Dream teams

OPENING DAY IS HERE, and for fantasy baseball addicts, things are about to get Uggla.

That's ''Uggla," as in Dan Uggla, a rookie second baseman for the Florida Marlins. Uggla was a star hitter in college, bounced around the minors for a couple of years before rediscovering his stroke, was acquired by Florida in the Rule 5 draft last winter, just turned 26, and-well, maybe I should stop there. If you're not a fantasy baseball owner looking to add some cheap pop to your middle infield this season, then you probably don't care about Uggla's alma mater (Memphis) or how many home runs he hit last year in Double A ball (21) or his family ancestry (Swedish). And if you are, I really shouldn't be sharing my secrets.

In fantasy baseball, participants draft rosters of real-life players, building a team that scores points based on those players' individual statistics. Scoring systems vary widely in complexity, but the most common format involves teams of 23 players and counts five categories of statistics for hitters (such as batting average and home runs) and five more for pitchers (such as wins and strikeouts).

The first fantasy baseball league sprang up among a group of New York journalists around 1980. Today, football and baseball are the most popular fantasy sports, although there is also fantasy basketball, golf, and even bass fishing.

Analysts say more than 6 million people will play in onlne fantasy basball leagues this season, up from 5 million last year. I've been in fantasy leagues since 1990, back before the Internet, when my fellow owners would jot transactions in a notebook kept at a local bar. Since 1997, I've played in a 12-team baseball league headquartered in New York City and stocked with the most zealous baseball fans I've ever met.

At my first draft, someone bid for a pitcher named Eric Plunk. In an attempt to be casually impressive, I muttered, ''Once traded for Rickey Henderson." To my astonishment, a few of the other owners just nodded, and we moved on. My co-owner and I inherited a team called the Bandits, became known for drafting Asian players before they became famous in the US (Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, and, sadly, Hee Seop Choi), and won our league's pennant in 2002 and 2003.

Along the way, I've come to realize that fantasy baseball has changed how I approach the real-life game.

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To the outsider, fantasy sports often look a lot like gambling: You bet on a bunch of athletes whose performance you can't possibly predict with certainty, and if you happen to win, you usually reap some financial prize. But the mindset of the fantasy owner is not that of the gambler. True, it may be difficult to distinguish between the flushed looks of the bettor who took George Mason and the points against Connecticut in the NCAA tournament and the fantasy owner whose closer got out of a jam by pulling the hidden-ball trick. (Todd Jones, a Bandit, accomplished this feat last August.) But there are far easier ways to make $100 than to build and manage a two-dozen-man baseball team over a 26-week-long season.

Many leagues allow teams to keep players from year to year, compelling owners to take the long view about their rosters and to work constantly to fix draft-day mistakes by picking up undervalued free agents and making savvy trades with other owners.

If this sounds like a recipe for obsession, it most certainly is. Join a fantasy league, and you will start thinking like a general manager, not a fan. And there's really no off-season for would-be superstar GMs, is there? You've got to weigh the value of various players you've never seen. To exploit, Moneyball style, the inefficiencies of the small market constituted by your fellow owners. And most definitely to curse real-life managers for not using players to your best advantage. I mean, really, how long until the Reds just let Ryan Freel bat leadoff and play second base and score the 115 runs a season he's clearly got in him?

We fantasy owners compile dossiers the Stasi would have been proud of on dozens of players that casual and even eager fans have likely never heard of-at least not yet. In 1998, USA Today ran a story on Prince Fielder, a 220-pound 14-year-old who was hanging around ballparks with his dad, the slugger Cecil Fielder. I had had Cecil on an old fantasy squad and decided to keep an eye on Prince. In 2002, he graduated high school as a star hitter, and the Bandits acquired him in our league's minor league draft. (Yes, we really have one.) Since then, I've tracked Prince through the minors, from Ogden, Utah, to Beloit, Wis., to Huntsville, Ala., to Nashville. This spring, he'll be the starting first baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers-and for the Bandits. He has no idea I've been looking forward to this for nearly a decade.

Most fantasy participants aren't quite that rabid, but almost all of us develop a hunger for constant updates on how our players are doing. Indeed, fantasy gamers are driving whole new industries and technologies by demanding-and being willing to pay for-real-time statistics over the Internet, on podcasts, and via cellphones. (Major League Baseball, trying to wrest control of the resulting hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues, is in court right now fighting fantasy services for the rights to player stats.)

They are also changing sports journalism: Many of today's savviest baseball writers spend their time evaluating players for the fantasy audience. This spring, ESPN the Magazine (where I work) dedicated 24 pages in one issue to its Major League Baseball showcase-what the magazine called its ''Reality Preview." Its fantasy preview, in a different issue, took up 44 pages.

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All of this obsessive research and close attention to numbers makes you a more knowledgeable but not necessarily better fan. Fantasy baseball drives your attention to results instead of process, and I've felt this get out of hand.

Two summers ago, I went to Shea Stadium to see my Mets on a beautiful afternoon. In the first inning, however, I spied on the out-of-town scoreboard that the Orioles had suddenly gone up, 4-0. For a couple of innings, instead of enjoying the leisurely pace of the game going on in front of me, I sat there hoping that the Bandits' catcher, Oriole Javy Lopez, had hit a grand slam.

And that's not the only way that fantasy can complicate how you root for the home team. Inevitably, every fantasy owner faces awful moments when a member of his fantasy squad is battling his real-life favorite club. When longtime Bandit Ben Sheets faces the Mets, a win-win result is literally impossible for me. I get twisted into hoping for a low-scoring game with lots of strikeouts and a blown save by Milwaukee's bullpen-hey, it could happen!

Most owners work to minimize cognitive dissonance. Many avoid drafting players they genuinely hate-a lot of teams are going to get Barry Bonds on the cheap this year, but, really, would you want yours to be one of them? Others grow so attached to the players they draft that they root for them in real-life, not just fantasy. The fact that Devil Rays DH Jonny Gomes's full name is Jonny Johnson Gomes is the kind of detail that will keep me pulling for the guy. If he happens to homer against the Mets in an interleague game someday, I'll just hope that it won't cost them the pennant.

And if Gomes someday leaves Tampa Bay to sign elsewhere, I won't be crushed the way a Rays fan might be, because I'll still be able to draft him the following season. Fantasy offers participants a way to invest time and emotion, and it also provides the illusion of control. In a sports world where free agency departures, labor wars, and flunked drug tests disconnect fans from their favorite players and teams, that can be pretty important.

It's also important, I've found, to not let the fantasy disconnect you too much from reality. My league has instilled in me not only great appreciation for the statistical feats of my players, but also for friends and relatives grounded enough not to need the fantasy at all. Every time I tell my wife about my team's latest battle with our archrivals, she reminds me, ''Nobody can be taken seriously if their nemesis is called the Slugs."

Peter Keating is a senior writer at ESPN the Magazine, where he writes ''The Biz" column.