A defense of America's other pastime

Why then, do I still feel embarrassed and unsure when I tell someone I’m in a serious fantasy baseball league? What is it about this game that produces so many eye rolls from the uninitiated and so much derision from the sidelines of both fantasy and reality?

Most people who don’t play fantasy baseball have a deep-seated conviction that the games aren’t serious, that they’re a waste of time and effort. And I’ll admit that, at times, I feel the same way. When I describe what I’m doing to those who’ve never played before, it definitely sounds pretty ridiculous, and it’s slightly absurd how much time and thought I put into my team. It’s this impression of insubstantiality that elicits the pre-emptive embarrassment involved in telling someone that I play fantasy baseball.

A lot of this comes, I think, from the fairly derisive moniker, “fantasy,” that is accepted in the cultural nomenclature. The league I joined in sixth grade, to which I still belong, is a “Rotisserie” league — a name that, while still somewhat bizarre, isn’t associated with the same loaded connotations as the title “fantasy.”

The term “Rotisserie,” interestingly, predates the widespread usage of “fantasy” to describe what we’re doing. It was coined by the players themselves as sort of an inside joke — knowing what it meant showed that you were in some sort of club. As far as I can tell, the name change came when the game went mainstream and those outside the club needed some shorthand to describe what was going on.

In choosing “fantasy,” they directly tied the game to what they viewed as other escapist, vaguely adolescent male daydreams, a perception that persists today. Nothing more perfectly captures this than the contempt espn.com’s The Sports Gal continuously expresses for her husband’s teams in the “League of Dorks” — or, for that matter, the almost identical confusion and disdain my girlfriend has for my team and league.

“Fantasy,” for better or worse, isn’t taken seriously by most people. Try describing the plot and background information of “The Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars” to someone sometime without explaining what you’re doing, and you’ll see cultural icons reduced to absurd parodies with fairly laughable premises. Games like World of Warcraft, meanwhile, have become pop culture punch lines (see: “South Park”) because of their emphasis on traditional fantasy storytelling. The very act of naming brought this same sort of cultural condescension to fantasy baseball.

But prejudices against the word “fantasy” miss the point. Fantasy baseball is worthwhile not just because it’s fun but also because it’s complicated and enlightening. Not enlightening the way Goethe or John Locke are, but enlightening in the very real sense that it teaches me more about both the real world and sports.

The first time I ever had to manage a budget was when I started playing Rotisserie baseball. No, I wasn’t spending and handling real money (though considering the league buy-in, I pretty much was). My participation, however, required me to engage in complex, multivariable, zero-sum and multiplayer simulations of reality with many different paths to success in the short, medium and long terms. In the past decade, I’ve learned about risk management, how damaging a highly positive rate of time preference can be and how to balance various requirements against each other. Correct me if I’m wrong, but those are good things to learn.

While it seems silly and somewhat strange to describe a game in terms of academic lessons, I think it’s the past way to encompass what I’ve done and learned during the 10 years I’ve been managing my team. I compete because it’s fun, but I’ve also learned a lot. And while I don’t expect everyone to agree, I think it’s time to embrace this “fantasy.”