While the origins of this game date back to a small group of academics at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, Rotisserie League Baseball, the game that popularized the concept of fantasy sports across the world (and is played in this book) was the brainchild of a group of Manhattan publishing types led by Daniel Okrent. As enormous baseball fans, Okrent and his friends spent countless hours arguing about the way teams were managed and, over time, convinced themselves that they could do just as good of a job as the yahoos who were actually paid to do so. In the Winter of 1979, Okrent set out to create an elaborate game that would simulate the process of building a ballclub. The idea was to determine, once and for all, which of his friends would really make the best general manager. After sketching out the rules over two days in his study in Western Massachusetts, he pitched the idea to a group of conspirators who quickly bit the hook. In April, 1980, this original group assembled in a Park Avenue apartment in New York to draft teams. Since many of the competitors were part of a regular lunch group that met at a Manhattan restaurant called “La Rotisserie Francaise,” they adopted “Rotisserie” as the game’s official handle. The central event of a Rotisserie season is a draft that takes place once a year near the beginning of the real baseball season. At this meeting the members of a Rotisserie league (usually about twelve people) gather around some commodious table to pick teams composed of real major leaguers—a process that’s nearly impossible to complete in less than six hours. While it’s called a draft, it’s really an English auction. Each “owner” pays $260 in real money to the pot in exchange for the right to spend that exact sum on ballplayers. When the auction starts, contestants take turns calling out names for bidding. Superstars (like Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees) tend to sell first for as much as $50, while bench players and pitching scrubs rarely cost more than a buck. The auction continues until every owner has filled out a roster of twenty-three players in the following combination: 9 pitchers, 5 outfielders, 2 catchers, 1 first baseman, 1 second baseman, 1 shortstop, 1 third baseman, 1 middle infielder (second or short), 1 corner infielder (first or third), and 1 utility player. In Tout Wars, the league I described in Fantasyland, there’s an additional “reserve draft” where each contestant picks six bench players, mostly prospects. Since Rotisserie teams are composed of a mishmash of names from different ballclubs, they can’t really “play” one another. The goal, then, is to have the players you pick, as a whole, accumulate the highest totals in eight statistical categories: home runs, stolen bases, runs batted in, batting average, saves, wins, earned-run average, and whip (a measure of a pitcher’s ability to keep runners off base). Tout Wars, like many leagues, has raised the total to ten by adding runs and strikeouts. During the season, trades are permitted, usually until the end of August. Before the season, each contestant is given what’s called a “Free Agent Acquisition Budget” (FAAB). Once a week, they’re allowed to use this $100 allowance to bid on free agents—any player who is not already on some owner’s team. Through trades and FAAB purchases, it’s possible (though not recommended) to turn your roster over completely. The scoring works like this: In a Rotisserie league with twelve teams, the contestant whose players fare best by one stat (collecting the most saves, for instance) will earn twelve points for that category, while the second-best team earns eleven, and so on, all the way down to one. At the end of the regular season, the scores from all ten categories are added up and the owner with the highest total wins the lion’s share of the pot. At the moment, somewhere between three and five million people play fantasy baseball. Thanks to the Internet, there’s an infinite variety of leagues with an incalculable variety of rules. Most leagues prefer to use a draft rather than an auction, which is less intense and can be conducted online by contestants in different cities. There are “keeper” leagues where a certain number of players are held over from season to season, and “ultraleagues” which use as many as fifty scoring stats including obscure things like wild pitches and holds. Traditional Roto leagues like Tout Wars force contestants to study by limiting the pool of biddable players to either the American League or the National League. But to simplify matters, a growing swath of leagues now uses a “mixed” format where all major leaguers are eligible. The hobby isn’t regulated. There’s no National Rotisserie Association to sanction events or set standards. But the concept itself has taken on all sorts of forms, from fantasy football (the most popular derivation), to fantasy golf and, over in England, fantasy cricket. Most of the major Web portals like Yahoo! and ESPN offer fantasy games, as does Major League Baseball’s official site. In total, one survey found that fifteen million Americans, or about 7 percent of the population, play some form of fantasy game, which makes this hobby more popular than recreational tennis and ice-skating combined.