Fantasy baseball

Materials in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library show that Kerouac (1922–69) played his own form of fantasy baseball starting quite young and continued developing and playing this perhaps private version of fantasy baseball during most of his life. His version of fantasy baseball was completely fictitious, with made up players and statistics. At the Library from November 2007 to February 2008, an exhibition on Kerouac's life and works includes several display cases of Kerouac's highly detailed fantasy baseball records, including charts, sketches, and notes.[2]

In 1961, another early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer by John Burgeson, IBM Akron, and distributed for several years by the IBM Corporation. It allowed two teams to play one another using random number generation and player statistics to determine a game's outcome, including a play-by-play description.[3][4] In the fall of 1961, Rege Cordic, a KDKA (Pittsburgh) radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program. The game was coded for a computer with only 20 KB in computer memory and was entirely self-contained.

Other early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball". One of the best-known was APBA, which in 1951 began publishing a game containing customized baseball cards of Major League Baseball players with their stats from past seasons. Participants could then re-create previous seasons using the game rules and the statistics, or compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against each other.

The first national fantasy baseball competition, Dugout Derby, was developed in 1989 by Lee Marc, Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos of Phoneworks who teamed with west coast ad agency (Wakeman & deForest) to launch the game in 1990 in a number of newspapers throughout the country including the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Tampa Bay Times, Morning Call, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun Times. Archives of Dugout Derby are available online and in most public libraries.[5] Dugout Derby is what current Daily Fantasy Sports are modeled after being the first game to allow large numbers of participants to compete against one another for prizes. Most importantly, Dugout Derby was the first game to convert games statistics to a basic scoring system. Participants created a team of major league players, earned stats (converted to points) for those players based on actual performance, traded those players on a daily basis, and accrued points while competing against one another to win prizes. The group filed and was awarded US Patents 5,018,736A and 5,263,723A, for Interactive Game System and Method; Interactive Contest System.[6]

The Rotisserie scoring system was developed independently and popularized in the 1980s by a group of journalists and formalized under the title Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980, named after the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Française, where its founders met for lunch and first played the game.[7][8]

Magazine writer-editor Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing the Rotisserie scoring system, coming up with the idea on a flight to Texas. After presenting his first vision of rotisserie baseball to friends there, none seemed interested.[9] Upon returning to New York a month later, he received an enthusiastic reception from a different group of friends, who then collaborated on the first league to use the system.

According to the rules, players (termed "owners") in the Rotisserie League would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players and would follow their statistics "during the ongoing season" to compile their scores. In other words, rather than using statistics for seasons whose outcomes were already known, the owners would have to make similar predictions about players' playing time, health, and expected performance that real baseball managers must make.

Because Okrent was a member of the media, other journalists, especially sports writers, were introduced to the game. Many early players were introduced to the game by these sports journalists, especially during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike; with little else to write about, many baseball writers wrote columns about Rotisserie league.

Rotisserie league baseball, nicknamed roto, proved to be popular, even in the 1980s when full statistics and accurate reporting were often hard to come by. The traditional statistics used in early Rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box scores and then from weekly information published in USA Today. Okrent, based on discussions with colleagues at USA Today, credits Rotisserie league baseball with much of the early success of USA Today, since the paper provided much more detailed box scores than most competitors and eventually even created a special paper, Baseball Weekly, which almost exclusively contained statistics and box scores. Local papers soon caught up with USA Today's expanded coverage.

The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring systems, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of real-time simulation of baseball, and allows many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real-world game works. According to statistics from a 2009 article in Forbes, nearly 11 million people play fantasy baseball today.[10]

Fantasy baseball has continued to grow [based on recent studies from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA.org)], but has been overtaken by fantasy football as the most popular form of fantasy sports. This is at least in part because some of those sports, such as football and auto racing, only participate once a week, making it easier for players to make adjustments, since they do not have to check their teams daily.

The growing popularity of fantasy baseball has created a niche for fantasy baseball trade referees. Owners of fantasy teams often trade players, and often those trades incite disputes within leagues. Third party websites provide fantasy players a place to have their trades reviewed by a panel of "judges" in exchange for a fee. Decisions are rendered based on the specifications, number of teams, statistical catego able to modern-day fantasy players.

New fantasy baseball formats have appeared that combine a traditional points-based competition with a liquid market that is used to facilitate real-time player trading. These games eliminate the need for fantasy trade judging by having team owners buy and sell players on a trading floor instead of negotiating trades directly with other owners.

Another new format of fantasy sports is 'daily fantasy sports'. Rather than joining leagues and selecting rosters that compete for an entire season, competitors are able to draft a line-up for a single day and compete against others with cash being awarded to the winner just hours after the games on the field that day have ended. A typical contest would pit two, four or six people against each other.

There are also fantasy baseball leagues that specialize in the Major League Baseball playoffs. Many fantasy baseball leagues stop their seasons at the end of the regular season.

Simulation games use computer programs, processing actual MLB player statistics, to generate results for contests matching teams comprising MLB players 'drafted' by 'owners.' This is thought to produce an experience which is more akin to that of being a real general manager.

Any fantasy baseball pool that "rolls over" into other years is called a "Keeper" or "Dynasty" league. Generally, "Keeper" leagues establish a certain number of players that are allowed to be kept on each team for the next season. "Dynasty" leagues are created for a more realistic General Manager experience, where the team owner has the option to keep all his/her players, as long as they can afford them under the league salary cap. The leagues can be run each year in any of the above formats with a winner declared at the end of each season. At the end of the year team managers decide which players they wish to protect (the number varies – from protecting and keeping all players, to keeping just one player). Before the MLB season opener, a fantasy draft is held to fill out the rest of the roster.

Many keeper leagues, as well as some single season leagues, have adopted salary cap rules similar to the NBA. In a "Salary Cap League", a salary is assigned to each player before the manager selects his team. Salaries are usually determined by the MLB player's real salary. Otherwise a number value is assigned – usually by an online baseball pool program – or it is determined through an auction process.[11] Each manager must ensure that they do not go over the predefined salary cap when selecting players.

One emerging option for a keeper league is the Draft Round Values system. This is a Sabermetric approach for determining the values of players selected in a particular round. The round a player was selected in the previous season is conceded in the upcoming seasons draft when they are elected to be carried over. Tables are provided with these values and a conversion chart that calculates the rounds to be conceded when multiple players from the same round selected as keepers. These tables also work for balancing multiple player trades.

Keeper leagues are especially easy in auction formats, where last year's dollar values can be used to calculate keeper values. At least one league uses this system in combination with a minimum rookie keeper wage scale with great success.[12]

Also some leagues have introduced a rookie draft into their fantasy league. By using the rankings from the last season to determine the draft order, last place gets first pick and so on. Also in some leagues, trading picks is allowed, but sometimes, a penalty may be accused for this.