Fantasy Baseball Report: What Must Be Done to Improve the Managerial Experience

You know, losing really does suck.

Even in the Land of Diminished Reality.

The unjust plunking of this rookie Yahoo Fantasy League manager's team to the bottom of the fantasy baseball league standings has placed its talented new skipper in an unenviable place.

I can now feel the pain of my other fellow losers, like the Oakland A's and the Milwaukee Brewers.

There have been times in the past when sports franchises produced poor results on the playing field and yet drew large crowds nonetheless. However, fielding those sad sacks didn't always mean that a given pro sports organization would be unprofitable.

So why, then, can't this be true in fantasy baseball, too?

The fantasy league's powers-that-be need to come up with some rockin' code or something to enable losers like my team to hedge their bets.

Yes, there's FanDuel, seen right here on this very page. But I'm talking about fixes for the full-season fantasy addicts.

What needs to be done is this: beyond the mere shuffling of fantasy players, there should be opportunities for us losers to excel in other areas. The fantasy bigwigs should create new ways for their league's teams to compete in other arenas simultaneously:

• Attendance ... Assigning stadiums to each player's team. Where attendance can vary according to different factors like weather, day or night game, wet t-shirt competitions, Hunter Pence bobble heads, fan protests, etc.

• Concessions sales ... It stands to reason that fans of a last place club like mine could at least propel my last place organization --as the disillusioned drown their sorrows over the results on the field-- to the league lead in beer sales.

• Player salaries ... My cellar dwellers should be able to get credit for salary dumps and other cost-cutting measures. We should be awarded better draft picks in the next round -- and perhaps other perks, as well -- over the upper crust, salary-cap eschewing league leaders.

For the sake of alleviating the nightmares of my fellow aspiring fantasy league managers, all the above innovations should be enacted without delay.