Tales from the future: The great fantasy comeback of 2014

In a living room, sometime in the future …

Come gather around, kids. Grandpa has a little story to tell you from his days of playing competitive fantasy baseball.

It's a story about how unpredictable the last several weeks of the season can be, how important it is to continue to improve a team (even if it's only a little at a time) and how much you can accomplish if you don't give up.

So put those PlayStation VR helmets in a safe place and listen closely, because the lessons of the 2014 season and its fantastic finish might not be clear to you until the very end.

Back then, I was going up against some of the greatest players the industry has seen.

The league was made up of 13 teams, and most of the owners were so famous, people knew them by their nicknames: "The Bearded One" … "The Godfather" … "The Wolfman" … "The Zen Master" … "Lord Z" … "The Oracle."

We all drafted our teams nearly three months before opening day. And we were all together for our draft in the same place, not in some video chat room. Heck, some of the owners didn't even use a computer; they had their draft lists printed out on sheets of paper.

Anyway, I thought I had a decent team, but things went south pretty quickly. Adrian Beltre missed half of April. Robinson Cano had two homers in the first two months. J.J. Hardy didn't have any. Mat Latos didn't make his first start until mid-June.

By Week 2, the team was in next-to-last place … and it didn't look like things could get much worse.

Until the middle of June, when it did. I dropped to last place.

"How much money were you playing for, Grandpa?"

Money? Pffft. We played just for pride. And we liked it.

The only reward for winning was the recognition of your peers. On the other hand, not finishing last might have been an even greater motivator. So I kept plugging away, despite hitting rock bottom with 41 standings points, 12.5 behind the team in 12th place.

I didn't just give up and start working on my fantasy football draft list.

And I certainly didn't rely on those fancy standings algorithm generators you have now — the ones that spit out your 4% chance of finishing first and encourage you to focus your attention elsewhere.

So what did you do?

I picked up Detroit Tigers outfielder J.D. Martinez, as he was getting started on the best 3½-month stretch of his major league career.

By the All-Star break, I had climbed out of last place and was up to 52.5 points. Cano and Eric Hosmer started to hit … and middle-round picks Brandon Moss and Michael Brantley no longer were forced to shoulder the load on offense.

I cut one Chicago Cubs prospect, Kris Bryant, but won a bidding war for another, Arismendy Alcantara. You would never make that swap any other year, but Alcantara filled a season-long hole at middle infield by playing almost every day the rest of the way.

And as you know by now, Bryant didn't see the majors until the following season — when he won the 2015 National League rookie of the year award.

I added another member of the future Cubs dynasty, pitcher Kyle Hendricks, when scarcely anyone had heard of him — even though he was the organization's minor league pitcher of the year in 2013. A 10-5 record and 3.59 ERA in 17 ClassAAA starts finally got him a call to the major leagues at age 24.

He was a fantastic asset over the second half of the season and turned into a tremendous value in keeper leagues.

Now, no one was going to mistake him for Greg Maddux, but you couldn't help but notice how many of the same qualities Hendricks shared with a guy who once was a promising Cubs prospect himself.

I also made a strategic decision to punt saves since my team was almost certainly locked into 12th place in the category no matter what happened the rest of the way. Focusing on making headway in wins, I traded Kansas City Royals closer Greg Holland for Los Angeles Dodgers starter Hyun-Jin Ryu.

And after the All-Star break, the pitching staff really started coming together.

Ryu, Hendricks, Alex Cobb and Madison Bumgarner were lights-out as I started moving up in the other four pitching categories.

I added a nondescript 29-year-old Milwaukee Brewers pitcher named Mike Fiers — and in his next game, he struck out 14 batters in six scoreless innings.

All of a sudden, in the middle of August, my team was up to 72.5 points and four points out of third place.

That was an accomplishment in itself. But in September … you never really know what can happen.

No one could have predicted Trevor Rosenthal's struggles as St. Louis Cardinals' closer would make Pat Neshek such an important pickup down the stretch. Or that rookie Rymer Liriano would give fantasy teams a power boost, despite playing with the San Diego Padres.

So as September rolled around, my pitching was on fire. Jay Bruce had yet to get on one of his patented hot streaks. And if Cano's Seattle Mariners teammates could give him a little support, there were points to be gained in the hitting categories.

This team that could easily have been left for dead in the league basement a couple of months earlier never would have made such a good story so many years later.

"So Grandpa, did your team come back to win the league?"

Well kids, I'll leave the conclusion for another day.

But don't forget ... even with six weeks left in the season, it's not too late to author your own miracle comeback. All it takes is a little imagination.

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Any similarities between this story and Bugs Bunny and His Hare-Raising Tale are purely intentional. Follow the fantastic finish in the FSTA experts league at www.rtsports.com/fsta.