Fantasy baseball
Fantasy baseball is a game in which the participants serve as owners and general managers of virtual baseball teams. The competitors select their rosters by participating in a draft in which all relevant Major League Baseball players are available. Fantasy points are awarded in weekly matchups based on the actual performances of baseball players in real-world competition. The game typically involves MLB, but can also involve other leagues, such as American college baseball, or leagues in other countries, such as the KBO League.
History
Early simulations
The history of fantasy baseball games can be traced back to the 19th century. The tabletop game Sebring Parlor Base Ball, introduced in 1866, allowed participants to simulate games by propelling a coin into slots on a wooden board. Later games featured outcomes determined by dice rolls or spinners, and some were endorsed by professional ballplayers. In 1930, Clifford Van Beek designed the board game National Pastime, which contained customized baseball cards of MLB players. After rolling a pair of dice, participants would consult the card of the MLB player "at bat" to determine an outcome, which could range from a single, double, triple, or home run to a strikeout, putout, walk, or error. Players with better statistics in the previous season were more likely to receive favorable outcomes; this allowed National Pastime to become one of the first games to attempt to accurately simulate the performances of real-life MLB players.A notable example of such games was APBA, which was first released in 1951 and contained cards of MLB players with in-game outcomes correlated to their stats from past seasons. Participants could compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against each other or attempt to re-create previous seasons using the statistics on the cards. Individual player cards and dice roll simulations were also emulated in the Strat-O-Matic game, which was first released in 1961. Daniel Okrent, who would later be credited with developing modern fantasy baseball, was an avid Strat-O-Matic player, telling Sports Illustrated in 2011 that "if there hadn't been Strat-O-Matic, I still think I would have come up with rotisserie, but unquestionably it helped."
In 1960, sociologist William A. Gamson developed the Baseball Seminar league, in which participants would draft rosters of active MLB players and compare results at the end of the season based on the players' final batting averages, earned run averages, runs batted in, and win totals. Gamson would continue to play the game as a professor at the University of Michigan, where another competitor was Bob Sklar. One of Sklar's students was Daniel Okrent. According to Alan Schwarz's The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, Sklar told Okrent about the Baseball Seminar league.
In 1961, another early form of fantasy baseball was coded for the IBM 1620 computer by John Burgeson, then working for IBM. A user would select a team from a limited roster of retired players to play against a team randomly chosen by the computer. The computer would then use random number generation and player statistics to simulate a game's outcome and print a play-by-play description of it. The game was coded for a computer with only 20 KB of computer memory and was entirely self-contained. In the fall of 1961, Rege Cordic, a KDKA radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program.
Rotisserie League Baseball
Modern fantasy baseball was developed and popularized in the 1980s by a group of journalists who created Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980. The league was named after the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Française, where its founders met for lunch and first played the game. Magazine writer-editor Daniel Okrent is credited with introducing the rotisserie league concept to the group and inventing the scoring system. Players in the Rotisserie League drafted teams of active MLB players and tracked their statistics during the season to compile their scores. Like the Baseball Seminar league, rather than using statistics for seasons whose outcomes were already known to simulate in-game outcomes, team owners would have to make predictions about the statistics that MLB players would accumulate during the upcoming season. The success or failure of a particular fantasy team would therefore depend on the real-life performance of its players rather than the results of a simulation.Rotisserie baseball, nicknamed roto, proved to be popular despite the difficulties of compiling statistics by hand, which was an early drawback to participation. The traditional statistics used in early rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box scores or weekly information published in USA Today. Okrent credits the idea's rapid spread to the fact that the initial league was created by sports journalists, telling Vanity Fair in 2008 that "most of us in the league were in the media, and we got a lot of press coverage that first season. The second season, there were rotisserie leagues in every Major League press box." According to Okrent, rotisserie baseball afforded sportswriters the opportunity to write about baseball-related material during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike, saying "the writers who were covering baseball had nothing to write about, so they began writing about the teams they had assembled in their own leagues. And that was what popularized it and spread it around very, very widely."
Continued expansion
In 1985, the Grandstand Sports Services launched the first nationally available rotisserie baseball leagues online through Q-Link. Between 1985 and 1996, the Grandstand continued to improve on the game and the technology by being the first to offer automated drafting, real-time scoring, real-time trading and transactions, and continuous leagues.A national fantasy baseball game, Dugout Derby, was developed by Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos in collaboration with the company Phoneworks as a telephone-based fantasy sports promotion. The game launched in 1989 in a number of newspapers throughout the United States, including the Hartford Courant, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Tampa Bay Times. Players selected their teams by calling a toll-free phone number and entering four-digit codes for each of their choices. Dugout Derby is considered an early predecessor to modern daily fantasy sports, awarding weekly vacation packages to top-scoring participants. Its success led to the creation of similar fantasy contests for other sports.
The growth of the Internet during the 1990s brought a "broad demographic shift in fantasy sports participation" because it enabled fantasy sports participants to instantaneously download tabulated statistics, rather than having to search for box scores of individual games in newspapers and keep track of cumulative statistics on paper. In 1995, ESPN launched its first entirely Internet-based fantasy baseball game, with other major sports and entertainment companies following suit in the ensuing years. In the early 1990s, estimates of total fantasy sports participation in the United States and Canada ranged from 1 to 3 million; by 2003, the number of players had grown to 15.2 million.
Daily fantasy sports are accelerated versions of the traditional fantasy format in which contests are conducted over shorter periods than a full season, often lasting one week or even a single day. The first major daily fantasy sports company, FanDuel, was founded in 2009 as a spin-off of a Scottish prediction market company. DraftKings, now the other major daily fantasy firm, was founded in 2012. In April 2013, MLB invested an undisclosed amount in DraftKings, making it the first professional sports organization in the United States to invest in daily fantasy sports. In 2015, DraftKings became the official daily fantasy game of MLB, a move that Business Wire called "the most comprehensive league partnership in daily fantasy sports history" at the time.
As of 2022, an estimated 62.5 million people played fantasy sports in the United States and Canada, per the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, and around one out of five fantasy participants played fantasy baseball.
League types
A fantasy baseball league may be organized in a variety of ways. The original rotisserie leagues, as well as their modern counterparts, rank each team in a number of statistical categories at the end of the season. Points are then awarded based on these rankings. For example, in an eight-team league, the team that collectively hits the most home runs might earn eight points, the team that hits the second most might earn seven, and so on. The number of statistics for which the teams are ranked may vary '. Another common format is head-to-head competition, in which each team only competes against one other team in a given week. At the end of the week, the winner of each matchup may be determined in a variety of ways '. In addition to scoring variations, league organization may also differ based on the structure of each team's roster .Competition variations
The original Rotisserie League Baseball used the following statistics:- team batting average
- total home runs
- total runs batted in
- total stolen bases
- total wins
- total saves
- team earned run average
- team walks plus hits per inning pitched