Yes, here's the breakdown for Fantasy Football: The Musical, which will apparently be part of the 2009 New York Musical Theater festival. Please alert any of your thespian friends to make this production magically come to life:

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NYMF 7/2 EPA - FANTASY FOOTBALL: THE MUSICAL?

Kristin Johnson
New York, NY

Other

September 1991, NYC. An unemployed stats geek & a small-time bookie realize that their passion for sports is keeping them from holding a job or a girlfriend. Joining forces, they set out to create the ultimate sports fan experience-and in the process, pull their lives together-in this "bromantic comedy" of a musical.

Matthew Berry:
Mid–late 20s. Strong comic lead. Sports-obsessed guy who doesn't have much going for him in the career department; covers his lack of success w/sarcasm. Tenor to G.

Bill Simmons:
Mid–late 20s. Very funny leading man. Runs small underground gambling ring, but is looking for the next big thing to take him over the top. Has a fair amount of hubris when it comes to being caught by the law. Tenor to A.

Sarah:
Mid–late 20s. Leading lady. Up-and-coming singer-songwriter who sadly allows her boyfriend Bill to care more about sports than about her. Beautiful singing voice. Must accompany herself on guitar.

Stoner:
Mid–late 20s. Classic frat bro in every sense. Drinks beer, smokes weed, watches football, goes bowling. Creates tons of "would you rather" sports hypotheticals. Manly singer w/high G.

Jacko:
Mid–late 20s. Most successful former-bro of the group. Has become a lawyer and a bit square since college, but still knows how to loosen his tie & have a good time. Baritone.

J-Bug:
Mid–late 20s. Matthew's odious former rival from the college newspaper. Used nepotism to get a sweet job in sports; lords it over everyone at every opportunity. Just a jerk. Baritone.

Cousin Sal:
Mid – late 20s. The bro who doesn't speak because he's fixated on the TV. Has priceless tacit reactions to other events around him. Sings an epic hero song. Must be able to play an instrument.

Rebecca:
Mid – late 20s. The possibly-psychotic Christian activist who drives Stoner insane with her chirpy and peppy love for all things religious. Delightful soprano with patter song.

Becky:
Late teens – early 20s. Rebecca's younger cousin who is a supposed clone of her elder kin, but has a secret wild side: her love of sports and bro-culture that she reveals as soon as the other girls leave the room. Delightful soprano with patter song.

Skip Berry:
Late teens – early 20s. Matthew's nerdy younger brother, whose wholesome geekiness gives way to angsty punk rock when he bursts into song. Punk rock voice. Must be able to rap.

Mrs. Berry:
Jewish, 45 – 55. Loving single mother who cares deeply about her two sons, but is struggling to make ends meet. Powerful, soulful voice.

Mr. Bulgewater:
45 – 55. Eccentric billionaire who loves the sound of his own voice. Amused at his own ridiculous success, and feels the right to interrupt anyone. Baritone.

Officer Kilborn:
40 – 50. Policeman who is looking for that one big case to send his career to the next level. Thinks he lives in the real life "CSI". No singing required.

You can't say the producers of this didn't do their homework. By casting Simmons as a tenor, they'll definitely be able to pick up his distinct nasality. I hope this production also explores the origins of the Talented Mr. Roto's (alleged!) latent sexual deviance.

Fantasy Football: The Musical? [Actor's Equity]

I was assigned the story by the New York brass because I had considerable experience with upstart dot-coms, but I was outside of the loop on this one; Twitter was scary to me, someone who, as you might have noticed, prefers to write long, rather than in 140 character increments. I started my Twitter account because I thought it might be a fun gimmick for the story, a reporter updates readers on interview while it's going on type of thing. It didn't work out that way — thankfully, considering that's a really hacky way to write a story — but I ended up being hooked. But I'm not hooked on Tweeting. I'm hooked on reading Tweets. That has to be one of the more effeminate sentence combinations I've ever written. And I've written many.

As you know if you follow me on Twitter, I'm not the world's most entertaining Tweeter. Mostly, it's just links to stories I've written, banal updates on parental visits and conversations with Cardinals beat reporters. As a writer, I find Twitter useful mostly as an aggregate. But as a reader, it has become my morning newspaper. When I wake up in the morning, I log onto Twitter to find out what's happening in the world. Which is idiotic and utterly true.

To me, Twitter is the world's greatest RSS feed, allowing me to gather information from friends, colleagues, reporters, comedians and anyone else who regularly updates with information I care about. Movies? Check! TV reviews? Check! and Check! Hilarious stumbling and backtracking? Check! Smart media criticism? Check! and Check! Genius baseball wit? Check! Dry fake outrage? Check! Mattoon news? Check! I make my own newspaper every day. And I can unsubscribe to any section of the paper I want to, at any time.

This is nothing new, of course; Old Man Discovers Twitter. But what's interesting to me is that I find using Twitter almost as passive an experience as reading a newspaper. I update my own Twitter about as often as I wrote on my newspaper, which is to say, "occasionally." I just feel like everyone does it better than I do. I enjoy reading what other people have to say; some seem to have mastered the form. Twitter has become my morning news source, because I just pick and choose what I want and ignore the rest. This is why I'm growing stupider. This is why we all are. I couldn't be happier about it. I'll read the New York Times later, to explain what happens. For now, this'll work.

I'm not turning my icon green, though. I still support the Iranian people. Honest.

J.J. Abrams. My parents were here all weekend, and as with all parents visiting from out of town, eventually you run out of activities for them and everybody just collapses in front of the television. (Like we were gonna go to a museum or some shit.) Desperate, I strapped them in a chair to watch the pilot episode of "Lost," and now, of course, they're hooked, spending most of the rest of the week trying to figure out why the bald guy can walk now and who's going to be the lucky castaway to shoot Boone and Shannon in the face. You would have thought my parents the last people on the planet to lack even the most cursory exposure to "Lost," but you'd be wrong. Witness! Foster Kamer at Gawker this weekend uncovered a Dutch television station duped into thinking the scene of the plane crash in "Lost" was actual footage from the Air France crash. No, really: They actually thought this. They even had a hilarious Web posting about it, which they of course took down. The best part is that you can see Evangeline Lilly as Kate in the photo. The Dutch don't know who this is? Come on, Holland, let's try to stay in the game here.

Michael Bay. I love the notion of enormous robots fighting as much as anybody, but after the horrific first Transformers movie — which was a spectacle in the same way that spinning around in circles in your yard for an hour until your brain explodes was a spectacle — you couldn't drag me to the sequel. (Particularly after withering report from a screening, the highlight being the product placement of "a huge Planters peanuts can is placed smack in the middle of a garage floor during one scene, because that's where one usually keeps food - on the floor with nothing around it in a huge garage." (Roger Ebert's review is particularly spirited.) You still can't escape the marketing of this film, though, and much of that is because of Bay, who really shouldn't ever be forgiven for Pearl Harbor, which has a legitimate claim on the worst, most misguided movie imaginable. His instantly legendary angry email to the Paramount promotions department contains this super doubleplus brilliant clause: "So far our print has been in my opinion and abject failure." That is the most sentence ever. That looks like it was written in this column.

Matthew Berry. Like Daulerio and Drew, I received an angry email from Tucker Max this weekend, and man, if that's not a career capper, I can't imagine what is. I'm not sure why it's Daulerio's fault that the aging cretin outed ESPN fantasy expert Matthew Berry as a guy who had a "threesome set up with a porn star and some other girl, had them both IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, and blew it-didn't fuck either one!" but hey, the video he sent all of us was awfully clever anyway. Of course, acting as if Tucker Max has ever said a truthful word in his life is somewhat of a fallacy in the first place; one gets a sense that Berry and Max had a few beers, and next thing you knew, Max was writing pretend stories about threesomes with porn stars and Berry's all "Wha-wha-wha?" I'm sure this hasn't been a pleasant week for Berry, who seems like a nice, if somewhat frattish, fellow, but it's difficult to feel too sorry for him: If you hang out with Tucker Max, and then tell the world about it (at 5:40 in the morning!), you probably deserve whatever's coming your way. I like that Max felt obliged to point out it wasn't Bill Simmons, though. I'm sure Bill appreciates that.

Stephen Curry. As a late-in-life, I-grew-up-without-a-team, hey-Woody-Allen-likes-them-why-not? New York Knicks fan/convert — I accept all scorn here — I'm cheering madly for the Knicks to end up with the modern-day Maravich, even if almost every mock draft anymore has someone choosing him before he comes around. I was trying to come up with the worst possible person for the Knicks to draft, the person who would inspire the Garden to freak out like the Balkman days of yore. I decided it would be Tyler Hansbrough, who, oddly, NBADraft.net has going to the Nets at No. 11. There wouldn't be a worse player for Mike D'Antoni's style, and he'd become an instant, legendary punchline. No one would remember Frederic Weis again. I almost hope it happens. How will you feel if your team drafts Tyler Hansbrough, and your team isn't the Charlotte Bobcats? This is my favorite new storyline of Thursday's draft.

Johnny Depp. I'm willing to wait in line for hours to see Public Enemies — rough early buzz aside — because I would watch Michael Mann film a peanut butter sandwich for two hours. (Particularly if that ham-sandwich was being eaten by a crazed Al Pacino with a come beat everybody up.) That looks like the mascot for Hell's minor league baseball team. Nightmare Fuel, indeed. [pours one out for Chandler]

Lucas Glover. Like the rest of you, I have no idea who Lucas Glover is and will therefore not bother telling you anything about the new U.S. Open winner. I do think some credit should go out to The New York Times' Mark Sweeney, who, using some strange golf Bill James statistics, picked Glover as his sleeper pick to win the tournament last Wednesday. Way to go, Mark Sweeney, whoever you are! Actually, it turns out that he kind of is the Bill James of golf. This Golf Digest story from two years ago talks about his "Urgency Effect," which basically attempts to quantify how golfers get the yips. I don't know what it means. I'm just relieved we're halfway through the golf season, when people like me have to pretend golf is a sport we follow as closely as we follow other sports. You know what golfers need? They need numbers, like in NASCAR. That way the middle manager at your corporate complex could stick a "23 Woods" sticker on the back of his Miata, and we'd know all we needed to about the guy we're honking at in traffic.

Joe Morgan. Now that Craggs has hit his stride — eventually we're all going to forget anyone else works here — I'm taking particular glee in his weekly hectoring of Joe Morgan. Much like Josh Levin is still in Rick Reilly's head to this day with the whole tooth metaphor thing, you get the sense, in the wake of Morgan's "apology" on Sunday night, that the same thing might be happening. That's the good news. The bad news is that Morgan might end up so shaky that he turns into Tim McCarver. You can imagine in future telecasts, Morgan, afraid that he will inadvertently unleash another pile of bullshit "confusion," limiting himself to saying easily verifiable things like, "That was a single. I once hit a single." and "There are nine innings in most baseball games." I'm not sure if that would be better or worse. Think of it this way: Do you prefer the harmless brainlessness of Clark Kellogg, or the obnoxious but opinionated snootiness of Billy Packer? That we must make such decisions ... that, friends, is our plight.

Alex Rodriguez. Pete Abraham of the Journal News is what New York beat reporters would be like if they weren't all crazy — slight oversimplification! Don't depant me next time I visit the press box, guys! — and he has absolutely nailed how sloppy the Yankees have been with Alex Rodriguez since he came off the disabled list. A-Rod's rehab, remember, was more of a split-the-baby procedure, a little bit of surgery here, a little bit of surgery at the end of the season, let the man settle in and work his way back type of thing. Manager Joe Girardi didn't do this at all, though, playing him every day until, inevitably, he broke down, to the point that they're going to be sitting him at least a day a week for quite some time, probably even more. It's like they completely forgot he was hurt, which is not a smart decision for a team paying him about $26 million every season through the 2017 season. This is why the Yankees are insane and still compelling: Every year is so important that they're willing to risk a guy they still owe $206 million simply to stay competitive for May and June. And it didn't even work. I have to say: The Yankees are a fun team to write about for your job.

Donte Stallworth. Like me, the Palm Beach Post, in the wake of Donte Stallworth's light sentence for killing a man while driving under the influence, got to thinking about Leonard Little. The Rams linebacker killed a woman in 1998 while driving home drunk after his birthday party — the woman was actually the wife of a photographer who occasionally shoots Rams games, as documented memorably by SI's Mike Fish — and was only suspended for eight games. (He served 30 more days in jail than Stallworth will.) Little, amazingly, is still playing, even though he was arrested again for a DUI in 2004, though he was ultimately acquitted of the charges. It's impossible to have the right stance on instances like Little's and Stallworth's. Part of you wants to throw them in jail for 100 years, and the other says that if you serve your time, you should have the right to rejoin your chosen vocation while you have the opportunity, even if you're a monster who did something stupid and terrible. Either way, it makes you want to bash your head into a wall until it bleeds.

Jeff Weaver. One suspects Tigers fans, Yankees fans and Mariners fans aren't doing backflips about it, but we Cardinals fans are happy for Jeff Weaver, who appears to be settling into a somewhat regular rotation slot with the Dodgers. As I've mentioned before, there's no place on earth other than Busch Stadium that Jeff Weaver would be greeted with a standing ovation, and that includes the Weaver household. On the list of unlikely World Series heroes, Weaver has to be considered one of the least likely; the man was dominant in a deciding game against a classic offense. (The only guy who hit him was Sean Casey, of all people.) The Weaver tenure in St. Louis was a total blur; he didn't show up until July and was knocked around until the playoffs. His October was so ridiculous that, when my father and I had a discussion on whose World Series jersey we should buy to commemorate 2006, we ended up choosing Weaver. Sure, I look like an idiot when I wear the jersey to softball games, but hey, I'm usually wearing black socks and maroon shorts anyway, so the jersey is the least of my problems. By the way, the 2006 commemorative championship video is particularly amusing to watch now, considering Albert Pujols, Jim Edmonds, Jeff Suppan, Adam Wainwright, everyone looks all officially and grownup, and then Weaver shows up looking like the biggest dirtball alive. All he's missing is a pack of Winstons and rotting teeth. Bless him.

No, it turns out former ESPN personality Eric Wynalda also caught wind of his Facebook updates popping up in "Deleted Scenes" and would like to set the record straight. [Sic'd] for the fans:

There has been some comments posted on a Facebook page that your website is reflecting as my comments.

Apparently my site has been hacked, apparently I have several facebook pages.

Please make the following statement or remove all posts in regard to this matter.

Apparently my facebook site made some comments about the US soccer teams recent performances. I not make these statements nor do I share the opinions of what was posted but I am extremely concerned about this.

I have fixed the problem

Okay. He was hacked, he claims. That's fine. That happens a lot?

Also, for those keeping track of the Twitter brigade — Matthew Berry claims he's not the model-humping ESPN columnist in question in Tucker Max's post.

Back to Ed Hinton!

Also Deasdpin (I assume everyone who writes here) will never be invited to any of Mr. Max's model-infested hangouts or midget-fucking expeditions.

Aw. Ouchy.

*****

Tomorrow: Sarah Schorno returns to Deadspin on a Saturday. Sunday: Bentern.

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. God Bless Gary Papa.

Based on the new book "Kerouac At Bat: Fantasy Baseball And The King Of The Beats" we find out that Kerouac obsessively maintained a fantasy team from his teenage years up until the time of his death with a fictitious league featuring teams like the "New York Chevvies" and the "Cincinnati Blacks." The book claims that Kerouac kept this side of his life a dirty little secret, especially from his too-cool-for-school friends like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

"I don't think the others knew. Or if they did, they didn't learn it from Kerouac. I think he was worried they might think it childish."

If only Kerouac were still alive today to do podcast chats with Matthew Berry.

A New Book Details Kerouac's Life With Fantasy Baseball [NYT]

In Berry's marathon ESPN chat, he was asked by a reader about the interview and he offered a long response as to why he was upset with Razzball's style of questioning.

Here's some what Berry said in his response:

I was disappointed in the final printed interview as he edited a lot of answers to shine a light on me a certain way and, more importantly, he didn't mention ESPN fantasy baseball at all - the whole reason for the interview. So not really grouchy but definitely didn't engage with him... [J]ust thought it was a little minor league and the kind of thing that gives blogs a bad name. ...The fact that we over four hours in and this is the first question of 10,000 I got about it tells me not a lot of folks read it, either... I was expecting a lot more questions on it.

Razzball was a little taken aback by the slight — especially since ESPN reached out to them to conduct the interview in the first place. They're just little squirrels trying to get a nut in an over-crowded marketplace. So they wondered why Berry was so touchy about some non-softball questions?

Berry responded to an email request to comment on the mini dust-up and reiterated his point:

"I have nothing against them. I checked out the site for the first time after the interview to see how it turned out and they are clearly smart guys who know fantasy baseball. But as I said in the chat, just thought that the way it was conducted - general tone, certain questions - were a little minor league. Not every interview is going to turn out how I would like, and I get that. But since I was asked about it, I felt like I should just be honest about the fact that I was disappointed by it when it happened. I try to be as honest as possible when asked about anything. I also wasn't thrilled with the comments made by Grey after the interview was posted. We spent a little time just talking...not for the interview, but just talking about his site. I shared a few of my experiences and things I did and learned back when I was a small site trying to get noticed. So, I was just surprised by some of what he said. Especially the part about me defending Jeter! I've had Jeter on every fantasy "hate" list I can remember... That was a low blow, saying I liked Jeter. But overall, as I said, it's not a big deal. Part of the gig. I've been called much worse and will be again in the future. (Probably by Deadspin commenters next time there's a photo of me out at a bar)

As someone who has been there with a "mom and pop" site before I got lucky with ESPN I get what they go through. I wish them well. Especially since they have set up a bunch of leagues at ESPN.com. (By the way...did I mention...that this year ESPN Fantasy Baseball - free live scoring, free to play, fully customizable, auction drafts for free, free draft kits - only on ESPN.com? Because if I didn't, I'd like to.)"

Who knew the world of professional fantasy baseball prophecising was so damn catty? It's like the modeling world, only less pretty and more obese.

UPDATE: Razzball responds:

We, like many sports fans and bloggers, have a love/hate relationship with ESPN but Matthew Berry is a good guy. We share his love for fantasy baseball and booze. We don't envy the task of having to write for such a broad audience as ESPN and we're sure he doesn't envy us writing for our comparably niche audience. Glad to see he's not holding a grudge and just said we were a 'little minor league.' Could have been worse - he could've compared us to Skip Bayless or Jay Mariotti. Plus, the 'little minor league' doesn't ring true, as neither Rudy or I are Taiwanese.

Interview With Matthew Berry [Razzball]

Deadspin readers might remember Christian as the man who took those fun photos of Michael Wilbon and JA Adande getting a little rumpy-pumpy with several starlets of the industry a few months back, or his ability to execute a stand-up 69 position without throwing his back out. I shot Christian an email to ask him how he took the news of his banishment and he said he was "surprised" by ESPN's decision to cut him off. "I can understand their decision as being the safe one, but I still think its dumb. Just put a disclaimer about me and move on. I don't know," he wrote.

But, hey, uh, Christian how did you and Bill end up becoming so friendly to begin with? "I sent him an email telling him to check out my blog and he wrote back that he liked it....this was in Jan. We spoke over email like twice after that."

Now we know one of Bill Simmons casual online masturbation sites.

Oh, and this is what Matthew Berry looks like when he's trying to woo a lady with his fantasy wizardry:

Ten bucks says he showed her a card trick moments after this photo was taken.

ESPN and porn evidently don't mix [Hank Brockett]