What do you do when everything goes wrong? Where do you turn when the players you drafted for their production are not producing and that one random player who you didn’t expect to produce much at all stops being so surprisingly useful? That’s my situation at the moment, folks. On paper, my roster is fantastic. My hitters are led by players like David Ortiz and Matt Wieters, and my pitching staff should be unbeatable. And yet here we sit in week five of the 2012 season, and I find myself in last place in my league.

To be fair to myself, injuries have decimated my roster. Andrew Bailey, Jacoby Ellsbury, Chase Utley and Doug Fister currently reside in that black hole we refer to as the disabled list, yet the players I have left should have been more than capable of holding the fort until their compatriots returned. Clearly, that has not been the case.

The problem is threefold. First, many of my supposed stars, especially on my pitching staff, are not burning quite as brightly as they usually do. Jon Lester has had a rough start to the season, though it seems he might be turning it around, and Josh Johnson, who I have defended and believed in through out all his injury struggles, has been downright awful, leading many to speculate that he is, once again, injured. Even Roy “Doc” Halladay, who may be the best pitcher in baseball, has proven more vulnerable than usual as of late.

Secondly, my hitters have done little offensively despite generally hitting for high average. Six of my nine starters are hitting over .290 and five of those six are hitting over .300. Despite that, my team ranks in the lower half of my league in every other offensive category. My sluggers are not slugging, my base stealers are not stealing and the fucking snozzberries most certainly do not taste like snozzberries.

Finally, even when my hitters do have good days, they seem to never have them on the same day. If David Ortiz goes 4-4 with two home runs, the rest of my team will lay a fat goose egg and fry up a delicious omelette that I can’t have any of. And it wouldn’t even be a golden goose egg. Yes, this is the Willy Wonka column. Get me some damn chocolate.

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to my problem. You can’t trade away an entire team, and you can’t replace your entire team with free agents. Well, you could, but it would be difficult and far too risky. The only thing I can really do is wait and hope that my team picks itself up out of the gutter.

Patience is a key to success, both in real baseball and fantasy baseball. In real baseball, hitters need to wait for their pitch, for the right moment to strike. At the moment, I am essentially waiting for my entire team to get their collective pitch. I know I drafted a talented team. I know what they are capable of, and because of that, I am willing to wait out this bad stretch. I’m not after the everlasting gobstopper or the golden egg or even that weird soda that makes you float, although that would be awesome. No, I want it all. I want the whole factory, which is, for those of you who aren’t following because you haven’t seen “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,”

a metaphor for first place in this case.

They say that good things come to those who wait. Lucky for me, I’m a champion at waiting. I’m the best at it. I’ll go into hibernation if I have to. I might do that even if I don’t have to. Now that I think about it, hibernating sounds like a great idea. Wake me when the Red Sox win the World Series. Good night.

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