I play in a Diamond Mind baseball league with seven other fellas. Around the house, it has gained no small amount of notoriety as “text baseball.” The links on how I have faired (second worst for two straight years) are over to the left.

There were three young pitchers for the Blue Jays that I wanted to have on my team, because I am a HOMER. When we draft, you always know how they did in the next two seasons. So last year, I drafted Shaun Marcum, Dustin McGowan and Casey Janssen.

They all had terrible 2006 seasons! They were truly terrible. I don’t remember the exact number runs they gave up (in order to keep them, season after season, we have to play them at least 33% of batters they faced in real life) but it was on the order of a million. That gave my team a Pythagorean record of 4-442.

Kidding! The three of them let up 62 runs in 69 innings. But through it all, I knew how the trio fared in 2007 (which we’re going to play after the World Series). Janssen was dominant as a setup guy, and likely moving to the rotation, where he would get a monster amount of innings. Marcum and McGowan were both above average. Couple these guys with Kazmir, Felix Hernandez, Josh Beckett and Gil Meche and I thought I had an outstanding staff.

Meche came back to earth to start the season, but that was fine. Casey Janssen tore his rotator cuff, so he was out for 2008. Marcum was pitching amazingly well, with like a 2.85 ERA when he went on the DL. And Dustin McGowan just tore his rotator cuff as well.

Good thing I gave them all those innings I GUESS.

Did I learn a lesson? Sure – develop one pitcher if you like, over the course of a season, but otherwise it’s just not worth it. We play six games a week for about 14 weeks and it takes about 50 minutes to play a game. That’s a lot of time to invest in “next year.” Well, not so much the time, as the time of the games plus the time picking the keys off the floor and putting them back into a punched-up keyboard.