VORP, WARP, EQa, oh my…

I have been following baseball for as long as my memory serves. An early institution in my life was the collecting of baseball cards. Collecting, in actuality does not really do it justice. Ordering, sorting, and studying baseball cards is probably a more accurate description. My family still makes fun of me because on a trip to Yellowstone National Park (Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas: My parents’ idea of a good vacation is a title for another for another day) I didn’t spend the hours and hours of driving in my grandparent’s RV enjoying the pristine and awe-inspiring scenery. Rather I sat in the back sorting my 1986 Topps set into teams, then positions, then by batting average, then by players posed sitting, players posed standing, hair color etc, etc. It was a never-ending and strangely captivating process.

While this was the source of entertainment for me in the elementary years, I have never been one of those who remembered the individual, minute, stats for each player. I can’t tell you what Wade Boggs hit in 1985 (.368 – just looked it up ) or John Tudor’s lifetime ERA (3.12) Nevertheless, I have been drawn to baseball for as long as I can remember. My dad grew up a diehard Red Sox fan and he sucked me in painfully early. I still remember my first trip to Fenway Park to see the Sox play the Angels (the last time I was there I snuck into the stadium with a tour group, so I am glad I have grown up). I still have a vivid image of Keith Moreland hitting one out of Wrigley Field when we lived in Chicago. When I was too young to stay up late enough to watch important Sox games my dad would always post the score of the game by the light switch in my bedroom so I could wakeup and immediately know what had happened. Some of these moments are the reference points for much of my childhood.

I don’t pretend to know everything about baseball, but I know enough. More knowledgeable than the casual fan. Less crazy than a totally rabid Bill James-ite. I fall somewhere in between but I can feel stirrings of the crazy.

I couldn’t collect baseball cards my whole life. Eventually it becomes too childish I guess, but I still needed some sort of baseball outlet. And in stepped fantasy baseball. In 8th grade my friend Joe Keiser asked if I wanted to join a roto baseball league. I had no idea what I was doing but one Saturday found myself at a local diner (a couple of adults were in the league, not as creepy as it sounds) drafting a team. I don’t remember much about that initial league except that I had Rafael Palmeiro playing first base for my team. He had a decent season and I knew that I was a baseball genius.

The obsession with fantasy baseball continued for the next 11 years and I would think about fantasy baseball throughout the year. Real baseball fans know that the off-season can be just as captivating as the regular season. But then on October 24, 2004 the fascination stalled. The Red Sox won the World Series and I guess I just felt like I had seen everything. I was through. Exhausted. Baseball had given me everything. I tried joining a new league the next summer and it just wasn’t the same. I found myself not even following it for the second half of the season. And then last summer I joined a league and forgot to show up for the online draft altogether. What had happened to me? I still loved baseball but maybe I was growing up, and growing out of my desire to be a part of as my friend Danny put it so eloquently the other day, “that thing that losers who cant play baseball do to make themselves feel better.”

I watched baseball for sure, rooted for the Sox but a little piece of the juice was gone. I saw myself becoming “that fan.” You know the guy: he knows his team to a certain extent but the rest of the league is a mystery. He can name a handful of superstars but the JJ Putz’s and Austin Kearns of the world are lost on him. I also, in an egotistical way felt like I was no longer going to be the smartest baseball guy in the room. I wasn’t putting in the effort.

And then my friend James called and asked me if I wanted to be part of a league with him and some of his friends. He warned that this was no ordinary league. This wasn’t a league based on the compilation of stats or hitting the most home runs. That was for amateurs. The league was based on strategy, expectation and played through simulated games worked out through an algorithm I couldn’t explain if I studied it for the rest of my life. I was interested enough to agree and shortly I was hooked. I realized there was an entire world of baseball beyond the back of a Topps card or inside the pages of a newspaper. There was VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) or PECOTA Cards. I started spending hours sorting through spreadsheets and talking about 17 year old prospects in the Oriole minor league system. James and I have logged more than a couple of hours discussing player options (he is bringing me up to speed on some of the more obscure players) At one point we became so overly excited about a stat called “Upside” that we failed to realize that we did not even know what it meant or how to interpret it. All we knew was a guy we wanted to pick had a big Upside number and that was all that mattered.

So now I am ready for baseball again. There is a whole new world out there. In a sort of a cliché, I feel like a kid again. I feel like I am in the back of the RV again with my baseball cards and while I might be missing the outside world speeding by it doesn’t matter because man do I love baseball. Even while writing this I refreshed Baseball Prospectus more than a dozen times. There weren’t any new articles to read but not to worry, there is always three minutes from now