It’s time for that rite of spring: fantasy baseball

You want to know the biggest fantasy I have right now?

No, no, no. Get your mind out of the gutter. That’s impossible.

This one is actually tougher to achieve.

One of these years I want to win my fantasy baseball league.

Just once.

I think I may have won years ago, possibly when Duane Kuiper was still playing (there were years when he would have been my best power hitter), but I’m not sure.

We don’t give out trophies – just really small checks – so there’s no tangible record of who won.

There’s just that good feeling you get when you’ve bested seven other guys in anything.

Sorry to sound sexist, but you get eight guys in a room and the testosterone starts to fly and … well, someone’s got to win at something.

The group I’m with has been around in some form or another for about as long as the Mariners, though I didn’t join until the mid-80s – my lord, I just realized I’ve wasted more than 20 years – and I’m still considered a newcomer.

Some are in more than one league, but as the retired Eastern Washington business prof once told me, defeating the seven other guys in Goofy’s National League (our league name) means more than winning one of those ESPN concoctions with 500 participants.

Like all Rotisserie leagues, ours has gone through changes through the years in members, numbers of teams, rules, beer preference, waistlines … you know, all the important things.

But there is a core group that survives year after year, meeting the first Saturday after the season opens to draft.

Though even that experience has changed.

Gone are the days when more than half the participants had to walk home, occasionally getting lost along the way. This is a group that’s evolved from draining a keg halfway through the night to a BYOS (bring your own soda) crowd, with more designated drivers than passengers.

But there is still more than a keg-full of humor available, some at each other’s expense, some at the expense of the overpaid (real and in the league draft) players we’re bidding on.

We used to have a toilet seat for the guy who finished last – I guess that could be considered a trophy – but it burned up in a fire a year or so ago.

We also used to have a grotesquely stained sports coat for the guy who finished second to last, but that burnt up as well. Hell, it may have even started the blaze.

So now we gather and trade quips, some with roots that go back to the day of Steve Bedrosian, who not only looked like Fred Flintstone but also existed around the same time. You may have heard the jokes 20 times, but they still make you laugh.

Some of the guys are pretty serious, with books and charts about every player who’s ever taken a big-league swing, but only the self-employed – or the unemployed – have that kind of time.

There are others who fly by the seat of their pants, feigning disinterest before swooping in at the last minute like a vulture to steal a player.

Yours truly runs the auction – at first I think it was because I was the only one who stayed sober; now it’s just tradition – and has developed a very quick “going once, twice, three times” call when controlling the bid. Which has burned me more than once when I stick myself with a bust like Jerome Walton.

We have teachers, students, bowlers, AARP members and an occasional dentist. Some of the guys you see only once a year – unless you bump into them at Hoopfest or at Zip’s – and others you might see tomorrow – especially if this tooth keeps hurting.

Still, they are the competition.

And I want to kick their computerized … well, I would like to win.

Heck, I might settle for not getting the ash from the toilet seat.