Oy vey, this week there are two sixty-four player tournaments and one thirty-two player tournament. Thank heavens for byes and qualifiers. The die-hard clay courters will play Stuttgart and Amersfoort and the rest will kick-start the hard court season in Indianapolis.
GMT has been actually been replaced by atomic time (UTC) – not a historical reference to the 20th century form of warfare, by the way, except in its scientific terminology – since time is now measured by a cesium atomic.
Stuttgart is paying its winner $131, 962. That’s a lotta money. The problem is that there are no sure players in the field. The highest ranked player is Gaudio at number 14 and he was disappointing last week. Gasquet has been inconsistent and Almagro has cooled off. Berdych has been playing well but he meets Almagro in the quarterfinals.
Amersfoort is paying $55,742 but Coria is their top seed! Coria has been so bad that I have him losing to number 316th ranked Cilic in the second round. Moya can probably get to the semifinals but I think this is the week that Djokovic gets his first ATP title.
If you haven’t used Blake very much, Indianapolis is paying $75,250. But be sure to save him for either Cincinatti or Montreal and the US Open since he’s best on hard outdoor surfaces. The rest of the draw is so confusing that I have Srichaphan in the semifinal against Roddick and Malisse in the other semifinal.
It’s a scraggly bunch but Djokovic, Moya, Gaudio, Ferrer, Gasquet, Berdych or Almago, Blake and Roddick look like the survivors.
A member of our subleague, Small Fry, lives in England and complained about the delay in getting tournament draws because of the time difference. This turns out to be a rather complex subject since the fantasy tennis community is worldwide.
All of the deadlines for submitting teams are 10am or 11am CET on the first day of the tournament. I have to admit I didn’t know what CET was but I now know that it’s Central European Time which is two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT+2). GMT is the time in Greenwich, England. Except that England is currently on Summer Time which is one hour ahead of GMT (GMT+1).
GMT has been actually been replaced by atomic time (UTC) – not a historical reference to the 20th century form of warfare, by the way, except in its scientific terminology – since time is now measured by a cesium atomic. The smallest unit of time is the frequency of a cesium atom that is emitted when the cesium is disturbed. This is an interesting subject – to me anyway – because we consider time to be continuous but it’s not, it’s discrete, meaning that it has tiny steps.
Look at a stream of light. It looks continuous but it’s not. It’s made of photons. If you look close enough at anything on the atomic level, you see steps. (I knew I’d be able to put my physics degree to use sooner or later.)
All by way of saying, Small Fry, that the 10am CET deadline is 9am in London, 4am in New York and 1am in Los Angeles. That means that you have more time but the US gets the draw five to eight hours earlier. Or never in the case of Newport last week. Which was exceptionally frustrating because Andy Murray was entered and I hadn’t used him yet!
The concept of a home team has been replaced by your own team.
When Justin Gimelstob got up 6-1, 5-4, 30-0 on Andy Murray in the Newport semifinal, I started to hope that Murray would lose because I didn’t pick him for my team and other subleague members did. That’s how fantasy sports warps your mind. Baseball fantasy players go to baseball games and cheer for their fantasy team members, not their home team. The concept of a home team has been replaced by your own team. Luckily for me, Murray did lose.
Bye the way, congratulations to the Brits for getting Brad Gilbert even if you had to pay 500,000 pounds a year for the privilege. The US’s loss is your gain. Andy Roddick might not be number three if he’d stayed with Gilbert but he’d be in the top five. That’s a whole hell of a lot better than eleventh.
Some people in the subleague are dropping by the wayside and haven’t submitted their weekly team. A tennis fantasy league team is more work, I would argue, than a Rotisserie league team because we have to choose a new team every week. Take heart though. I know plenty of people who joined the office pool for the NCAA championships, filled out a draw using the uniform colors or something equally random and did very well. So, even if you don’t have much time, look at the draws – all three of them can be found below with my picks – and pick eight people you like. I am embarrassed to tell you, considering how much time I put into this, how well you could with very little knowledge.
