Most people have hobbies or diversions that help them get through winter. For a large part of my life it’s been football, but over the past 3-4 years it’s been the Tour De France and Fantasy Baseball. More about the tour later, but suffice to say, I spent 2 very late nights on the weekend watching some fairly average racing – bring on the Alps! I’ll be the first to admit that I spend too much time on it, but the Preston Tramriders have been THE cinderella story this year. For the unaware, Yahoo runs a free competition each year where hundreds of thousands of people draft squads of baseball players, whose real life statistics determines your “team’s” fate, pretty much on a daily basis. So, you keep an eye on your 11 batters and 10 pitchers, and hope they do wonderfully for their respective real-life teams. The league I’m in rates each squad on the basis of 10 stats and gives the most points for who is the best in that stat. So, the trick is to get a balanced team together of big hitters, miserly pitchers, and guys who can steal bases. A few weeks into the season I was sitting last on 38 points and didn’t think I had a hope, so I traded players like crazy and within a month, things started happening. I like to think it’s because I know very few of the real life players, therefore I’ve made decisions based purely on statistics, but a big chunk of it was luck. So I can look back on this moment, I post today’s standings (nearly 2/3rds of the way through the season). 