Well....

Baseball is a different game, obviously, than basketball or football.

One of the things we talked about last year when playing "Salary Cap" basketball was that it was almost strictly a numbers game.

The players are fairly consistent, at least much more so than in baseball. Except in rare cases, a guy who averages 20 PPG and 10 rebounds is gonna come pretty close to his 20 & 10 every night. A Point Guard who averages 10 assists is gonna get his 8-12 assists as long as he plays his 35 minutes.

So it becomes a game, really, of trying to fit the greatest number of expected points each day into a lineup that stays under the salary cap. It really doesn't matter who the players are. You could just give us the stat lines for all the centers and leave out their names, and we could pick a reasonably decent team.

The game was, more than anything, a mathematical exercise. In fact, we had a few players in last years game who professed to know nothing about basketball past Kobe, Shaq, and a few of the big names, and, while they didn't win, they didn't embarrass themselves either.

Baseball is different though. The best hitters go 0-4, the best pitchers come up with minus totals, and the cheapest players sometimes explode for big nights. There's a lot more study required in the baseball game, and a lot more luck involved as well.

There are also some nuances in the strategy which I won't share here, but which I can tell from looking at their selections every day, that the better players have picked up to some extent or another, while the weaker players haven't.

But the biggest single factor that leads to success is, as we've discussed before and what FS pointed out so beautifully in yesterday's rant, that you have to be prepared to play every single day.

DB and I were separated by 159 points over the course of more than 180 days. That's less than a point a day difference.

Having the Milwaukee PS and Ben Sheets on Monday, and then not changing your team and winding up with a Wes Obermueller on Tuesday is the sure road to ruin. Missing a doubleheader on a day when the guy in front of you scores 90, and you get 40, can be suicide.

In two years, we've played four "halves" of fantasy baseball, and DB, JG, and myself have finished 1-2-4, 1-2-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-3. The biggest single reason for that record of consistency, I believe, is that betwen the three of us we've missed a total of three days in two years.

Also, the history of our game has been that once people start to fall further and further behind they tend to lose interest and stop playing. You don't have any track record yet, so we'll see. Perhaps the salary cap basketball game will give us a better idea.

Can you crack the top three? I guess it's possible. I certainly wouldn't completely rule it out. But it won't be easy.