Today was a special day for me and my baby. January 17th, 2012 marked the one-year anniversary on when I hitched my wagon to my dearest love, my Twitter account @MikeSGallagher. It has forever changed my life for the worse and for the better. I have neglected friends, family, work, and (ex) girlfriends because of my undying love for up-to-the-second sports news. I've also gone through new phones and bought a tablet based predominantly on their accessibility on Twitter. My Twitter account only drinks the finest breast milk.
I wasn't an early adopter of Twitter and it took multiple friends to sway me to get on the bandwagon. I loathed the idea of social media before I signed up and just looked at it as a waste of time and thought it was for girls and little kids. Boy, was I wrong. Twitter is a fantasy owner's dream.
One of the best parts about Twitter is for baseball. The MLB beat writers will post the lineups about five hours before first pitch. This is really helpful on those days where there is a day game in ESPN, so you can still make sure you have a backup plan and have a full lineup on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Basketball and football are really awesome, too. Since most of us don't have a game on every TV (and there's no Mix Channel for League Pass), Twitter is a great way to keep tabs on every game as it happens. Thanks to Twitter, people like myself have been able to add the backup to the guy that just got hurt in deep leagues within seconds of the injury.
A funny part is when ESPN has "Breaking News" and that story had already been on Twitter for 30 minutes. Similarly, ESPN will cite their "sources" on some stories. Thanks to Twitter, we all now that when it comes to NBA news, their "sources" are usually Adrian Wojnarowski. Speaking of which, the NBA trade deadline last year was INSANE. About six trades were announced on Twitter in the last 30 minutes before the deadline. One of which was a huge deal that sent Gerald Wallace to Portland and allowed savvy Twitter owners(or ones that were following the right people) to add Gerald Henderson instantaneously. I remember just firing out like 20 tweets in 15 minutes breaking down every deal. It was really the first time I knew I'd be hooked for life.
Pick-N-Roll with a TON of analysis from Tuesday is after the jump:
Another really cool aspect is that you can have access to all sorts of cool stats and semi-inside info from all the beat writers of any pro sports teams. Plus there are tons of other die-hard fantasy basketball people out there that can share their knowledge and insight. I probably wouldn't be as obsessed with Twitter without following Steve Alexander (@docktora) and Aaron Bruski (@AaronBruski) of Rotoworld. Those two guys are tweeting their opinions on pertinent subjects related to fantasy basketball seemingly every night. It's also at a very high volume, too. Which is completely awesome. I've ran into some other cool fantasy guys to follow like @fakebasketball, @Mr_Norof, @Sports_25toLife and @FantasyTrade411 in the past six months, too. If you follow all those guys in this paragraph, chances are you probably won't miss anything important for your fantasy basketball team.
Personally, as many of you can tell, I like to let my opinion be heard and I'll head to Twitter just about any time a fantasy-related idea hits me. I've had some gems like saying Jordan Crawford was going to go off on the day he was traded last year, Kevin Smith was going to win the Lions RB job in a couple weeks and called that Fernando Salas was going to be the closer two full weeks before he even made it to the Cardinals.I've had about 9,000 tweets in the year and about 99.9 percent of them were about baseball, basketball or football.
The moral of the story is the best piece of fantasy advice you can get is to get on Twitter ASAP. You can find out who to follow by just following some (or all) of the people I follow here. You'll also find other guys in your Twitter travels. I can just about guarantee that you won't regret it.
Post your comments below and send them to me on Twitter @MikeSGallagher
Pick-N-Roll is below!