I never used to be a fantasy baseball kind of kid.

But this year, after joining a fantasy baseball league for the first time, I’ve finally seen the light, so-to-speak, of spending countless hours in front of the computer screen scrutinizing over stats and lamenting the early season injuries of my star players.

Sure, it may not offer the roar of the crowd, or the peanut shells strewn across tiers of seats, but fantasy baseball offers a unique style of excitement that bridges the physical and virtual worlds of baseball. More than anything, I’ve found fantasy baseball to completely engage its participants. In other words: me.

Before joining a fantasy league, my breadth of knowledge about professional baseball was limited to the St. Louis Cardinals club. It’s not that I didn’t wish to expand my knowledge of baseball, or that I wasn’t looking outside of St. Louis, but there was simply no efficient way to follow a dozen games per day coupled with the hundreds of collected stats. Such a task seemed overwhelming.

However, upon joining a close-knit league of students from CHS, I instantly dove into the complexities of baseball, taking advantage of the information-laden interface that fantasy baseball offers. It hasn’t taken long — in fact, it’s only been about two weeks — to reach the point where I can casually discuss the majority of players in both the National and American Leagues.

While I was at first bewildered by the task of sifting through and organizing hundreds of players I didn’t know, I was immediately comforted by the abyss of online stats, fantasy projections, columns written by professional baseball analysts, and virtually endless forums discussing top prospects for the year.

One such prospect, whose name will be generously disclosed (although this is by no means an advice column), is such a result of scouring team rosters. Upon reading reports of prospects and then looking at injured lists and cross-referencing team rosters, I picked up Brandon Belt of the San Francisco Giants in my league. Not only has he been an excellent acquisition so far, but he has also engaged my interest with the Giants, their success thus far, and I’ve learned about the managerial conflict whether to make such-and-such changes to their rosters.

If none of the preceding information made sense, that’s completely understandable — in fact, it further proves that fantasy baseball is conducive to a much greater understanding of Major League Baseball.

Although the season has just begun and I’m by no means up to par with the other participants in my league, I have great anticipation for the months of virtual match-ups ahead.

I may not win overall, but the boy who’s never been “that fantasy baseball kind of kid” may know a thing or two by the end of the 2011 season.