My rite of spring

My Take, by Tim Brodt

Ok, I know that we just had a foot of snow dumped on us in the past week, but if you close your eyes long enough and imagine, you can visualize the green grass and brown dirt that brings baseball players from their winter cover to play America's favorite pasttime.

As we speak, Major League Baseball's spring training is under way in Florida and Arizona, gearing up for an early April start that will carry us through summer and into the fall.

As major league players break off the winter rust and prepare for the new season, they are being watched closely by vast networks of underground couch potatoes who are consumed with an annual ritual called fantasy baseball.

Fantasy baseball, or rotisserie baseball (named after the Rotisserie Bar in New York where the game was invented in the early 1980s) started the fantasy sports craze where everyday Joes pick a team of real players and pit their team's performance against their friends' teams in a league.

How do I know this? Because I am one of those who deviate from reality every summer to grasp a piece of the game I love.

It allows me to boast that I am the owner (that's what we call ourselves) of a baseball team, possessing the likes of Greg Maddux and Gary Sheffield, even if it is only on paper.

Our league got its humble start from my basement in Omaha, Neb., in 1989, when four other friends and I gathered to draft our first teams and begin what is now known as the Paducah Pioneer League.

We all lived in the Omaha area for the first few years of our league, annually gathering to hold eight-hour draft meetings as if they were of the utmost significance. Our draft resembled that of a high-level United Nations meeting -- except for the name calling, swearing and the thick air of cigar smoke that hung like a cloud above us.

Sitting at opposite ends of a Ping Pong table, we guarded our stacks of baseball magazines and newspaper clippings that contained extremely sensitive highlighted portions of player information. The draft was the culmination of countless hours of research that was done to give each of us a competitive edge.

I've come to realize over the years that all the hours of research that I have done really hasn't helped me much, but I still rationalize that I need to do it in order to keep a competitive edge. It compares to the same strategy of following each other off the side of a cliff.

If I had taken the enormous amount of time that I have spent researching players and developing strategy over the past years and channeled it into the pursuit of education, I would have a Ph.D. by now.

As our Air Force careers began to slowly scatter team owners from Hawaii to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other parts around the world, we were able to use the Internet and e-mail to keep our league alive.

Those who have never participated in fantasy sports probably wouldn't understand why people exert such time and effort for something like this. But as the five of us get older and our bones begin to creak more and more with every step, this grand delusion allows us bragging rights without ever having to break a sweat.

That fateful beginning in the spring of 1989 sparked a passion in all of us that has endured through 13 years of dramatic changes in our lives.

Who says guys can't make a commitment?