A Lesson for You Kiddies

This past Sunday my fantasy basketball season ended. I had made the finals, and it all came down to the last game. My matchup against team “White Bread” was tied 4 to 4. According to the tiebreaker rules if we ended the week in a tie I would win. To make a long story short there were two scenarios in which I could win the league, and he had only one. The only way White Bread could win was if Crash got a steal AND sot over 50% from the field. I liked my chances that both things wouldn’t happen since the Mavericks don’t turn the ball over, and play pretty good defense. So of course Wallace went out and got three steals and shot something like 10/15 from the field. So what happened? My team was way better than team White Bread all year. We played three head to head matchup’s and I won all three of them. Going off the previous weeks stats (which I essentially beat my opponent 9-0) if I had matched up with him the week before I would have won 7-2 and blown him out in six of the categories. Additionally my team was a juggernaut in percentages (shooting 52% from the field and 85.6% from the line the previous week) and his was one of the worse, and yet by at the end of our matchup he had taken BOTH percentage categories. The problem? The first two nights of our seven day matchup Marcin Gortat, Joakhim Noah, Kevin Garnett and Dorel Wright combined to shoot 8/23 from the free throw line. My field goal percentage also sat at an Aga-like .443. It didn’t matter that the rest of the week I shot REALLY REALLY well from the field and the line, and it didn’t matter that I was a much better team. I had dug myself a huge hole early on and had to play too well to catch a lesser team. The point of this long winded, semi-interesting fantasy story? The Red Sox do not want to get swept this weekend. Look obviously baseball’s 162 game schedule makes it easier than other sports to make up large chunks in the standings, but if somehow they started 0-9 and were seven games back, that’s a deficit that will take some pretty hot baseball for a long time to make up. The way the AL East is it’s not as easy as it used to be for the Yanks or Sox to just run off a ten game win streak when you need to-the teams on the “bottom” of the division are just better than they used to be. The Yankees went through it in 2008, it’s not too easy to make up insane chunks of ground, and much like those Yankees, this Sox team has pretty shaky pitching at the back end. I expect the Sox to take two out of three this weekend. I also expect them to be right there at the end of the season in the mix. If some way though they were to lose three this weekend, than this isn’t just an average slow start. This is 0-9. I’m not even sure that 153 games is enough to make that deficit up when you’re fairly close talent wise to the team you’re chasing. It happened to me. Nastradamus was defeated 5-4 by White Bread. Let the Sox be warned.