For a few brief hours last week, I entered into a massive depression. I didn’t want to eat or think or talk. All I wanted to do was comb my hair forward, pierce my lip and write sad acoustic songs until my agony subsided.

What’s the reason for this sudden Cobain-esque despair, you ask? It had nothing to do with a girl dumping me, or my parents cutting me off, or my favorite emo band breaking up after they finally realized at age 32 that they weren’t 17 anymore. It was because my fantasy baseball team lost in the semi-finals of my keeper league’s playoffs.

Now before you stop reading and tell your friends that Pipe Dream has a severely off-balanced loser writing for them, know that I am not alone in my obsession with fantasy baseball. In fact, it is estimated by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association that over 16 million Americans play fantasy sports annually. Hell, the reason the Fantasy Sports Trade Association was even created was to help regulate and study the vastly growing number of people playing fantasy sports in America. Admittedly, though, I may be a bit more obsessed with fantasy sports, particularly fantasy baseball, than most of those people.

To my defense, I can’t help but be obsessed with fantasy baseball. I consider the game of baseball a beautiful art. Yankee Stadium is Mona Lisa and Joe Torre may as well be Zeus in my book. Combine that with the fact that I am an overly-competitive jerk who, just the other day, managed to turn even the childish act of throwing baby carrots at a ceiling fan into a competition, and I was destined to be a lover of fantasy baseball.

Making trades, setting lineups and dealing with injuries is a ton of fun to me. I am the general manager of my own team, competing against 11 other guys over the course of five months for bragging rights in our little circle. It’s a blast, especially if your team is doing well and you make the playoffs.

So, if I am so in love with fantasy baseball and the team that I have been sculpting since late March, why am I here writing this article a week later instead of bouncing off the padded walls of a mental asylum room? It’s because at some time between my seventh and eighth shot of Seagram’s, I realized that as much as I love fantasy baseball, I hate it. Yeah, it’s a blast and really gets my competitive juices flowing, but it dawned on me that the game of fantasy baseball ruins the game of REAL-life baseball for me.

The fact is that the two games almost never go hand-in-hand for a true fan of the real-life game like myself. I am a Yankees fan to the death. I’d tattoo pinstripes down the entire length of my body if I knew it wouldn’t break my mother’s heart. I’d love to sit here and boldly declare that nobody and nothing can get in the way of how much I love the Yankees and hate the Red Soxs (or Red Sawks if you live by the Bawston Harba). But I can’t say that and truly mean it because I am a fantasy baseball player.

Two weeks ago, as the Yankees were beginning their push toward catching Boston in the standings, I had to pick up a young Red Sox pitcher named Clay Buchholz to help replace an injured Erik Bedard (oh, how that injury doomed me). The next night, in only his second career Major League start, he threw a no-hitter against the Orioles. Now, normally I would be absolutely disgusted by this and find every which way imaginable to pick him apart and mock him, and loathe the fact that Boston won and still claim Ian Kennedy looked better. But I actually found myself cheering for the kid! I wanted him to throw the no-hitter. He could have easily given up a hit or two, or three, and it would have meant virtually nothing as long as he didn’t give up any runs. But being the competitive idiot that I am, I relished the fact that I could gloat the next day on the league’s message board that I owned two of the guys who threw no-hitters in 2007 (Justin Verlander being the other).

The worst is when my fantasy baseball interests actually make me in some sick, twisted way root against the Yankees, the team I have adored since before I could use a toilet without assistance and will love until I can no longer use a toilet without assistance. Like the two different weeks where I played the guy who owned Alex Rodriguez and found myself rooting for every Yankee to knock in 40 runs each like I always do, but not A-Rod. Or if he did already crush a three-run homer, maybe he could stop and not hit another one. Another example is when the Yankees had a five-run lead on Detroit and I found myself rooting for Magglio Ordonez to hit a two-run home run because I really needed every stat I could get that week to win my fantasy match-up and it wouldn’t affect the Yankees all that much.

Looking back on such incidents, I am disgusted with myself. It was pure blasphemy on my part to actually root for an opposing hitter to ever hit a homer off a Yankee pitcher, even if it was Kyle Farnsworth. A-Rod’s pursuit of 60 home runs and Barry Bonds’ all-time record means the world to me, so how could I have spent two weeks actually rooting against him hitting a home run?!

My realization allowed me to snap out of my depression and hours later, when I sobered up, I decided to write this article. My fantasy baseball season is over. Now I can go back to being a fan of the real-life game, a fan of the Yankees and a true fan of guys like Doug Mientkiewicz who have virtually no fantasy value but mean the world to their team. I am free to completely enjoy the last month of the season. I can root for the Yankees and the game without the hindrance of wondering what everything that is happening means to my fantasy team. I am free to be just a fan of the game, a fan of the Yankees. I am free of depression.

Well, for now at least, because if the Yankees don’t win the World Series, it’s sure to send me back to the liquor cabinet a crushed man. Oh well, at least a new fantasy baseball season starts in seven months.