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As I’ve mentioned, I had my fantasy draft last night. My Dad and I are co-managing Footlong Foles. This is the first time we’ve shared a team, but we’ve been playing fantasy sports (mostly baseball), sporadically, since the early-90s. Back then, to prepare for the draft, we would sit around the kitchen table with newspapers and a copy of Who’s Who in Baseball (the book that forever confused me about the meaning of the word who) and compile our draft lists. The whole process was done with pen and paper, and sometimes a calculator to compute a stat my Dad called Power, which was simply the sum of a player’s home runs and RBIs. I think this is still how Ruben Amaro prepares for the Winter Meetings. Anyway, the rest of us have evolved with time and use websites, computer programs and apps to prepare for our drafts. But not my Dad. No, no. In advance of ours last night, for which I readied 20 minutes beforehand with Football Guys’ Dominator app (which is great), he forwarded me an email that had originally been auto-sent by a copier, because that’s the ultra modern contraption he used to scan his handwritten, handruled draft rankings – a homebrew cheat sheet based on magazine and website(!) data – and turn them into a versatile PDF.

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Incredibly, however, he FaceTimed me in for the draft so we could discuss and make our selections in real-time. Which was a great relief, because had that not worked, I’m pretty sure the backup plan was to telegram our picks in.