Seventeenth in a season-long series
Baseball is best enjoyed outdoors, in the sunshine. Next best is under the lights, still outdoors. But sometimes it rains or snows, and that’s when fantasy baseball rules.
Its history begins in a distant time and place, in the ancient Indian game of pachisi — familiar to all who have played the Americanized board game of Parcheesi. Indeed, both the board game and baseball itself may recall the Odyssey of Ulysses, with its seafaring perils between bays, or safe-harbor bases, before returning home.
But today’s fantasy-sport players, who may number more than the 65 million fans who attended MLB games in 2022, are not thinking of Indian board games or Greek legends. They have grown up with variations on Rotisserie Baseball, developed in 1980 by Dan Okrent and his lunchtime colleagues at New York’s no-longer-extant restaurant La Rotisserie Française.
Okrent has had a many-splendored career in baseball and out. The various stops in his half-century in the media business include a decade in book publishing, plus a couple of others in magazine editing (including four as the chief editor of Life). All along he has written notable books, appeared in film documentaries, and co-created an Off Broadway hit (552 performances) with Old Jews Telling Jokes.
Bill James and sabermetrics were largely unknown to fans before Okrent’s writing about them appeared in Sports Illustrated in May 1981. But his signal contribution came a year earlier, when he unleashed fantasy baseball upon the sports world. The idea of friends keeping their own rosters and rating them by players’ stats was not totally new; faculties at Harvard University and the University of Michigan had done it in the 1960s (see below). But Okrent made his game realistic: 23-man rosters, a salary cap, trading deadlines and more. Eight statistics were used to rank the teams: batting average, home runs, RBIs, and steals for position players; wins, ERA, saves, and WHIP (hits plus walks per nine innings) for pitchers.
After Okrent wrote an article about the game in Inside Sports, leagues sprouted up everywhere. One original member of the Rotisserie League, Glen Waggoner, wrote an annual guide (subtitled “the greatest game for baseball fans since baseball”) that spread the gospel farther and wider beginning in 1984.
Okrent grew up playing Strat-O-Matic, a game that Hal Richman had invented as a boy and then, in 1961, launched commercially. Improving upon its most notable predecessor, Ethan Allen’s “All-Star Baseball” (1941), Strat added two dice and spinning discs as randomizing devices to project performance for both batters and pitchers.
Also in 1961 (or perhaps December of the prior year) John Burgeson created the first computer baseball simulation, for which a printout of the 73rd run survives. He and his brother Paul had access to computers, and so they set about coding a baseball program in SPS (Symbolic Programming System), an assembler for the IBM 1620 mainframe computer.
The game featured a match-up between such Hall of Famers as Earl Averill, Rogers Hornsby, and Dizzy Dean on one team and Honus Wagner, Stan Musial, and Lefty Grove on the other. Burgeson loved that he could create a simulated contest across different eras. Believing the program had the capacity to educate non-computer users about what a computer could do, he was disappointed when in 1963 IBM decided to remove this and all other “novelty” programs from the 1620 library.
For novelty of concept and execution it would be tough to top Thomas Lawson’s 1884 invention, “Base Ball with Cards.” Lawson sold candy in the Boston area as a boy, saved his money, and invented a card game that he sold himself on trains and at the ballparks. Played by four players, two on each side, its object was “to secure as many tricks, or runs, as possible and by skilful [sic] combinations to destroy the value of opponent’s cards.”
The game was successful, and in 1885 Lawson arranged a tournament of the National League clubs, with prizes he posted himself (“$1,600 in gold and handsome trophies”). Unlike fantasy baseball, however, in which a player contents himself with statistical stand-ins for the players on his team, the “Base Ball with Cards” tournament was played by real players from each of the eight National League teams.
Backward spins the story.
Before the creation of probabilistic baseball games there was the pinball game for the parlor. (Later incarnations migrated to the boardwalk and the barroom.) The first of these to be given commercial life goes back to the game’s amateur era: the invention of Francis C. Sebring, real-life pitcher for the Empire Base Ball Club of New York (and bowler for the Manhattan Cricket Club).
No examples of “Parlor Base-Ball” or its packaging survive, but from the patent application of February 4, 1868, we see that a spring propelled a coin (“one of the thick nickel coins of the denomination of ‘one cent,’ issued by the United States Government in and about the year 1860”) from pitcher to batter, and another spring activated a bat that propelled the coin into one or another of the cavities in the field.
Sporting weeklies carried ads for Sebring’s “Parlor Base-Ball.” The December 8, 1866, issue of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly featured a woodcut of parents and young’uns playing the game, with an accompanying story.
I have never played fantasy baseball. Sometimes I think it is a menace to the game, breaking down civic loyalty to a real team and replacing it with dedication to a team that exists only on your phone. But other times I reflect on the millions of fans who play variants of the game — or gamble on its outcomes — with an intensity they might never have brought to the home team. And this must be a good thing, right?
PIONEERS: Dan Okrent was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.