The restaurant has been closed for some time

March 10, 2020 8:21 PM

In late 1979 or early 1980, a writer named Daniel Okrent met with five friends at La Rotisserie Francaise, on 52nd Street in New York City. Okrent proposed a new type of game, in which 10 participants would choose imaginary teams of real-life baseball players. The teams would be scored based on their players' actual statistics accumulated in the 1980 season. The first "Rotisserie League" draft was conducted on April 13, 1980, forty years ago this season.

Because different kinds of statistics are on different scales, they are divided into categories. The original baseball categories were batting average, home runs, RBI, stolen bases, pitcher wins, ERA, saves, and a statistic that Okrent invented and called IPRAT (innings pitched ratio, now called WHIP: Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched). Most teams today add runs and pitcher strikeouts to make 5 batting categories and 5 pitching categories. The original league distributed players via an auction system, which is one of the forms still used today.

Okrent trademarked the term "Rotisserie" for the game, which is why nowadays people call this kind of game "fantasy".

Interview with Okrent in Vanity Fair
ESPN 30 for 30, "Silly Little Game" (on ESPN+)
ESPN Fantasy challenges 12 fantasy writers and analysts to build their ultimate fantasy team of the last 40 years

MetaFilter usually has fantasy baseball, football, and soccer leagues, and men's and women's March Madness bracket games.

posted by Huffy Puffy (15 comments total)

That recently?
posted by wotsac at 9:25 PM on March 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think it was probably almost impossible to play until the rise of personal computers and spreadsheet software (visicalc), which came into existence around then.
posted by jenkinsEar at 4:14 AM on March 11, 2020

Way before the Madden games, or even Okrent's Rotisserie League, George R.R. Martin wrote "The Last Super Bowl" (published in 1975, in the men's magazine Gallery) about how the anticipated ability to roll your own teams and play them against each other in simulated games would kill professional sports, with the titular game happening in 2016, the other professional leagues having died already. Obviously, that didn't happen.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:10 AM on March 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

I think you’re underestimating baseball people. I have a friend whose childhood was spent playing Rotisserie league and Strato-o-matic baseball sans computer. Computers and the internet certainly accelerated the game, however, as did the advent of cable TV.
posted by q*ben at 5:12 AM on March 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

So THAT’s where the name comes from!!!

Al these years I’ve been wracking my brain* tryna work out the metaphor.


———
*But not hard enough to be bothered to google it.
posted by notyou at 5:53 AM on March 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

literally never knew (and often wondered) about the origins of the name, which my older cousins, raised in NYC always used - where it had always been fantasy in my mind.

At some point, maybe 5 years ago, i was at a bar on the lower east side while the other-side-of-middle-aged bartender and a bunch of his friends did a live, on-paper draft. yes i was the only person in the bar not participating, and i think it was weirder for me than them.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 7:31 AM on March 11, 2020

Does anyone still dump Yoo-Hoo over the head of the winner (as the original Rotisserie League used to do)?
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 8:41 AM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Metafilter league has not done this, at least not recently.

(There’s a sign-up link in my profile.)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 8:44 AM on March 11, 2020

Ha! My first exposure to fantasy baseball was when my Dad, sensing my precocious interests in both baseball and mathematics (I loved reading the Bill James stuff), networked a friend of his who was both an accountant and a sports junkie, to let me tag along to his fantasy baseball draft. This must have been middle school, ~1990.

The friend brought me to a local bar, and I stepped into a dark back room, ~11am, filled with cigarette smoke and numerous pitchers of beer. All the tables were covered with pages and pages of player statistics -- no computers -- and sports almanacs. My host had lists of players on ledger paper, and he'd have me cross off names as the emcee/commissioner conducting the draft called out each pick. All those trappings of the age -- the second hand smoke, the complete lack of digital technology, being allowed in a bar before I could even plausibly fake it -- definitely stand out in my mind. But beyond that, my Dad's buddy did a great job teaching me the basics of the game, as well as learning to assess value vs. risk -- a more broadly applicable skill that certainly has served me well since then. Plus, I still take great pleasure in geeking out while looking through box scores, of any sport.

Thanks for the post -- maybe a MeFi fantasy league is just what I've been missing since then!
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 8:45 AM on March 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

They drafted two weeks after the start of the season? Did they not include games before then? Imagine the backlog of data if they did incorporate games from the start of the season up until draft day!
posted by Fukiyama at 9:34 AM on March 11, 2020

I don't miss the weekly fax chain after our commissioner received the stats each week from the husband-and-wife team in Michigan that we paid to compile them. We dropped them after they refused to include a one-game regular-season playoff game that could've impacted our results. I've been in this league with many of the same guys since 1990, and now we draft (this year on the 22nd -- I have second pick!) at my friend's barbecue joint in the Catskills. In a world as uncertain as this, it's good to know that for at least a little while, I can focus on the worry of how late to wait to draft my catchers...
posted by AJaffe at 12:18 PM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

So, shameless plug: If you want to sign up for the MetaFilter fantasy baseball league, you should be able to click on the link in my profile, or you can MeMail me or cgk (the commissioner). We play on Yahoo. There are plenty of spots available.

Draft date hasn't been set, but presumably won't be the weekend after opening day (I never figured out why they had it then).

(I also run an ESPN auction league, which is non-MeFi-related; let me know if you want in on that.)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 4:35 PM on March 11, 2020

I think you’re underestimating baseball people. I have a friend whose childhood was spent playing Rotisserie league and Strato-o-matic baseball sans computer. Computers and the internet certainly accelerated the game, however, as did the advent of cable TV.

Yet and still, the world continues to await its real-life J. Henry Waugh.
posted by non canadian guy at 5:24 PM on March 11, 2020

I've been playing fantasy baseball since I was in my teens and strat-o-matic before that, and had no idea WHIP was invented for the rotisserie game. Neat.

If this topic interests you at all, definitely join us in the MeFi league!
posted by tonycpsu at 5:43 PM on March 11, 2020

And, uh, it looks like we’ll have a little extra time before the season starts...
posted by Huffy Puffy at 10:24 AM on March 12, 2020 [1 favorite]