The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000GUJH7G/ref=s9_asin_title_1/102-7247518-8763309

by Sam Walker

In summary, Sam Walker, a Wall Street Journal sportswriter, weasels his way into Tout Wars, an expert rotisserie league, and deludes himself into thinking he can win the thing. Walker hires a NASA scientist to handle the number crunching and an assistant to cover scouting reports and believes that between the numbers, the scouting reports, and Walker's access to major league players the title is all his. The league entry fee is $75 and Walker spends somewhere around forty grand in his quest to capture the title. While this seems a bit extravagent, and it is, the amount of effort put in for the amount of gain is not out of whack. Anyone who plays this game knows that it's not for the sane.

Rotisserie baseball was the brainchild of Dan Okrent. In the early 1980's, he gathered his friends at La Rotisserie Francais, a New York restaurant to draft teams of baseball players. They tracked the real life stats of the players they drafted, and compiled them into standings. Strat-o-Matic baseball, a similar game, had been around for 20 years and enjoyed some success, but a rotisserie league allowed friends to compete against each other in a newly defined way. (Heck, even I played a little Strat-o-Matic baseball with my friend Barry Gilmore back in the early 1980's.) My dad even received a Strat-o-Matic baseball game just this past Christmas. Since that time, and the advent of the internet, rotisserie baseball has exploded to become a billion dollar industry.

The word rotisserie has taken on several meanings, but to me rotisserie is reserved to the 5 x 5 (or 4 x 4) leagues that track specific pitcher and hitter categories. Each stat is summed up for each team in the league and points are assigned based on where your team falls in the rankings; and by how many teams are in the league. In other words, in a 12 team league, the team with the most RBI's for instance will garner 12 points for that category. The team with the least RBI's will receive 1 point. The points are totalled up for each category and the team with the highest point total wins.

I haven't played rotisserie since the 1998 season, the second year I started playing this addictive game. In fact, in 1998 I won my internet league. In 1999 I switched to a different form of the game, commonly referred to as fantasy baseball. In this format, each stat is assigned a certain number of points and teams accumulate those points over the season. It's not much different, but with this format more people began to start playing the game.

Back in 1999, I was asked by co-worker Matt Allsup to join the 10-team Saint Louis Fantasy Baseball League, a league that I am now the commissioner of. STLFBB has now been around for twelve years. Our league has morphed into a myriad of complexities that try to simulate what it would be like to be an actual MLB General Manager. Back in 1999 it was a simple auction draft and you played the season. Now the league consists of keeper players that have an inflation value assigned to them, carryover draft cash, and an elaborate trade structure that tries to ensure that teams don't 'cash out' when the going gets tough. We now have 12 teams and even though we aren't considered experts, I believe we have to be one of the more competitive leagues around. There are no slackers. You have to know how to evaluate players and you have to gather an insane amount of knowledge in order to compete. Case in point, one player in our league picked up Daisuke Matsuzaka in July, a Japanese pitching phenom who isn't even in MLB, but probably will be in 2007.

Back to the book ... Walker plays in Tout Wars, a league of experts. What kind of experts you ask? Well, that's up for debate. Until the late 1990's, most players were scouted the good old fashioned way; by watching them play. Hundreds of major league scouts spent every waking hour watching players play. However, several people believed that players could be projected just by looking at their stats. These people, led by the statistical baseball genius Bill James, are commonly referred to as sabermetricians. Closely following these statisticians are guys like Ron Shandler, who I've been a follower of for the past 4 years. While sabermetricians have used their projections for MLB clubs, Shandler, and others of his ilk, have adopted some of the sabermetrician calculations to project players for rotisserie baseball. In general, sabermetricians hate guys like Ron Shandler. It's really the difference between ivy league elite and state college dropout, even though both really do the same thing. Tout Wars contains those from Shandler's end of the spectrum, not Bill James. In fact, I'm sure Bill James thinks rotisserie baseball is stupid.

Walker joins Tout Wars, tries to combine his theory that stats and traditional scouting make up the big picture, and promptly finishes in 8th place. Ron Shandler finishes in second place. Walker surmises that in addition to the stats and the traditional scouting, a good rotisserie player needs something else; luck. I would agree. I've played in STLFBB for 8 seasons now and have yet to win the league. I've finished in the money the last 4 years, but have yet to bring home the Peter Gammons award. This year was the closest.

Fantasyland is an obvious must read for those who play fantasy sports. It chronicles the ups, downs, and rigors of a five month baseball season. It's also not a bad read for those who don't play the game, but love baseball. It's an easy read and holds the readers attention easily. No surprise that I really liked this book, but I believe others would enjoy it too; even if you aren't baseball insane like me.