Welcome. Welcome! Welcome to the future. No, not the future where I finished the Neuromancer playthrough, nor the future where I realize that a bunch of home arcade games that made me very, very happy if you follow shunted x-rays into the part of my dick that gets giggly for ten years which made it repulsively glow in the dark, nor the future where the New York Yankees can’t take four random players off the 2007 Blue Jays and be in first place with them. No, this is the future where my fantasy baseball website employs a robot that tells me to go fuck myself.
A little backstory – remember that time someone told you about their fantasy team and there wasn’t an x-ray/cancer producing old television around to point at them? I will never do that to you. I will never go into actual baseball details. Please don’t stop reading. This isn’t actually backstory, but I was hoping you would settle in if I said it was.
All websites are in the process of becoming terrible and the fantasy baseball website at CBS is no different. Rather than just giving us a flat forum to use as a message board, each post has its own little solar system and is its own little rich-content thing. You can’t just click on the message list and see who is calling who names any more. It’s awful and I told CBS but, well, I cursed at their automated e-mail system and it gave me a sharp automated reply.
I think the automated system that handles complaints for CBS held a grudge. I logged on tonight to see this bullshit, auto-posted:
Coming into the game, Mr Bandwidth (editor’s note: that’s me!) had the second fewest points of any team over the last three weeks. This week Coach Robb Sherwin’s squad scored a non-embarrassing number of points, but it wasn’t enough. They got beat by Clown Shoes 204.3 to 233.43.
The loss makes it six in a row for Mr Bandwidth, dropping their record to 2 – 6. The victory makes it four in a row for Clown Shoes, bringing their record to 5 – 3.
Clown Shoes were led by the three-headed-monster of Mike Minor, Johnny Cueto, and Everth Cabrera, who together got 94.3 of their team’s 233.4 points. Quite an improvement for Cueto, who last week scored no points. His performance this week ended a six week streak of failing to perform at a league average level.
Meanwhile, Coach Robb Sherwin will have a hard time pinning the blame for this loss on any particular player. Mr Bandwidth had six underperformers, with John Gast (-1 points) being the worst. That was the 2nd fewest of any pitcher this season.
Mr Bandwidth also had to deal with a bad performance from Alex Avila, who scored 0.1 points. Bad performances are pretty common these days for Avila, who has now underperformed the league average catcher in three straight weeks.
Mr Bandwidth will be going against SodaPopinski’s next week. SodaPopinski’s will bring the league’s top player, Clayton Kershaw, into the game.
Meanwhile, Clown Shoes will take on Finding Nimmo. Clown Shoes has now been an underdog in both the last two weeks, and won both times. Maybe they’ll get a bit more credit going into their next one.
This was generated BY THE CBS WEBSITE ITSELF. That is a 262 word treatise on how much I suck. Reading this analysis, I became aware of how little effort it took the opposing manager to defeat me. I also became the second guy this week to think Johnny Cueto ought to get punched in the face.
I started thinking to myself, Hey! I only had a low number of points the last two weeks because I pulled my pitchers when it was obvious I would lose. Who is this guy (sorry, automated bot) to give me shit about that? And then I realized that I was getting defensive over something not written by human hands. An x86 computer tried to court martial Captain Kirk once, so he went back into time and made sure his spaceship in the new time stream looked like the clenched sphincter of an Apple Store.
Anyway, I’ll probably lose again, so I expect I’ll make it easy for the bot next time, who will just post the word “Ha” 200 times.
Knuckles the Clown