Fake diamonds: how fantasy baseball is ruining the real game.

• Author: Sullivan, Amy

Just one week after we started dating, my boyfriend sat me down and told me he had a confession to make. It's safe to say these are not normally words one wants to hear early in a relationship. In my past, they have been followed by bombshells like, "I have another girlfriend--do you mind?" or "I'm married," or "I'm a Republican" With ghosts of boyfriends past whirling through my brain, I braced myself for the worst. "I'm in a fantasy baseball league," he told me.

If you are a fantasy baseball neophyte, as I was then, you'll understand that I was relieved to learn that this-fantasy baseball?.--was his deep dark secret of shame. It seemed endearingly geeky, making my whip-smart boyfriend a little more human. I was charmed. And although he seemed to believe that the news should upset me--a fact to which I should have paid more attention--I thought of fantasy baseball as simply an extended version of the NCAA tournament brackets I filled out every spring. You pick a few players, you root for them to do well, what's the harm?

Oh, foolish young love. If you are one of the roughly eight million men who play fantasy baseball each year (or are one of the women married to them), you may already be shaking your head at my naivete. And you won't be one bit surprised to hear that as I was assuring my boyfriend that our relationship would survive this revelation, he interrupted me to ask if he could use my computer to check his scores.

Some baseball fans celebrate the start of the season by oiling up their gloves; others make sure their favorite baseball cap is broken in. And then there are the truly demented, those who prepare for opening day by firing up their laptops and consulting their spreadsheets to figure out whether Brian Roberts can produce enough fantasy points on steals this year to make him worth acquiring in the seventh round of their draft. Their numbers are growing, but they must be stopped before they ruin the sport for the rest of us.

The rules and structure of fantasy baseball can differ from league to league, but the basic idea remains the same: Members of each league create "teams" comprised of real baseball players whose statistics are converted into points that yield a total score for the team. For instance, in my boyfriend's league, a single is worth five points, a double 10 points, a solo homerun 30 points, and so on. Points are subtracted for making an out or striking out. So each night, you can add up the statistics of your fantasy players and translate those into a point total. It's something like being a stock picker instead of an actual businessman. The businessman, like the baseball player, has real products and manages a business; the stock picker just selects companies whose price he hopes will go up and score a lot of points for him.

I prefer to distinguish between the two simply by referring to "real" baseball and to fantasy, both of which gear up in March. Most years...