For baseball fans, spring traditionally arrives on opening day. Fans rally around the home team, no matter how it compares with the Yankees.
A new breed of fan, the roto-geek, has undermined this equation. The roto-geek rests his hopes not on the home team but rather on individual players from many teams. For roto-geeks, spring arrives on the day of the rotisserie league auction.
A little background for the uninitiated: Rotisserie, also known as fantasy baseball, is a game in which a dozen average Joes each use $260 to “acquire” 23 major-
league players. The players are bought during a preseason auction or draft, after which they can be traded or released, just like in real baseball. The owner whose players accumulate the best statistics over the course of the season wins.
In his book “Fantasyland,” Sam Walker celebrates the evolution from traditional fan to roto-geek by reporting from Tout Wars, the country’s most competitive rotisserie league.
Walker, a sportswriter for The Wall Street Journal, persuaded the league’s grand pooh-bah, Ron Shandler, to let him join. The competitors in Tout Wars have made livings selling rotisserie advice. Shandler’s self-published Baseball Forecaster sells nearly 20,000 copies a year, and 7,500 subscribers pay up to $99 annually to access his website.
Newbies like Walker are not expected to compete in Tout Wars. The author, however, sees no reason why his team, the Streetwalkers, can’t win. His approach is a fantasy player’s fantasy. He hires a NASA engineer to analyze data and fields 172 résumés for the perfectly obsessed scout. Using his media credentials, Walker infiltrates clubhouses and interviews actual ballplayers for his team.
Shandler and others have pursued, like a fountain of youth, the best formulas to project player performances and fantasy-dollar valuations. The experts are well versed in these numbers, and as Walker astutely points out, you win rotisserie league by identifying the players who defy predictions.
Any self-respecting owner, in addition to knowing the numbers, has a well-conceived auction strategy. Several years ago, Shandler won Tout Wars with a plan called “Low Investment Mound Aces,” or LIMA. True to form, Walker counters with REMA, or “Really Expensive Mound Aces.” Shandler innovates further with a new and mysterious RIMA plan. Once the auction begins, the league members all must adjust their calibrations based on who is going for what.
Walker is not above a little deception. At the auction, he ingratiates himself to competitors with a brunet posed as a videographer. “Just as I suspected,” he writes, “there is nothing more emasculating than standing in front of a camera and talking to a beautiful woman about your lifelong fascination with fantasy baseball.”
The Streetwalkers start well, and Walker earns respect from his peers with savvy pickups and trades. With evangelical zeal, he blurs the line between fantasy baseball and the real thing. He gives Jacque Jones, Doug Mientkiewicz, and other members of his team Streetwalkers T-shirts. At the All-Star game, he has the gall to tell Red Sox slugger David Ortiz that he may have to trade him (in Tout Wars) for Alfonso Soriano. Walker consults an astrologer and pickets on behalf of a suspended player. He even tries to persuade then-Devil Rays’ manager Lou Piniella to give B.J. Upton, a Streetwalker, more playing time by using him at DH. Incredibly, the tactic works.
In 2003, Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball” heralded the arrival of Bill James’ Sabermetrics disciples into the kingdom of Major League Baseball. A few roto-geeks, including Shandler, who was hired by the St. Louis Cardinals, have slipped through the back door. Many major-league executives participate in rotisserie leagues themselves.
The entire field of reporting on baseball has undergone a seismic shift. On ESPN, fantasy stats accompany the sports scores. The creativity in the best baseball writing these days rests in prognosticating players, not in mythologizing them.
There is plenty of money at stake in the business of fantasy baseball, and implications for the reputation of “the national pastime.” MLB is involved in legal action against fantasy services over rights to the players’ statistics. Given that rotisserie leagues have turned an American institution on its head, it’s only appropriate that Walker indulges his madcap mission like a sugared-up kid on a playground.
Shandler didn’t last long with the Cardinals and noted, “I may be the only person in history who will choose fantasy baseball over real baseball.” To the contrary, many fans are doing just that.
Brenn Jones is a New York writer.
Fantasyland
By Sam Walker
Penguin, 368 pages, $25.95
