Is There No One on this Planet to Even Challenge Me?

Why I (General Zod) Rule Fantasy Baseball

Citizens of the Planet Houston:

At 6:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday, October 1st, the last out of the Major League Baseball regular season was recorded.  It was at that moment, and only at that moment, that fantasy leagues across the universe could determine their league winners.  It is the beauty – and the challenge – of fantasy baseball that nothing really matters until that last out of the season is recorded into the books, six full months after the first pitch is thrown on opening day.  It is only at that moment that anything actually counts, that scores can be tallied, that each team’s placement across each of the statistical categories – batting average, home runs, strikeouts, wins, etc. – could be measured. This was a special day for me.  It usually is.  Because it was the day I knew I was a Champion once again.  Actually twice again.  

It should be a national holiday.      

As I watched the live scoring update and confirmed that the season was indeed over, I started to conceive in my mind the words you now read. Even if I previously believed I was going to win, to start crafting these words, or to even think these thoughts, before the appointed hour would have surely been a slight to the fantasy baseball gods. After victory was sealed, I made a mental note to tip my cap to my own restraint, yet another in a long line of qualities that leads inexorably to Glory. It was only then that I began to craft this Long-form Taunt. 

In the middle of this reverie, I harkened back to my favorite sequence from the 1980s movie Superman II, a film I return to again and again for inspiration and instruction.  If you have not seen it, the premise of the movie is: what if there was a being who had the powers of Superman, but that being had a singular desire not to save the world (like the son of Jor El, purportedly), but rather to rule the world?  From the first moment this being, this General Zod, first appears on Earth, along with two equally powerful but subservient comrades, it takes him about fifteen minutes to realize how easy it would be to conquer everything and everyone around him. At that moment he declares himself the winner, which leads to some of the greatest proclamations of victory ever uttered in human language, the taunts against which all other taunts would forever be measured. 

I win.  I always win.  Is there no one on this planet to even challenge me?!

It is for this reason that I have always held the Good and Great General Zod in open admiration, so much so that for the last thirty years, I have named all my sports fantasy teams after him: the General Zods. Since fantasy baseball is one of the few things in life that I am genuinely good at, it is one of the only opportunities I get to gloat in polite society. (How do you get your gloat on?  That’s for you to decide, but I suggest you find out.) In any event, if you’re going to gloat, you might as well model yourself after the G.O.A.T. gloat.        

In the real world, unlike the movies, sometimes the bad guys win.  In fantasy baseball over the past thirty years, the bad guy usually wins. And that winner’s name is General Zod.  As each season passed and the trophies started to mount, it became apparent that I, like my namesake, actually do possess certain superhuman abilities when it comes to fantasy baseball.  It has taken me years to identify what it is, what attribute, that has led to such continued dominance over the course of decades.  At the end of this most recent season, it finally hit me, and it happens to be the same thing that drove the General Zod of Superman II.

I want to win more than everyone else.  I want to rule.

At first, adopting the General Zod name was aspirational, which gave me air cover to gloat with impunity, but we could all at least pretend it was just an act.  It was still an open question whether General Zod would become the type of bad guy wrestler who always lost, think Iron Mike Sharpe, or whether he would be a menacing force of evil, like Andre the Giant in the months leading up to Wrestlemania III. It did not take long to realize that not only was General Zod going to be a formidable competitor each season, but that he was someone who was singularly focused on winning. On beating you. And then he was going to rub your nose in it. General Zod became General Zod.

In 2023, the General Zods finished first in my two longest-running leagues, which is pretty much par for the course.  One league was from my school days (started in 1997), which I have won more often than not, including eight (!) times since 2011, and the other from my first job (started in 2001), which I have won seven times. I used to be in another league comprised of neighborhood friends, but that league disbanded.  Want to know why?  Could it have something to do with the fact that the General Zods won the league outright nine times (nine times), including the last three in a row? And then everyone gave up. Cowards!  It seems as if there was no one on that planet who even wanted a piece of the General.    

When most people think about fantasy sports, their minds immediately turn to football.  Fantasy football has become incredibly popular over the past twenty years or so.  It was not always the case.  Fantasy baseball was the first, and dominated this space long before anyone thought of doing the same thing with football.  Back then we called it Rotisserie Baseball.  My friends and I ran our first league back in 1994.  We kept score by hand, in pencil.  I have no idea how.   I suppose we had more mettle back then.

As a side note, fantasy football is fun as hell.  The format of a weekly head-to-head points competition generates great excitement, more excitement than can ever be found in fantasy baseball.  But let’s be honest: because of structural elements of the game, including the reliance on touchdowns, the amount of weekly fluctuation during the sixty minutes of game action, the inevitability of in-game injuries, the thing it measures as much as anything else is fortune.  It’s a game of luck. I know that, win or lose, fantasy football is a game moderately correlated with skill, but minimally correlated with character. 

By contract, fantasy baseball is maximally correlated with character.  By this I mean that a commitment of time and attention to fantasy baseball will yield predictable, demonstrable results. From a modest baseline of knowledge and instinct, even after an auto-draft, you can will yourself to success in fantasy baseball.  How?  By putting in the work necessary to win.  Everyone who plays fantasy baseball knows it.  Ironically, it’s actually how so many losing teams rationalize their mediocrity year to year, excusing their performance because they “just didn’t have enough time.” If these people were employees, they would – and should – be fired. 

Most fantasy baseball team owners demonstrate a level of attention that waxes and wanes throughout the marathon that is a baseball season.  For those who have the will to win, the last month of the season is always an opportunity to rise above the rest of the pack.  That’s because most other teams, even the ones that are high in the standings, can’t help themselves, and start to pivot towards football, whether fantasy or otherwise.  Or they otherwise lose interest in a competitive endeavor that can only yield results if you stick to it for the full six months, but they just don’t have what Gorilla Monsoon would have called the intestinal fortitude to see it through to the last out.   These are the type of people that the Good and Great General openly mocks. “Look, they need machines to fly.” 

Do you know what I did during that last month? I worked harder. The game itself is not complicated. Do better in each category, increase points, win, repeat. What were Prestige Worldwide (6th Place) and Wrecking Crew (7th Place) dicking around with that last month while I was out there tenaciously fighting until the last out? What was Luke Voit’s Car doing when he fell from 2nd to 3rd place in the final week? And what big work emergency caused the Weapon of Mass Destruction to crash down to 9th place? The bottom line is that there is a reason I am the one writing this right now, not you—I mean, them.        

To be fair, I don’t mean to imply that every other losing team does not have character.  Not at all.  I was actually impressed with Eve of Destruction’s (losing) fight to the finish. Some of them do have real character, which I respect.  It’s just that they just don’t have as much character as I have. 

A few years ago, I was having a drink with a former work colleague, rehashing old times.  One tends to have vivid memories of your first work experience in the real world. The topic of conversation veered towards the office fantasy baseball league, which he quit after only one season.  He told me that he left the league because he realized that he would never have the drive necessary to compete with the other teams.  In particular, he said he remembered that he was appalled when someone picked up a free agent player on the morning of September 11, 2001, “literally between the time the first tower came down and the second tower came down.”  He didn’t specifically remember which team did it.  I took a sip of my drink and looked him right in the eye. We stared each other down for an extra few seconds before I broke the tension, “Wow, that’s pretty fucked up.”

What makes a Champion? If you’re interested in learning more, my first bit of advice would be to go watch Superman II.  It’s one of the greatest superhero movies of all time, perhaps the best.  It’s almost perfect, in fact, at least until the end, when Superman cheats and wins. 

Kneel Before Zod!