"But every junkies like the setting sun."-Neil Young

OK, I confess. I'm an addict. A full bore, get the shakes if there is a player's strike, roto baseball junkie. I tell myself I could give up fantasy baseball anytime I wanted. I lie.

The calendar says January 26. The little voice in my head says, "Get down to the book store quickly, there has got to be at least one fantasy baseball magazine out. Only nine weeks to opening day." So here I am tonight, owner of a freshly printed copy of "Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster".

Life is good.

If you aren't a roto baseball nut, none of what I am about to say will make any sense. Most of it will sound deranged.

I am part of the Carolina-Illinois baseball league, an eighteen year old roto baseball league. A group of allegedly sane individuals who come together every April on a conference call, divide up the National League's players like happy pilgrims carving the first Thanksgiving turkey, and then spend the summer in various degrees of agony as all our best laid plans dissolve into pulled hamstrings and .230 batting averages.

For us February and March are spent in an almost religious ritual of purification. We must rid ourselves of the old bad stats, and breathe the fresh air of new numbers. We study the texts of our faith, trying to find wisdom and a pitcher whose ERA won't plump up like a ball park frank come May.

The known world can be summed up in what has happened over the past three years. No useful knowledge can be derived from anything which occurred before 2005.

Over the years getting ready for April has become more complex. The CIL has become more competitive. Think the Democratic Party presidential primaries, with just a notch more intensity.

I find myself longing for the days of owners who compulsively drafted Mark Lemke in the 3rd round or believed against all reason that Rey Ordonez could help their team. Now you wait to draft Kevin Kouzmanoff in the late rounds, inwardly chuckling over the fact that you and you alone have heard of him, only to find a circling committee of vultures has arrived before you.

So, you begin to read web sites in December, worry over the scarcity of starting pitching in January, and begin a monastic lifestyle of study in February.

The worst of it usually comes in March. One eye on meaningless exhibition box scores, the other on the fifteen tab spreadsheet you've created over several sleepless nights. You now know the batting average of every hitter in baseball on balls in play (minus strikeouts and home runs) against left handed pitchers of Lithuanian descent.

Maybe it's the lack of sleep, but you scuffle through the streets by day talking to your shoes about Mike Pelfrey's WHP. At some point they answer back. By night you wake with night terrors from a dream that you just drafted Mike Pelfrey in the fourth round.

Come March you are a machine. A microprocessor full of useless information you will forget the minute your league's draft begins. But you are a machine with 15 pages of crib notes. You are a machine who has studied more intensely in two months than you did in four years of college. With no social life and alienated friends and family.

You are Roto Man. Probably not what Ayn Rand had in mind when she wrote "The Fountainhead" but somehow not that far off from the Gary Cooper's brooding Howard Roark in the movie version. Meanwhile your girlfriend rewinds the scene with the jackhammer at the quary and curses you under her breath.

I must go now. Shandler's book awaits. It is a statistical opiate and I've got the shakes. It's all here. FX, xBA, cr%, BABIP, and of course the PQS Disaster Rate. I don't know Shandler, but I suspect he is mad as a hatter. The type in his book is in a font so small that it would induce blindness in eagles.

But I will read it all. I must. For I have seen Jose Lima and the damage done.

And now I must prepare.