SubscribeFor fantasy players, it’s all about “me.”
Manny Ramirez is the latest high profile player to be caught up in the web of performance enhancing drugs. Yesterday he was suspended for 50 games.
The sports and regular news pundits are busy decrying another nail in the coffin of the fans’ lost innocence (this was understandbly the top story in the Boston and Los Angeles press). Then there are the implications for the Hall of Fame, which could very well go without inductees when it comes time to consider the likes of Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Raphael Palmeiro (retired) and Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and Ramirez (still active).
But as Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon discussed on Pardon the Interruption, such lofty notions may just belong to older fans. Without being to cynical, I think the many fans — espcially those under 30 — don’t look as baseball as a “way of life” as did their parents and grandparents. To them it’s more a form of entertainment. Just look at how the new stadia are creating amusement park atmospheres: it’s no longer sufficient to have a game going on on the field; now you have to have high-end restraurants and arcade areas for the kids.
Included in this non-entrenched group are fantasy players who don’t care how the Mets or Yankees or Tigers are doing as much as how individual players performed. The team can lose, but as long as your guy went 4-4 with a couple of hmers and a stolen base, who cares?
So what about those players who had Ramirez as their marquee fantasy player? don’t think this is a trivial matter; in some cases there are big bucks at stake in the form of prize money, enough so that the situation has caught the attention of the media, including The Wall Street Journal, which queried Marc Edelman, head of SportsJudge.com (motto: “Real lawyers solving real fantasy sports disputes”) and its accompanying blog. Edelman believes that “generally, trades made after the Ramirez steroids news broke Thursday were nullified. Those made before would stand.”
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