I'm usually at my happiest during baseball season, even more so when the Giants are playing well. The Giants are playing very well, in first place in their division, with 20 wins and 12 losses, a .625 winning percentage. That would translate into 101 wins for the season, which rarely happens in major league baseball.
The team swept Atlanta this weekend with three straight wins by the scores of 2-1, 3-1 and 4-1.
But as all baseball fans know, it's early, there are 130 games left. And last year the Giants lost more games than they won and fell far behind their arch-rival LA Dodgers, who won the division easily.
Besides baseball, I love numbers and at least some parts of math. My fantasy baseball team, the Mud Lake Mafia, is off to a rocky start, in 8th place in a league of fourteen teams. I keep the stats for my team and study them every day.
I project forward how the team ought to perform, and frequently drop and add players in order to maximize the team's chances. This is a game -- fantasy baseball -- that makes your brain work. You need math, pattern recognition, intuition and risk-taking.
I believe my team should finish higher in the standings, probably fourth. In order to be better than that, they need to accumulate 5,000 points over the 162 game schedule. (Fantasy baseball tracks actual MLB games, so your "team" is a list of actual players in the league and your results are whatever they do day to day.)
They've not been doing that well. As of yesterday I projected them to only accumulate 4,470 points, which would probably achieve 7th place.
You have more players on your roster than can play each day, so you also have to figure out who to put into the lineup that particular day, depending on the pitcher-hitter matchups and other factors.
Athletes have good streaks and bad streaks, like all of the rest of us. Immersing myself in baseball, fantasy baseball, and math is one of the few ways I have found to find peace in a stressful world.
But I don't like the sound of 7th place. I like the sound of first place.
I also like my garden (above).
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