The Fun, Fantasy of Rotisserie Baseball

When Bo Jackson was released by the Kansas City Royals last month after suffering a career-threatening hip injury, a large group of peculiarly crazed sports fans was plunged into mourning.

They weren’t members of the Royals fan club. Rather, the tens of thousands whose day was ruined by the “Bo Goes” headlines were his other “owners”: the budding George Steinbrenners who are participants in Rotisserie, or fantasy, baseball leagues.

They were counting on Bo for 20-plus home runs, 30-plus stolen bases, and 80-plus runs batted in during the 1991 baseball season -- all numbers that would have been a glittering addition to their teams’ performances in the statistics-based baseball leagues.

Over the past few years, Rotisserie baseball -- named, as legend has it, after a now-defunct restaurant in New York where it was invented over a long lunch by a dozen advertising and publishing executives -- has become something of a phenomenon.

Dubbed “The Greatest Game for Baseball Fans Since Baseball” by its originators, Rotisserie League Baseball and its assorted fantasy derivatives are played by somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million addicts.

Each one, fancying himself or herself a better judge of baseball talent than any major-league owner or general manager, drafts a simulated team of real-life pitchers and hitters at the beginning of the baseball season. The owners then wheel and deal for the rest of the summer -- trading and signing players as free agents, coping with injuries and juggling minor leaguers -- in the hope of compiling the best record in their league in several statistical categories based on the players’ on-field performance. The winner usually gets a small amount of money from the other owners.

Publishers have found a bonanza printing books and magazines filled with statistics and analysis to help Rotisserie fanatics pick and draft their teams. And a sizable industry has sprung up to provide computerized statistical services and advice to Rotisserie players and to sell them computer software so they can run their leagues and project player performance -- unless they decide to tap one of several “900” toll phone numbers or newsletters for help.

Rotisserie baseball has even expanded into the computer world. One of the most interesting and increasingly popular forms of fantasy baseball is a computerized version run by Compuserve, the computer bulletin-board service. The Compuserve Information Service’s Fantasy Baseball section allows groups of owners to draft and manage teams without ever meeting -- communicating entirely by computers and telephone lines.

However it’s played, Rotisserie or fantasy baseball probably can take partial credit for the surge in baseball’s popularity over the past few years. It causes casual fans to become rabid readers of morning box scores, obsessed with the performances of backup infielders on the Seattle Mariners or obscure relief pitchers for the San Diego Padres -- not to mention promising young minor-leaguers in Medicine Hat, Canada; Modesto, Calif.; and Macon, Ga.

“Baseball is fun again,” says Mark London, a Washington attorney and Rotisserie player, “especially last year, when I was with all these knuckleheads who thought they knew what they were doing and I came in second.”

“It’s made a hobby an addiction,” says Geoffrey Precourt, a New York advertising executive and longtime baseball fan who has owned as many as four Rotisserie teams at one time. “The financial risks are minimal, and the rewards of being a child again are incalculable.”

There are countless variants of fantasy baseball, and the game has spread into other sports as well -- football, basketball and even golf. But the basic game, as outlined -- and even trademarked -- by the founding Rotisserie League Baseball Association in New York, goes something like this:

At the beginning of the season (and it’s not yet too late to start), a group of “owners” -- 10 in the National League version of the game, 12 in the American League -- gather to choose players to follow for the next six months. They hold a usually raucous auction with a team salary cap equal to $260 -- many leagues divide this number by 10, while others simply use it as an imaginary gauge -- and put together teams of 23 players each, nine pitchers and 14 hitters. Prices vary by player talent: Figure $50 and up for Oakland Athletics superstar Rickey Henderson, a buck for Orioles backup catcher Bob Melvin.

Trading generally begins within minutes of the end of the auction, and “owners” spend the season combing the free-agent list and major-league farm systems for quality players to replace those who have been injured or sent down to the minor leagues in real life.

In the basic version, standings are based on players’ cumulative real-life performance in eight statistical categories: batting average, homers, RBI and stolen bases for hitters; for pitchers, wins, saves, earned-run average and a ratio of hits plus walks divided by innings pitched.

Stats and standings are compiled by an otherwise unemployed member of the league or (preferably) by one of the many professional statistics services that have sprung up to serve Rotisserie leagues.

The game gives baseball box scores new meaning. Every morning, Rotisserie team owners scour the fine print in the sports sections to check the performance of their “players” the day before.

“It gives you a reason to get out of bed a little earlier in the morning (to read the box scores),” says Rafe Sagalyn, a Washington literary agent. “It used to be the stock market, but I don’t care about that anymore. It’s now the ... stats.”

Owners also stay in regular touch with others in the league, looking for trades, gossiping about players and analyzing the performance of their and others’ teams. Many participants say this contact helps build friendships that go beyond baseball.

“There’s a social aspect to it,” says John Benson, a Connecticut accountant and financial planner who has become a well-known Rotisserie analyst, publishing a book and regular newsletter analyzing player performance. “There is a fraternity to a league, just like a regular poker group.”

To many Rotisserie players, the highlight of the year is the initial draft, a several-hour affair in which emotions run high as the various owners bid against each other for players, often trading jibes and jokes about particularly overpriced -- or underpriced -- bids.

“It goes all the way back to when you were a kid and you would argue, ‘I can pick a better team than you can,’ ” Benson says. “With Rotisserie you can prove your point.”

The team with the best record at the end of the season wins. In leagues that play for money, first prize generally is half of the total of the auction pool, plus the fees for trades and other transactions. At $260 a team, that can mean first-place winnings of around $4,000. Second-, third-and fourth-place teams get smaller shares.

The original Rotisserie league showers its winner with Yoo-Hoo soft drink -- a ritual many leagues have wisely chosen to forgo -- and some leagues have non-cash prizes. One league in Baltimore presented its winner with a Bo Jackson baseball card from his rookie year -- then a valuable commodity, since somewhat devalued.

Leagues that carry over into the next year, and most seem to, allow teams to carry over up to 15 of their players from the year before, and hold a new auction to fill the rest of the rosters. You can even sign a player to a long-term contract, but beware: Under the rules, thousands of Bo Jackson’s owners had to pay double the value of the contracts to buy him out.

Those are the basics, but there are countless variations. Some leagues have added additional statistical categories, such as hitters’ runs scored and pitchers’ strikeouts. Rotisserie’s founders have pioneered something called Rotisserie Ultra, which expands team rosters to 40 players from 23 and puts a premium on obsessive knowledge of players in the minor leagues and even on college teams. At the other end of the spectrum is Rotisserie Lite, invented by a group of Washington schoolkids, which uses only six teams, no money and simplified rules.

To the dedicated Rotisserie player, knowledge about what’s going on in real-life baseball is the cornerstone of success. Is a star player’s injury going to put him on the disabled list for several critical weeks? Will the phenom who’s tearing up the International League be called up to the big club? Is a journeyman pitcher’s winning streak for real?

Like real major-league general managers, Rotisserie players revel in finding a diamond in the rough -- and recoil at the thought of overpaying for a star having an off year. For every Rotisserie owner who gambled on a cheap bid for Detroit Tiger first baseman Cecil Fielder last year and got a fabulous 51-homer season from him, there’s another who paid a huge amount for Kansas City Royal pitcher Mark Davis, one of last year’s most spectacular flops.

The game’s focus on eight specific statistical categories, participants say, forces them to look at baseball in a different way from the average fan, looking for skills that fit those categories. Offense, for instance, becomes far more important than defensive skills, which have no value in Rotisserie ball.

“I look for somebody who does at least two things well instead of one thing very well or three things badly,” says New York adman Precourt.

In their constant search for a winning edge, fantasy fanatics often spend an inordinate amount of time looking for information that will help them predict player performance, both in preparing for the annual draft and to aid in making transactions during the season.

They peruse the sports pages, subscribe to specialized newspapers, magazines and newsletters such as Baseball America, dial “900” numbers purporting to offer inside information and even pester real major-league teams to find out when players are coming back from injuries or why a critical player is riding the bench. The most devoted players make annual pilgrimages to spring training camps to scout prospects, contributing no doubt to the recent wave of sold-out exhibition games in Florida and Arizona.

London traveled to the Texas Rangers’ Florida camp one season. “The good thing about it was I knew who the players were,” he said. “I never would have known minor leaguers otherwise, and on draft day I drafted players because I had seen them.”

Rotisserie baseball also has proven to be a boon to the publishing industry, which is meeting the voracious appetite of stat- and analysis-crazed fantasy-baseball freaks by publishing an ever-growing list of books, magazines and newsletters predicting player performance.

The Rotisserie League Baseball Association annually publishes a widely available book containing full rules and individual player predictions; other scouting staples are the annual “Patton’s Fantasy Baseball Price Guide,” Bill James’s “The Baseball Book” and the Bill Mazeroski Baseball annual magazine. Subscriptions to the bi-weekly Baseball America are as essential to fantasy-baseball success as hotdogs and peanuts are to watching a big-league game.

One important new entry in the information sweepstakes this year is USA Today’s new baseball weekly, which began publication on April 5. Some sources say the inspiration for the newspaper came from the Rotisserie addiction of a high-ranking executive at its Rosslyn, Va.-based publisher, Gannett Co.

Owners can track the performances of their teams with outside help as well. Compuserve provides regular stats and standings for free; other leagues must choose between the time-consuming job of doing it themselves, buying one of several software packages that can help or contracting out to one of the many statistical services that have sprung up to serve the fantasy pastime.

The services -- which advertise in baseball and sports publications -- cost between $30 and $100 per team per season, depending on the amount of information desired. But for Rotisserie owners needing a weekly statistical fix, the cost is worth it.

To some, all this may sound suspiciously like a form of gambling, and indeed, authorities in Florida and Texas have recently cracked down on fantasy leagues as illegal games of chance. But some experts expect those cases to be thrown out, and fortunately, the Internal Revenue Service does not seem interested in cracking down on Rotisserie League winnings. Besides, at least one local prosecutor -- who requested anonymity -- owns a couple of Rotisserie teams himself.

As Rotisserie baseball’s popularity has grown, it has created something of a backlash among some baseball fans who worry that fantasy fans may be taking their interest in the game a little too far.

“There are some people who say that fantasy baseball, or Rotisserie baseball, is the worst thing that ever happened to baseball, because it isn’t baseball,” Conover says.

Indeed, because of its emphasis on individual performance rather than team win-loss records, Rotisserie baseball can skew a baseball fan’s view of the game, and many participants try to draft several members of their favorite big-league team to help keep their loyalties somewhat less complicated.

And the Rotisserie legend that the obsession has wrecked more than one marriage probably is apocryphal. And even those owners who watched Bo Jackson limp off into the sunset wouldn’t have traded their chance to have him on their teams for anything. (Unless, of course, another owner offered them a particularly good relief pitcher.)

Besides, Rotisserie owners say, this game within a game has only heightened their passion for the real thing by adding another level of interest.

“Rotisserie League Baseball” (Bantam), the book containing the basic rules and other information, is available at most bookstores. Personal computer owners can purchase Compuserve Information Service access kits at most software stores; once signed on to the service, type “GO FANS” to move to the Sports Forum to get more information about Compuserve Fantasy Baseball.