This Is Just to Say
This piece isn’t 100 percent about daily fantasy sports. At the same time, it isn’t not about DFS either, and those two things are basically the same thing.
Where No One Has Gone Before
I’m not sure where this piece is going, but I’m sure that we’ll get there.
We’re in the middle of a great 24-hour period for sports fans.
On Monday Night Football, we got to see ‘quarterback’ Brock Osweiler return to Denver and lose heinously to the team with which he ‘won’ a Super Bowl last year. There’s nothing I love more than watching sh*tty QBs have their sh*ttiness exposed by their former teams. That fact probably says a lot about me as a person. I’m an *sshole.
Tonight we get the beginning of the NBA regular season and the first game of the World Series, which features the Indians and the Cubs. Seriously, the Indians and the Cubs.
After decades of being the Midwest sports equivalent of New Jersey, the city of Cleveland might have two championship teams in the same season. And the Cubs: What really needs to be said about the Cubs?
The Indians, Cubs, and Pop Culture
Think of it this way: In the ’80s and ’90s, when seemingly any screenwriter could walk into a Hollywood studio, say something like, “I’ve got an idea for a sh*tty baseball movie,” and walk out with a contract, studio executives bothered to make four movies featuring the Indians and Cubs in a five-year span:
• Major League (1993): The Indians suck and then somehow make the playoffs.
• Taking Care of Business (1990): A convict breaks out of jail to see the Cubs play in the World Series — because in the ’90s both of those ideas seemed equally (im)plausible.
• Rookie of the Year (1993): A kid who sucks at baseball injures his arm and then becomes the best player on the Cubs.
• Major League II (1994): The Indians suck and then somehow make the World Series.
I’m not making this up. In the ’90s, it was just a cultural thing to think of the Indians and Cubs as the armpits of the MLB corpus. That opinion was in mainstream culture. It was in our movies. It was even in our video games. In 1994, Nintendo released Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I’m probably the best player in the galaxy at that game. No big deal.
At one point I knew almost every player on every team on that game: Their strengths, their weaknesses, and whether I could sweep a seven-game series with them when playing against other bros for six-packs of Coors Lite in a college dorm room.
When I wanted to give myself a challenge but ensure that I would still win handily, I used the Cubs. I once hit 80 home runs in a 162-game season with Sammy Sosa. Again, NBD. It’s not like that was my personal record — which is 83 with the unlikely Kevin Maas in a season in which he and Danny Tartabull (79 HRs) had a real Roger Maris–Mickey Mantle thing going. Paul O’Neill pulled a Brady Anderson as my leadoff man and hit 50 that same season. Again, I don’t like to brag.
And not once did I ever f*cking play a series as the Indians. Ever. Once, I bothered to look at their lineup, bench, and bullpen and thought, “I’m good, but I’m not that good. Besides, there’s a six-pack of almost beer on the line.” I was 11.
All of which is to say that it’s pretty cool that tonight we get to see these two teams — the baseball whipping boys of ’90s pop culture — play against each other in the World Series.
But I Digress
I had a Milton professor in grad school who was an Indians fan. I’m a Rangers fan. We often talked about baseball and about how the Rangers had stupidly let Travis Hafner go and about how Hafner was just one in a line of lefty sluggers the Rangers had stupidly let go throughout the last decade: Hafner, Adrian Gonzalez, Mark Teixeira, Chris Davis, and oh my god I can’t believe how angry I’m getting typing this sentence.
Anyway, when the Indians won the American League Championship Series, I emailed my former prof just to say congrats, because that’s what you should do for the fan of a sh*tty franchise. Unless his team beat your team to get there. When that happens, you just tell every Blue Jays fan you see to go f*ck himself and to root for a real team from a real country ’cause ‘Murica and I’m totally joking.
My prof emailed back, saying this:
As much skill as you can train folks to have, I’m more struck than ever with how much luck there is in the game. The Indians are good, and Terry Francona has done a great job. But they have been lucky, too. I think that a mere quarter of an inch changes the angle at which a ball leaves the bat, to say nothing of a quarter of a second in the timing of a swing. A lot comes out in the wash over 162 games, but in a short series (even seven games) there’s not much predicting.
And that got me thinking.
My Response
Here was part of my response to his thoughts on luck in baseball:
The topic of luck in (fantasy) sports is one that I think about a lot. There’s definitely skill involved in all sports — and I’ve become convinced that there’s a skill to being in the position to benefit from luck — but randomness definitely is a part of all sports, and lots of people (I sense) would prefer not to think about that.
Take baseball: People who play daily fantasy sports often love MLB — not because they actually like the game (few of them watch it) but because the sample of data is so large and predictive. Some data goes back over 100 years, and within each season there are 162 games to consider just for each team. Hundreds of at-bats per hitter and thousands of throws for many pitchers. With that much data to inform decisions and so many opportunities to play, sharp DFS players can often avoid the negative consequences of randomness over the course of the season.
But baseball also has pitchers, the players who have the most outsized impact on the outcome of any team sport. So you’re right. Over a season, a team’s record is probably pretty representative of what it is. But over a seven-game span — especially one in which a team can use its ace in three games — anything can happen. In baseball, eight guys can have a solid game, but if that ninth guy is off there’s almost no chance that they’ll win. A basketball team can still win if its point guard or center is having a bad game. A football team can still win a game — even a Super Bowl — if its quarterback is off. A hockey team can overcome poor play by its goalie. But baseball teams rarely overcome bad outings by their pitchers. I’m amazed by how much pitcher performance and ability matter.
And I guess this is where I write some thoughts related to DFS.
Singularities
What I was talking about in my email with my grad school prof was essentially the concept of singularity: The extent to which one player can predominate within the space of a team. Some singularities are good. The most awesome people I’ve had the privilege to know could be described as singularities. Massive and unique personalities that all have the potential and drive to improve their solar systems.
But not all singularities are good. There’s a dark side to the concept of singularities.
In physics, a singularity is a point where the space-time continuum has essentially collapsed into itself — where infinity and/or nothing is the norm. If we’re thinking of the Miltonic universe, a singularity is something akin to the never-ending nothingness of the cosmos before it’s differentiated and the world’s created. Think of a black hole. That’s a singularity.
What I love most about team sports is the way that single performances — or, more precisely, performers — can determine everything. Bill Belichick might be God, but Tom Brady is the Son. He’s the one who redeems this Patriots offense. The Cavaliers are world champions, but LeBron James is Atlas, putting the world of his team on his shoulders when they needed him to carry them. (P.S. I can admit when I’m sort of wrong.) The Dodgers are a pretty good baseball team — but if they were a band their name would be “Clayton Kershaw and the Heartbreakers.”
Black Holes
Singular players can also be DFS black holes. And although black holes can be cool in theory — if not for the black hole in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to see a second actor make a douche bag out of James T. Kirk — in general black holes should be avoided.
The DFS black hole is the failure of the “sine qua non,” the player without whom nothing can function. If a QB sucks, he tends to sabotage his entire offense, capping the upside of almost every player to whom he distributes the ball. (Cough, Osweiler, cough.) If LeBron has a bad performance — if he’s not scoring, assisting, rebounding, defending, and keeping his team in the game — his teammates are likely to be impacted negatively.
The DFS black hole is that which sucks everything close to it into annihilation.
I think that a big key to success in life is simply to avoid catastrophe. To stay alive. It’s not a coincidence that Warren Buffett‘s first rule of investing is this: “Don’t lose money.” It’s not “Get f*cking wealthy by leveraging everything and trading the sh*t out of complex derivative products and then do blow off of multiple strippers.” It’s “Don’t lose money.” In DFS, avoiding the players who destroy lineups might be more important than rostering the guys who provide value. If you have a strong investing discipline and militantly seek out reasons not to roster players, it will be pretty hard for you not to end up with players who facilitate DFS success.
NBA is just starting, NHL is still young, PGA is entering its third week of the 2016-17 season, NFL is not quite at its midway point, and MLB is about to conclude its 113th season with either the Indians or the Cubs as World Series Champions. Now seems like a pretty decent time to remember that sometimes the key to living is to focus less on thriving and more on surviving.
When voyaging the space of DFS, the goal isn’t to go boldly where no one has gone before. It’s to avoid flying the USS Enterprise into a black hole when traveling warp speed.
Stating the Obvious
Full disclosure: When I started this piece, I wasn’t planning on talking about Star Trek.
Of course . . .
- You probably know that.
- The odds of my talking about Star Trek in any given piece are always fairly high.
Frankly, we’re all lucky that I didn’t spend 1,000 words talking about Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
P.S. Check out our updated Player Models, 1) which can help you survive, and 2) to which I am contractually required to link. #NailedIt
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 91
This is the 91st installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation. Previous installments of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page.
