Silly Little Game

My name is Spencer (Edgar Spencer), and I'm a fantasy sports addict.

(Hi Spencer.)

If you're like me, someone who plays fantasy football in the fall, basketball through the winter, baseball in the spring and summer, has dabbled in golf and hockey, and even tried Fantasy NASCAR once despite the fact that I (a) think NASCAR is ridiculous and (b) know next to nothing about NASCAR, you'd enjoy the latest addition to The 30 for 30 Project, Silly Little Game.

What is now known as Fantasy Baseball originated as Rotisserie Baseball.

Why "rotisserie" you ask? Well, it's because the men who first cooked up the idea liked to meet at La Rotisserie Francaise for chicken. No, I'm not making that up.

Silly Little Game traces what has become a massive industry back to its origins, when a group of friends began playing a game they'd created where you drafted your own team of players and ranked each team across several different categories based on their accumulated stats.

Two things:

(1) They started with just National League players, using an auction format for their draft.

(2) One man, Dan Okrent — the lead "Founding Father" or rotisserie baseball — kept track of all the stats. By hand. From boxscores.

That makes me feel spoiled by technology and extremely lazy.



In addition to feeling lazy for the ease with which I'm able to spend hours a day — and I do spend a good hour or two each day — fiddling with the myriad fantasy teams I have on the go at one point, I also feel a kinship to the originators, as they were just like me.

Peter Geathers, one half of the first Rotiserrie Baseball champion Geatherswag Goners, has a line in the film that I know all too well. He says he'd get up in the morning and tinker with his team — thinking about trades, checking out boxscores — work from about 10:30 to 10:45, then spend the rest of the day trying to put together more trades and find ways to improve his team.

Yep, I know that feeling.

I also know Okrent's feeling from that first season, when he finished seventh. Here was the guy who created the game — including a new statistic that is still prevalent in baseball today (WHIP) — and knew a truckload about every player in the National League, and yet he got slaughtered.

Yep, I know that feeling too.

Random trivia from the film: Neil Allen was the first fantasy baseball surprise star, that guy no one expects much of anything from who ends up being vital to the championship team's success.

A middle reliever for the Mets heading into the season, the Geatherswag Goners paid $2 for Allen in their auction. He went on to become the closer, posting a 7-10 record with 22 saves in 1980, greatly exceeding his $2 price tag.

There's a Neil Allen in every season in every sport, and every one of us that plays fantasy sports hopes to land him.

The sad — in a "man, that's crazy" kind of way — thing about "The Founding Fathers" is that they haven't made any money off the fantasy sports boom. They sold a couple books back in the day and stuff like that, but this mult-million-dollar industry that has sprung up from their little idea hasn't earned them a nickel.

Why? They were focused on protecting the name "Rotisserie Baseball" and not looking at the bigger picture; the idea and structure of the game was the key element, not what you called it.

As they protected their trademarked name, the game morphed into "fantasy" baseball, and "The Founding Fathers" were left with their trademark and not much else.

I'd feel worse about the lack of money these guys made if they weren't all quality journalists and editors and whatnot; if this was their one shot at making a buck and they missed it by focusing on the name.

Instead, it's just a "laugh in disbelief" element of the story — and a lesson to remember for aspiring inventors and creators.

One other "laugh in disbelief" element: Dan Okrent is still searching for his first fantasy baseball championship. Thirty-odd years after inventing the game, he still hasn't fielded a winning team.

Now I don't feel so bad about coming in third last year.