Ah, the sounds of spring. Birds and their sing-songy melodies flying through the sky. The crack of bat against ball on the baseball diamond. Children giggling as they venture outside on the first warm day of the year. Me and my friends chanting “Meat Day” while rhythmically banging our fists on any hard surface we can find.
Spring ushers in many things, but for me it means baseball season and all the fun stuff that comes with it. My friends and I have been playing in a fantasy baseball league since 2011, and last year, we adopted Meat Day—the tradition of going to Fogo de Chão, an all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse, after drafting our teams to celebrate the end of draft day stress and to commemorate the beginning of regular season stress. (Playoff stress is another beast. We won’t talk about playoff stress.)
I couldn’t remember the exact genesis of Meat Day, so I sent a text to my friend Ryan to ask him.
“Meat good,” he wrote back. “No meat bad.”
This was true, and fair. In our circle, meat IS good. No meat IS bad. But I needed a real answer.
Ryan and his wife, Linda, he said, went to the Fogo de Chão in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, sometime in 2016, and they didn’t know what to expect.
“Needless to say, my eyes and tastebuds opened to a world I never saw before,” he said.
So he sold the idea to our friend Dan, the meat connoisseur of our group, as a day of meat. Then they decided we should go the day of the draft because they knew none of us would have other plans.
Meat Day was born. And it was glorious. Giant chunks of chicken, steak and pork brought directly to you and sliced tableside. Small, light, cheese rolls. Mozzarella balls at the salad bar. It was a perfect confluence of everything I hold dear food-wise. As soon as we paid the bill, we were already thinking about next year’s Meat Day—we decided it should be a once-a-year thing to preserve the gravity of the occasion.
I started to think maybe Meat Day was becoming more important than the actual draft. But then baseball season ended, and then winter came, and spring training began. Game time was approaching. Oh, game time was approaching.
We all take the league pretty seriously. Dan, the commissioner, is by far the most dedicated. He keeps detailed spreadhseets to prepare for the draft and tracks all of our statistics from the first year of the league until now. He even made player résumés for each of us, including records and team names, all separated by year. I’m a career 53-101 with three playoff appearances—those first few years were a little rough for me.
I would get too overwhelmed to check my lineup, or I’d hesitate too much before accepting a trade or adding or dropping a player. It’s a long season! Fantasy baseball is a commitment. It’s six months of updating a lineup daily. I’m bad at making decisions. Indecisiveness and fantasy sports don’t really go together. But I’ve learned to just stop thinking and make a trade or let a player go (though my friends might say otherwise).
My teams have gotten better each year as I’ve done a little more prep work and gotten bolder with adds and drops. We drafted this year on March 19—we somehow managed to avoid any power outages caused by one of the many early-spring snowstorms we faced last month—and I’m pretty happy with my team. I definitely reached too soon for a few players, but overall, I think I did a good job of pacing myself and considering my team’s needs into the later rounds. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell myself when I inevitably return to my 3-19 roots by the end of the season. At least my team name is good (Tommy Kahnle Hear Me, in honor of the Yankee reliever plus a song from The Who’s Tommy).
If anything, we always have a full slate of great names. Mr. Holland’s OPS. Shark Arenado. Betances with Wolves. If a baseball-pop culture crossover pun exists, chances are, one of us has made it.
It’s touches like this—coming up with goofy names, Dan’s dedication to documenting the history of the league, spending literally half the year every year since 2011 talking smack to each other—that make our league what it is. It can be frustrating and annoying, as all fantasy sports tend to be, but it’s our thing. It’s taught me the importance of sticking with things, and it’s helped me perfect the art of creating an idiotic pun. It’s kept me close to friends I’ve known since kindergarten, and we’ve never even toyed with the idea of dismantling the league. The long, cold, snowy winter is finally—hopefully—giving way to spring. Baseball season, our league—for me, it’s the real most wonderful time of the year.
No offense, Christmas.
She Said, She Said is Samantha Sciarrotta’s monthly column for the Hamilton Post.,
