finally, a fantastic triumph for johnny g

While the most of the baseball world's attention is focused on the ongoing playoffs, the governor of Michigan has declared today "John Gnida day" in celebration of my friend John's victory in his roto-baseball league. (An increasing number of people like to call rotisserie baseball "Fantasy baseball", this use of "Fantasy" annoys me to no end because if it were really a fantasy, only low-aspiring or self-loathing players would ever finish anything other than first at it. John has played roto-ball for the better part of the past two decades, and finally he has a team that finishes first. Whether his story augurs well for long-suffering fans of the Cubs and/or Red Sox, time will only tell.

Being a Michigan native, he christened his team the "Detroit Revolution" and its winning performance is shown in the standings below:



I should note that one of John's past second-place finishes was in the Indiana Sociology Department's League, when his "G-Men" finished the season a half-point behind my team, "The Snowplow" (a pun based partly on the 'freeze' pronunciation of my last name and partly as a homage to fallen Hawkeye Chris Street). That outcome is shrouded in controversy among roto-historians to this day, as any rational application would suggest that the reason John lost was due to some dramatically miscalculated statistics by another player in the league. John graciously did not insist on a recount. This was all in the days when roto-ball was a matter of entering statistics into a spreadsheet by hand, not the fancy "Internet" technology used today.