I dropped David Weathers from my fantasy baseball team this morning. And I feel terrible for doing it.

I’ve said before that I’m not a cut-throat team manager. And my record shows that. I’m now 85 points behind the leader and more than 50 points behind my nearest competitor. I am losing by so much that it’s almost (bitterly) laughable.

My main strategy in fantasy baseball (as I’ve mentioned before) is to acquire as many Mets and former Mets players as I can and to create a team out of them. There are some exceptions. Pudge Rodriguez has never played for the Mets, but he seems like a nice guy and I have a thing for aging catchers (in this instance when I say aging I mean two years older than I — how sad!). Preston Wilson never played for the Mets, but his dad, Mookie, did. Livan Hernandez is my nod to the hometown Nationals (although if he doesn’t start picking up his pace a bit, or if he gets traded away, I might consider dropping his 5.87 ERA (earned run average) pitching arm from my team).

Last year I managed to pick up lots of Mets. This year, they seem to be in higher demand (fair-weather managers!) and Yahoo picked some other random players for me, including a closer who quickly went onto the DL (disabled list). When they did that I consulted my magic list of “Mets who don’t play for the Mets” pitchers and came up with David Weathers, who was the de-facto closer for the Reds. It was rumored he wouldn’t stay in the position for long, but he started the season strong and I wanted to give him a chance. He’s always seemed like a player on the up and up, respected by his teammates and not dissed by the overly harsh and powerful New York City media and fan bases.

Last year Weathers pitched a decent 3.94 with a 7-4 record and 15 saves. With him in the closer position, I hoped for similar or better this year. But with his ERA hovering dangerously close to 5, Weathers recently was demoted back to middle reliever. The Reds have acquired a new lefty who will replace both Weathers and Todd Coffey as closer, at least for the time being. Weathers is just pitching an inning or two a game thrice a week, which is hard on a fantasy manager, particularly when the pitcher also misses out on getting a notch in the hold category.

And my original closer came off the DL to pitch two innings of shut-out ball.

My heart broke a tiny bit when I clicked the “Drop this player” button. But I clicked it anyway.

What does that say about me?

I am sorry, David. You don’t know me. You didn’t know you were on my fantasy team, or, probably, on any fantasy team. And you’ve just been dealt a tough blow for a pitcher, being demoted back to middle reliever or, even worse, right-handed specialist. I didn’t make your day any better, even if you didn’t know it. Thanks for all the good memories, and I’ll be rooting for you. Good luck.

Well, we did not go to the beach to visit Karen and Michael today as we’d hoped to do. The stars just didn’t end up aligning properly to encourage that scenario to work out.

However, we tried to quench our disappointment with other fun (and productive) activities that we wouldn’t have gotten to do otherwise:

1. See Russian Dolls (Les Poupées Russes) at the Avalon. I loved L’Auberge Espagnole (Russian Dolls picks up a couple years after L’Auberge left off) when it came out a few years ago and the ability to see foreign, art, and limited-release movies like this is one of the best parts of living in the city.
2. Shop. I went to the farmers’ market this weekend and came home with corn on the cob, shallots, potatoes, seconds tomatoes (Rudi wants to make gazpacho), squash, peaches (to make a pie), milk (to use next week when we come home from vacation), cheddar, and a pepper. We also got to buy some of the provisions we’ll need for the camping trip.
3. Cook. Dinner was a broccoli-cheddar quiche followed by leftover cherry cobbler topped with French vanilla ice cream. All (except the ice cream) made by me.
4. Clean. (Okay, this part was not as much fun as the rest, but it was necessary.) I am ashamed (but not so much as not to share) that we have not finished cleaning up following last month’s floods. But today the bottom futon went back on the bed. The last chair we’d been meaning to drag out to the street got picked up by someone who was excited to have hand-me-down furniture. Laundry was done, including some winter stuff that ought to have gone into seasonal storage months ago. I found that we own a butcher’s block under all the mail that had piled up. Rudi was terribly productive and packed all his vacation clothes already. (I am not that productive, although I have decided on what knitting project to take with me…) We aren’t done yet, but we’re both feeling much better about where we stand tonight as compared to Friday.

   Two-plus days and counting until vacation….