Slate.com Table of Contents drink Cognac Attack! dvd extras ad report card Fugue Interstate Jorge Posada Is Having Laura's Baby! election scorecard Advanced Search Outliers in Pennsylvania architecture explainer Architecture Is a Team Sport Do April Showers Bring May Flowers? art explainer Seven Mysteries of China Apocalypse No! assessment explainer WTF, WKW? Why Are Global Food Prices Soaring? books explainer The New Global Nomads Why Does China Care About Tibet? books fighting words Greer Tames the Shrew The Tall Tale of Tuzla chatterbox fixing it Hillary's Rev. Wright, Part 2 Health Care Policy Convictions fixing it Stuck on Yoo The Environment corrections fixing it Corrections The Laws in Wartime culturebox fixing it This Film Should Be Played Loud! 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Inverviews 50 Cents moneybox slate v The Mark-to-Market Melee Weatherman Gone Wild moneybox slate v Why Fed Reform Won't Work Dear Prudence: He Won't Dress Up! moneybox slate v Rich Men Behaving Badly Obama Girl Hurts … Obama! moneybox sports nut Staying on Bush's Course Grappling With History movies teachings Illegal Use of Hands Terror U other magazines technology The Rewards of Motherhood Cloudy Judgment other magazines television Clipping the Right Wing Ben Silverman's Critique of Slate poem television "Oh Blessed Season" Dance Marathon politics television What I Mean, Not What I Say Conan Appears on Leno politics the chat room Campaign Junkie Words of Warcraft politics the green lantern Chicago School Days Will Diesel Save the World? politics the has-been What Made Richardson Flip? Name That Loon Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/124 The Spot: A man lies comatose in a hospital bed. His anguished the has-been lover asks the doctors if there's anything she can do. Despair is Iron City Blues taking hold when suddenly the man's eyes open, and he begins to talk. "My team ... it's a keeper league," he says, spitting out the the undercover economist words in his last throes. "Don't. Trade. Prince. Fielder!" With The Price Is Right that, his vitals go dead, the doctors bring in defibrillator paddles, and the woman starts to wail. An announcer intones: today's blogs A Winning Argument? "Join the endless drama. Play fantasy baseball on ESPN." (Click here to watch the spots.) today's blogs Did You Get the Memo? The purpose of this campaign (it includes a teaser ad that runs on TV, plus several more Webisodes available at today's blogs EndlessDrama.com) is to create and retain interest in ESPN's Mugabe's End? fantasy-baseball leagues. According to the ad agency behind the campaign, the fantasy-baseball season can feel "long" and today's blogs Sadr Says "daunting" to some players. Thus the ads—with their references to the "endless drama" inherent in fantasy sports—are meant today's blogs both to fire up excitement for the start of the new season and to Dean Screams encourage players to stick it out for the whole marathon. today's papers I'm a decent test case for the campaign. I've played fantasy How To Lose a Fight in Five Days baseball in the past, and the long season waiting ahead does feel daunting. So daunting, in fact, that this year I finally decided to today's papers Yoo Said It opt out. I couldn't get jazzed about signing on for another six months of statistics parsing. I couldn't summon the passion today's papers required to scour the waiver wire, replace injured players, assess Food 911 daily spreadsheets, and make lots of careful, math-based decisions. It seemed like it might be more fun just to watch some today's papers real baseball games on TV. Best Laid Plans So, did this ESPN campaign work on me? Did it get me psyched today's papers up for my league's draft and stoke my fires for another half-year Bogged Down in Basra of fantasy "drama"? No. (Frankly, by late July, the only drama in today's papers my league is over who can come up with the punniest team No More Alphabet Soup name. Queer as Foulke? Siouxsie and the Ben Sheets?) But my mind was already made up, and, indeed, my league has now today's papers started without me. For people who were still on the fence as this Swimming With the Sharks season loomed, it's possible the ads offered a nudge of encouragement. video Wars: Chechnya and Iraq Any habitual fantasy player will enjoy the knowingness of the war stories jokes. The ads get all the details right and are clearly written by Bush Bungles in Basra and Bucharest people familiar with the ins and outs of nerdball. (In fact, one of the ad-agency creatives involved with the campaign has actually well-traveled written a book about playing fantasy football.) References to The Mecca of the Mouse lopsided trades, shady waiver wire pickups, and "keeper leagues" (in which you can carry players over from one season to the next) help establish geek cred. And framing the campaign as a soap opera parody is a clever ad report card idea. It puts forth the notion that a season of fantasy baseball Jorge Posada Is Having Laura's Baby! offers enough unexpected ups and downs to keep players A new ESPN campaign spoofs soap operas. Is that a good thing? engaged for months on end (just as a soap buoys along its By Seth Stevenson viewers on a stream of twists and turns). But the trouble with the Monday, March 31, 2008, at 11:23 AM ET campaign is that it gets the balance wrong: It's too much about Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/124 soaps, not enough about baseball. While nailing the parody, it as a bartender breaking up a fight. (His wife also appears as a sort of forgets why it's here in the first place. (Perhaps, like a love interest. When I asked if she was an actress, the ad guys soap character in a head bandage, it has amnesia? Or maybe this described her as "an aspiring actress.") But some of the episodes is the evil, goateed twin of the real campaign?) feature no baseball players at all—just the soap actors and maybe a bland ESPN commentator. I can't see how these spots Executives at Arnold Worldwide, the agency behind the spots, could hold much appeal for a jocky audience. In fact, some Web had originally planned to hire a big-name commercial director to sleuthing last week suggested that the campaign is stirring up mimic soap opera production values. But then they realized: more intense interest on soap opera message boards, where fans Why not just get the real thing? Through connections between are delighting at the chance to see their soap heroes appear in a ESPN and ABC, they enlisted a director from the long-running sports context. Great for the soap fans, but I think ESPN was soap One Life To Live and even filmed on the show's sets. hoping for the opposite effect. "The way they shoot soaps is completely different from the Grade: B-. Almost too well-executed. The ads play so much commercial world," says executive creative director Roger like real soap scenes that they neglect to do enough spoofing. I Baldacci. "The director sits in a control room with lots of did enjoy the "smack videos" available at EndlessDrama.com. monitors. They have three cameras running, and he snaps his These are intended to keep you excited about your fantasy fingers to switch cameras and go live to the next one. You're league as the season wears on by letting you e-mail seeing the whole ad happen live [instead of filming one camera unsportsmanlike video clips to your competitors. For instance, angle, stopping to set up the next shot, and then restarting with you can send a clip of a sexy nurse who offers sympathy to another camera angle]. The lighting technician sits in the control opponents when their star players get injured. "It's not enough room, too, and they have every light imaginable on the ceiling of just to win in fantasy sports," chuckles Baldacci. "You have to the set. With the push of a button, they can change the lighting. rub it in." In the commercial world, we would stop for 45 minutes while they set up flags and bounces and the D.P.