Let me start by saying I love playing fantasy sports. It’s great for the obvious reasons:

- As a fan, you can’t help but learn more asinine details and statitstics about your favorite sports when you play fantasy.

- It’s a fine excuse to shit talk your buddies year-round.

- With fantasy sports, every game with every team matters.

- Team names like “Manu’s Bald Spot”, “Giambi’s Butt Syringe”, and “Roger Goodell’s Gestapo”.

And those just barely scratch the surface.

My question though…why FANTASY sports? Couldn’t the powers that be come up with a better word than “fantasy”? Something that doesn’t conjure up images of unicorns posters and geeks in the basement playing D&D?

I’ve got a few slightly lame suggestions. 1) Sim-sports (Sim-Baseball, Sim-Football, etc), 2) StatBall, and the real name, 3) Legalized Sports Betting. Maybe our forefathers settled on “fantasy” because it was too hard to come up with something better. Does anyone have a more clever suggestion?

The bottom line is that we shouldn’t feel embarrassed by the name of the game when we tell people what we’re doing every day as we skim the waiver wire and manage our lineups. I don’t know about you all, but I get the occasional raised eyebrow when I mention my affinity for fantasy sports. I like to think it’s got more to do with the fact that it’s called fantasy sports than the fact that my mind is cluttered with thoughts like “Andy Pettitte’s high WHIP makes it hard to explain his low ERA” and “Is Paul Konerko slumping, or is he really having a bad year?”

As my girlfriend likes to say, “At least you’re not playing video games.”