The next level: Fantasy fantasy baseball

Originally posted by Mark Leff on Apr 9th, 2008 at 9:53 PM.

The concept goes back to a conversation I had with my girlfriend, who was teasing me for writing not about a game, but about a game based on a game. Two degrees removed from reality, if you will. I pointed out that two degrees is not really very much, that there could be many more degrees of removal from actual baseball. That’s when it occurred to me: fantasy fantasy baseball.

Much like baseball and fantasy baseball, fantasy fantasy baseball is simple but ambitious. Fantasy fantasy owners, rather than drafting teams of baseball players, would draft teams of fantasy owners, and the success of the fantasy owners in their leagues would determine the fantasy fantasy team’s success.

Traditionally, there would be six positions: 5×5 AL-only, NL-only and mixed, and 4×4 AL-only, NL-only and mixed. Owners would select twelve people in their draft, and the starting lineup would include eight: one from each position and two utility.

Scoring would be based on the change in points value of the teams in an owner’s starting lineup. For example, if you have Sam Walker in your lineup one day, and he starts the day with 61 points and finishes the day with 59 points, your team loses two points. I can foresee this leading to some fascinating strategy, in which a fantasy fantasy owner might draft a player they know is lousy, only to bench him when his team has a lot of points and is likely to go down and put them in the lineup when they just cannot get lower.

The key, though, is that a fantasy fantasy owner cannot draft a player to his team that has already done his standard fantasy draft. In other words, you have to pick players not based on how they did in their own draft but on your faith in their ability to play fantasy well.

The best part of fantasy fantasy baseball is that an owner who plays both traditional fantasy and fantasy fantasy can draft himself. I’ve always wondered if athletes play fantasy sports, and if so, are they ever tempted to draft themselves. Now I know.

Then there is one of my employers, Sang Park, who admitted to me over drinks recently that he cheats. He uses his computer hacking skills to control the course of the league. There are some advantages to being a computer geek (in addition to all the girls it gets you, of course). This makes him a quality pick, since, unlike baseball and its new policies on drug testing, fantasy baseball does not have an independent office for punishing cheaters.

Fantasy fantasy baseball is the future of online sports games. It’s just one level above. The distant future may hold fantasy fantasy fantasy baseball, but I’m keeping my hands off of that one.