So I’ve been playing fantasy sports with the same knuckleheads for about seven years now. They’re a couple of friends (and their friends) who don’t mind if we argue, pay our entry fee a little late or skip a season. I love them… except for the fact that they always draft the week before the season starts, whether it’s baseball, football or basketball. So this year I tried to get them to move the draft date back so I wouldn’t have to be writing my opening salvo the night it’s due. I also had another motive—the fact that if we draft too late, there’s a real possibility Yahoo! won’t recognize our league until the second week. More often than not, it’s what happened. And guess what? It happened again.

The league commissioner decided to draft Sunday, right before the first game of the season (although, between the Japanese games, the Sunday night game and Monday’s games, there were three opening days—gotta pay those exorbitant salaries somehow). Yahoo! has a lot of quirks (although not as many as ESPN’s league that, well, shuts itself down once or twice every season), and one of them is allowing leagues to be formed by a certain time. But when is that? Sometimes we’ve drafted this late and we’ve been allowed to activate the season the first week. Alas, this year it didn’t. And while that pisses me off, it’s not for the reasons you’d think.

The first week was a rough one for my cadre of Latino players. Placido Polanco? Thanks for hitting .118. Willy Tavares? Take your .143 and shove it. Not even my token non-Latino Justin Morneau (whose stats won’t be used) did poorly sitting on my bench, hitting a paltry .250, but ending the week with two home runs (I gotta trade him—and fast).

The biggest hit, however, happened to my pitching staff when Pedro Martinez went down with a pulled hamstring and Carlos Zambrano left his opening day game with cramping in his hand. The cramping, it turns out, comes from not drinking enough water and a lack of potassium. W… T… F? I feel like starting an internet group with other Zambrano owners (and Cub fans) and start grouping money together to send Carlos cases of water and bananas, just like the fans of the show Jericho did when they sent CBS palettes of nuts to stop their show from being canceled. If it can get a crappy show back on the air, then hopefully it can get the ace pitcher for a playoff team to drink some water—or at least stop him from using the internet so much.

So yeah, my team sucked last week, but it didn’t count. That’s the inadvertent good part of the procrastination shown by my league mates. The screwed up part is that because we weren’t active, our commish didn’t let us hit the waiver wire all week. So yesterday morning, while I was braving the morning commute and a bad case of allergies, the waiver wire opened up at 7 AM PST (I’m the only player not in LA), the only alert being a post by the commish put up way after me and my sinus headache had gone to bed.

So good bye Carlos Gomez and Xavier Nady, my would-be replacements for Willy Tavares. See ‘ya later Johnny Cueto, my target for a probably-done Pedro Martinez. I’ll have to do with your fellow Dominican, non-union equivalent, Edison Vólquez. In any case, I’m probably toast in the pitching category until Yovani Gallardo comes back from the DL. I mean, I’m starting two Reds (Bronson Arroyo being the other) under the unwatchful eye of Dusty Baker, the man who single-handedly (armedly?) destroyed the careers of Kerry Wood and Mark Prior as Cubs manager. This can only end badly.

So last week, reader Carlos put this question in the box:

I’ve got a couple of questions. Did the anyone notice during the draft that you were only taking latin players? I assume they’ve either figured it out or read your piece by now, if one of them offers you a top tier non-latin player for one of your latin scrubs, would you turn it down?

Thanks for the question Carlos (and remember, people can send me questions and tips here), and no’s the answer to both. I asked a couple of my league mates if they noticed, and they said no. Apparently they weren’t listening to me, either, because they sent me trade offers for non-Latino players shortly thereafter. This leads to your second question—I wouldn’t take a trade offer for a studly non-Latino player (say Prince Fielder) for a collection of Freddy Sanchez, Oliver Perez and Placido Polanco. It would drive me nuts, but I couldn’t do it. That’s the discipline. Let’s see how long that lasts.

Earlier: Feature: Latino Fantasy Baseball. Gary Sheffield Made Me Do This.