The author thought he could take advantage of his clubhouse access and inside information to win the toughest Rotisserie league on the planet. He even tried to "manage" Doug Mientkiewicz

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By Sam Walker

From Fantasyland by Sam Walker, published by Viking, March 2006, reprinted by permission of the author.

Before the 2004 season Sam Walker was a happily married sports columnist for TheWall Street Journal. He wore a tie to work, maintained a social life and showered on a frequent basis. But by the time that season was over, Walker had spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money, traveled more than 20,000 miles, interrogated hundreds of major league ballplayers, scouts, managers and executives, skipped weddings and funerals, and severely tested the patience of his family and friends.

How did this happen?

Though he'd never played Rotisserie baseball, Walker had accepted an invitation to compete in Tout Wars, an elite, 12-team fantasy league that featured some of the nation's most seasoned statistical analysts and baseball savants. Along the way he hired a team of advisers ranging from a NASA mathematician to a baseball astrologer and set what is probably a world record for asking baseball players inappropriate questions. By the final month of the season he had become a disheveled, caffeine-addled insomniac who was willing to do anything to help his fantasy team, including, in some cases, actually trying to "manage" the major leaguers on his roster. The following is an excerpt from Walker's new book, Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe (Viking, $25.95).

In the middle of May, with my team safely ensconced in second place, I reloaded my beat-up wheelie bag for a trip to Toronto. With the Minnesota Twins due to arrive there for three games with the Blue Jays, I'll have nine of my players in the two dugouts, the highest concentration at any ballpark so far this season. This will be my first chance to try my hand at "managing" my team.

In addition to bringing along a pile of provocative statistics to discuss with my guys, I'm also beginning a campaign to build team morale. Last month, armed with color markers, my assistant, Nando Di Fino, had sketched up an official team logo. In it, my team's name, the STREETWALKERS BASEBALL CLUB, appears in navy script above the silhouette of a pimp in a leisure suit with a cane, a fedora and a garish robe with fur trim. I had the logo printed on 40 gray T-shirts, nine of which are bundled in my suitcase for distribution. They look sharp.

Interviewing ballplayers at spring training was one thing. But since the season began, I've learned that talking to the players on my fantasy roster is an entirely different kettle of fish. My conversations with a few that I'd caught up with at Yankee Stadium had taught me that saying, "Dude, you're on my Rotisserie team," wasn't much of an icebreaker. When I met one of my pitchers, Aaron Sele of the Anaheim Angels, all I could think to do was ask him for a favor.

"Can you take it easy on [David] Ortiz and [Bill] Mueller?"

"Those are your boys?" he asked.

"No, those are your boys."

"Sure thing," he said, laughing.

If I really wanted to have an influence on these guys, I knew I'd have to be more than a groupie. To understand them, to really get inside their heads, I'd have to come to the ballpark prepared to ask intelligent questions.

I arrive at the SkyDome just before batting practice and make my way to the visitors' clubhouse, where the mood is loose and upbeat. Players slouch around on stools and worn leather sofas while Outkast thumps from the stereo. The Twins have been knocking the cover off the baseball lately and have opened up a comfortable lead in the AL Central.

Directly below an overhead television, I spot my first baseman, Doug Mientkiewicz, who's perched on a folding chair and spitting tobacco juice into a Gatorade bottle. Mientkiewicz was born in Toledo, where his father was a walleye boat captain on Lake Erie. He's sort of a throwback: He doesn't wear batting gloves, he keeps his pants pulled up high on the calf, he blows giant pink bubbles and he never walks off the field with a clean uniform. For this he's earned the nickname Dougie Baseball. But he may be best known as the owner of one of the most confounding surnames in the history of professional sports. (It's pronounced ment-KAY-vich.)

Most players, when I tell them they're on my Roto team, respond with a nod or a smirk or something diplomatic like "Cool." But after listening to my spiel about Tout Wars, Mientkiewicz says something else entirely.

"Sorry to hear that."

I laugh, assuming it's a joke. It's not.

"I tell everybody the same thing when they say I'm on their fantasy team," he says. "I'm like, 'Well, you're an idiot.' There are so many guys I'd take over me."

As Mientkiewicz is apparently well aware, he's a baseball misfit -- not just in Rotisserie terms but in the real player market, too. He's a first baseman better known for defense than power, a guy who won a Gold Glove in 2001 but has never hit more than 15 home runs. At the Tout Wars auction I picked him up for $12, which was a bit below his actual statistical value. It's not that I'd caught my opponents sleeping: Most Rotisserie general managers, like their big league counterparts, prefer to have power at the corner infield positions. "It's a shame you don't have a category for defense," Mientkiewicz says, "because I know I'd be one of the first couple of guys picked."

As Dougie Baseball's make-believe manager, my biggest concern is his batting average, which has been skidding. After hovering at .311 in early May, it has plunged to .271, which, since a high batting average is about all he's got to offer my team, is a genuine cause for alarm. In their farm system the Twins have a big Canadian first baseman named Justin Morneau, and he has been pounding home runs at a savage pace. If he's not careful, Mientkiewicz could wind up parked on the bench. "I'm going through a stretch where I look out from the plate and I see a big glove," he tells me. "Unless I hit it over the fence, it seems like everyone's catching it." Still, he says, he's 60 points ahead of where he was this time last year, when he finished at .300, "so let's not panic."

After hearing this I dig through my notes and pull out something I never intended to show him today: a list of possible Mientkiewicz trades that I've been kicking around. In general, the idea of asking a professional athlete to help you expunge him from your fantasy roster seems like a good way to get smacked in the head. But for some reason I get the feeling Mientkiewicz is the exception. I hand him the list.

"What do you think?" I ask.

"If you want power, Jody Gerut's a good one; he's going to hit 20 homers," Mientkiewicz says, scanning the paper matter-of-factly. "Jose Cruz is going to hit too, not for average but a lot of pop. Matt Lawton's having a great year too, as long as he stays healthy."

When he's finished, I hand him a jersey. "Team T-shirts?" he says, holding it up to the light. "All right!"

As I turn to go, Mientkiewicz shouts some parting advice. "Hopefully you'll get me traded sooner rather than later!"

Two months after the trip to Toronto, the Streetwalkers have slipped to fifth place and my attempts to trade Mientkiewicz have gone nowhere. Yet on July 26, five days before the major league trade deadline, I hear some interesting news: The Twins are apparently trying to do the same thing.

Given that Mientkiewicz is hitting .246 while Morneau, the 23-year-old prospect, has been poking home runs ever since his call-up on July 16, it's hardly a surprise that the Twins are looking for takers. Even less surprising is that Mientkiewicz chooses to deal with these rumors by making lots of embarrassingly candid statements. "I feel like a ship with no harbor," he tells reporters.

After a few days of his public moping, terms like "clubhouse cancer" and "martyr complex" pop up in posts on the TwinsGeek chat room. "It would behoove him to just shut up," says another poster.

Sad as I am to see one of my players on the trading block, that situation also presents an opportunity. Reports say the two teams most interested in Mientkiewicz are the Boston Red Sox, who would probably not play him every day, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, who surely would. In Rotisserie terms I'd much rather see Mientkiewicz go to Pittsburgh, where he'll be a mainstay in the lineup and a more productive member of my Rotisserie team.

That same afternoon I place a call to my chief of statistics, Sig Mejdal. By day Sig is a NASA biomathematician whose job is, among other things, to use the most advanced mathematical tools on the planet to determine the optimal sleep schedules for astronauts on the International Space Station. But after the whistle blows, he devotes the rest of his energy to the statistical analysis of baseball and, at least for this season, trying to help me win Tout Wars.

Together, Sig and I begin to pore over the numbers, looking for some compelling and heretofore invisible reason why the Pirates should acquire our $12 first baseman. After wading through some lukewarm indicators, we strike pay dirt. Sig notices that the Pirates' home infield is a difficult surface to play on. In the last two seasons there were 42% more infield errors committed at Pirates home games than Pirates road games, which is the biggest such deviation in baseball. Nonetheless, the pitchers on the Pittsburgh staff have a strong tendency to give up more ground balls than fly balls. So not only do the Pirates have a tricky infield surface, but they've also built a pitching staff that exacerbates the problem. If there's a team that needs a Gold Glove first baseman, it's this one.

Hanging up with Sig, I dial a number with a 412 area code.

"Dave Littlefield," a voice says.

I'd talked to Littlefield, the general manager of the Pirates, during the winter meetings in December. I'd told him about Tout Wars and my Rotisserie team, and thankfully he remembers the conversation. Right away I tell him that I'm calling to nakedly lobby on behalf of one of "my" players, Doug Mientkiewicz, whom I'd prefer to see in his dugout rather than Boston's.

"O.K.," he says.

I open by asking about the trade talks. Littlefield says he has done all the due diligence on Mientkiewicz, looking at scouting reports, medical factors and personal attributes. The sticking point, as he puts it, is "the financial piece." This is Littlefield's way of saying that the shoestring Pirates aren't thrilled about paying the $3.75 million that Mientkiewicz is slated to earn in 2005.

"Well, here's something you might find interesting," I say. When I'm done explaining the team's infield conundrum and the obvious merits of adding a solid defender, Littlefield doesn't hang up. In fact, he seems intrigued. "You bring up some good points about ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratios on the staff," he says. "And I didn't know that figure about more errors at the ballpark. That's significant." Littlefield pauses. "Interesting stuff," he says.

From the looks of the paper the next day, my gambit seems to be working. Reports say a deal between the Pirates and the Twins "appears close," and that night Mientkiewicz is pulled from the Minnesota lineup, prompting speculation that a trade is imminent.

Then, bubkes.

In the days that follow, I hear conflicting news. Some reports say the Pirates are in the running; others say they're out. One says the Twins are having trouble finding a serious trading partner for Mientkiewicz. (I can relate.) "I find it hard to believe nobody wants me," he tells the writers.

On Saturday, July 31, the major league trade deadline passes with barely a murmur. At the Metrodome in Minneapolis, Mientkiewicz, having heard nothing, dons his uniform for batting practice, assuming he's still a Twin. But right before game time, he's summoned to the manager's office, where he's told that he's part of a seven-player deal among four teams that has delivered him, just as I feared, to the Red Sox. The Pirates, unable to justify the dollars, had passed.

If there's any consolation to this lousy news, it's that the sting of my defeat is nothing compared with the ordeal Mientkiewicz is about to endure.

In the clubhouse he peels off his white home uniform for the last time after nine years in the Twins' organization. He'd already said his goodbyes and packed his gear into two duffel bags, fully expecting to be loading them on a plane that night. But there would be no trip to the airport. The Red Sox aren't just Doug's new team, they're also the Twins' opponent tonight.

So with a couple of clubhouse kids carrying his bags, Mientkiewicz leads a sad procession through the swinging doors of the laundry room, where the machines clack and hum, through a second pair of doors and into the visitors' locker room. "Toughest 12-foot walk I've ever had to make," he called it. On the Red Sox lineup card he sees that in a matter of minutes he'll be starting at first base and batting sixth. By the time the Boston equipment manager finishes steaming all 12 letters of his name on the back of a Boston jersey, the game has already started. "At least they spelled it right," he says.

When Mientkiewicz comes to the plate at the Metrodome for the first time in a gray road uniform, his longtime Twins teammate, pitcher Brad Radke, steps off the mound and tips his cap while the hometown fans give Mientkiewicz a stirring ovation. Then he grounds out to Justin Morneau, the guy who stole his job.

In the seventh inning Mientkiewicz singles to center and finds himself standing on first base next to Morneau. Since spring training the two had grown accustomed to the awkwardness, but this was different. As Mientkiewicz would tell me later, the conversation went something like this: "You know," Morneau said, talking from the side of his mouth, "if you would have done that sooner, maybe you'd still be over here."

Mientkiewicz shot him a look. "If you would have caught some ground balls in spring training, maybe I'd have been gone at the beginning of the season."

On Sept. 17, with the season winding down, the Red Sox have rumbled into the Bronx for another episode of their rivalry with the Yankees. The series has attracted such a caterwauling horde of media that the only seat I can find before the game is a folding chair in the basement media room hard by the gentlemen's crapper.

After squeezing through the crowd to the Boston clubhouse, I see a familiar face: Doug Mientkiewicz. He's slumped over, looking a little green, sitting inside a circle of fluid containers that he has arranged around his chair like pillars at Stonehenge. It's been seven weeks since he was traded to Boston, where, as I feared, he has been used mostly as a defensive replacement in the late innings. Today he's battling the flu.

"Hey, Doug. What's up?"

"Have you traded me yet?"

"No."

"Well, then, that's your own fault."

Mientkiewicz takes a sip of a blue concoction in a clear plastic bottle and gargles it down. "You're not winning," he continues. "I guarantee you you're not winning. You're not even good, are you?"

I shake my head.

"Look," he says, holding out a palm, "give me your money. Don't just give it to anybody!"

This is the first time I've seen Mientkiewicz since his trade from the Twins, so when he's done berating me, I ask him how he's feeling about it. "I understand that they're rebuilding," he says. "I understand they want to go younger. I'm not old, I'm not young, I'm in that limbo region where...." His voice trails off. "You know, they wanted somebody else, that's fine."

I'm trying to think of some words of encouragement, but Dougie Baseball has had a season that's too bizarre for words. After hitting .361 in the first nine games, he sprained his foot. After hitting his first two homers, he wrenched his back so badly that he could barely put on his pants. No sooner had he broken a June slump with long balls on consecutive nights than he fouled a pitch off his instep. Another streak ended when he got nailed by a line drive during batting practice, and his hot start in Boston was doused when he popped his shoulder sliding into second. As soon as he recovered from that, he says, "Boom, I get sick."

I ask Mientkiewicz if there's any explanation for this profound run of sorry luck. He pauses, glancing around the room like he's wondering if he should say what he's about to say. "Well, there is one thing."

Back in May during a road trip in Seattle, he confesses, "I walked under a ladder, and I haven't hit .300 since."

I wait a few beats for a possible "Just kidding," but it never comes. "Is there any ... cure for that?" I ask.

He nods. "Every time I see a ladder, I try and walk under it to double it, you know, to reverse it."

After letting this sink in, I decide to take my leave before Mientkiewicz is moved to describe any encounters with black cats, gris-gris dolls or the grassy knoll. "One more thing," he says, waving a finger as I stand up to leave. "Don't ever predict my numbers before the season again. Please."

In the Boston dugout one hour before game time, I see Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein. Seeing as I had drafted several of his players, including David Ortiz, Curt Schilling and Bill Mueller, and had bombarded him with Rotisserie questions on more than one occasion, I present him with a Streetwalkers shirt. He tosses it nonchalantly over his shoulder.

"So how are you doing?" he asks.

"I'm getting drilled," I say.

Since the point is now moot, I tell Epstein about my attempt to derail his Mientkiewicz trade by trying to influence the Pirates. "Nothing personal," I say. Soon I'm running through a litany of reasons why I never should have spent $12 on Mientkiewicz, from the presence of Justin Morneau to his chronic lack of power. Epstein listens with a tranquil expression. He's clearly heard it all before. "He'll be fine," he finally says. "He's a better real player than he is a Rotisserie player."

Flash forward to the ninth inning of Game 4 of the World Series, where the Red Sox are one out away from sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals. Boston closer Keith Foulke scoops up a lazy grounder to the mound and turns to first base.

It has been 86 years since Boston won a championship, a chasm that stretches beyond the memories of all but a handful of sentient beings. That baseball in Foulke's hand isn't just a mass of twine and horsehide; it's a historical artifact. And for the rest of time, Red Sox fans will remember the name of the guy who caught it for the final out: Doug Mientkiewicz.

By all rights, this could have been a fairy-tale ending to an otherwise miserable season for my first baseman, but no sooner had the cheering faded than he put himself in the middle of another predicament. Rather than hand that historic World Series ball over to the Red Sox for posterity, he decided to keep it. He jokingly referred to the ball as his "retirement fund." The result was a public feud between the player and the Red Sox brass that would be chronicled on Page One of The New York Times. Mientkiewicz agreed to loan the ball to the team for one year, but when the deadline came, the Red Sox decided not to hand it over. (The matter has yet to be resolved.)

Before the 2005 season Mientkiewicz was traded from Boston to the New York Mets, and his struggles continued. In June, hitting only .219, he somehow pulled a hamstring while warming up in the on-deck circle. "Would I like to be in there every day?" he told Newsday after losing his starting job. "Yeah, of course. Everybody would. But that's why it's called a team and not the New York Mientkiewiczs."

Issue date: March 20, 2006