Daily Fantasy MLB Baseball

Fantasy Major League Baseball: The First Fantasy Sport Developed

Fantasy baseball, among the very first of the fantasy sports to be developed, is a game where players (known also as General Managers or GM) manage imaginary baseball teams based on the real-life performance of baseball players, and compete against one another using those players' statistical records to score points. It is thus considered as the oldest form of fantasy sports, and one of the most difficult and time-intensive fantasy sport game due to the 162-game baseball season almost every year.

History of fantasy baseball

The earliest version of fantasy baseball was coded in the early computer models in the 1960’s with the use of statistics recorded from the baseball leagues at that time. Development was rather slow because the computer was also a very new thing then and still going through its birth pains, calling for more development research and improvement in design and functions. The fantasy baseball game then allowed only two teams to play against each other using random number generation and player statistics to determine a game's outcome.

Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called, understandably, "tabletop baseball." Among the few promoters of the new game was a firm called Strat-o-Matic, which in 1963 began publishing a game containing customized baseball cards of Major League Baseball players,, with their stats culled from past baseball seasons. Participants at that time would re-create previous seasons using the game rules and the statistics, or compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against one another. The landmark tabletop game then, called Pursue the Pennant, had its debut in 1985 and took baseball board games to much more realistic levels of play; it incorporated ball park effects, clutch hitting and pitching, and many other nuances of baseball. Fantasy baseball became more famous as authors pitched in to help in their promotion with the sporting crowd back then.

The development of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980 was a major event in the development of fantasy baseball. The name Rotisserie League came from the New York City restaurant, La Rotisserie Française, where its developer, Daniel Okrent and some friends of his met and played the fantasy game. The game's innovation that developed was that "owners" in a Rotisserie league would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players following their statistics during the ongoing baseball season to compile their scores.

As Okrent was a member of the media, other journalists, especially sports journalists, were also introduced and got drawn to the fantasy baseball game. Many early players were introduced to the fantasy game by these sports journalists. When there was nothing much to write about the ongoing baseball season then, many writers instead wrote on fantasy baseball in the Rotisserie league.

Rotisserie league baseball became popular in this way, even in the 1980s when full baseball statistics were not easily available and accurate reporting was still a question at that time. The traditional statistics used in early Rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were compiled from newspaper box scores and from weekly information coming in from the major leagues.

The advent of powerful computers and the Internet soon revolutionized fantasy baseball, with the scoring done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a real-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real baseball game works.

Fantasy baseball has continued to grow in popularity, but has lately been overtaken by fantasy football as the most popular form of fantasy sports. This is primarily because some sports, like football and auto racing, only happen once a week, making it easier for people to make adjustments, since they do not have to check on their team every day.

Fantasy Baseball Player Selection

Rotisserie leagues and the other fantasy baseball leagues typically draft teams before the fantasy season begins (or very shortly thereafter). One approach they use is to hold an auction, where each owner has a fixed amount of money to bid for players, and he must fill his team's roster within their budget. Another approach is to perform a serpentine system kind of drafting of available players until all teams are filled up.

In either case of player selection, the skills of the team managers come into play in the "pre-season" by their knowledge of the talent and ability to forecast the performance of Major League Baseball players and their prospects for the coming season. The team managers now draw on a great variety of sources of information, including tout sheets by various forecasters. They predict the coming season's performance and the likely overall "value" (often in terms of auction dollars) of the Major League baseball players.

Some leagues allow team owners to keep some players from one year to the next, allowing them to build fantasy dynasties. These leagues are often referred to as "Keeper Leagues" where teams have the same people in them, and owners keep their players, unless any off-season moves have been made.

Teams are also allowed to trade players with each other during the season, as well as to replace players who stop performing well with players from the pool of those who are not presently owned. However, some leagues prohibit in-season "free agent" replacements, wanting to ensure that the game is more interesting when teams live and die by the quality of their own drafts.

The stakes involved in Fantasy Baseball

Many, but not all, fantasy leagues are played for money. Owners have to pay entry fees at the beginning of the season and they may also be charged for in-season activity such as trades and "free agent" acquisitions. The money collected this way are then pooled and then distributed to the winner(s) at the end of the season. Most often, however, there are games in which the main reward is the bragging rights that the winning participants' aim for, to get a sense that they not only know how to assess baseball talent, but also how to play the fantasy game in all of its dimensions. This includes of course the pride that they know how to select real baseball talent. Established fantasy baseball leagues often have a league plaque or trophy that is awarded to the annual champion. Money-wise, of course, team owners make their dough from revenues realized from advertisers who take advantage of the huge audiences they know are watching the fantasy baseball games.