Following baseball in the abstract and far beyond

Sporting News, The, July 7, 1997 by Michael MacCambridge

He presented the rules a week later to a group of Phillies fans that met regularly for lunch at La Rotisserie Francaise in Manhattan, and the first Rotisserie League auction was held that April.

Word of the addictive pursuit spread beyond the circle of Manhattan media types a year later, when Okrent's two-page article about the first Rotisserie season--"The Year George Foster Wasn't Worth $36"--was published in the May 1981 issue of Inside Sports. A hardened subset of orthodox Rotisserians hewed to the letter of Okrent's laws, but countless alternate versions sprang up, as common as variations on stud poker. All held to the same basic concept, and after the first Rotisserie League Baseball book was published in 1984, the game swept through the baseball community. Mario Cuomo played. Bryant Gumbel was the commissioner of an NBC league. There was even a rumor that Red Sox outfielder Dwight Evans was in a league and, near the end of one season, traded himself for pitching help.

As Rotisserie's popularity continued to grow, so did the number of people who wanted to tell Okrent all about their teams. Okrent eventually came to the conclusion that although any two strangers might have a compelling discussion about baseball, a similar conversation about Rotisserie is almost impossible. James concurs, and he has compared conversation about real baseball and fantasy baseball with "the difference between reading a novel and a diary." Individual fantasy leagues are closed societies, and although the one-upmanship and camaraderie within a league can make for endlessly fascinating conversations within that group, the same subjects, when taken out of context without a knowledge of the participants, can be stultifying.

"No one else's Rotisserie league is interesting," Okrent says. "The Cincinnati Reds are interesting and the Seattle Mariners are interesting. But the Okrent Fenokees are not. Your own team is deeply yours. It's an expression of your personality, the way you connect with baseball, your thoughts about a variety of things--there's really a lot of self-expression and self-revelation in your Rotisserie team. But it isn't the team, it's you."

"It's a damn shame, too," James says. "Because good fantasy games create a need to vent."

For years, the twin phenomena of James' growing influence and Okrent's compelling game prospered in self-contained units of the larger baseball universe. But by the mid-'80s, they began to affect the way the game was being reported. James' success proved that there was a market for more detailed statistical information, and major league baseball and the publications covering it responded. And as fantasy games took hold, Rotisserie players began demanding more detailed information from daily papers (by the early '80s, The Associated Press began reporting season totals for saves and stolen bases in its standard box score).

Then came the computer age, which provided a crucial boost to both pursuits. Without the rapid calculations of spreadsheet technology, James' work might have been bogged down in tedious research, preventing (or at least delaying) the emergence of his various tenets, or what might be called the James Unified Field Theory of Baseball. In Okrent's case, Rotisserie Baseball and its fantasy offshoots require a series of endless sixth-grade mathematical exercises. But with the computer, the fantasy game has made baseball the first truly interactive team spectator sport "The advent of the personal computer is a vital part of the information explosion in all of sports, not just baseball," says STATS, Inc., president John Dewan, whose company publishes eight annuals for baseball alone. "However, without dames and Okrent, this explosion would still be in its infancy. No question about it"