On the third anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting, I thought I'd re-post the BaseballHQ.com column I wrote shortly after the incident. Sadly, in the three years since, nothing has changed.
April 19, 2007
There have been three times that my wife, Sue, and I have sat glued to the television in grief. The first was the Challenger disaster. We lived in New Hampshire at the time and felt a connection to Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire teacher who perished in that tragedy. The second was on 9/11; we are both natives of New York City.
The third was this past Monday.
Some of you may know that Shandler Enterprises is located in Roanoke, Virginia, just 40 minutes up the interstate from Virginia Tech. We are well familiar with the campus and attend events there often. My daughters have stayed in the dormitories during summer camp. Sue currently works for a doctor who was called away to the trauma center on Monday. The daughter of close friends is a freshman there; she is fine but her best friend was one of those who died. Once again, it is personal.
When we experience a tragedy of these proportions, our natural inclination is to try to understand what could possess someone to carry out such a horrific act. Our need to understand is a defense reaction to protect ourselves from such an event occurring again.
So CNN trotted out their experts during the week. One psychiatrist described the type of person who would perpetrate such an act and concisely summed it all up in one neat package: A well-educated male who is a social failure.
After 9/11, we were taught not to "profile." Still, for some of us it is difficult not to see terrorists as anything other than radical Muslims. And perhaps it is equally difficult not to pigeon-hole crazy mass murderers as intelligent guys who can't get a date.
Here's the problem for us:
Many people have pigeon-holed fantasy leaguers as geeky stat-heads. We are typically intelligent, we are primarily guys and our social BPV can run well south of 50. It is one of the reasons why this hobby has taken so long to start breaking down the walls of legitimacy. Some of you might scoff at the idea that fantasy leaguers and mass murderers can be similarly profiled. Ah, but we have short memories.
We forget a throwaway fact about one of the Columbine killers: He played fantasy baseball. In fact, he was a good player, finishing in fourth place in each of the two seasons prior to that fateful year. He even drafted a team a few weeks before offing a dozen classmates. Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of that tragedy.
But the problem is not fantasy sports. The problem is what the recent evolution of fantasy sports has given birth to.
Thanks to the internet, the fantasy sports industry has become a hobby that fosters social isolation. Online gaming has taken over a pursuit that was designed to be a wholly social activity. For those who still manage to participate in live drafts, you know how much face-to-face interaction adds to the experience. Heck, it is the experience. But the internet has provided us with the ultimate in remote detachment. Not only don't we need to be in the same room, we also don't even need to use our real names.
It is true that the internet has created far more connections that would otherwise have never existed. But what is the quality of those connections? We are all just blank personas linked together by a computer monitor. Of all the people in your online leagues, how many would you recognize if you passed them on the street? As a parent, I am constantly warned about stalkers in my children's chat rooms, but how do you know that your other league-mates are not pedophiles, Hollywood celebrities or 12-year-old girls?
These days, even our live leagues have been affected. When was the last time you picked up a phone to make a trade offer? Fifteen years ago, there was no such thing as an email blast to scope out a deal. You picked up the freakin' phone and worked the wires. Today there are no dialogues, just lots and lots of uni-directional text messaging. It's not the same thing.
We are social creatures. Denying us direct access to each other creates people who never learn how to properly interact. Consider how many flame wars there would be if the participants were forced to look each other in the eye. For these internet denizens, we are not only creating social misfits, we're also creating cowards.
Students who were in the same classes as the Virginia Tech shooter described him as "...so quiet. He would sit by himself whenever possible, and didn't like talking to anyone. Some of us in class tried to talk to him to be nice and get him out of his shell, but he refused talking to anyone. It was like he didn't want to be friends with anybody. One friend of mine tried to offer him some Halloween candy that she still had, but he slowly shook his head, refusing it."
You can feel the isolation. But among his last words: "It didn't have to be this way."
For those who play in faceless, online leagues... This week, post a message on your league's board and ask the other owners for their phone numbers. Then pick up the phone and call another owner to commiserate over his recent DL loss. If you recognize a familiar area code, hop in your car and meet someone for some live conversation over a few beers.
But get out from behind your monitor. The true enjoyment of fantasy sports is not crunching numbers but connecting with live people.