Silly Little Game

I was trying to figure out what I should write about today.  There has been a lot going on in sports lately, but I decided to break away from card collecting for a day and write about another passion of mine Fantasy Baseball.  I bet nearly every reader of this blog has either played or is currently playing at least one fantasy game.

My two favorites are football and baseball.  Yesterday I watched a movie called, “Silly Little Game”.  It’s one of ESPN’s 30 for 30 movie series and for a fantasy baseball junkie like me, it was great to watch.  To see how the game started and evolved into a 2.1 billion dollar industry.  The idea was cooked up by Daniel Okrent and when pitched to his friends that were sports journalists, they all got together, outlined the rules at a restaurant called La Rotisserie and Rotisserie Baseball was formed.

I remember reading about it in 1981 during the strike shortened season.  I went out and got the book that described how to play the game.  My friend Frank and I would create our own teams and track stats through a season. It wasn’t until I hit high school where I really began to fall in love with the game.  I had a group of friends who were all big baseball fans and love to gamble.  We decided to have a league.  There were eight of us and we decided to hold the draft at my house.  I was named the commissioner, which really meant that I was in charge of stats.  Really though, I was the only one with a computer that was solely mine.

In the end we each threw in 20 bucks which at the time was a ton of money and decided it would be a winner takes all.  The stats portion was a bear so we decided to just create our best rosters at the end of the season.  One Saturday we all met at my house and tabulated each other’s data.  In the end I finished third, and If I remember correctly Joey C, the top all around athlete in our class won the whole thing.  Once I got to college, I had a whole new group of roto geeks and we actually did do the stats ourselves every season.

Every year we would meet the Saturday before the start of the regular season and hold our draft.  This group has remained together for the most part since 1990 and we continue to play to this day.  Of course as time goes by, we all have other priorities in life and old members dropped out and new members come in.  However I have never missed a roto season since 1984.

Amazingly although the fantasy sports industry has blown up, the card industry has never followed suit.  They seem to be a ying for the other’s yang and yet they never behaved that way.  The best part for me of running a fantasy league team, is to go out and collect those players.  Generally I try and get my favorite players on my team, which makes collecting even more fun.  Maybe one day the card industry can figure out a way to blow up like fantasy sports has, as they really should go hand in hand with each other.

When did you start playing fantasy sports?