Happy May Day everybody.
A fitting salutation today because (a) it's the First of May, (b) after last night's debacle, many of us need to be reminded to be happy, and (c) Mayday is the international signal for distress, which Chris Sale put all of us through yesterday.
I'm sure I was not alone. Was there any more of a sure thing than Superstar Chris Sale was going to put away the lowly twins in a style befitting a $10K+ price tag? I could say that the lesson learned was that there are no sure things in this game, but that would be too simplistic. I could go into detail about how, a negative outing from a pitcher, especially a high priced one dooms your team from any hopes of achieving even mediocrity. But the best thing to do is what all great pitchers do when they give up a home run: Shake it off, Forget it, and give the next batter your best pitch.
A more interesting, and certainly more uplifting, item became apparent during the activities on Draft Kings last night.
Last night, the good folks at Draft Kings offered a free roll to win a trip to see the Manny Pacquiao -Floyd Mayweather fight. It cost nothing to join, and you could have won a deluxe prize package worth $3500. Who wouldn't take a flyer on that? I did and finished in 16,247th place. The guy who won played high cost pitcher Stephen Strasburg, took a flyer on James Paxton versus the strikeout happy Houston Astros, and staked his batting lineup on the Twins rocking Chris Sale's world. Good for him, and Congratulations.
With a finish of 16,247th place, with my worst lineup card score ever of 43.95 points, I was curious as to who, and how many folks could have possibly scored lower than me. The answer is 2,695. That's it. More people are killed each year in Hippopotamus Attacks than I outscored last night. It's enough to make you give up, however,
A fitting salutation today because (a) it's the First of May, (b) after last night's debacle, many of us need to be reminded to be happy, and (c) Mayday is the international signal for distress, which Chris Sale put all of us through yesterday.
I'm sure I was not alone. Was there any more of a sure thing than Superstar Chris Sale was going to put away the lowly twins in a style befitting a $10K+ price tag? I could say that the lesson learned was that there are no sure things in this game, but that would be too simplistic. I could go into detail about how, a negative outing from a pitcher, especially a high priced one dooms your team from any hopes of achieving even mediocrity. But the best thing to do is what all great pitchers do when they give up a home run: Shake it off, Forget it, and give the next batter your best pitch.
A more interesting, and certainly more uplifting, item became apparent during the activities on Draft Kings last night.
Last night, the good folks at Draft Kings offered a free roll to win a trip to see the Manny Pacquiao -Floyd Mayweather fight. It cost nothing to join, and you could have won a deluxe prize package worth $3500. Who wouldn't take a flyer on that? I did and finished in 16,247th place. The guy who won played high cost pitcher Stephen Strasburg, took a flyer on James Paxton versus the strikeout happy Houston Astros, and staked his batting lineup on the Twins rocking Chris Sale's world. Good for him, and Congratulations.
With a finish of 16,247th place, with my worst lineup card score ever of 43.95 points, I was curious as to who, and how many folks could have possibly scored lower than me. The answer is 2,695. That's it. More people are killed each year in Hippopotamus Attacks than I outscored last night. It's enough to make you give up, however,
- I actually beat four different people in Head to Head games, with one poor soul scoring a whopping 24.3 points. I certainly was not alone.
- The Fight Package was a free game with only 18,942 participants.
The second part brought me hope. I expect nearly everybody on the site took a shot at this game. Why wouldn't they? And Draft Kings is the second largest site for Daily Fantasy Sports, growing to this size by acquiring two smaller competitors Draftstreet and Starstreet. And let's say, some folks weren't playing and that Fan Duel (The largest DFS website) has twice the participants, that means that less than 100,000 people play DFS today.
And then consider these two facts
- 33.5 million people play fantasy sports (and that number is growing).
- There are an estimated 500 million baseball fans world wide.
This means that we didn't come to the game late. We're still on, or at least very near the ground floor. And just like today, when it appears we are just handing money over to the more experienced players, somewhere down the line, the time and effort we put in today will prepare us for the nearly unlimited supply of new folks coming to hand us their money. There's millions of them on the horizon with open wallets.
That's the lesson, the future for all of us is brighter than we think.
No comments:
Post a Comment