When was rotisserie baseball invented

In the early s, though, no one referred to this game as "fantasy. It used a scoring method devised by Daniel Okrent, who invented the system on a flight down from New England to Texas. The game was simple and ingenious: Participating players would draft their own teams, acting as general managers. Scoring would be done by using the statistics provided in newspaper box scores.

Today, of course, this game is familiar to more than 10 million people around the world who participate in online fantasy baseball leagues. Even more play fantasy basketball and football, the latter of which has become the most popular of all fantasy sports. The rules of today's fantasy baseball are strikingly similar to how it was conducted in the early s, when this group of friends in New York City developed a passion for the game.

Waggoner ended up winning that inaugural season, and the game's participants kept at it. The game's popularity slowly started to spread beyond that initial group of people. In , Waggoner taught the game to some undergraduates at Columbia who had heard about the game and were interested in playing themselves. Those undergraduates founded the Roach Motel League, named after a less-than-attractive campus dormitory. Today, it stands at the oldest continuous fantasy sports league in the world.

What made Rotisserie baseball so popular was its grounding solidly in the present -- and, through that, the wrinkle of team owners operating as general managers. Before the s, there were precursors to fantasy sports that used statistics from past seasons to allow for the simulation of games.

Analysts offer advice to the millions of people playing. This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access. Okrent could not have fathomed such an outcome 40 years ago. But he has no regrets. Facebook Instagram Twitter. Who Invented Fantasy Baseball? View Larger Image. Early Days of Fantasy Baseball Interest in having the experience of running your own baseball team began in the midth century.

Once the internet began, the popularity exploded. Related Posts. Cardinals World Series Wins to Present. Louis Cardinals Baseball. Leave A Comment Cancel reply Comment. Go to Top. But Daniel Okrent is best known as the inventor of Rotisserie baseball—the forerunner of the fantasy-baseball leagues that consume zillions of American man-hours every year.

The first draft of the Rotisserie League occurred the following April at somebody's apartment. Within a year, every press box in the Major Leagues had a running game of its own. The term "fantasy" caught on, and the rest is history. As Americans sit down to plot out their draft strategies this month, Jonathan Kelly, who played in the same Rotisserie league as Okrent's son as a teenager, discusses our new national pastime with its founding father. VF Daily: When did you first become interested in baseball?

Daniel Okrent: I grew up in Detroit and the Tigers were my team. My father took me to my first game—I remember where I was sitting, and I was a fan from that moment on.

I was a crazed baseball card collector as a kid. I played ball after school every day and in the summer. It was a huge part of my life. When I went to college I dropped my interest in baseball entirely.

He was just so damn exciting. From that moment on, I haven't let go of it.