Rookie of the Year

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #192*. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.*

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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.

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Monopoly has become an obsession in the Rookie of the Year household.

My youngest son, Peter, is the primary obsessive. He had us borrow Monopoly for the Nintendo Switch from the Steinway library (by the time you read this, he might have received a copy for his birthday already – but, still, shhhhhh). We go mano-a-mano nearly every day, and when I win (99% of the time), he cries. He visualizes rounds in his head, The Queen’s Gambit-style. On weekend mornings, we’ll lie in bed discussing various scenarios in which he might have beaten me, or recapping, move by move, how he finally managed to make his dream come true: securing the Boardwalk-Park Place color set and bankrupting me.

Earlier this week, Peter, in his final days as a six-year-old, took out the physical board game and began rolling dice and moving round and round the board, buying properties and placing houses and hotels. He was playing (inventing?) Monopoly Solitaire and having the time of his life. He’s been playing it every day since.

An actual exchange we had one morning:

“Peter, it’s time to go to school.”

“OK, Dad, I just need to advance to Boardwalk and pay myself $2,000 because I have a hotel.”

The boy has definitely got my blood.

But the activity that has best defined the outsized influence Monopoly now has over our lives happened on a recent Saturday. The Wife of the Year was in Montauk on a girls’ weekend and the boys and I were left alone.

“Mom is gone,” I announced that morning. “We can play videogames all day long. Just two rules: 1. If you fight at all, the Switch gets turned off and we go [pause for effect] for a long walk. 2. At 1 p.m., we are taking a break for a few hours to work on a creative project.”

What sort of creative project? It was an idea Peter and I had hatched an hour earlier: We would all hop in the car, drive to Staples and buy poster board. Then we’d bring the poster board home, gather all the supplies we need…and create our own custom Monopoly board.

Marronopoly.

Jacob, my 10-year-old, was game for it, and he was assigned the role of note-taker. As I cut the poster board down to the perfect size with an Exacto knife, he carefully copied out all the names of the actual Monopoly properties and led our family brainstorm. We would rename each space to reflect our most cherished family values (Boardwalk became Disney World, Park Place became Yankee Stadium) and the world around us (we made spaces for Jacob’s room and Peter’s room, and turned the jail into Rikers Island).

We measured. We traced. We drew. Well, I measured, I traced and I drew. But we all colored it in with magic markers and – just a few short hours later – Marronopoly was born.

Did we play it? Of course not! It was time to get back to videogames.

But Peter and I eventually did play it, a couple nights later. I became the first (and still only) winner, bagging both Disney World and Yankee Stadium. But the highest point was when Peter bought “Grandma’s Apartment” and raced downstairs to tell her.

I waited a beat.

“Get out of here!” I heard him yell.

My son, Monopoly/Marronopoly enthusiast, had evicted my mother-in-law.

Am I a good Dad?

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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.