Full disclosure, to get this off the line today: I am a retired fantasy football player.
I played in a league with a bunch of friends and former colleagues, and it was great fun. We were print newsies who worked together at the Fort Wayne (In.) Journal Gazette back in the 1990s, and, the nature of print journalism being what it is, we'd all scattered to the winds since. Fantasy was a way to reconnect, revive all the inside jokes and have a few laughs.
I don't recall any of the guys ever threatening to slap me. Perhaps we weren't hardcore enough.
Or, you know, major league enough.
Not so Tommy Pham and Joc Pederson, who play baseball for the Cincinnati Reds and San Francisco Giants, respectively, and who last year played in the same fantasy football league.
Apparently, they weren't doing it for the inside jokes and to have a few laughs. Apparently, they saw it as bloodsport -- which is why Pham accused Pederson of cheating by stockpiling players on his bench, and Pederson responded by saying, well, neener-neener-neener, dude, you just don't know the rules.
Fast forward to last Friday, when the Reds were playing the Giants and Pham sauntered over to Pederson and ... slapped him.
"He called me a big dumb poopyhead!" Pham explained.
Well, not really. What Pham really said was Pederson was so cheating (the additional "was-so, was-so" here is implied), and compounded it by saying "disrepectful s***."
"I didn't like the sketchy s*** going on in fantasy," Pham said later. "We had too much money on the line, so I look at it like there's a code. You're f****** with my money, then you're going to say some disrespectful s***, there's a code to this."
A code! Hey, guys, did you know about this? Because no told me about any code. Not that I'm accusing you of keeping it from me or anything. That would be some disrespectful s***.
(BTW, I'm betting right now someone in your league renames his team "The Disrespectful S***s" this fall. My money's on Jim.)
In any event, Pham got a three-day sitdown for slapping Pederson, and the rest of us got yet another reminder that baseball is a game for little boys who never grow up. It's the game of eternal youth, which is why it became America's Pastime for awhile, and then just something to fill the time between NFL minicamps and training camps and Your Team's Fantasy Draft.
On the other hand ...
On the other hand, a fantasy football beef might be the best thing that ever happened to the former Pastime. I mean, what could better restore baseball's relevance?
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