Fantasy Baseball - Rotisserie League Baseball

Rotisserie League Baseball

The most common scoring system in Fantasy Baseball is known as "Rotisserie". The landmark development in fantasy baseball came with the development of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980, named after the New York City restaurant, La Rotisserie Française, where its founders met for lunch and first played the game.

Magazine writer/editor Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing the pastime, coming up with the idea on a flight to Texas. After presenting his first vision of rotisserie baseball to friends there, none seemed interested. Upon returning to New York a month later he received an enthusiastic reception from a different group of friends, who then collaborated on the first rotisserie league.

The game's innovation was that "owners" in a Rotisserie league would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players and would follow their statistics "during the ongoing season" to compile their scores. In other words, rather than using statistics for seasons whose outcomes were already known, the owners would have to make similar predictions about players' playing time, health, and expected performance that real baseball managers must make.

Because Okrent was a member of the media, other journalists, especially sports writers, were introduced to the game. Many early players were introduced to the game by these sports journalists, especially during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike; with little else to write about, many baseball writers wrote columns about Rotisserie league.

Rotisserie league baseball, nicknamed roto, proved to be hugely popular, even in the 1980s when full statistics and accurate reporting were often hard to come by. The traditional statistics used in early Rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box scores and then from weekly information published in USA Today. Okrent, based on discussions with colleagues at USA Today, credits Rotisserie league baseball with much of the early success of USA Today, since the paper provided much more detailed box scores than most competitors and eventually even created a special paper, Baseball Weekly, that almost exclusively contained statistics and box scores. Local papers soon caught up with USA Today's expanded coverage.

The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring systems, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of real-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real-world game works. According to statistics from a 2009 article in Forbes, nearly 11 million people play fantasy baseball today.

Fantasy baseball has continued to grow, but has been overtaken by fantasy football as the most popular form of fantasy sports. This is primarily because some of those sports, such as football and auto racing, only participate once a week, making it easier for a person to make adjustments, since they do not have to check their team daily.