FANTASY BASEBALL-MY SEDENTARY PLEASURE

Like many men over the age 50, I need to get a whole more exercise. I am easily 40 pounds too heavy. I have diabetes which tends to create a rounded stomach. I get winded all too easily and my joints are generally tight. And I am working on it. Walking each day, watching my diet, learning to exert myself physically strategic ways. Yet one of my greatest pleasures is quite sedentary--exercising my mind instead of my calves. I can do it standing, but not for too long. The one thing that contributes to my weight control is that I can get sufficiently immersed in it that I forget to eat. The mental exercises it requires is scientifically proven to help arrest the onset Alzheimer's. It is a sedentary pleasure, but it is a pleasure.

It's fantasy baseball. I am about to begin my fourth year doing something I have come to love deeply. I play the fairly straightforward edition sponsored by Major League Baseball (mlb.com). I have the maximum of five teams. I had ten teams last year in four different groups, but that over-expansion took away some of the joy. If my good friend Jeff Boylan reinstitutes his league in Yahoo, I may make it six.

My first year my only team, the Landisville Sluggers finished third in their division but was one of the two wild card teams in my MLB league, but fell in the playoffs to the champs. Year two I had two teams, both of which finished in third. Last year, one of my teams, Dunn's Tigers Cats lead from opening week until the end of the season and won it all. Year four the Sluggers and the Tiger Cats are back along with the Church Street Giants, the Mendon Pirates and Leylands Allstars. In the MLB.Com a powerful pitching staff makes much of the difference, as did the Braves and the Tigers for me in 2011. This year my five teams have the Phillies, Tigers, Braves, Nationals, Brewers--making four of my teams look very good on paper.

I know some of you are thinking, so what? Remember, it's MY sedentary pleasure.