Cornucopia

In the Hunger Games series, the Hunger Games opens with the “contestants” starting in their own little pods but then being released into a central area with other contestants, who happen to be trying to kill each other and as many as they can. This central area also contains various items that the contestants need, including food, water, supplies, and most importantly of all (especially for the whole killing part) weapons. This happens in both the first 2 movies of the Hunger Games movies (great movies, btw, and follow the books they are based on to a T, which is refreshing) and illustrates a very important concept: The Opening Rush. Don’t get too greedy here: you need to pick up something, but the better the idea there is, the more risk you incur to get it and in winning the battle, you might lose the war. Chinese Proverb= 因小失大.

This is exactly the lesson at this point of the season in fantasy baseball. Most teams are 2 or 3 games into a 162 game season, basically like opening night of an NBA season. It happens every year: guys get hot in the first few games of the season and seem to have a LOT of value. This includes Justin Smoak(7RBI) , Emilio Bonifacio (4 steals already!) and Alejandro DeAza, perennial not-top 200 players who are getting picked up at a prodigious rate in fantasy leagues. The Closer Carousel also seems to be at full speed at the beginning of the season, with Nate Jones being replaced on Monday morning unexpectedly, fantasy owners not finding out Jim Henderson had been replaced by Frankie Rodriguez until Rodriguez actually came in for the save (a truly “Huh?” moment for Henderson owners, me being one of them), Jose Valverde taking over for the injured Bobby Parnell, Jim Johnson imploding twice already, Josh Fields leading the Houston saves committee, etc., etc. Bottom line, there are a LOT of seemingly valuable assets on the waiver wire. And some of them WILL actually pan out to have great season: Check Josh Donaldson and Matt Carpenter last season. But just be selective in these adds. Don’t give up the farm or blow your FAAB (the most devoted fantasy baseball managers of course know this as Free Agent Auction Budget). And as we found out with Katniss in Catching Fire (SPOILER ALERT!) it was better that she wound up with a small knife and backpack during the cornucopia than going for her coveted bow and arrow, which she might have been killed while getting. Final cliché: Baseball is a marathon, not a sprint, and nothing is truer than right now during this “Opening Rush”/Cornucopia stage. Get something out of it. Pick up the scraps.

I’ve written about the “Opening Rush” in dating too, especially when meeting someone for the first time. The first 5 minutes of that frenzied kind of feeling is pretty cool, but it’s nothing compared to what an opening rush of dodgeball is like for advanced teams. In most dodgeball leagues, there is an opening rush where players from both teams literally run up to the middle line for the balls, meeting and then engaging in battle.  The rules basically facilitate an early slaughter where players have balls really close to their opponents, and it gets really chaotic, with balls flying everywhere and people going out left and right. I love the Dodgeball cornucopia, especially if you can survive it. Even if you don’t, the sheer exhilaration and adrenaline rush of that is hard to compare, I often play back the memories of how fast things move later on. Bullets are flying in the air, your dodgeball life is very much in danger, you have to kill (get someone out) or be killed (get out). I can only imagine how the tributes in the Hunger Games felt, with their lives on the line.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan