Going Beyond Fantasy Sports and Stats

For or a long while now I have ranted against fantasy sports, mostly because it consumes a person’s life, requiring countless hours of your day to research, assuming that you want to do decently and win some money. But more than anything it makes sports into a mere numbers-crunching excise.

While I don’t  judge if you play a fantasy sport, I think it’s important for people to understand that sports can often be a lot richer when you go beyond the numbers.

Many sports fans all over the Globe get involved in a fantasy sports leagues ,/Picture courtesy of http://www.pixabay.com

 —Jame Wilson—

Instead of simply enjoying the game, we start to abjectly the players, thinking things like “How many yards did Matt Ryan  get for this week? I really need some fantasy points for my fantasy team.” Really people. whatever happened to seeing athletes as human beings?

Not everyone has forgotten the human element of professional sports or sports in general. A while back, I scanned a Sunday edition of a New York Times and saw an article about how Los Angeles Dodgers Pitcher Clayton Kershaw went on a mission trip to Africa in January 2011. Stories like this interest me because they display the personal side of athletes.

Don’t get me wrong, I use to love the raw sports statics. When I was in middle school I spent many a Saturday on baseball performance.com reviewing old players’ stats inside and out. This was not a great idea for my social development at the time, but I managed to compensate  for it later on.

Once I even joined a fantasy baseball league, although I never  kept up with it.  In order for me to win the league (weather for a cash reward or something else), I would have I would have needed to sit in front of the computer screen on a daily basis, tracking the likelihood that a given hitter or pitcher was going to get on a hot streak. Even as a middle school student that just seemed like too much time.

But fantasy sports leagues are not completely bad. One benefit I see is the camaraderie they inspirer in groups of people. Families and friends gather around the television on Sunday, eagerly anticipating how the players and teams on their fantasy squads will do. It becomes a fun and intense personal competition. But whatever happened to the days of cheering for athletes for more than just their raw stoical performance?

I once wrote a feature on a high school classmate of mine that failed an art class during our sophomore year and could not play soccer that spring. Devastated  this  soccer player became  the laughingstock of the school. It is pretty puzzling how someone could fail an art class, but it happened. However, he and his teammates won a state championship the year after that (once his grades improvised), and he earned a Division I soccer scholarship.

The last time I checked the athletic site for his college’s soccer team, he was a stoical ghost because he hadn’t played much and hadn’t scored many goals and such. Still, I find his story interesting because it’s a testament to the hard work that goes far beyond simple sports statistics.

While I don’t  judge if you play a fantasy sport, I think it’s important for people to understand that sports can often be a lot richer when you go beyond the numbers.