be a constant reminder of what annoying bastards Major League Baseball are.

But that’s all in the past now. There will be other games in this World Baseball Classic and Team Japan will not be robbed again. Team Japan rocks. I saw them play the Mariners last week. I had front row seats, right on top of the Japanese dugout. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera, so I paid $12 for a disposable camera, only to find out it didn’t have a flash. Now I realize that very few of you idiots have the intelligence and/or manual dexterity needed to operate a camera, but here’s a little photography tip for you: taking pictures at night, without a flash, and with a bunch of bright lights shining onto the field doesn’t really work all that well. The picture in the upper right of this post is a picture of Munenori Kawasaki leaping over the first base line. It’s quite possibly the shittiest picture I’ve even taken, seen or been told about. But I still like it. It captures one of the many unique aspects of Munenori. Some players make a point to not step on any of the lines on the field, but Munenori goes one step further, bounding over the line the way George Costanza might jump over a pothole. That is just one of the many reasons why Munenori Kawasaki rocks your face.

For those of you not familiar with Team Japan, pretty much everyone on the team wears those silly frat boy necklaces and has highlights or frosted blond hair. Not Munenori. He’s not a pretty boy like Akinori Iwamura or Tsuyoshi Nishioka. No, he’s 71 kilos of goofy-looking baseball excitement. He made a bitchin’ over-the-shoulder catch in yesterday’s game and he’s the only player of Team Japan who actually looks like he’s having any fun. I hope that Team Japan advances to the next round of the WBC so Ichiro!, Munenori and Hirota-san get the opportunity to avenge their loss to the US. And I hope they hit Derek Jeter again. Nothing pleases me more than seeing Derek Jeter get smacked by Japanese balls.