I got my Papelbon!

Ever since I drafted a fantasy baseball team that was totally devoid of Papelbon, I have been kicking myself for not doing whatever it took to get him. The hell with Santana, maybe Paps should have been my 1st pick. How many ducks did Santana slaughter in the offseason? Less than 4402, I bet. Is Santana a Jedi? Well, I think he might actually be a Ninja, but that is not quite as good as a Jedi. Either way, what's the point of playing fantasy baseball if you don't have Papelbon?

So I signed up for an ESPN (Note: It's free and it rocks!) league against random internet Phillies fans for the purpose of getting Closer Boy. And I got him with the 77th pick in the draft.

The live online draft was an interesting experience- I think only 2 or 3 of the other 10 teams were actually live drafting, the rest were on auto-draft mode. So I would draft, using my full 30 seconds, and then the next 8 teams would draft. In 8 seconds! It was a bit disconcerting. Kind of tough to plan ahead at all. But the auto-draft mode also produced some strange results: the auto-drafting teams did not get enough pitchers, and got a lot of redundant positional players. For example, one team has like 4 3B! I think I did pretty well, and I have Papelbon, so I like my chances. My team:

C: Mike Piazza
1B: Richie Sexson
2B: Robinson Cano
SS: Michael Young
3B: Miguel Cabrera
OF: Carl Crawford, Alex Rios, Torii Hunter
Bench: Ian Kinsler, Jorge Cantu, Eric Byrnes

SP: Roy Oswalt, A. J. Burnett, Jason Schmidt, Barry Zito, Derek Lowe
RP: Joe Nathan, J.J Putz, PAPELBON!

Not a bad squad.