The phrase "I've got to be honest with you" is never good news.
It's never followed by, "You've won the lottery!" or "You're my favorite person."
So, receiving two phone calls within a week from fellow fantasy owners who start the conversation with that phrase and follow with an assessment of your fantasy team is generally not what you want.
Especially if you write a fantasy baseball column.
Like a race car driver getting a ticket for driving too slowly, or a boxer getting beaten up in a bar fight, a fantasy columnist with a bad fantasy team raises eyebrows. And rightly so. It's deliciously ironic.
Everybody wants to pile on, and why not? In April, I could hide behind the notion that it was too early to judge; now, it seems almost impossible to move into contention without wholesale changes to my current team.
I?ve got to be honest. I am the not-so-proud owner of a bad team.
Thanks so much for your honesty, all you fantasy well wishers.
I made several fatal drafting errors. Mostly, they involved buying into the hype of high-risk, high-reward players. Taking a couple of flyers is a good idea; filling your team with them, apparently, isn't quite so smart.
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MISTAKE NO. 1
Delmon Young, OF, Devil Rays
It's tempting in a draft to exploit your knowledge of up-and-coming players, and call out names such as Young and Alex Gordon before their time. Young is a future star, but we've seen this too many times before to be surprised; last year, Jeff Francoeur struggled at times, and now he's one of baseball's finest producers. That's Young next year.
