This past weekend, my buddies came to town for our annual boys weekend of watching the start of the NCAA tourney and having our fantasy baseball draft. Some highlights:

- On Friday, we broke our personal record and ordered $145 worth of Italian meats and cheeses (ten and a half pounds total, plus three pounds of roasted red peppers). We then spent about 13 hours, starting at noon (everyone took the day off) at my buddy’s place in Brooklyn eating, drinking, gambling, watching basketball, playing drinking games and being perfectly typical red-blooded American males. Clichéd? Yes. Glorious? Fucking A.

- A handful of us went out to a nearby bar around 2am, and that’s when things got fuzzy. Conservatively, I would estimate that I had the equivalent of 30 beers in the course of the day (this is a serious guess). This would explain why I sent the following text messages at 4:17am to my lawyer friend, a girl I made out with once years ago whose last name is similar to my lawyer friend’s (and who I’ve had minimal contact with since), and the letter “Y”:

“We need to talk tmrw”

“Legal no worries”

I have no idea why I would need legal advice at 4:17am on Friday night. The letter “Y” was totally useless in this department, though.

- We had our fantasy baseball draft at Foley’s in Midtown on Saturday (specifics below). I had, I would say, one of the top ten hangovers of my life, and before meeting the guys at 2pm for the draft, I’d drained my entire apartment building’s supply of hot water TWICE by taking long, hot showers, trying to recover. It didn’t work. Rough day for ol’ Uncle Jason.

- Foley’s was fun, but approximately 82 degrees. Between the hangover, the heat, the greasy food, and the beers, there were at least three separate occasions during which I thought I was going to have a stroke. Again, rough day.

- Just as the draft was winding down, Foley’s two celebrity bartenders for the evening showed up. One was Jenn Sterger, who is famous for something (my guess: the boobies), but who is also in that rarified air of being so-hot-that-it’s-not-safe-to-be-that-hot (I mean, really, she can’t walk the streets alone). The other was Jay Williams. No, not the chauffeur murderer, but the former Chicago Bull and Duke All-American. What’s interesting is that two buddies of mine in the fantasy league know Jay Williams from growing up in NJ, so Jay was talking to us the whole draft (the end of it, at least). Not only that, because Jay was there, Jenn figured we were safe and also spent our draft with us. So I was drafting Francisco Liriano while Jenn Sterger and Jay Williams sat two seats away from me. I probably should have offered to sign something for them, ideally Jenn’s boobies, since I’m famous and all, too. But boy, I was in no shape to mingle, as the “hair of the dog” approach totally let me down and left me run down. I’m definitely getting old.

- Speaking of, we had to take a buddy (who shall remain nameless) from the bar at 10pm, as he was spitting on the floor with his eyes half-closed and mumbling incoherently. This is what happens when you have kids. Weak sauce.

- Everybody left early Sunday morning and I spent my day planted on the couch, masturbating like a mental patient, before meeting some friends for evening drinks, which kept me out until 2am and made Monday not so fun.

So pretty much it was a dynamite weekend. The next boys weekend will be the weekend of September 18 in New Orleans. I should be recovered by then.

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[If you don’t care about fantasy baseball, skip to the next section. I don’t think there’s a single joke in here, and if there is, it ain’t worth it.]

So far, I’ve done two of my four fantasy baseball drafts, including (as mentioned above) my main league last Saturday. It’s a four player keeper league, so I already started with Chase Utley, Hanley Ramirez, Evan Longoria and Chris Carpenter (holla! – though I don’t love Carp). It’s standard five categories for pitching, but OBP instead of AVG and TB instead of HR. My team is below (parens indicate the round in which the player was drafted, but remember, there were four keepers, so when I say “4” it’s really the 8th round of the universe of players). I had the third overall pick in the draft.

C: Matt Wieters (4)
1B: Derrek Lee (5)
2B: Chase Utley (K)
SS: Hanley Ramirez (K)
3B: Evan Longoria (K)
OF: Grady Sizemore (1)
OF: Bobby Abreu (3)
OF: Torii Hunter (6)
Util: Nyjer Morgan (9)
Util: Michael Cuddyer (12)
B: Placido Polanco (15)

SP: Chris Carpenter (K)
SP: Josh Beckett (2a)
RP: Francisco Cordero (7)
RP: Jose Valverde (8 )
P: Leo Nunez (17)
P: Cole Hamels (2b)
P: Jorge de la Rosa (10)
P: David Price (11)
B: Max Scherzer (13)
B: Ben Sheets (14)
B: Francisco Liriano (16)
B: Dice K (18)

The team follows my four basic tenets of drafting:

1) Look for speed guys that contribute in other categories (Five guys – Utley, Hanley, Sizemore, Abreu and Hunter – could each go 20-20+; I’d put the over/under for those five guys, health permitting, at 115 HR and 110 SB);

2) Always target high OBP guys, as that’s hard to make up (Lee, Utley, Hanley, Sizemore, Abreu each have career OBPs of .380+ or thereabouts);

3) Always target high K pitchers (I don’t think any pitcher on my staff has a career K/9IP of 7.5, except for Carp, who is not totally lacking here); and

4) Try to get at least two closers who will not lose their jobs (Cordero’s making a fortune to close, Valverde was acquired to close).

Some general thoughts:

- I had to overdraft pitching by taking Beckett and Hamels with my two picks in the second (I’d had an extra from an in-season move I made the previous year), but Carp is a real unknown to me. Love Beckett: contract year, great team, ground ball-ish pitcher with improved team defense. Love Hamels, although all the spring training hype required me to draft him a little higher than I would have liked. Overall, I’m pretty comfortable with those three at my top, and I like de la Rosa’s potential (and think that Rockies team is going to be just dynamite this year).

- I don’t necessarily love Wieters, because he broke my heart last year. But this is a keeper league. In non-keeper leagues, Wieters is going in the 9th round. I got him in a keeper league at the end of the 8th. Great, great value.

- Speaking of, I will likely be keeping Utley, Hanley and Longoria forever. Not so much with Carpenter. This means I’ll have to keep a different fourth guy next year. This is why I drafted Sizemore, Wieters and even (believe it) Hamels. I’m assuming that one of those guys will be my fourth keeper next year.

- Check out the poo-poo platter at the end of my pitching staff: Price, Scherzer, Sheets, Liriano, Dice-K. Yikes. My thinking is that if at least one of these guys work out, I’ll be happy (and I knew Dice-K would start the season on the DL, so for the last pick in the draft, as someone I can put on the DL and free up a roster spot for on day one, not a bad pick). You’ll see a theme among these five: all of them have shown flashes of tremendous talent before, all are high K pitchers, all (with the exception of Sheets) are pitching on good teams. Sheets and Dice-K have been awful this spring, Price and Scherzer ok, and Liriano is filthy. I predict that by season’s end, two of these guys will be at least SP3-caliber pitchers, two will be abominable, and one will be ok – all for SPs I took after the 14th round overall.

- Best pick: Placido Polanco. Career .303 hitter. Batting second in the best lineup in the NL, between Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley. Will have 2B and 3B eligibility five games into the season. In the past three years, has averaged 145 games, 92 runs, 9 homers, 66 RBI, 7 steals, and a .311 average (with a .356 OBP). I’m calling it right now: 110 runs, 14 homers, 74 RBI, 11 steals, .310. At 2B and 3B. In the 19th round. Yes, please.

- Worst pick: Max Scherzer. The nachos had just come out, I had to pee, and I had just yelled at everyone for taking too long (and now people were yelling at me), so when this pick came up, I was in a bad place. I mean, I like Scherzer, but not in the goddamn 17th round overall. But, I can live with it. Still, if there’s one guy that I’d cut if I had to, it’d be him (also, not huge on Price at 15th round overall, but I’m more ok with that).

- Guy I wanted most but didn’t get it: Tommy Hanson. Not because I necessarily think he’ll be a monster this year – I think he’ll be good, but I think his innings might capped and his ERA will be comfortably above 3 – but because I had him last year. I followed his every start for the Gwinnett Braves, and when he came up, he dominated for me. So I felt like he was my special project. But, alas, it is not meant to be. But this “love” for a player is what happens when you have a keeper league (I was on Longoria before 99% of the fantasy baseball universe realized he wasn’t Eva’s brother).

Overall, I feel confident going for my third consecutive title in this league. God, I can’t wait for baseball to start.

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Six Songs

“Bang Pop” Free Energy
I know I pimped these guys on the last Six Songs, but between now and then, I saw them at Mercury Lounge here in NYC. And I’m calling this one, too: they’re going to be big. And remember, the last time I saw a musician at Mercury Lounge and said he was going to be big, it turned out pretty good for him. Point: I know what I’m talking about. Hop on the train now before there’s no room left. If you like parties, and you like rock, and you like fun, you’ll like Free Energy. Truth.

“Light My Fire” Will Young
Two nights ago I was cleaning my apartment (ok, I was eating the reuben mac and cheese from Macbar while waiting on hold with Time Warner because my cable had been shut off due to a $290 past due balance because I haven’t opened up a piece of mail that doesn’t say “IMPORTANT TAX DOCUMENT ENCLOSED” in about five years), when this song came on over the iPod speakers. And it is just a lovely little cover. I’m not going to say it’s better than the original, even though I hate the Doors and think they’re one of the most overrated bands of the 20th century, because a cover has to be really, really, really, really good to be better than the original. But still, just a lovely little ditty.

[I may hate the Doors, but the anger I feel toward them is nothing compared to the wrath I feel toward KISS. So, let me get this straight: you guys play bad music dressed as demon clowns; one of your lead singers is the most repressed/closeted homosexual in recent memory; and your other lead singer has never had a drink in his life and has sold the band’s likeness to essentially everything in the universe – I work at a mega law firm and would not be surprised if one day I picked up a piece of our bond paper and beneath our firm’s name, there’s the Kiss logo. I’m convinced that Gene Simmons got into music not for the love of rock and roll or even for the women, but because it was a money-making opportunity, not unlike one would get into coal or semiconductors. He is the anti-artist, and if you don’t realize this, you’re a jerkoff.]

[…]

[…calming down now…]

[…]

[Ok, I’m better now.]

“Keep the Lights On” Wave Machine
And then this song came on after “Light My Fire” and I started dancing. Likes: bass grooves, falsettos. Dislikes: Doors, Kiss.

“Head Over Heels” The Go-Go’s
In addition to being almost overwhelming sexually attracted to Belinda Carlisle, this song makes for some fun. Don’t judge.

“Airplane” The Local Natives
Intense, elegiac. I wish I could write more, but I have to save up my energy for the next one.

“Keep On Running” Spencer Davis Group
Let’s look at the lyrics to this song:

Keep on running
Keep on hiding
One fine day I’m gonna be the one
To make you understand
I’m gonna be your man

Keep on running
Running from my arms
One fine day I’m gonna be the one
To make you understand
I’m gonna be your man

Everyone’s talking about me
Make me feel so bad
Everyone’s laughing at me
Make me feel so sad

[Break, repeat second verse]

Is it me, or are these lyrics to this song, well, kinda scary? “You run and you hide but one fine day, I’m gonna to make you understand that we belong together”? “Everyone’s talking about me and laughing at me, causing me anguish and pain”? “But you just keep on running from my arms, my arms that are reaching out to you, because one day, one glorious day, I’m going to make you love me”?

Were these lyrics written by Steve Winwood over a pint in a London pub, or by some large, bald-headed mentally-challenged man, scribbled in crayon on the wall of his bedroom in his mother’s basement, shortly before he masturbates to the shrine he’s created of the cute neighbor girl who’s too afraid to even say “hi” to him? Especially if you replace “sad” with “mad” in that last verse, I mean, this is the type of stuff that serial killers write before they go out on the hunt.

And so we bear witness to the power of music. Next time you’re rocking out to your favorite catchy tune, be sure to listen to the words.

[Next week we examine “Baby It’s Cold Outside” as a date rape anthem.]

[Have a good weekend]