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[MFS62]

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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"You spend a good part of your life gripping the baseball, and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time." Jim Bouton

[A Boy Named Seo]

I'm reading it right now. So far it's really funny and I'm a quiet fantasy addict in my second season and am identifying with his obsession completely (and am totally jealous of his access).

He compares hard-core fantasy guys to the high school DnD players, which is funny and probably true. He was always annoyed by fantasy guy (I am, too); the guy always talking about the trade he just pulled off, the depth of his pitching staff, or commenting during a game how that double just helped his fantasy team, etc. But working as a sports writer for the WSJ, he envied fantasy guy for being so invested in the players and the game that they seemed to not be bothered by the issues that plagued it, big business, steroids, etc. So he decides to play.

His idea is to use his press credentials to get close to the Major League GM's who draft and sign the players, the scouts who scouted them, the managers who manage them, and the players themselves that he'll be drafting, to see if he can get an edge on his competitors in his league. While all of his opponents are esteemed numbers guys and fantasy gurus (some employed by ML clubs), he wanted to take fantasy scouting to an unexplored level by talking to the players, getting to know them as people, and gauging them as human beings as well as just statistics.

There's interesting commentary by the author on the old guard in baseball (the scouts) versus the new (the young Harvard stat geeks, many of whom got their start as fantasy or roto guys, and still are). The author tries to see if there is a balance between the two, while using whatever "inside information" he can gather to help him gain leverage and win his league.

I only started reading the thing today, but so far I really dig it. It's really funny and well-written and I'd recommend it to baseball fans regardless of their opinion on the fantasy stuff.

[A Boy Named Seo]

I'm loving the crap out of Fantasyland. I haven't laughed out loud at a book ths much since "Confederacy of Dunces".

Ooo-wee!

[Johnny Dickshot]

Mean to get a copy soon. Sounds like fun.
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"Send the fat kid back to Tidewater."

[A Boy Named Seo]

Eh, this one kinda slowed down for me some, but still enjoyable. Curious what anybody else thinks.

[PatchyFogg]

I had Sam on the show last week. Something went wrong with the tape, so I can't post it. But, he was a great guest and I enjoyed the book. However, the money he laid out was nuts.

[Johnny Dickshot]

Started this as my 'commuting book' the other day. Pretty skillfully done so far, with the subtle funniness much better than the overt funniness.
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"Send the fat kid back to Tidewater."

[Edgy DC]

Part of my birthday bootie.

[Johnny Dickshot]

In the end I gave about as much a crap in Walker's fantasy league as I do in yours.
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"Send the fat kid back to Tidewater."

[Vic Sage]

i loved it
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"It's not the answers that matter, it's the questions."

[Vince Coleman Firecracker]

I had fun reading it. I especially enjoyed when he started campaigning to get Jose Guillen more playing time, only to find out he was a complete dick.
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In the meantime the Top talent the alligator in-lived itself however in the USA and for higher tasks was already recommended.