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Any of you folks reading this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/books/22barr.html
Quote:
Analyzing Baseball's Dream Dimension
By DAN BARRY
If you hate baseball, the crossword puzzle is around here someplace. But if you adore baseball, if you think owning Thomas Jefferson's autograph or Oil Can Boyd's is a toss-up, then do not turn the page simply because this review concerns a book about that national pastime mutation called "fantasy baseball."
Fantasy baseball does not imagine, say, an outfield of Bettie Page, Yoda and Robin the Boy Wonder. But neither does it take into great account those aspects of the game often called the "little things": laying down a sacrifice bunt; hitting the cutoff man; using the least detectable steroids. This is because fantasy baseball is a cafeteria form of baseball, heavy on the carbohydrates, with no interest in all the spices that make the game so enticing.
Here is how fantasy, or rotisserie, baseball generally works, as neatly described by Sam Walker in his entertaining first book, "Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe." You and your colleagues enter teams in a virtual league, conduct an auction of Major League Baseball players while keeping within an established salary cap, and compete against one another by tracking the statistics of your players.
In a classic rotisserie league, only certain statistics usually help to determine the league's winner at season's end. For hitters: home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases and batting average. For pitchers: wins, saves, earned-run averages, and something called WHIP, which Mr. Walker explains is a formula for "walks allowed plus hits allowed divided by innings pitched."
If your head is now imploding because you never saw a WHIP statistic on a bubble-gum card, you are not alone — though if you think about it, the statistic makes sense.
For nearly a generation now, two camps have battled over how to assess a player's worth. The traditionalists, usually mocked as tobacco-stained scouts with radar guns, rely on old-fashioned statistics and gut feelings about the little things. The newcomers, usually mocked as college wonks who think a jockstrap is a BlackBerry accessory, use advanced formulas worthy of NASA and dismiss gut feelings and the little things as sentimental claptrap.
Mr. Walker addresses this scout-wonk struggle within Major League Baseball, but focuses more on a related phenomenon: the rotisserie leagues that have millions of participants — and you know who you are. You read injury reports, make trades, stay up late for game stats from the West Coast, and generally do not care that Derek Jeter leaped several rows into the stands to make a spectacular catch, because defensive plays do not compute.
Mr. Walker, a sports columnist for The Wall Street Journal, did not particularly like these rotisserie zealots, as he calls them, or the influence they were gradually exerting on baseball. But he came to realize that as he covered the steroids scandal and other nasty baseball business, he was nowhere near as connected to the game of baseball as the rotisserie rabid seemed to be.
He decided to join the major league of rotisserie leagues, Tout Wars, in which some of the very best and very oddest experts compete against one another. He wanted to explore the personalities and describe the arc of one rotisserie season, while attempting at the same time to answer the question of whether statistics alone can predict a player's worth.
What follows is a vivid journey into baseball's bizarro world. Mr. Walker goes all out, hiring experts, attending spring training, peppering general managers and players with technical questions and trying to determine whether the clubhouse access he enjoyed as a sportswriter would help him in drafting the best batters and pitchers.
Some of this research helped him, and some did not. When he asked Aubrey Huff of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays about his technical approach to hitting, the ballplayer answered: "See the ball, hit the ball."
One of the book's strengths is that Mr. Walker not only finds the humor in this world of the obsessed, he also finds the drama. For example, the reader somehow feels the tension of the moment, as various misfits and wonks gather in a windowless conference room for the crucial pre-season draft, or auction, of players.
In the first game of the season, one of Mr. Walker's selected players, the weak-hitting Rey Sánchez, hit a single — and the author's strange summer began. Within a couple of weeks, he had this revelation: "For as much baseball as I am watching in these early days, I don't have the slightest idea what the standings are, nor do I care. For the first time in my baseball fanhood, they're irrelevant."
Mr. Walker's narrative energy flags at times; there is only so much you can do with sedentary men watching television and crunching stats. Now and then he lapses into the kind of sports writing that never goes out of style, but should. He writes, for example, that the "notion of joining this league stuck to me like a dollop of ballpark mustard."
Most of the time, though, Mr. Walker's prose is entertaining and informative — he provides a concise, Joseph J. Ellis-like history of rotisserie baseball's origins — and often very sweet.
One night he attended a Chicago White Sox game with a Tout War competitor, Dean Peterson, a computer engineer who slept five hours a night, played on two softball teams, ate chocolate crepes for breakfast and belonged to 13 fantasy baseball leagues.
In the seventh inning, a Minnesota Twins pitcher on Mr. Peterson's fantasy team gave up a home run to a White Sox player on a rival's fantasy team. This would normally infuriate a fantasy fanatic, but for some reason, Mr. Peterson began to clap.
An astonished Mr. Walker asked why he was cheering, and the man gave a kind of see-the-ball, hit-the-ball answer. The White Sox, he said, were his favorite team.
Later
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