Las Vegas League 9 Champion Profile -- Jesse Herron

[Tom Kessenich]

A fantasy baseball championship that goes down to the wire is the epitome of excitement - unless you’re one of the teams in the chase. And then it is nothing short of pure anxiety.



But when it ends up going your way and the title is yours, those anxious moments at the end turn into glorious moments of celebration.



Jesse Herron can attest to that.



Herron and his co-manager, Dustin Ashby, saw their hopes for a league title in the Las Vegas 9 league of the NFBC in 2005 literally go down to the final inning of play in the season’s final game. To say they were sweating out those final three outs would be a monumental understatement.



“We didn’t know we had won the title for sure until the Seattle Mariners made their 27th out against the Oakland Athletics,” Herron said. “Our league came down to a half-point on the final day of the season. It’s amazing that after 26 weeks and thousands of games it came down to rooting against Mike Morse, Mark Ellis and Johnson - praying they wouldn’t do anything crazy.”



None of them did and Herron and Ashby’s team escaped with the narrowest margin of victories.



“We basically won by two RBIs,” Herron said.



But in the end, the league title belonged to the two friends who have been playing fantasy baseball for well over a decade.



“We’ve both been stats geeks since we began playing Strat-O-Matic baseball at ages 7 and 8 in 1982,” said Herron, who resides in Alpharetta, Georgia and is the CFO of Sanford Brands (a.k.a. Sharpie). “We ran our first fantasy baseball league in 1991, involving manual stats which we calculated during our high school classes. I won that league by getting Tom Glavine for a dollar the year before he dropped 20 wins and a sub-3.00 ERA.



“But who’s keeping track?”



Finding a gem like Glavine paid dividends for Herron way back in ’91 and he and Ashby found some quality nuggets in the 2005 NFBC as well.



“We made some good moves on the Waiver Waire,” Herron said. “We aggressively targed (Dustin) Hermanson and then picking up (Clint) Barmes in advance of ihs return. We had a balanced team, allowing us to pick up meaningful points in every category.”



That balance proved vital as Las Vegas 9 was one of the toughest leagues in the NFBC last year.



“Our league was incredibly competitive with some of the best players in the industry,” Herron said. “Players like Pat Gagne and Emmett Ruland, Gene McCaffery, the Satinoff brothers, just to name a few. But really we could list all of the owners in our league. There were no cupcakes here.



“When you come out on top ahead of that caliber of talent it is very rewarding.”



Both men are happily married and Ashby is in the club management industry as General Manager of a Nicklaus Design golf course. He also co-hosts a golf talk radio show. The two men have been part of the NFBC since its inception and they’ll be back for more in 2006.



“We have had great experiences each of the last two seasons and would recommend the league to anyone with a passion for fantasy baseball,” Herron said. “Greg and his team are first class in everything they do. We look forward to competing again (in 2006) and hopefully defending our title.”