As those of you who follow this blog know, the Fan makes game picks every day of the season. Hey, somebody has to do it. Those picks are made possible (or more lazily) by going to http://www.ballhype.com/ which has this game thing where you can pick the games every day. They weight upsets more heavily on the scale, so if you correctly pick an upset, you can get like 2.7 points. If you pick the clear favorite (like the Twins beating the Royals), you only get like 0.3 points for the correct pick. But the kicker is, no matter what, you get -1 for an incorrect pick.
So say you pick fifteen MLB games and you have a good night and go 10-5 but all of the correct picks were games where the favored team wins. Your total point tally for the day could end up being in the minus column (10*0.3 < 5*-1). Which is pretty unfair to begin with.
The Fan has been having a good picking year to date with a record of 147-83. That's a .630 winning percentage or roughly what the Yankees did last year to win the pennant. But the highest the Fan has ever gotten on the list of BallHype pickers is second. The average finish is around fourth or sixth.
Meanwhile, they have this twerp over there named Thrabak who wins every week. He's on top this week for probably the sixth or seventh week in a row. What this dingdong does is wait until everyone else picks and then picks all the games that are less favored. So every week he picks only 43% of his picks correctly, but scores a bajillion points. Now isn't that stupid? Does this guy really feel great about himself being right 43% of the time?
Now it really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things since BallHype doesn't give away any prizes for winning. But it's the point that counts. BallHype has a great site and its collection system of sports writing is a neat idea. But any gaming system that rewards losers rather than winners is a pooched gaming system. It's un-American. Wait! That's not right either. Because in America, you get more rewarded for being lazy than you do for working hard too. So maybe then BallHype is very American. And the Fan supposes that it more mirrors how gambling gaming systems work too. Don't know. Don't care.
Whatever it is, it's very annoying. The Fan wrote the site and complained and got a nice letter back stating that the game isn't changing. Fine. Don't change it. But it's still wrong.
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