Tagged: crazy fictional teams

May 14, 2009

Mailbag: Can Real Beauty Equal Fantasy Beauty?

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

Toby, it seems like every year some girlfriend
of a friend ends up in the money in my March Madness Pool when she picked her
teams solely by how attractive their players are. How do you think I would do
in fantasy baseball if I simply drafted the best looking guy for each available
roster slot? I’m fairly confident you have not put together a player hotness
ranking, but some enterprising young girl has here. Thoughts?

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Excellent question.
Let’s begin with the list you provided.
That enterprising young girl is now a middle-aged woman, as this list is
from at least 10 years ago. The domain
was a dead giveaway, as Geocities is like the slap bracelets of the internet
world — All the rage back in the day but irrelevant now (PS – I definitely had
a slap bracelet in elementary school.
Bendable magnets wrapped in neon fabric?
Who could resist?). And if you
couldn’t figure it out from the web address, J.T. Snow is the first baseman and
Manny is listed as playing for the Indians.
So it’s a bit dated.

Luckily for you, I’m very secure in my masculinity. So after making absolutely, positively
certain no one could see what I was doing, I hit up Google to try to find
current ballplayers that are swoonie. If
any of you out there go back to check my work, I implore you to make sure safe
search is turned on. I cannot stress
this enough. Some things you can’t
unsee.

After about an hour of running searches that are certain to
lead to some interesting email offers, I was able to compile a pretty decent
list. To my surprise, there are plenty
of message board posts dedicated to this very subject and the hard-hitting
journalists over at Cosmo filed an excellent expose blowing the lid off the
whole topic.

Now that I’ve gathered the player pool, I can consider your
question. The whole notion that some
secretary can win an office pool based on crazy criteria such as hotness of
players, cuddliness of mascot, or closeness of the school to Mecca is a bit
misguided. What really happens is they
end up picking favorites early and then maybe an upset or two later for
some wacky reason that happens to work out.
When asked why they picked it, they end up spouting off some crazy talk
and everyone thinks she was nuts all along.
The truth is they mixed a lot of chalk with a little luck.

So, to answer your question, I think you could draft
a very competitive team filled with nothing but attractive players as long as
you picked them at their proper value.
To illustrate, I went back and cross-referenced the list of attractive
players I compiled with their average draft positions (I know, I know, I’m a
loser, I get it) and came up with the following core team that would cause both
hardcore fantasy players and teenage girls hearts to flutter.

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Continue reading →