When it comes to fantasy sports, I like to employ the philosophy passed down from a stoned Reese Bobby to his son Ricky:  If you ain’t first, you’re last!

In an era where kids are given teal ribbons of participation and everyone receives a trophy just for sitting on the bench, I spit in the face of those who spend every waking moment protecting a kid’s self-esteem. It’s called tough love, people. My parents used it, their parents used it, their grandparents used it and you know what…? I turned out just fine. We’ve gradually come away from “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” to a world where kids carry their books from class to class with the help of a piece of Samsonite carry-on luggage on wheels. Well, I call bullsh*t! It’s first place or no place, folks. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

So now when I tell you the tale of how I lost the SiriusXM Host League in the final week of the season, do not confuse the meaning behind the story. It’s not me shrugging my shoulders and saying, “Well, I still finished second in a 15-team league of experts.” It’s me teaching you how not to end up a loser after you’ve been coasting in first place for two months. Yeah, that’s right – a loser. Because no one gives a crap about who finished second each year. They only care about who won. So if you don’t want Cal Naughton, Jr. sneaking into your house to cuckold your wife and steal your kids, you’ll pay attention here.

I never did a write-up of my original draft and I’m not going to go back and try and recap it all now because…well…no one cares. But needless to say, I used the first few picks to land the likes of Paul Goldschmidt, David Price and Bryce Harper, supplemented my core players with the likes of Jason Kipnis and Prince Fielder and then boarded the S.S. Hype-Machine and took players that the experts of SiriusXM Radio routinely pissed on for their ADP increases. Yup. We’re talking Kris Bryant in the seventh round, Yasmany Tomas in the 13th and even Danny Salazar in the 26th.

I thought I did a nice job of building a balanced team. I had insane power, good speed and decent pitching. In retrospect, knowing how overvalued starters were and how everyone was tighter than a frog’s ass (water-tight) with regard to trading, I would have probably liked one more second-tier starter, but overall, I walked away from this draft with confidence, despite some of the harsh on-air criticisms I took.

The team opened the season on the sluggish side and I had to make a few roster adjustments early on. Nothing major, but considering we had daily roster moves, I needed to build a couple of platoons. I hovered in the middle of the pack for a little while and when the calendar flipped to June, BAM!!! The band of fantasy brothers known only by my trademarked phrase, “Am I Trippin’?” began to climb the ranks. By the end of the month I was shuffling around the top three and by the time July ended, I was sitting in first place with an 18-point lead.

Now here’s where the advice part comes in…

Like anything in life, if you want to win, you need to step on your opponents’ throats. You need to beat them into submission so badly that they have no way of getting up. And once you’ve achieved that, then you employ the crippling blow and finish them off. Call it a competitive spirit. Call it killer instincts. However you want to label it, I don’t care. Just use it. When you’re sitting in first place of a 15-team league, you have to assume that the bottom half of the league doesn’t give a crap anymore while the top half sets you, and you alone, in their sights. They won’t trade with you for fear of helping your team and every roster move they make is littered with “how can this guy help me and f*** the first-place guy up at the same time?”

You also have to beware the fact that when the bottom half of the league checks out, they start dropping like flies in a number of categories. When you’re that high up in the standings, you don’t have many places to climb so you need to maintain your place at the top of each category and really push to improve wherever you can. Stretch that lead. Because once the lower half of the standings starts to descend into the abyss of neglect, your competition is racking up points that, technically, they should have been fighting for a whole lot harder.

It’s your job to keep that from happening and when it came to this league, to put it simply, I didn’t do my job. I let my guard down. I let my focus wane and in the end, I let myself get caught because of neglect. Maybe there was some hubris in there and the baseball gods opted to kick me in the fantasy groin, but overall, this loss is on me.

As I said before, the league had daily roster moves, but we only had weekly FAAB bidding and no ability to make personnel changes during the week. With that being the case, I should have been, regardless of my lead, sensibly plotting out each week to make sure that I filled in gaps and had enough player insurance so that if an injury happened on Tuesday, I was covered for the duration of the week. I started the season that way, but once I had that big cushion, a bit of neglect settled in. I missed the weekly deadline a few times, which obviously results in lost second-half gems, and when I did make moves, I probably didn’t research them as well as I should have.

Another area of neglect came with the daily maintenance of my roster. There were days where I neglected to check my team before the games started and I had holes in my lineup for the day which could have easily been plugged. I missed starts from some of my pitchers who should have been used while I wrongfully left guys in my rotation who had horrible match-ups I should have avoided. My overall points still didn’t fluctuate that much, but while I stayed stagnant, the objects in my rearview mirror really did become closer than they appeared.

When Adam Ronis of the RotoExperts got to within three points with just two weeks left in the season, I knew I was cooked. I scrambled to replace an injured Greg Holland but Ronis had already picked the waivers clean because he did his due diligence and glommed all the would-be closers when he needed to. When he got to within one point, I looked at the categories to see which ones were potentially still movable and all I had left was strikeouts. Unfortunately, trying to boost my K’s forced me into a few hurlers I would never have normally used and my WHIP and ERA began to suffer. I knew it was all over for me and no matter how many times I asked tiny baby Jesus to help me out, I knew that I really sh8t the bed on this one. With two days left, Ronis passed me in the standings and my team was completely incapable of even a last gasp of desperation. It was all over. I was done. The season wrapped on Sunday and there I was in second place, or as we all know it to be – first loser.

Somewhere here there’s a DirectTV commercial in the making where we have me, a fantasy champion side by side with me, the fantasy chump warning you to not be like the “chump me.” Until the casting director calls, you’ll just have to take my word for it here and don’t do what I did. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch and do not, under any circumstances, neglect your team when there’s a championship on the line.