Following baseball in the abstract and far beyond

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

The explosion has had its downside, unleashing in print and electronic media what James has described as "a Chernobyl of statistics," many of which were misinterpreted, given undue significance or were simply irrelevant on their face. James blanches at today's overstuffed box scores, which go on much longer than the the game stories that accompany them, and have lost much of their shorthand legibility in the expansion. "I don't spend more time with them, and I don't find them easier to read," he says. "To me, there's more information than I can process."

But he has found other numbers illuminating, like statistics that focus on park differentials for hitters, or the percentage of runners caught stealing for catchers. Thus the challenge facing today's fan isn't getting the numbers, but deciding which ones merit attention, and when.

What couldn't have been foreseen 10 years ago was the complementary nature of James' work and Okrent's game. Success in fantasy leagues is undoubtedly aided by an understanding of many of James' theories, such as the tendency for power pitchers to have longer careers than finesse pitchers, or the dramatic impact that different ballparks have on a player's performance (a variant that James identified as significant long before Coors Field was in the blueprint stages).

Conversely, even hard-core fans who had earlier dismissed Rotisserie as a childish triviality have been amazed at how their first fantasy league experience forced them to learn more about the game itself. "I could probably give you the lineup of every World Series winner dating all the way back to 1903," says Keith Olbermann, bound to MSNBC from ESPN. "When I got into my first Rotisserie league, I realized for the first time how little I knew about what, statistically, went into the success of a team. What I learned about baseball, sort of backward, by trying to analyze how to put together a good team through statistics, doubled my knowledge."

It is what Okrent calls "the great revelation" of Rotisserie, the way that playing the shadow game can lead to a greater understanding of the intricacies of baseball itself. "You saw how futile it was to be a short reliever for Tommy Lasorda, because he never wanted to rely on one guy, it was bullpen by committee. So you'd begin to understand bullpen strategies," Okrent says. "Or how the trade of a player, like Sixto Lezcano from Milwaukee to St. Louis, caused you to see that those numbers wouldn't translate, because of the ballpark differences. You sort of got this underneath-the-fingernails level of appreciation and understanding of the game."

Baseball was always about more than ambience, and many of a player's strengths and weaknesses were already in lines of figures. Today, the lines are sharper and more detailed and offer a finer-grained view of the game. But that's not all; on some crucial level, the game has served as an outlet, a highly sophisticated defense mechanism.

"Obviously, Rotisserie is a cry of some kind of complaint by fans, in itself," Olbermann says. "Rotisserie is saying: Look, you have completely cut the tether between the fan and his favorite players. With the new economics of the last couple of years, you've made it almost impossible for the same team to take the field two years in a row, it's like the gravity has been turned off. With that, the fans have said, `If you can do that, so can we. We're going to reassemble teams, and we're going to be in charge now.'