RotoBaller is Obsessed with Baseball and Fantasy Baseball

The passionate writers at RotoBaller have been hard at work all preseason churning out 5-6 articles a day, giving you the relevant MLB news and the best fantasy baseball analysis and advice for your 2015 drafts. And they will continue churning milk into sweet cream for the rest of the MLB preseason.

But on this Monday morning, we stare at the beginning of March and right around the corner from spring training games and the MLB season. I very exciting time for us baseball fans. So I'd like to take a step back, relax, and simply take a few moments to enjoy the wonderful games of baseball and fantasy baseball.

I want to share with everyone my love for baseball and fantasy baseball, and explain why RotoBallers from all around flock over here daily to read the thoughts and analysis of this site's passionate MLB writers. Because as you can imagine, there is one underlying reason that really brings us all together - it's for the love of the game. Hopefully you feel the same way.

 

RotoBaller is Obsessed, And Here's Why

We'll say it again. RotoBaller is obsessed with baseball and fantasy baseball. That's just the easiest way to describe it. Our obsession with fantasy baseball stems from our love of the sport. Some people say baseball is too boring, but we say it's perfect. There's nothing like kicking back after a long day, popping open a frosty adult beverage, and watching your favorite baseball team for two to three hours.

At some point, either during the game or during your multi-decade love affair with this game, you feel like baseball starts flowing through your veins. And everything that we love about baseball becomes magnified through the lens of fantasy baseball. It's a vehicle and engine to dig deeper into the sport, and digging deeper is what makes baseball so intriguing and fun to follow.

Fantasy baseball fuels my passion for baseball and forces me to stay on top of the daily news and statistics. It makes me love baseball more, which in turn increases my passion for fantasy baseball. It's a lovely self-sustaining cycle.

Fantasy baseball is great because it allows each person to get that much closer to feeling like a professional athlete, and to become his or her own personal general manager of a sports franchise - a common dream among many sports fans. It allows us to compete against friends or family or just some guy from Peoria.

There's a lot at stake, sometimes money, always pride and bragging rights at the least. Every day, week, and month, I get to step up to the plate against my league opponents and implement my strategies to show them that my team is the best. Every day, I get to change my lineup, start/bench my pitchers, and make all the savvy adds and drops to prove to myself that I am the best fantasy GM in my league. I get to play the role of scout, manager and GM all at the same time. I get to make high-stakes moves and decisions and see the results validated (or invalidated) on a nightly basis. It can be extraordinarily fun and rewarding, or extremely frustrating, but it's guaranteed to be interesting and engaging.

At the end of the day, who doesn't love to go home with a championship, a trophy, and a bundle of cash? But aside from winning championships, talking trash to your buddies, and taking home some cake, fantasy baseball allows you to get a little bit more analytical than some of the other fantasy sports. Between the hitters and the pitchers, there are so many different statistics and categories that are watched today by baseball folks. Add to that the sabermetrics movement with advanced analytics, and there is an endless world of baseball statistics and analysis that provides some insight into why certain players perform in certain ways.

There is no other sport around in which there is as distinct a mapping between statistics and player performance as there is in baseball. If a player doesn't strike out much and works out walks while hitting for a decent average, you know that he's going to produce. So with that knowledge in mind, I can understand that if this player was recently traded and now has an opportunity to play every day, I can use that analysis to predict solid production in the near future.

As fantasy baseball managers, we each get an opportunity to become the scouts and general managers of our own baseball teams. We get to perform our own analysis and come up with our own determinations on how this player will perform, or why he performed a certain way in the past, and how other players with similar profiles will perform going forward. For a baseball lover, this is practically a dream come true.

I encourage every baseball fan and lover of the sport out there to participate in at least one fantasy baseball league in his or her lifetime. Anyone who is passionate about the game should experience the thrill of the fantasy baseball draft, being able to select your own hand-picked self-scouted players. You should experience the thrill of rooting for the Seattle Mariners playing on a Thursday afternoon in Kansas City - just because you own Felix Hernandez. You should experience the thrill of starting Yu Darvish against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, and seeing him throw a two-hit gem with 10 strikeouts, which makes you feel like a professional scout and fantasy baseball guru.

So why do we love fantasy baseball? We have an endless passion for baseball, and fantasy baseball is our portal into this world. We get to learn the game and its intricacies a little bit better every day, which continually expands our love for the game. It never hurts to bring home a stack of cash either. Hold it over your leaguemates all winter long is a definite plus. And oh, that trophy? It will sit on my mantle for a very, very long time.