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FANTASY SPORTS COMMUNITIES ON THE INTERNET: THE
EVOLUTION OF FANDOM IN AMERICAN SPORTS CULTURE

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FANTASY SPORTS COMMUNITIES ON THE INTERNET: THE EVOLUTION OF
FANDOM 1N AMERICAN SPORTS CULTURE

By

Jesse James Draper

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTERS OF ARTS

American Studies

2008

ABSTRACT

FANTASY SPORTS COMMUNITIES ON THE INTERNET: THE EVOLUTION OF
FANDOM IN AMERICAN SPORTS CULTURE

By
Jesse James Draper

The aim of this study is to identify and utilize relevant cultural theory as it relates
to fantasy sports as a cultural phenomenon. Fantasy sports are a logical evolution of
sports fandom within the context of specialization, quantification, the Internet, and the
growing desire for participatory entertainment. By juxtaposing classical and
contemporary theory, we can begin to understand the growth of fantasy sports as they are
tied to the structural reification of the hegemonic capitalist ideology by communal social
activities that simultaneously, counter that ideological domination.

The sanctioned meanings of baseball statistics have historically been inculcated
by Major League Baseball through strategic commercial alliances. With the publication
of the Bill James 197 7 Baseball Abstract, the meanings of those statistics were openly
challenged for the first time, starting what would become along, hard struggle for
linguistic and symbolic capital taking place in multiple “authoritative” annuals, in the
broadcast booth, in the print media, and finally culminating within the fantasy baseball
community on the internet.

I close the study by situating fantasy sports within popular American culture. The
fantasy sports experience is an evolution of fandom in the age of free agency and the
Internet. American culture is committed to profiting off of the desires of the consumer,
and the consumer clearly desires a stronger and more personal connection to sports. The

full impact of fantasy sports on American culture has yet to be realized.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
HEAVY WITH KNOWLEDGE:

BECOMING A FANTASY SPORTS GURU ......................................................

CHAPTER 1
CELEBRATION OF THE SUBJECTED:

AN EXPLANATION FOR THE GROWTH OF FANTASY SPORTS ON THE INTERNET . . . . . .

CHAPTER 2
POWER IN NUMBERS:

TWO FANTASY SPORTS COMMUNITIES IN TRANSITION ..................................

CHAPTER 3
STEALING SIGNS:

THE BATTLE FOR LINGUISTIC CAPITAL IN BASEBALL ...................................

CONCLUSION
PURITY AND PROFIT:

ROTTISSERIE, STEROIDS AND THE AGE OF THE SUPERSTAR ...........................

APPENDIX A

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL NEWSPAPER BOX SCORE . . . .. . .. . . .. . . .

APPENDIX B

THE RULES AND ROSTERS FOR STANDARD ROTISSERIE BASEBALL .........................

APPENDIX C

........ l

24

..... 49

...... 66

....... 90

107

..... 108

FANTASY SPORTS WEB SITES ......................................................................................... I 10

WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 112

GENERAL REFERENCES .....................................................................................

iii

...... 116

INTRODUCTION

Heavy with Knowledge: Becoming a Fantasy Sports Guru

Embarrassed, I later realized that what 1 do in watching football is to
call the game myself like a chess neophyte following Spassky and
Fischer and trying to anticipate each move. My eye tries to catch
injury, fatigue. or slowness on the other side; intuitively, I am guessing
which sorts of plays have not been working; I look for defensive lines of
force and patterns of response; I focus my eyes abstracted/y, looking
for zones not adequately defended. Impossible to do, I know, for one
must be on the field to feel the tempo of will and strength, to see how
the lines of instinct and tactics are flowing at a given time. to sense the
any differences that open up unsuspectedpossibilities. Still, 1 match
my wits with those of the quarterbacks and coaches. During the game,
my wife has noted, my palms sweat; impossible to gain my attention
seriously. (I playact.) After the game. I am exhausted Entertainment?
It is more like an ordeal, an exercise, a struggle lived through. And not
exactly vicariously. flVovak 87)

In 2006, sixteen million adults in the United States, including twenty-two percent
of all men with Internet access between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, played
fantasy sports.1 For the last three years that number has grown steadily at a rate of seven
to ten percent annually. Each year the fantasy sports industry generates one to two billion
dollars, and is further responsible for a three to four billion dollar impact across the sports
industry.2 That says nothing of the additional economic impact realized in the
information technology industry; including but not limited to, Internet service providers
and the hardware and software companies that form the structures upon which that
industry is built. These numbers are significant, and yet to date, the phenomenon has
received little attention in academic circles. Studies focused exclusively on fantasy sports
have primarily been limited to the discussion of legal issues regarding the rights of

players as owners of their statistical performance (Bolitho; Massari; Karcher), intemet

 

' F STA Market Study by Ispos, August 2006.
2 F STA Consumer Behavior Study by Dr. Kim Beason, Associate Professor of Park and Recreation
Management, University of Mississippi in March 2006.

addiction (Ng and Wiemer-Hastings), gambling (Bernhard and Eade), and gender issues
tied to the reification of male dominance in sport (Davis and Duncan). All of those issues
are relevant to fantasy sports culture; however, in this research they are typically
presented as one-dimensional overgeneralizations of an assumed rather than actual
experience within fantasy sports communities. Moreover, such articles fail to address
why the industry is growing at such a rapid rate.

Online role playing games, on the other hand, have recently received much
attention, particularly in popular culture studies. At the 2007 Popular Culture
Association/American Culture Association Joint National conference, eight panels were
exclusively devoted to Digital Games. By way of contrast, there were only three
presentations on fantasy sports, placed in only tenuously related panels such as
Composition and Rhetoric, Blog and Online Gaming Communities, and Realism and
Fantasy in Sports. Many of the themes treated in those panels can be applied to a study of
fantasy sports, such as the nature of virtual social interaction in online forums and peer-
to-peer competition, as well as the simulated “fantasy” aspect of the games.

In a previous paper on fantasy sports in popular culture, I referred to an article
written by George Lipsitz called “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular
Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies” as an example of the methodology I
hoped to use in my own research. Lipsitz began his article with an anecdote about the
great Duke Ellington. In the story Ellington teaches young trumpet virtuoso Clark Terry
to learn to listen first: to explore the spaces and silences within the music so that he could
understand how to add a meaningful contribution to the music, one that blended with the

voices and sounds of the other musicians around him. Lipsitz suggested that “the

complicated relationship between scholarly methods and the popular cultures, political
economies, and ideologies of America demand a scholarship capable of adopting Duke
Ellington’s advice and learning how to do careful and comprehensive listening” (Lipsitz
311). He found that approach increasingly necessary, as “the ever-increasing reach and
sc0pe of commercialized leisure has eclipsed both ‘high culture’ and ‘folk culture’
artifacts, replacing them with cultural products resistant to traditional methods of
criticism” (Lipsitz 311). What Lipsitz then offers as an alternative approach to those
traditional methods is an integration of contemporary European theory, which he feels
bears an affinity to American popular culture. By making the effort to join the band, to
slow down, sit back and listen to the voices around me, it is my hope that my experiences
within fantasy sports communities in conjunction with theory drawn from the social
sciences might add a meaningful contribution to the music.

Fantasy sports allow fans to invest themselves in the ritual of American sport on a
truly participatory level, and true understanding of fantasy sports in popular culture will
come from the study of that interaction and the social relationships growing out of it. For
this study I have chosen to focus solely on fantasy baseball and football. One reason is
because they are the most popular games in American fantasy sports culture, and as such,
they offer the largest and most committed communities to study. Furthermore, I have
favored fantasy baseball for much of the theoretical content due to the ease with which it
structurally demonstrates concepts like instrumental rationality, and because of the
important role it has played in the battle for linguistic capital in Major League Baseball.
Sociology, anthropology, and linguistics are the fields from which I build my theoretical

approach to understanding fantasy sports, primarily because I believe that those fields

offer explanations for the social behavior that l have observed and experienced while
studying fantasy sports culture from within as a participant. The application of cultural
theory based solely on external observation will only result in the sweeping
generalizations and gross inaccuracies like those previously mentioned. While some of
those elements are indeed present within fantasy sports culture, they are not nearly as
dominant or determinative as some studies have suggested.

In addition to the works I have selected by theorists and social scientists like Karl
Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Theodor Adomo, Charles S. Peirce, and Pierre
Bourdieu, there are essential works that come from popular culture which prove to be
indispensable sources for research. There is much to gain from the tremendous work of
writers like baseball scholar Bill James (whose Baseball Abstracts have revolutionized
the study of baseball), and from what I will call fantasy sports memoir, such as Sam
Walker’s Fantasyland (2006) and Mark St. Amant’s Committed: Confessions of a
Fantasy Football Junkie (2004). The most illuminating texts, however, are the fantasy
sports articles that supposedly offer “expert analysis”, and the message board discussions
and instant messenger logs generated by the fantasy players themselves.

In this study I have tried to answer the following questions: Why have fantasy
sports on the Internet proliferated in America in recent years, and what is the impact of
that growth on American sports culture? What are the social dynamics within the
communities that play these games, and what are the external forces that shape those
dynamics? Are fantasy sports merely a product of the valorization of fandom within a
capitalist society, or does the open source environment of the message board

communities suggest a break from such strict determinism? What is at stake in these

social interactions and in the struggles to define the meaning of baseball statistics? And
finally, how do the answers to those questions inform our understanding of American
culture and sports in an age of rapid technological development, free agency and
performance enhancing drugs? In my attempts to answer those questions, I find myself
facing the same dilemma that complicates the process of becoming a “fantasy sports
guru”: for every answer I find, new questions arise.

Throughout this text I make use of different conceptions of the “symbol”. In
Chapter One, symbols are introduced within the context of Leo Marx’s conception of the
construction of cultural meaning as “image(s) invested with significance beyond that
required for referential purposes” that are pieced together in narrative as a myth “which
embodies the virtually all-encompassing conception of reality—the world-view—of a
group” (Marx 86). In Chapter Three, the symbols are discussed semiotically as signs
(Marx’s images) “which lose the character which renders [them] as signs” (Peirce 240) in
the absence of an interpretant, or one that performs the action of investing the image with
greater meaning. I will also discuss Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic power, whereby
power is exercised symbolically under a misperception of legitimacy and shared belief
(Bourdieu). The unifying action in each of these conceptions or processes is investment
of value or significance into something - an object, a statistic, a position of power — that
is greater than that which is referentially required. It means something significant to hit
35 homeruns in a season, but that meaning is fluid, and can be interpreted or valued in
different ways by different individuals with competing claims of linguistic and symbolic

capital.

In an effort to ease the theory into the context of fantasy sports communities, I
would like to start at the beginning, with the two questions that set the foundation for this
study and foreshadow the material covered in later chapters: When, where and how did
fantasy sports begin, and what exactly does it mean to be a fantasy sports guru? I have
decided to introduce the genesis of fantasy sports with a brief summary of the story of
baseball’s own origins. The process that institutionally sanctioned Abner Doubleday as
the creator of American Baseball in the village of Cooperstown, New York mirrors, in
many ways, the process of discovering the origins of fantasy sports and the symbolic
power struggles that work together to ascribe value and legitimacy to individuals and
symbols that are used to reinforce cultural myths and positions of power. Once a good
understanding about the evolutionary ascendancy of fantasy sports in American culture
has been established, I will then close this introductory chapter with a discussion about
what it means to be a fantasy sports guru, which is drawn in part from my own

experiences on the path towards fantasy enlightenment.

Origins

In his remarkable narrative chronicling the origin of Baseball’s Hall of Fame,
James Vlasich tells the story of an argument over the true origins of the game of baseball
between two of baseball’s most influential figures at the turn of the 20th century. Albert
Goodwill Spalding was a star pitcher in the late 19th century, owner of the Chicago White
Stockings, one of the co-founders of the National League, and began publishing one of
baseball’s first “official” yearly publications, Spalding ’s Ofiicial Base Ball Guide in
1877. Henry Chadwick, dubbed “The Father of Base Ball”, was baseball’s first true

sportswriter, statistician and historian. He was the editor of baseball’s first published

 

yearly, Beadle ’s Dime Base Ball Player which began publication in 1860, and took the
same position for Spalding’s Guide in 1881. Chadwick had long argued that baseball had
evolved from the English game of rounders, and in the 1903 issue of the Spalding Guide,
Chadwick wrote an article presenting a history of the game from its inception, which he
recognized as 1833, when the Olympic Town Ball Club was formed in Philadelphia.
Chadwick claimed the organization of that club was the first documented evidence of an
organized evolution from the game of rounders. Town ball, then, eventually evolved into
the modern conception of American baseball.

In the 1905 issue of the Spalding Guide, Spalding publicly contested Chadwick’s
version of the origin of the game, arguing that the game was created by a former Civil
War general, Abner Doubleday, and that it originated in Cooperstown, New York.
Spalding was determined to prove that the game was distinctly American, owing none of
its existence to foreign influence. In efforts to establish an “official” version of the origin
of the game, and to strengthen the credibility of his position that directly contradicted the
position of baseball’s most celebrated and accomplished scholar, he created a self-
appointed baseball commission to gather the evidence and deliver a final verdict. The
Mills Commission—named for its chairman, Abraham G. Mills, the president of the
National League at the time—finally sided with Spalding and declared that the game was
indeed of distinctly American origin after reviewing what really amounted to, at best,
inconclusive evidence that hung on the questionable testimony of Abner Graves, which
was forcefully endorsed by Spalding. To counter Chadwick’s evolutionary history, Mills
argued that even though rounders and baseball employed the same implements, there was

no sure sign that one necessarily evolved from the other. Two games developed on two

continents using similar implements, and neither had a rightful claim to “inventing” their
use in competition. And so what Vlasich referred to as baseball’s “immaculate
conception” was institutionalized as an historical fact (Vlasich 10).

Although it is now primarily accepted that Chadwick’s history is likely the most
accurate version, the myth of Doubleday held sway for many years, and if asked today, a
great number of fans would still probably recognize Cooperstown as the birthplace of
America’s Pastime. And while legitimate questions as to the veracity of the Doubleday
story have been raised by new research made possible by the discovery of the original
Mills Commission papers in 1999, the Hall of Fame itself is still hesitant to let go of the
Commission’s original verdict. One hundred years later, another argument of origins has
attracted the attention of many American sports fans, and just like the Spalding/Chadwick
debate, this argument centers on claims of autonomous invention. With the explosion of
the Internet at the turn of the twenty-first century, participation in fantasy sports has
grown exponentially, and while football is the clear industry leader, it is fantasy
baseball’s legend of La Rotisserie F rancaise that holds the aura of Cooperstown.

Although it seems as if fantasy sports are a relatively new phenomenon, brought
on by the technological advances of the lntemet, the games were in fact being played way
back in the “dark ages” using snail mail, newspaper box scores (Appendix), and a pad of
paper. In their fantasy sports memoirs, Sam Walker and Mark St. Amant each offer very
detailed and colorful histories of the development of fantasy baseball and football
respectively, and so, much of this section simply paraphrases and reorganizes their
efforts. Although fantasy football accounts for eighty percent of all fantasy sports

participation in the United States, boasting nearly three times the number of participants

 

as fantasy baseball (12.8 vs. 4.8 million)’, there is a common misperception that fantasy
football evolved from Rotisserie baseball, created in 1980 by Daniel Okrent.
Furthermore, Okrent has only a slightly more tenable claim as the “founder” of fantasy
baseball than Abner Doubleday has as the father of American baseball. So which sport
came first and where exactly were these games first played? It is probably best just to say
that A.G. Mills’ notion of simultaneous, distinctive origins for baseball and rounders is
surprisingly fitting in this context.

The origin of fantasy sports is obscured by the same logistical nightmare that
casts a shadow over the authenticity of baseball’s beginnings. In the third chapter of
Mark St. Amant’s fantasy football memoir, which is cleverly titled “The Book of Fantasy
Football Genesis”, he states that the dispute about the origin of the game lingers “because
there’s just no official recor ” (St. Amant 25). St. Amant immediately rejects the
evolutionary argument that ties fantasy football’s origins to Rotisserie baseball,
marketing efforts in sports bars by beer distributors, or the “cyber-explosion” of the
Internet age. He then proceeds to relate the story, originally reported in an article by Bob
Harris and Emil Kadlec for the 2003 Fantasy Football Pro Forecast (8-14), of how three
men with ties to the Oakland Raiders conceived of the game that we now recognize as
fantasy football while on a trip for a road game against the New York Titans in 1962. Bill
Winkenbach, a limited partner with no controlling interest in the Raiders, is credited for
coming up with the idea, which was based on similar games he used to play with baseball
and golf in the 19503. Raiders PR man Bill Tunnell and Oakland Tribune writer Scotty

Stirling helped him organize the league rules, rosters and scoring. At the end of a long

 

3 F STA Market Study by Ispos, August 2006.

 

night of planning, the foundations were laid for what was later christened the Greater
Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League.

The GOPPPL was comprised of eight teams, all of which, according to the
original rules, had to be owned by persons either affiliated with an AF L team, involved
with professional football as a journalist, or responsible for the purchase or sale of ten
season tickets for the Raiders’ 1963 season (St. Amant 28). Each team drafted twenty
players from either league; however, a maximum of eight were allowed to be brought
over from the rivaling NFL. Each week team owners would submit a starting roster
composed of two offensive ends, two halfbacks, a fullback and a quarterback (Harris and
Kadlec 12). Despite the exclusive membership requirements, word spread over time, and
others soon wanted in on the game. The founders had no idea that the game would
explode in popularity the way that it did. Scotty Stirling told St. Amant, “We had no idea
it would explode into the kind of mania that exists today. Pro football isn’t a game. It’s a
cult. And this stuff (fantasy football) is close to a cult” (St. Amant 29). But the fathers of
the GOPPPL were not the only ones to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, nor do
they necessarily hold a legitimate claim as the inventors of the game.

In Fantasyland, Sam Walker (59-60) recounted a story that took place two years
prior to the founding of the GOPPPL, in either March or April of 1960, when a research
associate in social psychology at Harvard’s School of Public Health named Bill Gamson
had gathered another group of three men together to try out a game that he had come up
with based on baseball. Each man contributed ten dollars, which represented a team
budget of $100,000. The men then poured over Major League rosters listed in a copy of

The Sporting News, and when one of them saw a player he wished to bid on, he threw a

10

playing card on the table. This process continued until each man had maxed out his
budget. The game was then played by tracking a set of eight statistics, generated by the
players they had selected, throughout the season. The team of players that had the best
cumulative stats at the end of the season won. Immediately following this account,
Walker makes an observation that is incredibly important, and worth citing here in its
entirety:

Through a modern lens, this may look like a perfectly normal way for

three baseball nerds to spend an evening in April. But in 1960, the

whole exercise was thoroughly radical. Baseball was still a rigid

institution. The old reserve clause bonded players to teams as if they

were indentured servants. Fans still wore suits to the ballpark, and

owners and managers ruled baseball with baronial authority. It

wouldn’t have occurred to most people that baseball could be toyed

with, the players could be put into the service of your own imagination,

or, for that matter, there could be more to being a fan than just buying a

ticket and clapping at appropriate junctures. (Walker 60, italics mine)
Walker insightfully points out one of the most significant characteristics of fantasy
sports, one that will play an important role in sports culture throughout the latter half of
the twentieth century: namely, that fans of the games have played a very significant role
in challenging the institutional authority and dominance in professional sports. Fans of
the game discovered the lost Mills Commission papers that challenged the Doubleday
myth and the origins of baseball; fans of the game have challenged the way players and

teams are evaluated and have worked to improve erroneous and inefficient assumptions

based on elitist notions of authority and tradition; fans of the game have challenged what

11

 

they see as the ridiculous notion that publicly reported statistics should be licensed for a
profit.

Gamson’s game spread quickly, expanding the following year to ten teams,
forcing him to conduct the bidding through the mail. He decided to call it “The Baseball
Seminar” in an effort to prevent anyone at the post office from mistakenly coming to the
conclusion that he was a bookie. In 1962, the year Bill Winkenbach reportedly invented
fantasy football in a New York hotel room, Gamson took a position at the University of
Michigan, where the game really took off, growing to twenty-five teams. The game fast
became an obsession as “academic conventions became excuses to sneak in ballgames,
office hours were canceled in the name of bid preparation...” (Walker 62). The University
of Michigan’s top social scientists were running regression analyses on baseball statistics
in an effort to get an edge on the competition. The game’s popularity was indisputable,
and in time it spread out from Ann Arbor as players
eventually took positions in different locations and began to create sister leagues.

It was a full fifteen years later, on a flight to Austin Texas, before Daniel Okrent
expanded upon the game that was introduced to him by Robert Sklar, a noted American
Studies scholar, and former professor at the University of Michigan. Okrent had never
played in The Baseball Seminar himself, but what he had taken from helping Sklar work
up his player bid sheets at his kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York was the notion that
this game offered baseball fanatics “a workable excuse to gorge on baseball nearly all
winter long” (Walker 65). With that notion in mind, Okrent set himself to the task of
refining Gamson’s game, tweaking it a bit here and there, until he had worked out the

rules and scoring for the game that would become known as Rotisserie Baseball. Using

12

 

his Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, Okrent looked at four years worth of National
League East final standings and tried to isolate the statistical contributions that most
frequently led to a team’s success. He settled on the following eight official categories for
the scoring of his game: homeruns (HR), runs batted in (RBI) , batting average (AVG),
and stolen bases (SB) for hitters; wins (W), saves (SV), eamed-run average (ERA), and a
statistic that he came up with himself, walks plus hits per innings pitched (WHIP) for
pitchers. One important difference between his game and the Baseball Seminar was the
institution of roster limits. Walker reports that Okrent decided to limit the rosters because
of a response he received in an interview with former Baltimore Orioles manager Earl
Weaver, “who had told him that the toughest decision he made every year was choosing
which twenty-five players to take north from spring training” (Walker, 65). With the
rosters and scoring system set, Okrent introduced his game to a group of friends at the
now legendary La Rotisserie F rancaise. So while Okrent does not himself have a
legitimate claim to the original conception of the game that spawned fantasy sports,
surely his version is a natural descendant of the original, right? Not if “Wink” has
anything to say about it.

In a side bar of the article detailing Bill Winkenbach’s 1962 invention of fantasy
football, Harris and Kadlec challenge the claim that Daniel Okrent’s Rotisserie baseball
was the first of its kind. They clearly had no knowledge of The Baseball Seminar, but if
their claims are true, even Gamson was at least two years behind Wink. According to the
article, Ed Winthers was a charter member of The Superior Tile Summer Invitational
Homerun Tourney (or S.T. SIHRT), which he claims had its inaugural season as early as

1959 or 1960. Harris and Kadlec cite “considerable anecdotal evidence supporting his

13

claim... the earliest documented evidence... in the form of league correspondence from
1966” (Harris and Kadlec 9). Reminiscent of the manner in which the Mills Commission
felt that the circumstantial evidence supporting Doubleday’s invention of baseball was
sufficiently authoritative, Harris and Kadlec used what they could piece together to assert
authoritatively Winkenbach’s preeminence as the true innovator of fantasy sports.

There will likely never be a commission created for the purposes of establishing
the true origins of fantasy sports in American culture, but it seems clear that the frndings
would prove to be dubious at best. There is no official record for who deserves the
legitimate distinction of being named the Father of Fantasy Sports. But what we do have
is a string of narratives that offer a picture of a history of simultaneously developed
efforts to create a deeper connection to the great ritual of American sport. The unifying
characteristic of these stories is a deep love for the games of baseball and football. Fans
want more than spectatorship; they want to play the game themselves. For the majority of
people, getting into the big leagues as a player was and never will be anything more than
a dream. Fantasy sports offer a way for fans, at least on an intellectual level, to get into
the game.

Some have argued that “fantasy geeks” have no true love for the game as it was
meant to be experienced; that they value team loyalty no more than the greedy prima
donna that embodies the destructive commercialization of the free-agency era; that they
reduce athletes to faceless quantifiable data, utterly devoid of the beauty, strength and
grace that hit the human spirit above the banal existence of corporate culture, to the very
limits of physical perfection. However, the fantasy baseball player is no less emotionally

involved in the game than any other fan of sports. I believe that the men in the stories

14

 

related above would strongly identify with the anecdote cited at the beginning of this

' Introduction that depicts Michael Novak’s feverish emotional investment in a game of
football. These men are archetypes of the fanatic, from whom the rest of us regular fans
draw our lineage, and their spirit lives on in the gurus that now preside over the rituals of

fantasy sport.

Learning to Fish

The process of becoming an “expert”, which is synonymous with “guru” within
the context of fantasy sports, is really about coming to the realization that there is no such
thing. Fantasy sports websites offering tools and advice that provide customers with a
“competitive advantage” used to make claims of expertise in some fashion or another.
Clearly that cannot be accurate with such a divergence in methods and theory. After all, if
such a statement were indeed true, the same websites would win every year in the expert
leagues, and that rarely happens.

An important, albeit extended, parenthetical note must be inserted here right off
the bat. I originally worded the previous sentence about website’s claims of expertise as
“Most fantasy sports websites... clearly advertise claims of expertise... typically on the
site ’3 homepage.” In the process of researching for this project, I typically spent at least
two hours a day scouring those websites. I have seen every respected fantasy writer make
pains to state explicitly that there is no such thing as an expert. And yet, I was sure that
each of those sites had some claim to authority posted on the front page, either in the
form of guru or expert, if for no other reason than boosting credibility for the sake of
increased sales. As I was writing, it occurred to me that I should be careful to check that

fact, and to my astonishment, of the sites that I spent hours perusing only two (Yahoo!

15

Sports and The Huddle) had the words “guru” or “expert” on the front page in any
context. And so even as I find myself in the process of writing, of presenting the research
that I have spent the better part of two years accumulating, I am stumbling across new
questions. Why did I have that false perception about claims of authority? I believe part
of that answer lies in my discussion of the power of symbolic capital in Chapter Three;
however, it is interesting to note that even as 1 claim to know how positions of authority
are worked out and justified within the context of fantasy sports culture, I myself am still
quite susceptible to doxic notions of who holds that authority that stem from
predispositions that subconsciously guide my thoughts and actions. Despite that fact that
I have most likely spent just as much time (if not more) researching fantasy sports as any
one of the writers at those websites over the last two years, I still associate them on some
level with the social status of “expert.”

As I said, many of the most respected fantasy sports writers often make
disclaimers within their articles, denouncing the title of expert as a misperception of fact.
The only difference between a fantasy guru and the average fantasy participant is time
investment. The writers that work for ESPN, Yahool, CBS Sportsline,

F antasybaseball.com, SportsGrumblings.com, et. al., spend an immense amount of time
reading player updates, beat writer columns, valuation theory, game theory, and whatever
else they can get their hands on that might give them an inside edge. The secret is total
immersion into all things related to the sport. “Knowledge is power.” There are of course
some valuation processes that have historically proven to be more accurate, but even the
best “draft strategies” are fluid and dependant on multiple variables, like the changing

dynamics in the player pool, strength of competition, scoring format, etc. As arguably

l6

baseball’s most accomplished scholar, Bill James once said that “baseball is an infinite
puzzle. You can never really understand why teams win and why they lose. You can
understand a little bit more, and a little bit more, but you can never exhaust the subject”
(as qtd. in Gray xiv).

Todd Zola, the Research Director at F antasybaseball.com, is one of a handful of
fantasy sports analysts that probably has a legitimate claim to the title of expert. He has
written a couple of articles on what it means to be a “so-called” expert, a phrase that he
used to detest, in which he argues that true experts do not claim the title for themselves.
A true expert is one who “has earned the respect of his peers within the fantasy
community”, and one who has “earned respect in the court of public opinion” (Zola,
“MIXED”). In an attempt to somewhat humorously demonstrate that argument, he then
suggests that the reader take a minute to “Google his name.” The results include virtually
every major fantasy sports outlet including Sports Illustrated, XM Radio, ESPN, and the
National Fantasy Baseball Championships. In article for Sports Illustrated, Zola quotes
the Chinese Proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish
and you feed him for a lifetime" (“Surfers” 2). This is, without question, Zola’s mantra
and the philosophy that has garnered him such a devoted base of disciples. The idea is to
learn to do the research, player valuation, and decision making yourself. Most of the
questions posted in the forums of fantasy sports sites take one of the following forms:
Should I drafi this guy? Would you trade x for y? What holes do 1 have on my roster?
The premise behind the fisherman philosophy is that it is better to be able to make your
own decisions, backed by research and methodology that you understand and agree with,

than it is to have someone else make those decisions for you based on logic that you are

17

not in a position to question due to ignorance. I spent three weeks in the spring of 2007
trying to create my own set of player projections based on Zola’s valuation theories, and
while I did have some success with that, the analogy is very appropriate: becoming a
successful fisherman takes a lot of time, a lot of patience, and there are infinite ways to
catch a fish. The trick is knowing how and where to catch a marlin rather than a bluegill.

As I stated earlier, my intention was to conduct this study from inside the
community as a participant. In many ways this work is an ethnography, and like musician
Clark Terry in George Lipsitz’s story at the beginning of the Introduction, I wanted to get
into the community and listen and learn so that I could eventually get out from under
Duke’s (or in my case, Zola’s) shadow and lead my own band. If I am to attempt to make
any authoritative claims about fantasy sports communities and the processes that shape
their social dynamics, I must legitimize my right to speak for that group. As I will
demonstrate later from the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, authority is conferred by the
institution that the individual is speaking for, and furthermore, that authority must be
recognized by the community within which the individual claims that authority (1991).

In the summer of 2006 I was contacted by Emil Kadlec, who along with being the
co-author of the article cited above about fantasy football’s origins, is the president of
Fantasy Sports Publications, Inc., the largest publisher of fantasy football magazines in
America for the last seventeen years. I sent an email by clicking on the generic “ask us”
link on the website for the 2006 World Championship of Fantasy Football, which offers a
$300,000 grand prize to the best of over 1,000 participants, inquiring about the possibility
of obtaining a press pass so that I could conduct interviews and observations for this

project. I was immediately contacted by Kadlec, who sent me his cell phone number in

18

his reply and asked me to call him immediately. At the time I had no idea who Kadlec
was, and certainly had no clue that he was one of the most powerful men in the industry.
When I called him up and informed Mr. Kadlec of my intentions, I told him that I had no
interest in participating in the contest, and assured him that I was only looking to get an
objective perspective on fantasy football’s marquee event for an academic study. Kadlec
immediately began defending the game, and was worried that I might portray the game as
a harmful addiction as others had done. The barons of fantasy sports are clearly
concerned with maintaining a reputation as a legitimate business, and as Kadlec reiterated
over and over again to me on the phone that afternoon, fantasy sports communities are no
different than going to the neighborhood sports bar. Most people go to have a good time,
have a few drinks and talk sports. Just because there is a segment of the population that
doesn’t know when to quit drinking, that does not mean that everybody is an alcoholic.
Kadlec had no problem with getting me a press pass to the event and even offered a
complimentary room at the hotel—so long as I promised to be objective and fair in my
representation of the industry.

Achieving a level of recognized authority among peers within the fantasy
community, on the other hand, is a much more time-consuming process. An individual
can be viewed as authoritative in three primary ways, though towards the end of my
study, my perceived status among community members as a “scholar of fantasy
communities” also conferred upon me some authoritative credibility. However, that
authority was primarily relegated to the realm of social interaction and community
building, which I will discuss in more detail in Chapter Two. The three traditional

sources for authoritative legitimacy in fantasy sports communities are: an individual’s

19

competitive record in publicly recognized advanced or expert leagues; holding a position
as a writer or analyst for a credible fantasy sports analysis website; or earning the respect
of peers by securing a reputation for offering sound advice and analysis by way of public
discourse on the community message boards. The most common path to becoming a
fantasy sports guru involves a combination, in the reverse order, of all three as part of a
progression that serves essentially as an apprenticeship.

My own apprenticeship worked out due to a good deal of luck, as I happened to
be in the right place at the right time. In the early stages of my research, I stumbled across
a fantasy football website called F ootballDiehards.com, which also happened to be one of
Emil Kadlec’s and Bob Harris’s websites. Alter perusing the message boards for
sometime, I came across an announcement by Harris that they were going to host two
leagues for site members in honor of Bill Winkenbach and the founders of the GOPPPL. I
signed up to run one of the teams and prepared for the draft. The league was an IDP
league, or Individual Defensive Player, which is recognized as the most complex and
prestigious format to take part in, because it forces team owners to have an extensive
knowledge of defensive players in addition to the standard offensive skill players that
dominate the headlines. I was new to the format, but after spending hours researching
everything I could find on the Internet about defensive players, I was ready to give it a
shot. When the draft had concluded, I was contacted by another player in the league who
had been paying attention to the moves I had made. He asked if I would consider taking a
position as an Offensive Coordinator for a team on another site that employed staffs of
five to build teams with a maximum salary cap of $30 million using a rookie draft and

contract system, franchise and restricted free agent tags, and a free agent auction. That

20

sure sounded like the big leagues to me, so I signed up at GridironGrumblings.com and
began working my way up the ladder in the HAF A (Hire and Fire Association) league.
The unique draw to this format, about which I will spend more time discussing in Chapter
Two, is that the league is economically linked to the forum community on the website.
The currency is only a virtual currency, referred to as “Nutbucks”, but with this currency
owners can purchase virtual stadiums for their franchises and pay salaries to their staff.
Community members can deposit their earnings at the Nut National Bank, where their
Nutbucks appreciate at 2% interest; they can open up virtual pubs in the message boards
with names like Lassy’s Last Chance, K-Rock Café, and Reb’s Castaway; and they can
even gamble with their earnings at one of two virtual casinos, Seizure’s Palace or the
NGN Grand.

After establishing myself a bit in the forums, I was introduced to the site owner,
John Georgopoulos, who offered me a position on staff writing a weekly article called
“The Rookie Report”, in which I would recap the performances of the top ten scoring
fantasy rookies during the previous week. Eventually I began adding fantasy related
insight to player news blurbs, as well as contributing to preseason preview content. My
compensation for writing included a Gridiron Grumblings t-shirt (commonly referred to
as “site swag”), $200 at the end of the year, and a “Staff” designation to my avatar on the
message boards. With that public designation, there was a noticeable change in the way
my comments were received in the community. When I offered suggestions, forum
members began to act on the advice 1 had given, adding a follow up post with the results
of that action looking for additional insight. I had been granted the authority to represent

the site, and that authority was publicly recognized in the community. I have since left

21

my position on staff to concentrate on finalizing my research, but the status I had
achieved is still acknowledged on some levels in communication with subscribers on the
site. For example, in a recent post in the baseball forums one member asked the
community for some trade and draft pick advice, and as I offered my opinions, the follow
up questions started being addressed directly to me. The recognition of my legitimacy as
an authoritative voice is demonstrated by the individual’s decision to take my advice over
that of the others who responded. Another sign that I still retain some level of authority is
demonstrated by the fact that some forum members ask for my input directly via instant
messenger, rather than waiting for a response in the forums.

Am I a fantasy guru? Hardly. Though I perform fairly well in competition and
offer sound advice from time to time on the message boards, I still find myself Instant
Messaging Todd Zola for draft advice. But I can say with complete sincerity that I have
developed a fairly strong understanding of the social dynamics that shape community
interaction within the fantasy sports industry. I have participated in those communities
from almost every position in the social hierarchy: the newbie, the garner, the league
commissioner, the writer, and the “so—called” expert. The fantasy sports phenomenon has
exploded in popular American culture, and there are many reasons to believe that it will
continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In the chapters that follow I hope to offer
plausible explanations for that growth with reference to cultural theory and the social
sciences; to shed some light on the dynamics of community interaction and the forces that
both encourage and disrupt it; to show how this game that takes place in virtual spaces
has had an impact on American sports culture and the power structures that shape it; and

finally, to show that fantasy sports are an expression of the era in which we now live.

22

After years of sitting in front of my laptop, pouring over statistics, chatting about trade
scenarios, and trying to soak up all that fantasy sports have to offer, I have become fat,
arthritic and lazy. But I can also tell you that in St. Louis, an outfield prospect named
Colby Rasmus is going to get more than 450 at bats in 2008, with a solid shot at hitting
20 homeruns and stealing 20 bases. Much like the great spiritual gurus of the East, I have

become heavy with knowledge.

23

CHAPTER 1

The Celebration of the Subjected:
An Explanation for the Growth of Fantasy Sports On the Internet

Investigators of popular culture find their objects of study so implicated in commercial and
practical activities, that it is sometimes diflicult to distinguish the text from its conditions of creation,
distribution, and reception. For those engaged in research about commercialized leisure and electronic
mass media, the approaches advanced within European cultural theory may provide the only adequate
fiameworks for exploring and theorizing the fitll implications of their objects of study. (Lipsitz 319)

A community of individuals with a wealth of disposable income has developed
into a Web-based commodified subculture that is growing at a significant rate. While
other rapidly growing industries on the Web share certain characteristics with the fantasy
sports industry—such as the incredibly lucrative pornography industry, and the social
networking available at sites like F acebook and MySpace, which like fantasy sports have
both been labeled as dangerously addictive—the importance of studying fantasy sports,
and at least part of the explanation for the growth of the industry, lies in the
characteristics distinguishing it from those industries. To begin with, fantasy sports do
not carry the negative social stigma of pornography, and the addictive qualities of fantasy
sports are often celebrated around the water cooler rather than hidden behind locked
doors. Furthermore, the personal interaction and community building that take place in
fantasy communities are different from the social networking website experience in two
very significant ways. First, interaction in fantasy communities is typically motivated by
the desire for competitive advantage. While leagues are often comprised of a group of
fi'iends utilizing the league as way to stay connected to each other—after college

graduation, for example—however, tighter friendships within the group are often

exploited advantageously in trade negotiations. Second, the interaction takes place in

24

forum communities that are governed by a hierarchy of perceived status. While social
hierarchies do exist to some degree in communities formed at F acebook and MySpace,
they are not as overtly recognized as they are in the fantasy sports communities, nor are
they as directly tied to competition. Finally, fantasy sports communities do not suffer
from the stigma of “cyber stalking” that is common in both the pornography and social
networking industries. One reason for the success of the fantasy sports industry, then, is
that it has managed to capitalize on the addictive qualities of similar Web communities in
other industries, while avoiding or masking their negative qualities.

The aim of this chapter is to attempt to find a sociological explanation for the
rapid growth of fantasy sports on the Internet that is grounded in classical theory. Fantasy
sports are comprised of community interaction taking place within a virtual space. That
interaction is built upon elements that make up sports culture, including the rules and
language that shape the games and the economic system that dominates that culture. In
order to understand fantasy sports culture, then, I will incorporate some of the existing
scholarship on the sociology of sports, particularly work that draws on the theory of Karl
Marx, Max Weber, Theodor Adomo and Georg Simmel.

By juxtaposing the surprisingly relevant theories of Marx, Weber, Adomo and
Simmel, I argue that the rapid growth of fantasy sports is due to the reification and
legitimization of the hegemonic capitalist ideology. However, this ideology extends into
social activity in a context within which utopic potentialities exist in interactive social
forms that have the ability to transform the antagonistic nature of conflict into the
partnership of a shared struggle in competition. Finally, fantasy sports share many of the

ritualistic characteristics of religion, which further add to the explanation for the growth

25

of fantasy sports communities. Bringing this all together, however, first necessitates a
proper understanding of those characteristics of modern sports derived from capitalist
culture that are assimilated by the fantasy sports subculture. For these are the
characteristics that shape and sustain the fantasy sports experience, which is perhaps best

summarized by Adomo’s notion of the “Celebration of the Subjected” (Inglis).

Modern Sports According to Guttmann

Allen Guttmann’s From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (1978)
was the author’s attempt to develop an historical sociology of modern sports, based on
the development of seven defining characteristics: Secularization, Equality,
Specialization of Roles, Rationalization, Bureaucratic Organization, Quantification, and
the Quest for Records. He offers a basic introduction to Marxist and selected Neo-
Marxist critiques of those characteristics, followed by a Weberian interpretation of their
social organization emphasizing the transition from traditional to modern society.
Guttmann’s work is an essential primer to the sociological study of modern sports
subculture as it introduces that subculture’s assimilation of the defining characteristics of
the modern, rationalized, capitalist society. By extension, as an assimilation of modern
sports, fantasy sports communities also take on those characteristics, though often in
more pronounced ways.

Guttmann begins building his definition of modern sport by developing a
paradigm based on the notion of play taken from Roger Caillois’s Les Jeux et les
hommes, “in which the poles of paidia and ludus provide a scale for the transition from
spontaneous play (paidia) to regulated, rule-bound games (ludus)” (Guttmann 10).

Guttmann’s selected Neo-Marxist critics argue that at the very moment of the transition

26

from the spontaneous to the regulated, the very idea of “play” is eradicated by the
repressive power of the bourgeois class and replaced by the rationalization of labor. In
Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (1978), Jean-Marie Brohm presents that very
argument by citing the following statement by Jacques Ellul: “We are witnessing a
process whereby playfulness and joy, contact with air and water, improvisation and
spontaneity are disappearing: all these things are abandoned in favour of obedience to
strict rules, efficiency and record times” (Ellul, qtd. in Brohm 41). While there is no
denying the institution of and obedience to rules in modern sports, the notion that
playfulness and joy are disappearing is questionable. Perhaps the reason the Neo-
Marxists fail to see the joy in sports can be attributed to their disregard for religion. In
The Joy of Sports (1994), Michael Novak powerfully argues for the existence of
spontaneous play within regulated games by stating that “sports flow outward into action
from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious: an impulse of fi'eedom, respect for
ritual limits, a zest for symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection” [emphasis mine]
(Novak 19). One key to understanding the growth of fantasy sports in American culture is
a recognition that emotional and religious experiences are also a part of the assimilated
sports culture. I suggest that perhaps we are underemphasizing the celebration of those
being subjected.

The most anticipated and celebrated ritual in fantasy sports is the draft, or auction,
at the beginning of the season. It is within this ritual that the charge that modern sports
lack spontaneity and improvisation can most clearly be refirted. Again, as Sam Walker
stated in Fantasyland (2006), a significant motivation for the creation of Rotisserie

baseball was to develop “a workable excuse to gorge on baseball nearly all winter long”

27

(Walker 65). This year-round extension of one’s favorite sport is another reason for the
popularity of fantasy sports. Participants “gorge on baseball” all winter to gain an
advantage in the draft/auction; however, each participant has access to essentially the
same information, so the edge really goes to the individual that, as the staff at
FantasyBaseball.com like to say, learns to “zig when others zag.” Even the best strategies
for the draft/auction are subject to the unpredictable whims of subjective player valuation
and the variations in the way opponents choose to configure their rosters. As such, to be
successful one must be prepared to improvise and make spontaneous decisions that result
in changes to one’s originally intended blueprint for roster construction. It is precisely
this unpredictability that provides much of the excitement and joy in the draft/auction
ritual. There are of course limits imposed upon the ritual by the rules and structure of the
league; however, contrary to Ellul’s argument, those limits actually force participants to
embrace spontaneity and improvisation. If the Rotisserie baseball player had no salary
cap restrictions, there would be no need for “on the fly” adjustments due to fluctuations
in the market. The processes of limitation and improvisation are juxtaposed together in a
manner that maximizes the excitement and joy produced in the draft/auction ritual. The
increasing demand for, and subsequent development of, “mock drafts” on fantasy sports
websites attests to the significant role that experience plays in the success of the fantasy
sports industry.

At this point it is important to note that within Guttmann’s paradigm, fantasy
“sports” are actually nothing of the kind; as Guttmann states, “watching a physical
contest is not really very much like engaging in a physical contest. Betting comes closer,

but not close enough” (Guttmann 8). This distinction can be applied to fantasy baseball,

28

for example, as some have gone so far as to classify the game as no more than elaborate
gambling (Bernhard and Eade). Fantasy baseball is only a sport in so far as it appropriates
and utilizes the culture, organization, identities, and quantified results of Major League
Baseball. Ellul’s critique about losing “contact with air and water” then becomes quite
literal, as sports become digital simulacra within the virtual spaces on the Internet. The
experience is intended to be ludic by design, appropriating the defining characteristics of
society perhaps to an even greater extent than the sport it mimics. And yet, that is perhaps
one of the real draws to fantasy sports, as the distinction between the real and the virtual
removes the obstacle of physical limitation from participation. Later I will further suggest
that this separation from the physical toil of sport could be another reason for the
popularity of fantasy sports, as it represents the presence of a utopic potentiality offering
the hope of a future liberation from the destructive consequences of antagonistic
competition.

Richard Gruneau states that Guttmann found the Neo-Marxist critiques selected
for his analysis “unpersuasive because they overly value economic determinations, and
because they are supposedly guided more by ‘ideology’ than by ‘careful empirical
study’” (Gruneau 40). However, this interpretation of the Neo-Marxist critique also
serves as one of the shortcomings of Guttmann’s treatment. While that criticism is clearly
valid, it falls short of standing up as a definitive representation of Neo-Marxist thought.
In an article intended to “resuscitate what [he] regards to be the genuine critical thread
underlying Neo-Marxist sport theory”, William J. Morgan suggests that the scholars
being cited by Guttmann—Bero Rigauer, Gerhard Vinnai and J can-Marie Brohm—are

guilty of ideological distortions that “bastardize” the work of Theodor Adomo and the

29

other Frankfurt scholars (Morgan 25). It is important to recognize this problem early,
because one of the central arguments presented in this chapter suggests that one
explanation for the growth of the fantasy sports industry hinges on a proper
understanding of Adomo’s work.

Guttmann did recognize that a model “derived from the fundamental Weberian
notion of the difference between the ascribed status of traditional society and the
achieved status of a modern one” had clear advantages over Marxist models reduced to
economic determinism (Guttmann 81). And as I described in the Introduction, the
distinction between ascribed and achieved status is a matter of serious debate in fantasy
sports communities, particularly with reference to one’s designation as a “fantasy sports
expert”. Class distinctions based on economic status typically end with the digital divide.
Once a player has access to the community, economic distinctions shift primarily to the
process of player valuation.

More recent scholarship has sought to reexamine the application of classical
sociological theory in sports culture by expanding the analysis of those critiques, in an
effort to incorporate the previously overlooked subtlety and rich complexity of those
original works. Notions of economic determinism and rationalization are of course
perfectly relevant to the understanding of fantasy sports; however, as the application of
Novak’s religious analogy has shown, they cannot fully account for the grth of fantasy
sports communities. As such, perhaps fresh interpretations of the classics as applied in
recent analyses on the sociology of sports will, if nothing else, suggest a better way to ask

the question.

Reexamining the Classics: New Scholarship on the Socialization of Sport

30

In Richard Giulianotti’s recent collection of essays entitled Sport and Modern
Social T heorists (2004), Alan G. lngham’s opening essay engages the “founding fathers
of social theory” by synthesizing Marx’s concept of valorization, Weber’s concept of
rationalization, Durkheim’s concept of collective representation, and Freud’s concept of
repression (Giulianotti 4). I will use Ingham’s synthesis of the classical theorists as a
model in my own analysis of the fantasy sports community for this study. I have chosen
to incorporate the work of Simmel rather than Durkheim and Freud, however, in an effort
to address the socially interactive aspect of fantasy sports in a more direct manner.
Furthermore, in an effort to expand my application of Marxist theory, I will incorporate
David Inglis’ essay from the same collection on Theodor Adomo’s concept of systemic
ideological domination. Adomo’s concept is actually somewhat analogous to Ingham’s
presentation of Durkheim and Freud in its attempt to show the power of a coercive
socializing force, so much of Ingham’s work proves to be both relevant and readily

applicable to my analysis.

Revisiting Marx: Valorization and Adorno’s Systemic Ideological Domination

Ingham argues that “the processes of valorization, rationalization, and bourgeois
civilization (the processes associated with modernity) constitute the modern forms and
relations through which class domination has been made institutionally effective”
(Ingham 12). He begins his synthesis of those concepts by discussing the process of
institutionalization, and more specifically, how that process informs questions of power
and social domination. That process is inextricably linked to the growth of fantasy sports,
as the will to dominate is central to success in the game. When one can establish a

consistent record of success in league competition—particularly when that success is

31

achieved against individuals with publicly recognized authority—they accumulate
symbolic power that is then actualized within the linguistic exchanges that take place
within the fantasy community. That process of institutionalization legitimizes a level of
authority conferred upon the individual as a result of that success. With the public
recognition of that authority, the individual attains a higher social status within the
community, which often provides the individual with the symbolic capital necessary to
legitimately dominate message board discussion. Domination, then, is central not only to
the process of competition, but also in daily social interaction. The feeling of self-worth
that accompanies the recognition of one’s contribution to the community as distinctly
valuable also powerfully contributes to the desire to participate in fantasy sports. I will
discuss this process fiirther using Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power and the
institution in Chapter Three.

The processes that support the institutional effectiveness of class domination can
further be demonstrated as the fantasy sports industry became an extension of the
valorization of fandom. Ingham emphasizes that the valorization of sport was dependent
upon the creation of a market of consumers, but that previous attempts to use the ‘urban-

industrial society thesis’ to explain its creation were insufficient.

What should be emphasized is how the capitalist mode of production
became so naturalized that it influenced production in other spheres
(such as sport) and became hegemonic. Thus, in a capitalist society, the
valorization of sports would have occurred when conditions were ripe.

Urban-industrialism merely accelerated the process. (Ingham 14)

If we accept the naturalization of the capitalist mode of production as inevitable across

the whole of society, then the same process of acceleration must also apply to the

32

valorization of spectatorship and fandom in conjunction with the development of
information technology and the Internet.

I suggest, then, that the fantasy sports industry can be seen as a hybrid of the
valorization of sport and spectatorship, as it combines the exchange-value of pleasure
received from watching the athletes with the newly created surplus-value generated by
the sale of the spectators’ ability to interact for profit. In all of this, the fantasy sports
participant is willfully reinforcing existent class distinctions as the barons of the sports
industry, and even the overpaid superstars that play the game, grow richer with every
dollar they spend. Once the fantasy sports industry was recognized as a legitimate source
of revenue, major professional sports leagues began investing greater amounts of capital
into the promotion of fantasy games, even going so far as to cater broadcast presentations
to the fantasy sports community. And as with everything that proves to be profitable
within capitalist society, the fantasy sports industry flourished, and continues to do so, as
new ways to capitalize on its success are continually being introduced.

In his conception of the valorization of sport, Ingham suggests that when games
are transformed into organized sport, the participant’s play becomes labor that generates
both exchange- and surplus-value, which is realized in the pleasure of the spectators and
the profits of the owners. Thus, in the Marxist sense, the participant is alienated from the
product of their play. Ingham explains that as play is turned into toil, “sport becomes part
of a larger system of domination and exploitation, illustrating Marcuse’s surplus

3”

repression or ‘negative institutionalization (Ingham 18). As the process of valorization,
or “sportification” as Ingham calls it, finally overtakes the act of play, the external

coercion that pushes players to excel turns them into objects of instrumental rationality,

33

and the dominant capitalist ideology becomes on ongoing process of systemic
inculcation.

With fantasy sports, however, it is worth noting that the physical “toil” presented
in this argument, does not apply. In fact, one could legitimately argue that it is precisely
that separation from the physical that makes fantasy sports so attractive. My inability to
field grounders on a gymnasium floor ended my own baseball career at the age of
fourteen, but that limitation did not take away from my passion for the game. With
fantasy sports, as with video games, the fan can reconnect with the game on a
participatory level. But does this alienation from toil, so to speak, offer the potential for
something other? Is this a different experience within a system that to some extent has
the ability to reduce the sacrifices inherent in market capitalism? Nevertheless, fantasy
sports participants do have a role in the promotion of instrumental rationality, and by
extension, the reification of the dominant capitalist ideology. The player valuation
process and the manner in which seemingly innocuous conversations take place for the
purpose of securing a competitive advantage in the trade market both show how central
instrumental rationality is to the fantasy sports experience. Paradoxically, those
experiences provide much of the enjoyment that is partially responsible for the
sustainability of the fantasy sports industry.

Fantasy sites offer resources for gathering player and team information, studying
game theory and strategy, receiving direct expert advice, and sharing digital “space” for
the development of large social communities. The subscriber content is generally
purchased as a yearly subscription costing somewhere between thirty and fifty dollars.

These sites are recognized as sources of “inside” information, and those who frequently

34

offer the most accurate inside information have an elevated recognition within the social
community’. The latent domination of instrumental rationalism rules social interaction as
the community works together to develop better methods for player valuation and
strategy, so that in the end they can compete against each other in an effort to
competitively dominate their peers. These communities can be seen as analogous to, or
extensions of Adomo’s depiction of sport, which is “designed to reinforce the ideological
domination of the capitalist System. Sport itself is not play but ritual in which the
subjected celebrate their subjection” (Adorno qtd. in Inglis 85).

The social interactions within fantasy sports communities are social phenomena
within which the juxtaposition of Marx’s valorization and Weber’s instrumental
rationalization would seem to render Simmel’s notion of detached sociability virtually
impossible. Personal relationships habitually represent the potential for the generation of
surplus-value as “our humanness is debased through capitalistic processes, encouraging
us to objectify the competitive Other” (Ingham 19). As such, I would like to expand
Marx’s concept of valorization by including an analysis of Adomo’s argument that
Marx’s critique needs to be viewed systemically rather than in the context of outdated
notions of class conflict. As has been demonstrated on many levels thus far, many of
these critiques often explain the popularity of the fantasy sports industry far more
effectively than they denounce it.

In “Theodor Adomo on Sport: The Jeu D’Esprit of Despair,” David Inglis frames
his essay on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he describes as

their “vision of the destruction of individuality and freedom in terms of the rise and

 

4 . . , . . . .

Thrs elevation can be seen as an example of Weber 5 notion of status as a context wrthrn which one can
gain power. As the website gains credibility, the influx of customer traffic would then also add to their
economic power base.

35

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eventual triumph of ‘instrumental rationality (Inglis 83). Inglis is working to counter
misinterpretations of Adomo’s position on sports by Rigauer and Brohm, whom he refers
to as ‘Neo-Adomians’. Notably, these were the very same scholars that William J.
Morgan referred to (in the earlier discussion on Guttmann) as being poor examples of the
Neo-Marxist critique as well. Inglis reinforces Adomo’s assertion that the problem of

capitalism was not merely a matter of class conflict, but rather it was a systemic problem

rooted in the ideological domination of instrumental rationality.

Domination does not so much operate in the service of a particular
dominant class, the thesis that Marx had essentially put forward, but
operates in the interests of the overall System, a capitalist system no
longer based on free competition between individual capitalists, but
oriented around the power of big business corporations each with

monopolies in particular markets. (Inglis 83)

Every aspect of culture, therefore, is inculcated with the dominant ideology of capitalism.
Moreover, individuals within that culture seldom, if ever, have any conscious recognition
that they are being coerced by the dominant ideology to behave in a manner that
reinforces the system. One very important clarification must be made here. For Inglis,
Adomo’s “excessively negative rhetoric” was an intentional use of irony, thereby leaving
the possibility for the “utopian element of the object to be revealed,” and it is precisely
this utopian element of Adomo’s work that was entirely missed by Rigauer and Brohm
(Inglis 90).

An argument that 1 have already been hinting at throughout this chapter is that the
fantasy sports community might contain elements that point to a “potential future

characterized by non-domination,” such as the freedom to choose one’s level of

36

participation, and the potential to satisfy conflict in non-threatening, reciprocally agreed
upon contexts (Inglis 91). There are still winners and losers, but the playing field is
leveled, offering equal opportunity for success. For example, both Yahoo! and ESPN
offer free fantasy sports services, thereby providing those with limited financial resources
an opportunity to play. There are also different levels of competition that the fantasy
sports participant can choose to take part in, allowing for the enjoyment of competing
against individuals with similar skill sets. Perhaps the key to understanding the growth of
fantasy sports lies in that potential. As I stated earlier, another plausible explanation for
that growth is that as an assimilation of sports culture, the fantasy industry could likewise
be viewed by “big business” as a profitable long-term market. Ingham states that “a
sustainable industry... requires a quality product to realize exchange- and surplus-values.
With the valorization of sport, the rationalization of its means and relations of production
would follow. Science/technology and bureaucratic/managerial forms of administration
would intentionally be applied to sporting production” (Ingham 21). Each of those
characteristics are essential qualities of fantasy sports industry, and so it is clear that the
next step in this analysis is to turn our attention to Max Weber and his notions of

rationalism and instrumental rationality.

Weber: Instrumental Rationality

Transitioning from the concept of valorization to systemic domination in the
previous section, I suggested that the social interactions within fantasy sports
communities are a juxtaposition of Marx’s valorization and Weber’s instrumental

rationalization; moreover, Adomo’s own interpretation of domination was likewise tied

37

to the realities of systemic instrumental rationality. Returning to Ingham’s sportification

synthesis, he introduced Weber’s concept in the following manner:

Instrumental rationality is cold, calculative, and conditional, and from a
more Marxian reading implies that human beings, as well as physical
objects, can be considered as a means to another individual’s end. For
Weber, instrumental rational action characterizes social action in the
material structures of advanced capitalism. Instrumental rationality is
the hegemonic orientation to social action in the institutionalization and
modernization of the industrial capitalist way of life and thought. It
subsumes other forms of social action almost bending them to its will.

(Ingham 20)

Ingham treats Weber’s notion of rationalization not so much as a theoretical
concept, but rather as a process of systemization and standardization. As such, he focuses
his Weberian critique of sport biographically as the inculcation of instrumental
rationalism becomes naturalized in the individual as he/she moves from spontaneous
forms of play, to agonal games, and finally into organized sport. Of primary importance
is the moment at which the individual recognizes the body as having an instrumental use
in play, in the same way that it does in the labor of work. Ingham distinguishes between
two forms of institutionalization: positive institutionalization, which can be understood as
the repression of needs and desires necessary to live with others; and negative
institutionalization which stems from social domination, or “the power to shape
institutionalized life.” While Ingham does recognize that institutional socialization can be
contested, he emphasizes that “the articulation between dominant institutions is powerfiil
ideologically and influences the ways in which we live our lives” (Ingham 13). Play in its

purest state is affected by neither, as pleasure is sought for its own sake, free from all

38

constraints. When the individual begins to play agonal games, positive institutionalism is
necessary to ensure the reciprocity of exchange-value. The use of the body of the
individual now becomes instrumental as it is used as a tool to achieve competitive
advantage within the bounds of a gaming context, which is constituted by a set of
mutually agreed upon rules. With the creation of rules and regulations, rationality is
introduced as a means to an end.

This is the point within Ingham’s developing paradigm at which Simmel’s
concept of sociability proves analogous, for sociability is likewise contingent upon
positive institutionalism, and a level of rationality that governs and guarantees the
reciprocity that ensures the possibility of equal exchange-value in interaction. In agonal
games, each participant theoretically has an equal share in the potential for victory. As I
stated earlier in the Guttmann portion of this study, fantasy sports arguably do not go
beyond this agonal stage of competition. They are not physical games, but rather
intellectual contests. However, that is not to say that they are then isolated from the
ideological inculcation that takes place within sports. To be sure, as a product of capitalist
culture, fantasy sports assimilate the features of instrumental rationality just the same.
The important difference is signified by the absence of physical toil and coerced
participation, which implicitly suggests the potential for instrumental rationalism to be
implemented for the purposes of non-destructive competition, reducing the antagonistic
nature of conflict.

Within sport, instrumental rationalism works together with negative
institutionalism to foster an exploitative environment in which individuals finds

themselves working in excess to avoid becoming expendable. Ingham states that “we

39

allow our lives to be organized by a cadre of experts and administrators both on and off
the field. This ‘scientization’, ‘technicization’, and managerial/bureaucratic organization
of our athletic labour is part of Weber’s rationalization process” (Ingham 22). This also
supports Guttmann’s emphasis on the Weberian notion of achieved status rather than
ascribed status, as the individual can only attain status through this process of
instrumental rationalism. Within the context of fantasy sports, however, the process of
instrumental rationalism is precisely the point, and it is clearly evident in the following
selection from an article written by F antasyBaseball.com’s Todd Zola and Rob

Liebowitz:

What will follow is a detailed presentation of the theory and mechanics
of calculating one’s own dollar values. The method will be applicable
to leagues of all types, shapes and sizes. It is customizable to meet any
category or scoring requirements. It is more logical and mathematically

sound than any method published. (Leibowitz and Zola l)

The subjection to the systemic domination of instrumental rationalism and the
dominant capitalist ideology as it extends into the fantasy sports community is, in fact,
one of the primary causes for the celebration. Success in the fantasy sports community is
directly tied to the participant’s ability to use instrumental rationality to gain perceived
competitive advantages in player valuation and trade negotiations. Fantasy sports thrive
in American culture because they are, to their very core, an unabashed celebration of
capitalism. However, I have also stated that the theoretical applications to sports as
presented by Ingham, Inglis, and Adorno do not always directly correlate with fantasy
sports because of the lack of physical subjection. And since the games are played within

virtual spaces without physical activity, one more analytical approach should be

40

discussed in an effort to specifically address the importance of social interaction within

fantasy communities.

Simmel: Duality, and the Forms of Social Interaction

Georg Simmel held that society was a process that was “constantly being
realized” as individuals symbiotically influence each other through their interactions
(Appelrouth and Desfor Edles 245). Simmel viewed the relationship between the
individual and society as an interdependent duality, symbiotically linked in the same way
that individuals within the society are connected to each other. His sociological method
was a process he called “sociation,” whereby he understood the focal point of
sociological study to be the form of social interaction, rather than the content. The three
forms of social interaction according to Simmel are exchange, conflict, and sociability,
each of which are extremely usefiil for the study of fantasy communities. I begin this
section on Simmel by suggesting that his notion of duality is a reasonable explanation for
the apparent conflict that arises between what Ingham called positive and negative
institutionalization, as they alternately manifest themselves in the social interaction of
fantasy sports communities.

Positive institutionalism, as defined by Ingham, refers to an instance of the
internal repression of instincts in order to “minimize conflicts with the reality principle
that the engagement with others produces” (Ingham 15). Within the context of games,
this necessary form of rationalization within social interaction serves to create, and
facilitate, the observance of rules or standards set up to allow for the equal opportunity of
each participant to receive pleasure from the experience. Simmel’s concept of sociability

is likewise contingent upon positive institutionalism, though Simmel himself says that

41

rationalism “finding no content there, seeks to do away with sociability” (Appelrouth and
Desfor Edles 270). However, I would argue that sociability does require rationally
structured standards to guard against the interference of personal interests. Rules of
engagement are necessary to ensure the reciprocity that allows for the possibility of equal
exchange-value in interaction. Simmel’s concept of exchange as a form of interaction
might appear to be a truer representation of positive institutionalization as it refers to
notions of reciprocity, give and take, and exchange-values; however, in agonal games,
each participant theoretically has an equal share in the potential for victory. There are no
such conditions of equity between participants contained in Simmel’s discussion of
exchange as a form of interaction. It is important to remember that games offer the
participant both use-value in the form of individual pleasure gained from the experience
of play in and of itself, as well as the exchange-value inherent in reciprocal interaction.
And yet, this seemingly innocuous social experience breaks down when the other side of
Simmel’s duality asserts its coercive force.

Social interactions within fantasy sports communities are societal phenomena that
are also affected by Marx’s process of valorization. Combined with Weber’s instrumental
rationalization, Simmel’s notion of sociability becomes virtually impossible. The game
upon which all of this interaction takes place is based on the ability to maximize surplus-
value by taking advantage of disparities in perceived exchange-value. The process of
negative institutionalization destroys sociability as external systemic forces of ideological
domination transform all modes of interaction into opportunities to realize a profit. Every
conversation within the fantasy sports community is continuously shadowed by ambitious

intent, and at the heart of that intent is the interdependent duality that makes fantasy

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sports possible. Without the potential for reciprocity, no one would bother to take part in
the process of interactive exchange. Positive institutionalization in the form of exchange
disguised as sociability works symbiotically with the negative institutionalization of open
exchange, or conflict, as participants seek to maximize the accumulation of surplus-value
in a social environment utterly inculcated with instrumental rationality. There is,
however, one important question that remains unanswered. Thinking back to Adorno and
Horkheimer, is there even a shred of latent utopic potentiality to cling to within this
dystopic society that is so completely permeated by community sanctioned dominance?
In his discussion of conflict as a form of social interaction, Simmel states that
“conflict is thus designed to resolve divergent dualisms; it is a way of achieving some
kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties”
(Appelrouth and Desfor Edles 263). Clearly annihilation is not the result we are looking
for in our hope to resolve the divergent dualisms of reciprocity and domination; however,
the context within which fantasy sports participants are experiencing conflict is a virtual
one. In such a space, the toil normally associated with the oppression of class conflict is
non-existent. There is no physical contact of any kind with one’s adversary. The
victories won and the exploitation of others for the accumulation of surplus-value take
place in a world of simulacra. While researching Jean Baudrillard and his work on
simulations and “the Procession of Simulacra”, it became apparent that perhaps the work
of noted American Studies scholar Leo Marx and his notion of symbols and myths as
culturally definitive ought to be revisited as it applies to the study of fantasy culture.
Marx’s “American Studies — A Defense of an Unscientific Method” defines culture as “a

system, or interrelated group of systems, of values, meanings, and goals” (Marx 79). The

43

framework by which he studies that culture is a careful reading of symbols and myth. “If
a symbol may be defined as an image invested with significance beyond that required for
referential purposes, then a myth is a combination of symbols, held together by a
narrative, which embodies the virtually all-encompassing conception of reality — the
world-view — of a group ”(Marx 86). I will develop the significance of symbols within a
linguistic context to a greater degree in the third chapter, but for the purposes of the
current argument, Marx’s conception is particularly useful. They are not, in fact, all that
different, as I will demonstrate later.

Fantasy sports culture can be studied by understanding the cultural systems and
symbols that define the “world-view” of the players involved, and the narrative that ties
that view together creating the perceived hegemony of those within it. Using Marx’s own
“machine in the garden” imagery, one could go so far as to say that fantasy sports culture
on the Internet represents what Jacques Ellul might recognize as the apocalyptical
fulfillment of that train of thought: man in the machine. Marx noted that “one observation
that later proved to be of value was the simple fact that machine images seemed to take
on symbolic power to the degree that they were coupled with images of landscape” (Marx
83). With the lntemet, specifically in relation to fantasy sports and gaming, the machine
has become the landscape. Moreover, I would argue that one of the reasons fantasy
communities continue to thrive is precisely because of their connection with the images
from the symbolically potent American sports culture.

The machine is sold to the public as a way to make dreams reality, as a way to
“get into the game.” The dream is culture recreated in an environment of total control;

created in the image of the world as the individual thinks it should exist. Man leaves the

44

landscape altogether as he steps into the machine. The symbol of the American Dream
made real by technology represents for Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra”
(Baudrillard 350). By this he meant that the signs of the real (the dream realization
represented by the Internet) are substituted as the real itself, creating what he calls the
“hyperreal.” The chat rooms, forums and role playing universes on the web that are
designed to simulate and facilitate group interaction and social constructs become “real”
locations. A man comes home from work everyday and “goes to” his fantasy website,
where he spends the next four hours “hanging out” with his friends. Every aspect of
social interaction found in a bar or the office is replicated in the forums, invoking very
real emotional and physiological reactions by the participants. However, the negative
reactions that can often arise out of competition takes place within a landscape that offers
the potential for complete anonymity. Conflict can be resolved without facing a “real”
adversary, thereby mitigating the stigmatizing effects of public humiliation stemming
from defeat.

Now the individuals and objects upon which that simulation is based are very real,
and so the reification of dominance is still realized. But the potential for a future where
games virtually satiate the inevitable conflicts that arise in a society is also a systemic
feature inherent in fantasy sports. Morgan offers Horkheimer’s perspective on the
potential for the positive social contributions of sport in response to the negatively

deterministic misinterpretations of his and Adomo’s critiques:

Horkheimer (Horkheimer 180) speaks of another sense of competition
in sport in which one’s opponent is not so much an adversary as a
partner in a struggle in which the antagonism between the other and the

self disappears. Similarly, Horkheimer ( l 83) refrains from a wholesale

45

indictment of the rise of spectator sport, noting that there is a deeper,
communal form of spectatorship which betrays its partisan,
nationalistic facade in which the desire to catch a glimpse of perfection
supersedes the desire to see one’s own side win. Horkheimer further
refuses to deride the claim that the ideal of fair play embodied in the
rules of sport positively contributes to the cause of international peace.
While acknowledging that this ideal is frequently violated in modern
sport, he nonetheless contends (Horkheimer 184) that without this
sporting spirit one cannot imagine the existence of fair and peaceful

competition between nations. (Morgan 28)

It is clear the Horkheimer felt that sports and spectatorship did indeed contain seeds of
hope, and as the fantasy sports industry is itself a combination of the two, there is every
reason to believe that it contains those very same seeds of hope, particularly as I have

shown, within the virtual environment.

Conclusion: Why Is The Fantasy Sports Community Growing So Quickly?

The aim of this chapter was to revisit the classical theories of Marx, Adorno,
Weber, and Simmel in an attempt to analyze fantasy sports culture, and to discover the
reason for its tremendous growth over the last few years. As the fantasy sports industry is
an assimilated subculture of sports, I decided to use scholarship on the sociology of
sports as my reference, using some of the recent scholarship in the field as a foundation
upon which to grid my analysis. It is relatively clear at this point that the work of Karl
Marx is best used in conjunction with more recent Marxist scholarship that better suits
the social context of “late” or “global” capitalism. In this manner, the work of Theodor

Adorno proved to be incredibly useful as a means by which I am able to juxtapose the

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work of each of the classical theorists using his concept of systemic ideological
domination. Additionally, Alan G. Ingham’s synthesis of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and
Freud was ideally suited for this study as his emphasis on valorization and instrumental
rationality complemented my application of David Inglis’ work on Adomo. And of
course Simmel’s concepts on the forms of interaction were essential to tying everything
back to the fantasy sports community.

I believe we can attribute the explosion of fantasy sports on the Internet first and
foremost to the valorization of spectatorship, which in turn led to the rationalization of
the structures that support its marketability. Once again, Ingham states that “a sustainable
industry... requires a quality product to realize exchange- and surplus—values” (Ingham
21). The websites that host the community forums are continually reevaluating the
quality of their content, in a rationalized process of attempting to realize greater surplus-
value. In the next chapter, I will present a study of two fantasy sports analyst sites that
completely overhauled their Websites in an effort to increase profitability and quality
primarily through technological upgrades. Ten years ago, fans would collect baseball
cards of their favorite players, thereby objectifying and valorizing the image and
statistical output of the players. With the development of the Internet and the popularity
of fantasy sports, now producers can sell the exact same use-value at a higher rate of
exchange due to savings in the cost of materials, which has ultimately led to a greater
maximization of surplus-value.

The popularity of fantasy sports can also be explained by Adomo and
Horkheimer’s notion of latent utopic potential. The experience allows participants the

excitement and challenge of conflict removed from the physical effects and costs of

47

domination and repression. In fantasy sports one can “do battle” in an anonymous fashion
for the fun of it, which ties the explanation to Simmel’s notion of sociability. I made the
argument earlier that sociability was next to impossible due to the economic nature of the
social interaction in fantasy communities; however, the perception of anonymity offered
by the virtual environment ultimately removes the personal stakes typically involved in
value-based interaction. So in a sense, the ‘person’ gaining from the introduction of
instrumental rationalism into the interaction is nothing more than a simulacrum of the
individual staring into the terminal. Now in leagues comprised of friends and
acquaintances, there is typically an understanding that exchange-value involves differing
conceptions of value. As such, each participant enters into trade negotiations with the
recognition that they do so in an effort to maximize their own value.

Finally, we must recognize that as an extension of American sports culture,
fantasy sports share the ritualistic and emotional qualities of religious experience. There
is something about the attraction to sports that cannot be reduced to theories of
economics and utopic resistance. It lies somewhere between myth and symbol. It cannot
be rationally explained or justified, as its origins offer little in the form of concrete
definition. Americans love their sports with a zealot’s passion. They are secularized rites
of worship and devotion, complete with the idols, sacraments and ceremonies that sustain
religious faith. Given the elasticity and sustainability of the characteristics that I have
offered as explanatory for the growth of fantasy sports, I see no reason to assume that the
rate of expansion should slow down in the near future as new participants continue to buy

into the opportunity to celebrate their own subjection in the glorious rituals of fandom.

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CHAPTER 2

Power In Numbers: Two Fantasy Sports Communities in Transition

The boards are dead as doornails. As implied earlier, we are going to
have to fully transition over to mrwfantasybaseball. com. Actually, the
only thing that has not moved yet are these free boards. Please realize
they are free to you but not to us. The hope is every-tone moves over, and
with the added cache of the fantasybaseball. com URL, we build a
community even stronger than we have here now. (Todd Zola “just
curious, new boards”)

We are creatures of habit. While cliche's often ring hollow, sometimes they are
unavoidable, particularly within the superstitious culture of professional sports. Every
morning when I launch my Web browser, after initially checking my email, I
methodically scroll through my bookmarks:

-Rotoworld Player Updates

-My fantasy leagues (The Pete Rose Hall of Fame, Queen Felix and the Tommy

Johns, The Bush League, and The Sports Grumblings Invitational)

-FantasyBaseball.com

-SportsGrumblings.com,

-BaseballProspectus.com

-ESPN.com
After years of performing this ritual every morning, a certain degree of comfort and
homeliness has become associated with the Web sites, particularly those with forum
communities. Here is today’s two-for-the-price-of—one bonus cliché: Human beings are
social creatures.

It is always interesting to look at the list at the bottom of the forums to see who is

currently online, a process that often (though not always) sparks an internal monologue

49

along these lines: “bodhizefa is online! Why hasn’t he answered my post yet?” And with
that admission, I confess that my statement in Chapter One regarding a lack of cyber-
stalking in fantasy sports communities was not entirely true. Though this is clearly
stalking of a different sort. As individuals start getting used to the community dynamic,
they typically latch on to a handful of members whose counsel is highly regarded. As a
result, an apprenticeship of sorts is formed, though it might be closer to the truth to
characterize it as a discipleship. Over time, the different factions of disciples can become
more pronounced, particularly within theory and strategy discussions. Typically there are
groups of site members that prefer the analysis or conversational style of one Web site
staffer over another. Furthermore, there are often long standing site subscribers that tend
to draw a significant following as well. For example, one of the veteran posters on

F antasyBaseball.com has developed a reputation as the guru of pitching because of his
“Annual Tiers of Pitching” post that went up every spring. This year he decided that he
did not have the time to pull it off, resulting in multiple posts lamenting the end of an era
of greatness. These long standing veterans are the rocks of the community, and are often
eagerly sought after for approval and insight.

When a Web site undergoes a transition either due to a corporate buyout or
perhaps simply to technologically revamp the site—like F antasyBaseball.com and
SportsGrumblings.com, the two sites I have chosen to focus on for this chapter—with
very rare exceptions, the staffers are all going to tow the party line by vigorously assuring
the community that the “necessary” changes are going to benefit everyone in the end. But
the veteran members, those who have been around long enough to develop their own

level of symbolic power, are not always thrilled with the changes. They are comfortable

50

with the status quo. They like knowing where everything is, how everything works, and
they definitely do not want to have to change their bookmarks! And though they do hold
a significant amount of social clout, when the site owners decide to make changes, they
are powerless to do more than make suggestions to ease the transition. In most cases,
however, because the veterans were themselves mentored by the staff members in the
same way that they mentor the newer community members, they tend to stay loyal,
exercising patience during the transition.

The fantasy sports industry thrives on community interaction, and when a
community faces dramatic structural and environmental changes, the strength of the
community is tested. And while the maintenance of the community’s social dynamics are
often important to the Web site owner, if the product has been around long enough and
the writing is good, it is admittedly not essential to the success of the business, as the
strength of the product will most likely bring new members. But to the individual
members within the community, particularly when the community is vibrant to begin
with, continuity of the social dynamic within the group is paramount. As the changes are
implemented, the members of the community observe those members who have been
around the longest. They are looked upon with a degree of authority, and as such, they
are expected to offer guidance. And it is in the actions and comments of those individuals
that one can legitimately gauge just how smoothly the transition is working out.

The two Web sites I will be looking at are direct competitors in the fantasy
analysis market. I will say right from the start that this study is in no way intended to
promote nor degrade either site. This is merely intended to be a study of the social

dynamics within the message board communities at each site as they went through a

51

major structural transition. Mastersball.com was bought out by F antasyBaseball.com
prior to the 2007 baseball season, and as such the forum communities were forced to get
used to the functionality of an entirely different Web site. SportsGrumblings.com was
originally GridironGrumblings.com, which provided fantasy football analysis
exclusively. Around the same time as the Mastersball/FantasyBaseball merger, Gridiron
Grumblings owner John Georgopoulos decided to expand his successful football site to
include content for baseball, basketball and hockey as well. For the “Grumblers”, the
transition involved not only a whole new set of technical bells and whistles, but also the
potential that their intimate little community of football junkies might become
oversaturated. In the pages that follow, I will discuss how each community dealt with
their respective transitions based on personal observation as a member of those

communities, and from forum discussions posted by other members of the communities.

The Masters Go Corporate

Mastersballcom was founded in 1997 by Jason Grey and Todd Zola.
Rotoheaven.com founder Rob Leibowitz joined the team in 2002 when the two sites
merged. In the last couple years, Perry Van Hook and Gary Jennings have also been
added to the staff. Adding to its reputation as one of the top fantasy analyst sites in the
industry, some of the work from Mastersball had also been utilized by the scouting and
operations departments of several Major League Teams. Jason Grey’s outstanding record
as a competitor in the nation’s top expert league, Tout Wars, included back-to-back
championships. Todd Zola was recognized as a pioneer in the fields of research and
player valuation both in the fantasy community and in the baseball community. And

Leibowitz was widely recognized as one of the industry’s most skillful writers.

52

FantasyBaseball.com owner Craig Davis wisely retained every member on the staff when
he brought Mastersball into the fold (though Jason Grey has since moved on to
ESPN.com). I no longer remember how I found the site, but it was definitely those
credentials that pulled me in long enough to get hooked.

I had been a member of the free message boards at Mastersball for two or three
years before I finally convinced my wife that paying $30 for a Platinum membership was
“necessary”. Many of the Platinum members often posted on the free boards, as well as
the “Forum F unklord” himself, Todd Zola. The insight these guys offered was incredible.
They broke down fantasy baseball in the same way that I had seen Brett F avre break
down so many inept Chicago Bears secondaries. The intelligence, the confidence, and the
accuracy in their analysis were astounding. I squeezed as much free advice as I could
from them, hoping that I was not coming across like an annoying 45 year old man
screaming for autographs at a baseball card show. I had consistently improved every year
in my league since stumbling across that forum, and it was time to take the next step.
Conveniently (insert sarcasm here) I joined up either a year too late, or a year too early
depending upon whose perspective you took. Weeks after I joined, we were informed that
a “big announcement” was coming shortly, and that it would mean great things for us as
paying customers. The big announcement turned out to be Mastersball.com’s merger with
FantasyBaseball.com.

The boards lit up with questions: Were the staff staying on? Was there going to be
any downtime during the merger? Were the message boards going to be ported over?
Would we have to be subjected to F antasyBaseball.com’s inferior writers? The panic was

not unexpected by the staff, and they were extremely diligent in answering all questions

53

promptly with confident reassurance. In hindsight, however, even the staff admit the
timing of the transition was not well thought out. They waited until just after Opening
Day so as to avoid messing with the preseason drafts of the members, but no one foresaw
the technical issues that would threaten to bring the usually vibrant user activity in the

community to a grinding halt:

Where is every one?

I was wondering the same thing.’ I hope old threads will be transferred
over here!

So I assume all that talk about Mastersball. com surviving because of
the dedicated fan base was just talk. eh? Sad, sad day.

Up until about 4 or 5 days ago Mastersball.com and then the

F antasyBaseba/l. com message board rocked. I had been a member for
about 4 years but whatever they did certainly sucks eggs big time. I've
got Netscape at home and couldn't get to this page. Tried calling using
the help number for Infinity something but had to leave a message but
they never called back. That was 4 days ago. Makes one wonder
whether or not to pony up for the Platinum given the kick in the teeth
they 've given to those of us who've been coming here for a number of
years. Hopefully there was just a SNAFU and things will get back to
normal but something tells me this is the NEW board.

Hey Jason/Todd what's going on? (“Where 'd everyone go? '7

Over the next few months, the same issues kept popping up and the frustrations
from the Platinum subscribers were mounting daily. The free forums had always been
extremely vibrant, and many of the paying customers finally decided to go back to
posting there, giving up on the Platinum boards all together. The two veterans that I had
latched onto when I started frequenting the boards at the old Mastersball.com site had
both settled in on the free boards, so naturally I tagged along. The interesting thing was
that the discussion there was as solid as ever. The only instances of a disconnect in
community interaction occurred when one of the members started griping about the
crossover and the ensuing argument grew personal. Typically, one faction would form

backing the member who felt slighted, taking the opportunity of someone else’s initiative

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to air their grievances. Another faction would rally around the staff, defending the site
and suggesting that the gripers either cut it out, or take their money and leave. That was
the really interesting part of the whole process: there was always a standing money-back
guarantee, but no one took it.

As one of the newer Platinum members, I definitely sympathized with those who
felt that what they received with that membership was very different from what was
expected. When I made the decision to buy the Platinum subscription, a large part of that
decision was based on the assumption that the discussion in the Platinum-only boards
would be incredible. My previous experience in the free boards was outstanding, and I
was sure that discussion limited to only the most committed fantasy players would blow
my mind. In reality, the Platinum subscription is really not about the message boards.
While you do get the benefit of having one or two more active staff members trolling the
boards, the discussion is fairly comparable to the free boards. The strength of the
Platinum subscription was in the tools and articles available. The first time I downloaded
their player projections, dollar values, and draft charts into an Excel spreadsheet, I
figured I came out ahead in the deal by a long shot. But there were others who could not
get over the letdown of the Platinum forums. One particular member has complained
regularly since the beginning of the transition over a year ago, and even now when
everything is functioning smoothly, he finds something to gripe about. And yet, despite
numerous offers to refund his money, he keeps hanging around.

A year after the transition, the General Forum in the Platinum boards had six
pages with twenty posts per page just in the first week of the season. Each post had an

average of roughly four or five responses. And that volume was much higher prior to

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Opening Day when the boards were still being flooded with draft and auction questions.
The activity slows down a bit as the season gets going and players settle into their teams,
and then as the All-Star break approaches, the traffic will pick right back up as midseason
trade discussions heat up. The number of registered forum members has dropped slightly
from 5614 members when the Mastersball.com forums were closed, up to the 4990
registered members today on the FantasyBaseball.com forums; but the community
dynamic is relatively the same as it was prior to the merger. Any given day, the same five
or six veterans drop in and guide discussion, and the newer members are still excited to
get their feedback. Even new site owner Craig Davis pops into the discussions every now
and then. In one particularly delicate episode, Davis’ interaction proved to be extremely
wise, and provided a reassuring stability to the community in the face of dangerous
allegations from one of the community’s most respected veterans.

One of the veteran guys that I had initially followed around when I first joined
Mastersball.com years before the merger dropped a rhetorical bomb on the site one
morning this past offseason. In his post he charged F antasyBaseball.com with sending an
advertising cookie to those with Platinum memberships. He argued that as a long-time IT
veteran, he regularly scanned his PC for cookies, and that the only difference from the
last time he performed the scan during the previous week when his machine was clean,
was his purchase of the Platinum package. He then proceeded to post his email
discussions with the F antasyBaseball.com IT guy and Davis. He was incredibly offended
at what appeared to be more than reasonable explanations for what had happened. At the

end of the post, he then copied in Davis’ frustrated offer to refund his money. Apparently

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he accepted and decided to post the message as a warning to the other Platinum members,
and as a last dig at Davis’ credibility.

Two other respected members of the community responded to the post, expressing
their sadness for his leaving and mixed responses about the culpability of the Web site.
Rob Leibowitz jumped in and announced that the thread was being left up on the board,
but that further posts were going to be disabled. As one of the original Mastersball.com
staff, Leibowitz expressed that both he and Todd Zola were concerned about the incident,
and that they were planning to talk it over with Davis. One of the conditions of the
merger had been the Mastersball.com staff’s loyal commitment to customer satisfaction,
so it looked like this issue could be a cause for dissension between the two parties. But
Davis was smart, and allowed himself a full twenty-four hours to cool down before
responding publicly to the allegations. And when he did respond, he responded to every
charge methodically, line by line with clarity and force. After recapping the events from
his perspective, he added the following comment about the customer’s right in a manner
that clearly demonstrated why he has been able to consistently deliver a quality product

while maintaining a loyal staff:

The customer is always right, but verbal attacks on my stafl don 't fly
with me. LE TME BE CLEAR ON THIS... ANYONE WHO COMES
AFTER ONE OF MYSTAFF MEMBERS AND VERBALLYA TI'A CKS
THEM (especially after they spend time trying to honestly help
someone out) WILL NOT BE TOLERA TED, NO MATTER WHO THEY
ARE. Say what you want about me because I know my history and
reputation in this industry and one accusation isn't going to make me
crawl into a corner and lament with pity. However, and call me old
fashioned, but I take care of my own. I 'm protective of my stafl and
whether it's George or Todd or Rob or Perry or Ryan or Kermit the

F rog, NO ONE will be permitted to say this type of stuff about my
employees and get away with it, period. (“Did you get more”)

Davis closed his post by explaining why the cookie was still an issue, and by apologizing

to the member who left the site. His final words were that customer service and integrity

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were extremely important to him, and that he was personally available to anyone who
still felt uncomfortable. The crisis was resolved, and any questions about the new
ownership’s dedication to the community were laid to rest. But as will be demonstrated in
my next case study, the decisions made by management for the good of the community

are not always as readily justifiable.

Trash Talk or Personal Attack: Drawing the Line in Fantasy Football

Trash talk has always played a major role in American sports culture, and with
Web-based fantasy football, that practice has turned into an art form. In typical public
league play, the message board on the league’s homepage gets a fresh coat of trash fairly
regularly. In private leagues among friends it happens daily, as the better you know your
opponent, the better you know how to publicly humiliate them. Now, not all trash talk is
about open humiliation. In fact, some of the best work involves subtle inside jabs to the
body, causing damage that only the giver and the receiver can truly appreciate. One of the
biggest criticisms in gender based critiques of fantasy sports community interaction
focuses on this ability of men to callously berate each other in public settings. And yet,
there are limits to the types of attacks that are recognized as socially acceptable. Personal
attacks about intelligence and family members for example are generally off limits. But
there is always one jerk who was seemingly raised without any sense of tact or social
competency whatsoever, and when that guy get going, the other players in the league
have to have the ability to shut them out, otherwise the season is lost to senseless alpha
male posturing. Now imagine a league that involves staffs of multiple players per team
that is rooted in an incredibly intimate forum community. The complications of dealing

with that kind of tactless aggression within that context are immense.

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SportsGrumblings.com has a very loyal customer base that has formed one of the
most uniquely intimate forum communities that I have ever witnessed. The majority of
the individuals in the community have been playing fantasy football together for years,
and in many cases these relationships track back across multiple Web sites. When the
Fantasy Asylum shut down at the end of the 2004 football season, many in the
community migrated together from site to site until they finally settled at what was
formerly GridironGrumblings.com. In that process they created a virtual currency called
Nutbucks, and an economy that fed into the development of the community they dubbed
Nut Nation. They also developed a new style of fantasy football which emphasized team
effort through the hiring of multiple staff members to fill specific positions with salaries
appropriate to their rank. The members of this micro-society are literally and figuratively
invested in success of the community. And over the years strong bonds have been
formed, resulting in friendships that extend beyond the forums and the rosters. There is
the joy of fellowship when children are born, and there is the shared sorrow when tragedy
strikes. As such, the unity of the community is closely guarded by its own. And when the
actions of one individual fostered the perception of a threat to that unity, even if only by a
small minority, swift and absolute action was taken to root out the threat.

There are now three HAFA-style (Hire and Fire Association) leagues at
SportsGrumblings.com, HAF A, HOPE, and HEAT, (now referred to as the Tri-Leagues)
which are all acronyms that in various ways represent multiple-player staffs, and the
ability to hire and fire anyone at anytime. The owners of the teams have to have a
significant amount of collateral in the form of the aforementioned Nutbucks, with which

they are required to pay their staffs, cover their players salaries up to the $30 million cap,

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and other various expenses associated with ownership. As such, the team owners are
typically site members that have been around for a while. For perspective, a typical salary
for a general manager’s position in these leagues is somewhere between three and eight
million. So it takes awhile to get enough capital together to own a team. The site decided
to expand to three leagues with the hopes of pulling in some new faces and expanding the
community, but what ended up happening instead was a lot of crossover. In 2006 I was
simultaneously a GM in HEAT and an Offensive Coordinator in both HOPE and HAF A,
which was a very common occurrence throughout the leagues. That kind of involvement
demands the ability to communicate effectively with many different personalities, and to
work comfortably within multiple competitive philosophies. Needless to say, this is not
an ideal fit for someone with brash tendencies, and no self-imposed social filter.

At the beginning of last season, working as the GM for a team in HEAT, I hired a
guy to be my Head Coach who had just been fired for personality conflicts with other
members on his team. After listening to his side of the story, I read him as being a bit
impulsive and very opinionated, but also very knowledgeable and committed to the game.
So I rolled the dice and told him that I would handle all of the trade negotiations, while
letting him run the team fairly autonomously. And for the most part it seemed to be
working out splendidly. I spent half of the time running the team than the previous year,
and I felt good about his decisions. About midway through the season he started stirring
up trouble on the message boards and in the other leagues, and I found myself having to
reign him in and apologize to other members of the community for his behavior. The

problem was that he was great with me and the rest of our staff, and he was clearly an

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enormous asset for the team. So I brushed it aside and tried to maintain damage control
for the remainder of the season.

In the offseason I typically check out entirely, so I had not noticed that our guy
was stirring up quite a mess over perceived rule violations. He was accusing other
members of the community of conspiring to subvert the rules, so he began working with
the commissioner to hammer out the rules in a manner that he deemed clear and concise.
However, due to my absence from the site, apparently I was only privy to select
information that he would occasionally send to me via email. Towards the end of January
I was surprised to learn that my head coach had been banned from all activities related to
league play at SportsGrumblings.com. There was no warning and no open consultation
with the community. The owner of the site had decided that his public and private
behavior towards members of the community had gone well beyond what was acceptable
and appropriate for the SportsGrumblings.com community. The banned individual came
to me immediately in an effort to show how he had been ganged up on by a very small
group of individuals who had the ear of the Web site owner. I made a few inquiries, and
what I found, was that the problem was much larger than the banning of one individual.
After talking to many members of the community, I wrote the following open letter to the
community in an attempt to address some issues that were beginning to seriously effect
the quality of the community experience at SportsGrumblings.com, specifically as they
related to the Tri-Leagues:

COMMUNITIES WITHIN THE COMMUNITY:
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

Over the last year this community began to dissolve. Just as the Sports Grumblings site
began to get some real muscle behind it technologically and in terms of content, the very
community it is designed to serve started to tear each other apart. And I 'm not only

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speaking of disagreements between members on message boards and in emails. I 'm not
talking solely about unprecedented banning. The community and by extension the leagues
fell apart for a number of reasons. I believe the most powerful of those reasons can be
summed up thusly:

1. "Old Boys" exclusivity, cliquishness, and in-breeding.

2. Heavy-handed, dictatorial league management devoid of true democratic
representation in decision making.

3. The lack of a way to develop new participants to replace the necessary, regular
turnover that happens in fantasy leagues as a result of REAL LIFE.

In community, we must of course develop friendships, some closer than others. We must
eventually develop a group of "elders ". But when the representative voice of those groups
take on too much power, the risk of the alienation of some and the creation of "insiders"
threaten to destroy the fabric of that community.

All fantasy leagues must have a commissioner. All commissioners will at times deal with
issues of disrespect, ungratefulness, and scape-goating. But the role of the
commissioner(s) is to serve the majority in a democratic institution. When measures are
taken that destroy the faith in the process of democracy in a league, dissent is sure to
rear its head, and if those measures are not swiftly and properly addressed, that dissent
gains momentum based on hearsay, half-truths, and assumption.

In all fantasy leagues, attrition is a natural occurrence. We grow up, we grow old, we
reevaluate our priorities from time to time. In a league like the T ri-Leagues, when that
attrition is accompanied by a lack of faith in the process, when it is accompanied by a
sense of exclusivity, it is terribly hard to keep up with. Sports Grumblings, once again
unique and ahead of its time, has failed to see the strength of a system that they already
have in place to combat this issue. The strength is the community, and from the
community the community must grow. Sports Grumblings has a natural ”feeder" source
from which, if done properly, it can draw on fi'esh faces and friends to breathe new life
into the T ri-Leagues. The T ufl Leagues are excellent and incredibly enjoyable. They are a
proving ground. We ought to use those resources to bring new life to the T ri-Leagues. 3
or 4 years ago I was playing in a league that I thought was tough, and full of excellent
players. I thought I had reached the pinnacle of competitive play. Then I found out that
Sage and Snurpz were watching me... waiting to introduce me to HAFA... to the
Grumblers. This is the cream of the crop friends. There is no better league setup that I
have seen, and now others are even trying to copy it. This is the major leagues. I earned
my job in the proving grounds at Diehards... the T ufl leagues could and should be utilized
in the same manner.

In closing I will say just a bit more, and I will be blunt.

The leagues are falling apart because the system needs a tune up. The community is sick,
and infighting is no way to heal it.

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The recent banning of one member may very well have been justified, and it is absolutely
within the rights and jurisdiction of site ownership to make a decision like that. But the
manner in which it happened could have been handled better, and furthermore, whether
you supported the decision or not, it was symptomatic and representative of getting away
from the strength of this site:

COMMUNITY. (“TRI-LEAGUE MANIFESTO”)

The publishing of that letter prompted thirty-nine responses that dealt with
concerns over notions of exclusivity and power suggested by the existence of an “old-
boys club”, questions about how to properly get new community members plugged into
the Tri-Leagues, questions about Web site owner John Georgopoulos’ apparent lack of
forum involvement, and most importantly, how the upgrade of the Web site had taken
away many of the things that contributed to the vitality of Nut Nation. Prior to the
upgrade, there were forums specifically designated for Nut Nation activity, such as the
Nut Nation Bank (where Nut Bucks could be deposited to earn interest), Seizure’s Palace
(for those who like to gamble), and Texas Hold ‘Em (where community members played
poker together). After the upgrade, some of those features were removed, and those that
remained were hard to find. Clearly the community was starting to lose its previous levels
of intimacy, and the loss of these community gathering activities was one of the
explanations. Another cause was simply the natural turnover that eventually happens with
fantasy sports communities. As responsibilities in the real world grow, demanding more
time, individuals withdraw from the community. Sometimes it is a temporary seasonal
withdrawal, and sometimes it is permanent. With the site transition, and an unusually
high and concentrated level of membership turnover happening simultaneously, the

community had no plans to account for that.

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As the discussions went on, GeorgOpoulos let it be known that he was indeed
monitoring the discussion, but that his other responsibilities with the growing site did not
allow him the time to be personally involved. Instead he created three new positions to
oversee the issues that had risen out of the discussion. The first was a Chief Rules
Officer, whose responsibility was to ensure that the rules of the Tri-Leagues were clearly
organized and communicated. The second was a Community Ombudsman, who worked
as an intermediary between site ownership and those who wanted to communicate
problems with the site. And the final position was essentially a Forum Overseer, whose
responsibility was to monitor forum discussion and keep it civil. There is still some
disagreement among community members over the manner in which the divisive
individual was banned, but it was understood that like it or not, it was well within
ownership’s right to do what was best for the peace of the community. And the results
have borne that out, as the tension that hung over the community has all but disappeared.
As the NFL draft approaches in mid-April, traffic on the site is picking up again as the
owners and coaches of the Tri-Leagues prepare their rookie draft lists. There is nothing

like football season in April to bring a community together.

Conclusion

The common thread that tied the transitions of these two websites together is the
significant role that individual members within the community play in the sustenance of
the group. There are individuals who hold significant amounts of symbolic power within
the community, which is accumulated through a combination of time invested and
demonstrated knowledge about the games. These veterans have the power to unite and

the power to divide. In the first example, one of the veterans nearly divided the

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community during a very sensitive moment in its transition to new ownership. However,
stability was restored with a timely statement by the owner that demonstrated the
openness and integrity that community members were accustomed to under the previous
ownership. Furthermore, his recognition of the rights of the customer and his apology to
the offending member within the address both worked to symbolically empower the
members of the community.

In the second example, the unity of the community was maintained as well,
though in an entirely different manner. Georgopoulos removed the offender with a show
of autocratic power, but then stepped back into the background to let the veterans of the
community exercise their own symbolic power to restore order. Then in an effort to
publicly decentralize some of his authority, Georgopoulos created three positions of
power that were filled by veterans of the community who had already demonstrated that
they could wield that power with respect and effectiveness. In both scenarios it is clear
that the true strength of a fantasy sports community lies in the ability of established
members of that community to secure and exercise a level of symbolic power that is
recognized by both the community and the owners of the institution. In the chapter that
follows, I will show how the ownership and use of language and the instruments of
symbolic production play a significant role in the acquisition and exercising of symbolic

power.

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CHAPTER 3

Stealing Signs: The Battle for Linguistic Capital in Baseball

Baseball statistics acquire the powers of language, which is what
makes them so uniquely fascinating... A .296 average doesn ’t stand for
296 of anything; it doesn 't make one think of 296 apples or 296
oranges. Three hundred means excellence; .296 means just short of the
standard of excellence. (James ”Stats " 102)

Fantasy baseball is a game in which success is defined by the ability to project
player performance and the relative value of that performance within the context of a
competitive market, whether that market be defined as a player draft, an auction or the
mid-season waiver-wire bidding process for free agents. In this way, fantasy baseball
directly mirrors Maj or League Baseball, as the participants that play the fantasy game
attempt to think like the general managers that oversee the construction of major-league
rosters. As such, fantasy baseball participants are playing a game that is comprised of
activities that are closer to the accounting and human resource management of the front
office than they are to the games that take place on the baseball diamond. Their success
relies not on their ability to hit a curveball, but rather on their ability to efficiently
evaluate and allocate resources. However, unlike their major-league role models, they
have one significant limitation that is inherent in their valuation process: they have no
direct access to the players that they are evaluating.

As he was conducting research for his book Fantasyland (2006), Sam Walker did
actually have access to the Clubhouses and spring training facilities of major-league
baseball teams. Some fantasy sports analysts, like ESPN.com’s Jason Grey, who have
worked or are currently working for major-league teams in some capacity in addition to

their roles as analysts also enjoy a great degree of direct access to the players. But the

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overwhelming majority of fantasy baseball participants are just fans with Internet access,
who may only go out to the park for a few games during the season. As such, the fantasy
baseball player has only the statistics recorded in the box scores to gauge a player’s
value, augmented by the oversaturated and often contradictory analyses of what those
statistics mean by fantasy baseball “experts” writing for hundreds of different sources
primarily found on the Internet. There are some analysts, like the aforementioned Grey,
who have the resources and the time to scout the players in person. But the majority of
the fantasy baseball writers on the Internet are part-timers, working for small stipends and
“schwag” (autographed player jerseys for example), making their judgments solely from
the numbers, just like the average fantasy sports participant. But can one assign a
legitimate value to baseball players and their production without actually seeing them
swing a bat or throw a pitch? And exactly how does one determine whether the authority
granted to any of these “experts” and their statistical interpretations is legitimate? The
central question that concerns fantasy baseball players—as well as Major League
Baseball scouts, coaches, executives, and writers—in their pursuit of success is this: How
does one, as the professional baseball scouts are asked to do, put a “dollar sign on the
muscle” (Kerrane 29)? That question has been a matter of dispute throughout the history
of professional baseball, as it is currently in fantasy baseball.

In this chapter, I suggest that the sanctioned meanings of baseball statistics have
historically been inculcated by Major League Baseball through strategic commercial
alliances with the media and the Elias Sports Bureau (official statisticians for Major
League baseball since 1919), the standardization of the box score, “officially sanctioned”

historical publications, and the statistical standards used as qualifiers for admission to the

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Baseball Hall of Fame. As a result, society developed the notion that the absolute
understanding of the game lies in the language of statistics, signified exclusively by
“baseball men”, the authorities delegated by the institution of Major League Baseball.
With the publication of the Bill James 1 97 7 Baseball Abstract, the meanings of those
signs were challenged from the outside with moderate success for the first time, and a
scholarly community of fans known as “sabermetricians” began to take shape, offering
new ways of signifying the performance of the baseball player through statistics.

The rise of that community started what would become a long, hard struggle for
linguistic and symbolic capital taking place within multiple “authoritative” annuals, in the
broadcast booths, in the print media, and finally culminating within the fantasy baseball
community on the Internet. While arguments over the value and meaning of ballplayers
and their statistical output are not new to the game, no “baseball outsider” has been able
to infiltrate and make changes at the very core of baseball culture (the front office) with
the success of Bill James, this generation’s most respected and influential baseball
scholar. “Sabermetrics” (coined by James in honor of the Society for American Baseball
Research or SABR) is defined as "the search for new knowledge about baseball; the
systematic study of baseball questions." (Gray ix) The sabermetric revolution in baseball
has succeeded because, as with so many other cultural revolutions, the revolutionaries
were able to inspire and empower change by identifying and drawing upon the power of
“fiction and drama and poetry” (Lewis 67) latent in the language of statistics.

If, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the possibility for resistance and change exists
only from within the context of the dominant institution and its official language, then

one must first learn that language (by entering into, perpetuating, and acknowledging the

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system) to change it (Bourdieu 64). And while the official language of the game as it is
presented in the box scores still dominates baseball culture, at no time in baseball’s
history have the fans been as knowledgeable and connected to the game as they are today,
which can be credited to the simultaneous risings of Bill James, saberrnetrics, fantasy
baseball, and the Internet. To get a clear understanding of where that language comes
from, and why it continues to prosper among the majority of baseball fans, we need study
its development in conjunction with the development of the power structures that shape

and control the institution of Major League Baseball.

The Development of the Official Language of Baseball

When the first baseball associations were being formed in the middle of the 19th
century, the game was largely controlled by the men who played the game. The first
officially recognized professional league, the National Association of Players, allowed
anyone who paid the $10 entry fee and agreed to play by league rules the opportunity to
play. In 1876, the stronger teams in the league, frustrated by the inefficient management
of some of the other teams in the league, left the Association and formed the National
League of Professional Baseball Clubs. With the new league’s emphasis on the
professionalism of its ballplayers, the power was transferred to the owners of the teams
which were now treated as business entities, and a formal league structure and
bureaucracy was formed under the direction of the league’s first president, William
Hulbert (James “New Historical” 11). With the commercialization of the game, the
practice of offering players competitive salaries led to the need for placing greater
importance on a player’s individual contribution to the success of the organization. Even

as early as 1861, Henry Chadwick wrote that in order to “obtain an accurate estimate of a

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player’s skill. .. it is requisite that all... contests should be recorded in a uniform manner”
(as qtd. in Schwarz 6). The game has since been understood by the quantification of the
events that take place within the historical context of the games themselves, recorded as
statistics that in turn act as signs, or symbols, that in various ways signify a player’s
value. The designation and analysis of those signs has been a struggle for symbolic and
linguistic capital in Major League Baseball since the inception of the box score in 1854.
An understanding of how statistics work semiotically as signs, then, is necessary if we are
to understand the power structures that have historically shaped and controlled the
language and economics of player valuation, both in the major-leagues and in the fantasy

sports industry.

The Semiotics of Baseball

No study of the role of signs in language can avoid referencing in some way the
linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his sign-signifier relationship. However, the
dyadic Saussurian form of the analysis of signs is insufficient for the purposes of
understanding the symbolic meaning in baseball statistics for a number of reasons, all of
which stem from the fact that it works from an entirely internal perspective. In Language
& Symbolic Power (1991), Bourdieu denounces Saussure’s semiotics on the grounds that
“they ignore the social-historical conditions of the production and reception of texts”
(Bourdieu 4). Saussure’s sign-signifier relationship fails to explain the relationship
between baseball statistics and the actions that they represent, because it cannot account
for the possibility of multiple interpretations of their meaning within a social-historical
context. More importantly, Saussure’s model fails to take into account the levels of

authority that must be socially recognized if the interpretation of a sign is to be accepted

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as legitimate and accurate. A proper understanding of the semiotics of baseball statistics,
then, must in some way recognize what Bourdieu referred to as the “structures of the
linguistic market, which impose themselves as a system of specific sanctions and
censorships” (Bourdieu 37). In order to do that, we must embrace a semiotic with the
ability to grow beyond the limitations of “a strictly linguistic competence, abstractly
defined, ignoring everything that it owes to the social conditions of its production”
(Bourdieu 38).

Charles S. Peirce, an American logician and philosopher during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also refuted Saussure’s notion of an internally
defined sign-signifier relation, asserting that “thought is not immediate perception or
undeniable experience of ideas within a self. Thought is in signs that attain meaning
through the triadic relation: Object — Sign — Interpretant.” (Peirce 8) The key distinction
between the Saussurian and Peircean conception of semiotics, is that for Peirce, a sign is
something that stands to somebody for something else within a particular context. Peirce
states that “the interpreter of the sign (i.e., the mind to which a sign stands for an object)
is transformed into the interpretant of the sign (i.e. the “proper significate effect” or
outcome of the sign (Peirce qtd. in Colapietro 6). The emphasis placed on the interpreter
is the essence of Peirce’s semiotic, and it is that distinction that makes it particularly
suited to the study of meaning in baseball statistics. One other important characteristic of
Peirce’s semiotic is his assertion that the task before both linguistics and semiotics is
“ascertaining the laws by which... one sign [symbol, language element] gives birth to
another.” For Peirce, the process of semiotics is open ended, and “symbols grow” as they

come into relation with new interpretants (Peirce 9). Using this framework, we can begin

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to understand the processes by which baseball players are assigned value, as their
statistics and physical attributes become signs and symbols that have the capacity to
change and grow as different interpretants are introduced within different contexts.

Statistics initially refer to the ballplayer’s production directly on the field, for
example, when a pitcher is recognized as winning a game with a “W” in the box score.
That statistic also works as a symbol, as the win-loss record has long been recognized by
the delegated authorities in Major League Baseball as a way to measure the skill of a
pitcher. One of the things Bill James hoped to show with his work was the fallibility of
that interpretation, by showing how other statistics such as strikeout-to-walk ratio and
homeruns-per-nine-innings, serve as a better measurement of a pitcher’s skill by
removing incidental factors like defense and run-support that are beyond the pitcher’s
control. The win, as a symbol, then grew as those factors were included in its meaning.
By studying the socio-historical contexts within which that symbol was originally
generated, and the processes that were involved in legitimizing its interpretation, we can
begin to understand why that incomplete interpretation was recognized as accurate for so
long. John B. Thompson opens his editor’s introduction to Language and Symbolic
Power, acknowledging that “we are aware that individuals speak with differing degrees
of authority, that words are loaded with unequal weights, depending on who utters them
and how they are said, such that some words uttered in certain circumstances have a force
and a conviction that they would not have elsewhere” (Bourdieu 1).

Processes like the legitimization of the box score format, the systematic
codification of a player’s physical tools by professional baseball scouts, and the

determination of whether batting average or on-base percentage offers a more accurate

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representation of a hitter’s skills, are processes that can give the interpreted meaning of
statistical signs the symbolic power of an official language. Bourdieu described the

development and acceptance of the official language of a nation-state in this way:

The subsequent normalization and inculcation of the official language,
and its legitimation as the official language... was a gradual process
that depended on a variety of other factors, such as the development of
the educational system and the formation of a unified labour market.
The production of grammar books, dictionaries and a corpus of texts
exemplifying correct usage is only the most obvious manifestation of

this gradual process of normalization. (Bourdieu 6)

What are the processes by which one’s interpretation of a statistic or a player’s value is
recognized as legitimate, authoritative, and “official” in Major League Baseball? By what
qualifications do we judge whether or not an individual is an authority figure in baseball?
Perhaps the answers to these questions will present themselves if we stay true to the
methods of Peirce and Bourdieu, by studying the socio-historical context within which
those processes take place.

When the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs was formed in 1876
with the aim of unifying the labor market and enforcing league rules, the struggle to
define the language of baseball had already been going on for at least twenty years.
Henry Chadwick was constantly working on new methods to quantify a player’s
contribution to his team. While the box score initially served as a means to recap the
outcome and events of the games, Chadwick felt that their meaning could be much more,
provided that they were used correctly. At its inception, the National League officially

incorporated a statistic called fielding percentage by which they intended to measure a

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player’s ability in the field. However, Chadwick found that statistic insufficient because it
was based on errors, a measure of how often a player failed in the field, which he argued
was much less important than measuring how often a player succeeded. Chadwick’s
argument fell on deaf ears, and it was about hundred years later before contemporary
baseball scholar Bill James once again challenged the value of errors as a means for
judging a player’s fielding ability. It simply takes watching a game in person, and
witnessing all of the other factors that effect whether or not a player can make a play on
the ball, to see that often a player has no chance of being in a position to make the play in
the first place. As such, raw statistics often need to be reevaluated and contextualized,
particularly when judging fielding ability, in the effort to properly gauge the abilities of a
ballplayer, and by extension, his value. Furthermore, there is a significant segment of
individuals within the institution of Major League Baseball that have developed their own
system of symbols—distinct from the statistical record—for the purpose of evaluating a

the value of ballplayers: the baseball scouts.

Dollar Sign on the Muscle

The wisdom of scouts is not science but lore: literally, what has been
learned from experience. Their charts categorizing tools, makeup, and
performance look objective enough, but the men who fill them in are
the first to admit that they traffic in opinion—personal and hard—won
opinion—rather than demonstrable fact. (Kerrane 289)

When professional baseball really started taking shape at the end of the 18705,
there was no minor-league development system in place. In Dollar Sign on the Muscle,
Kevin Kerrane’s chronicle of the history of baseball scouting, he stated that “the normal
path to the majors was (I) to be discovered and signed by an independent minor-league

team, usually local, and (2) to be sold up the ladder after being seen by a major-league

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representative. The problem was that there were so few of these representatives, and until
about 1909 none of them was a full-time scout” (Kerrane 5). However, by 1910, Branch
Rickey, a former professional catcher and the coach of the University of Michigan’s
baseball team, was sending scouting reports of his players to the St. Louis Browns. Based
on Rickey’s philosophy of acquiring quality through quantity, the St. Louis Cardinals
organization went on to develop the biggest minor-league farm system in the history of
the major-leagues, controlling as many as thirty-two teams and 650 players in 1939
(Kerrane 9). With the development of these farm systems, minor-league teams began to
be viewed as nothing more than feeder teams for the parent club in the majors. Owners
no longer had to compete with their rivals in an open market for players that they
previously would have had only limited access to. Why pay for production when you can
grow your own? Teams began to employ greater numbers of scouts, who would travel the
country and observe players in multiple contexts for longer periods of time. The scouts
also worked with the minor-league coaches to develop the players according to what was
deemed most valuable to the parent club. As the number of scouts and coaches within
organizations increased, it became necessary to develop a unified language, or coding
system that could be used to most effectively identify and project the value of the
ballplayers.

Statistics were of course already being used to measure the skills of ballplayers,
however, the scouts often felt that while statistics could be useful, they were secondary to
their own powers of observation. Kerrane describes the elitist notion of the exaggerated

powers of observation among contemporary scouts like this:

The dollar sign on the muscle was a code, a fictional vocabulary... It

invited a scout to rate each ballplayer—beyond the number grades

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assigned to his tools, projected skills, and makeup—by naming a final
dollar figure... Fluent use of this code required familiarity with other
vocabularies of talent. .. But most of all it required the first skill of a
baseball man: knowing how to recognize a ballplayer when you see

one. (Kerrane 29)

The clear point of emphasis in that passage, is that the baseball man, or the authorized
insider, is alone capable of interpreting the signs that designate a player’s value. And
moreover, while any sports writer could rattle off statistics, only a true baseball man had
the ability to divine the meaning of the object prior to the generation of the sign. In his
discussion concerning the sources and effects of symbolic power, Bourdieu argues that
the field of symbolic production in which symbolic systems are produced by a body of
specialists—such as the code and other vocabularies of talent used by scouts—is an
autonomous field of symbolic production that produces a division of labor which
dispossesses those outside of the institution of Major League Baseball from the
instruments of symbolic production (Bourdieu 168-9). The scouts are then referred to as
“baseball men”, and their position of authority within the institution is recognized as
legitimate by this act of symbolic power.

But the value that the scout designates is a projected value, and as such, the
grammar that he uses to describe the speed, power, and even the “face” of the prospect
with terms like “tools” and “makeup”, is different from the grammar used to describe the
abilities of established ballplayers. The statistical record of the veteran player has more
meaning, because that record serves as a history—a narration in numbers—that verifies
the legitimacy of the scout’s projections within a proven context among peers. The

statistics are, in fact, symbols that have grown, in a sense, from the symbols that were

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originally signified by the scouts. If, for example, a scout rated a player’s speed as a 75
on a 60-80 scale, his valuation would prove to be legitimate if that player ended up
averaging forty stolen bases over a number of years in the major-leagues. But have scouts
been correct in their valuations consistently enough to warrant the authority and

recognition that they have received as “baseball men”?

Undermining Linguistic Capital in the Institution

Bourdieu has asserted that institutions “are not necessarily a particular
organization... but any relatively durable set of social relations which endow individuals
with power, status and resources of various kinds” (Bourdieu 8). Although society plays a
significant role by acknowledging that authority, the power they have in that act of
acknowledgement is often forgotten or unrecognized. Eventually their power is replaced
with acceptance, which finally leads to what Bourdieu refers to as habitus; that is a doxic,
internal predisposition or conviction that this power relation, or control over the linguistic
and symbolic capital that defines meaning, is just the way things are, with no conscious
recognition that there could possibly be any alternative. Armed with the officially
sanctioned language of Major League Baseball, scouts and former players of the game
wield a tremendous amount of linguistic and symbolic capital. For much of baseball’s
history, the game’s meaning has been defined through box scores, baseball cards and the
words of the player’s whose achievements fill them. Baseball fans have accepted those
meanings for the majority of baseball’s history, because they have been educated by the
authoritative representatives of the institution of professional baseball such as: the major
media outlets that rely on former players for their analysis of the game; Little Leagues

which are training grounds modeled after the game; the Baseball Writers Association of

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America who hold the authority to elect former players into the Hall of Fame; and the
officially sanctioned historians of the game like the Elias Sports Bureau, who act as the
true guardians of the official language of baseball. Each of these power delegating social
relations that make up the institution of Major League Baseball work together to
inculcate the authority of the “baseball man”, and by extension, their sanctioned
interpretations of player valuation.

In the last thirty years, however, the legitimacy of those interpretations has fallen
under scrutiny, as recent baseball scholars like Bill James have suggested that perhaps the
“baseball men” have missed their mark. As Vincent Colapietro remarks in his work on
Peirce’s semiotics, “a sign cutoff from its future interpretants is a sign denied the
possibility of realizing its essence; that is, the possibility of being a sign” (Colapietro 77).
And what that means is that at the moment that the interpretations of value by baseball
insiders are sanctioned as authoritative and final, the sign is stripped of its potential to be
fully realized. For example, fielding percentage is one way to judge the abilities of a
player in the field. But if we do not allow for further interpretants of that ability, we
become victims of an interpretation that is inherently limited by its subjectivism, which
according to Bourdieu “presupposes the possibility of some kind of immediate
apprehension of the lived experience by others... that is by itself a more-or-less adequate
form of knowledge about the social world” (Bourdieu 11). Is the sign hitting its mark if
the “official scorer” charges a player with an error, even though the scorer’s immediate
apprehension of the play entirely missed the fact that the player’s inability to make the
play was due to an infield shift called for by the manager? Furthermore, are we to assume

that one has the ability to properly interpret a sign just because they played the game? In

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The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (2003), James relates that “in early
1890, Cap Anson journeyed to Canton, Ohio, to see Cy Young pitch. He reported that

9”

Young was ‘just another farmer (James “New Historical” 44). Anson was merely
regarded as one of the best third baseman of his era, and Cy Young went on to win 511
games, more than any pitcher in the history of the game. According to James, “what
counts is evidence, not the authority of the person making the claim” (Gray 91).

Scenarios like this one undermine the legitimacy of the authority figures charged
with interpreting the symbols in the official language of the dominant institution. It is
this breakdown that is at the heart of struggle for linguistic capital in the writings of Bill
James and sabermetricians, who are dedicated to finding a more accurate understanding
of the game of baseball by employing open-ended statistical analysis. James himself has
said that statistics cannot tell the entire story, and that they often fail to account for the
human element in baseball. However, he also argues that they represent the best tool in
the shed, and echoing Chadwick, that they have to ability to be much more than raw
signifiers of events on the field.

In Moneyball (2004), Michael Lewis writes that “language, not numbers, is what
interested [James]. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. ‘When the
numbers acquire the significance of language,’ [James] later wrote, ‘they acquire power
to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry’”
(Lewis 67-68). James uses the language of statistics to study the world of baseball with
an objectivism, that according to Bourdieu, has the power to “elucidate the structures and

principles upon which primary experience depends but which it cannot directly grasp”

(Bourdieu 11). While Bourdieu and James hold that both subjectivism and objectivism

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are inadequate, they recognized that objectivism is, at the very least, less inadequate. In
Scott Gray’s The Mind of Bill James (2006), James offers two caveats about baseball

statistics:

First, they are ‘not pure accomplishments of men against other men,’
but ‘accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances.’
The second is that when the public’s faith in a set of metrics solidifies,
it’s tough to break... Misguided faith leads to stubborn repetition of

foolish decisions. (Gray 42-4)

While statistics appear to be the best tool for understanding the accomplishments of
ballplayers and the value associated with them, James is careful to recognize that they
cannot become symbols with closed interpretations. As Peirce stated, symbols grow. So
when faith in the static meaning of static becomes doxic, the statistic loses its ability to
accurately signify a ballplayer’s value. Furthermore, when the statistics lose the
significance of language, they lose the symbolic power inherent in language.

By adopting an open-ended model of semiotics for the study of statistical
meaning, James was able to secure linguistic capital and eventually, a degree of symbolic
power. Even though James’ methods represented a stark contrast, and even a direct
challenge to the methods of the “baseball men”, he was able to generate support for his
ideas on the “inside” because front office men who were saddled with the limitations of
playing in smaller markets recognized that by using his methods, they could improve
their ability to accurately project player performance and its relative value with fewer
resources.

Thanks to the success of Moneyball, the impact that James’ work had on Oakland

Athletics General Manager Sandy Alderson, and his successor, Billy Beane, is well

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known in baseball circles. From the time that James published his first Baseball Abstract
in 1977, he has used statistics as symbolic language to tell the story of baseball, and
where he has succeeded in fostering the growth of those symbols, he has acquired
symbolic capital that had previously been controlled solely by the “baseball men.” As
baseball fans have increasingly recognized that symbolic power, and as a new generation
of executives that were weaned on James began to break into the front offices of Major
League Baseball—Oakland’s Beane, Boston’s Theo Epstien and Toronto’s J .P.
Riccardi—the institution has been forced to accept the power shift, even as “baseball
men” like Hall of Fame second baseman and ESPN baseball analyst Joe Morgan openly
fight to resist it. But again, as James noted, despite the protests of those in authority, the

evidence is often hard to ignore:

The man who spoke for all insiders was Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame
second baseman, who was in the broadcast booth for the entire five-
game series. At some point during each game Morgan explained to the
audience the flaw in the A’s (James-influenced) thinking — not that he
had any deep understanding of what that thinking entailed. “You have
to manufacture runs in the postseason... you sit around and wait for a

three-run homer, you’re still going to be sitting there. .

But the wonderful thing about this little lecture was what happened
right under Joe Morgan’s nose, as he was giving it... A few moments
later, Eric Chavez hit a three-run homer. And Joe Morgan’s lecture on
the need to avoid playing for the three-run homer just rolled right
along, as if the play on the field had not dramatically contradicted every

word that had just come out of his mouth. (Lewis 271-2)

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As demonstrated in moments like these, the tide in the struggle for symbolic power began
to shift. Major League Baseball’s authority figures were losing their credibility, the
linguistic and symbolic capital that secured their status as authorized delegates of the
institution. A new generation of baseball fans are recognizing the legitimacy of James’
methods, just as the owners in Oakland, Boston and Toronto have done in Major League
Baseball. But no one expected those fans to be knocking on the doors of the institution

themselves.

The Fight for Linguistic Capital, Fantasy Baseball, and the Intelligent Fan

James spent years in his battle for linguistic capital just trying to get access to the
data that was locked up in the databases of the Elias Sports Bureau, the only “officially
sanctioned” statistical storehouse for Major League Baseball. Resigned to his status as a
baseball outsider, James was forced to rely on the box scores for his analyses. As a result
his calculations were occasionally off by a small margin. His frustrations over his
ongoing fight with Elias led to the creation of Project Scoresheet, which was officially
launched in his 1984 Baseball Abstract. The idea was to recruit an army of volunteers
that would go to every baseball game throughout the season so as to record all of the
statistical information that Elias was wrongfully withholding from the baseball public.

A year later, Dick Cramer, who was himself an early saberrnatrician, contacted
James looking for investors in a company that he had recently acquired called STATS
Inc., a computerized stat service that a few teams were using. J arnes became a five
percent minority investor, and his Project Scoresheet project director John Dewan and his
wife Sue invested $30,000 for a thirty percent stake in the company. In time, STATS Inc.

became one of the biggest statistical providers in sports, holding contracts with USA

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Today, Sports Illustrated and ESPN, who chose STATS over the Elias Sports Bureau
when they began broadcasting Major League Baseball games in 1990 (Schwarz 180). At
long last, fans had access to the statistics that Elias had hoarded for so long. In The
Numbers Game (2004), Alan Schwarz emphasized the importance of this development as
follows: “And in a conscious effort to not be the Elias Sports Bureau and to make its
statistics openly available, STATS allowed any fan with a computer and telephone to
access updated player stats through an early online service for 25 cents a minute. At last,
an intravenous stat drip” (Schwarz 177). And with that, James had indirectly played a
part in providing the outsiders with unlimited access to the language of the game.
Moreover, when the work of James and his fellow sabermetricians began to be applied to
the process of player valuation by Rotisserie baseball participants, Major League
Baseball was placed in the paradoxical position of trying to defend the sanctity of the
institution while catering to a new generation of fans who are invested in the game more
than ever before. The battle for linguistic capital was, however, far from over.

In 1995 STAS worked out a deal with Motorola to supply up-to-the-minute
statistical updates for NBA games that would be transmitted to a pager-like devise called
SportsTrax. Subscribers paid $200 annually for instant access to everything from
statistics, scores, and time remaining (Schwarz 183). Now fans not only had direct access
to the statistics, but they had it instantly wherever they were during the day. On the one
hand, women across the country must have been thrilled that they could get the men away
from their TVs. On the other hand, how many weddings were now being interrupted by
sudden displays of excited emotion? NBA officials were not impressed, and they acted

quickly.

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In February 1996, John Dewan received a letter from NBA attorneys demanding
that STATS Inc. cease providing that information immediately, on the grounds that they
were violating copyright laws, unlawfully appropriating commercial property that
belonged to NBA Properties, and that they were in violation of the US. Trademark Act
(Schwarz 183). Not surprisingly, Seymour Siwoff, the head of the Elias Sports Bureau
(the Guardians of Sacred Statistics) had a hand in this as well. Siwoff sent a letter to NBA
Properties’ vice president of business affairs, William Nix, suggesting that STATS was in
violation of the “with expressed written consent” disclaimer used by every professional
sport. Dewan, however, was not about to give up on his life’s work, and so he prepared
for battle in court.

The NBA filed suit against STATS Inc. on March 5, 1996, and on July 19, the
judge presiding over the case issued an injunction against STATS and Motorola on the
grounds that STATS had taken the NBA’s property unlawfully. The lawyer for STATS
immediately filed an appeal to the Second Circuit, and that appeal was heard on October
21. STATS was not without support from some very powerful allies in the media, such as
America Online, the New York Times, and the Associated Press. But the NBA also had
the support of all of the other major professional leagues. This was the biggest battle for
the control of linguistic capital since the inception of the box score. On January 30, 1997,
the Second Circuit ruled in favor of STATS Inc., stating that they were only restating
facts that were a matter of public domain (Schwarz 188-91). The institutions of
professional sports could no longer legally claim proprietary ownership of the

instruments of linguistic and symbolic capital. That decision would prove to be

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monumental, and would set a precedent that would impact the fantasy sports industry ten
years later.

CBC Distributing and Marketing had licensed player stats and data from Major
League Baseball for close to a decade when, just prior to the 2006 season, MLB and the
Player’s Association decided to consolidate the number of fantasy leagues available to
the public by signing exclusive agreements with larger providers like ESPN and
CBSSportsline. CBC decided to continue to offer its services without a license from
MLB, citing the First Amendment and their right to use material that existed in the public
domain. Following the NBA’s example ten years earlier, MLB filed suit against CBC,
hoping that CBC’s appropriation of the statistics for fantasy sports leagues would amount
to more than just reporting public fact. In August 2006, a US. District Court ruled in
favor of CBC, stating that the First Amendment trumped MLB’s right of publicity. MLB
was unsuccessful in its appeal with the Circuit Court of Appeals, which on October 16,
2007, upheld the original decision of the District Court. In his article covering the case,
Eric Bangeman cited this response from the judge presiding: "First, the information used
in CBC's fantasy baseball games is all readily available in the public domain, and it
would be strange law that a person would not have a First Amendment right to use
information that is available to everyone" (Bangeman l). Twenty-three years after Bill
James began the fight for public access to statistics, the instruments for the production of
linguistic and symbolic capital now rest securely in the hands of the fans of the games,
and one fantasy baseball player was about to show the world of baseball just how

powerfully those instruments could be used.

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In F antasyland, Walker summarizes the connection between James and the
fantasy baseball community as follows: “The two entities fed off each other. Frothing
Jameseans took to Rotisserie as a way to let off steam, while Rotisserie leaguers started
reading James as a way to get an edge” (Walker 70). What fantasy baseball players
sought in the work of the sabermetricians—the good players anyway—was the ability to
make educated decisions about a baseball player’s value, by applying methods that dug
deeper than the traditional box score. One such fantasy baseball player learned to
recognize buying opportunities with pitchers whose market value might have been
deflated by a high earned-run ratio that was actually a result of bad defense rather than
the deterioration of skills.

College dropout Vdros McCracken was weaned on Bill James as a teenager, and
when he joined his first Rotisserie league in 1999, he decided to pull out his old Abstracts
with the hopes of using James’ methods to evaluate players more accurately. In an effort
to find a way to quantify the effects of fielding on a pitcher’s performance, McCracken
eventually developed what he called Defensive Independent Pitching Stats (DIPS). Prior
to his discovery, sabermetricians were convinced that there was no way to statistically
account for luck. DIPS not only offered a way to statistically account for luck in a
pitcher’s performance, but it also proved to be a fairly reliable way to project future
performance as well. In January 2001 , McCracken posted the explanation for DIPS on a
the sabermetric Web site baseballprosectus.com. Shortly thereafter ESPN.com ran a story
about McCracken’s discovery, and in August of 2002, he found a job offer from the

Boston Red Sox in his email. DIPS proved to be fairly useful for Rotisserie as well, as

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McCracken won the league three years straight (Schwarz 210-3). Still, there are elements
in the game of baseball that cannot be accounted for by statistics.

An astute player will use the quantitative analytical tools (symbols) created by the
sabermetricians to generate a relatively strong set of performance projections, grounded
in sound logic and historical evidence. From these projections the player will then
attempt to select the surest bets to perform at or above their historical averages that can
be acquired for the best value. That data then, when used devoid of emotional attachment
to favorite players or teams, should provide a risk-averse pool of information from which
the player can attempt to build a team of players that will score more points than the other
teams in the league.

Another aspect of the game necessary for success, luck, depends more on gut
instinct and “scouting” than on empirical data (DIPS withstanding). A fantasy player
could use statistical data to attempt to divine breakout rookies for example, but often
unquantifiable information like opportunity and potential tend to be better sources for
generating luck. This kind of information can only be gathered through the more
traditional avenues of player valuation, like actually watching the games. Walker
explains the value of watching games like this: “Instead of running around interrogating
people as I had, (Trace) Wood spent his time studying players on the field and trolling for
clues that the numbers can’t tell you: whether a rookie hitter is fouling off a lot of pitches
or just missing them entirely; whether a struggling young pitcher is on the verge of
harnessing his electric slider” (Walker 319).

Fantasy baseball players have become co-participants with the sabermetricians

against the authoritative voices of the institution in the struggle for linguistic capital, as

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they continually attempt to reinterpret the symbols of baseball statistics to suit their own
purposes. And there is evidence that they have been successful in their attempts to
acquire linguistic capital, and by extension, symbolic power within the institution. As
stated earlier, major league teams are now hiring sabermetricians and fantasy analysts as
consultants on player valuation. Bill James himself was hired as a consultant by the
Boston Red Sox in 2004, the same year that they won the World Series for the first time
since 1918. Ron Shandler of Baseball HQ, which started out as a sabermetric website, but
has now shifted completely to offering fantasy baseball analysis from a sabermetric
perspective, spent a year working as a consultant for a professional baseball team. Jason
Grey of ESPN.com, a graduate of baseball’s scouting development program, and a
statistician for the Arizona Diamondbacks, continues to offer player analysis to both
communities. However, as sabermetricians and fantasy analysts begin to take the place of
traditional baseball men as specialists in the field of symbolic production, the division of
labor that Bourdieu sites as a necessary product of that process is noticeably diminished.
With the success of STATS Inc., and other such public statistic providers, fans are no
longer dispossessed of the instruments of symbolic production.

Only by first embracing the symbolic language of the dominant institution, was
the opportunity for the acquisition of symbolic capital made possible. And even now, as
the evolution of the language is seemingly gaining momentum, fantasy baseball players
are constantly reinforcing the official language, as fantasy players ultimately use the new
language simply as a means to succeed within a construct that still uses the old language.
But for the first time in the history of professional baseball, the fan has access to the

instruments of symbolic production and the ability to use that information for the

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generation of their own linguistic capital. The baseball outsider now has the potential to
be a player in baseball’s linguistic market. Furthermore, in the fantasy baseball player we
see the evolution of fandom in this new era of sports, that is shaped by greater degrees of

interactive participation, unlimited information, and free agency.

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CONCLUSION

Purity and Profit: Rotisserie, Steroids, and the Age of the Superstar

F ans from the Me Generation were longing for a level of involvement
deeper than just watching the game, and Rotisserie was the stiffest
drink at the bar. At the same time, free agency had switched off the
gravity that once held teams together. As established stars changed
uniforms with greater frequency, fans were increasingly attracted to a
game that allowed them to buy and sell players like the commodities
they'd become. (Walker 70)

Over the last three years while conducting research for this project, I think I can
fairly say without hyperbole, that two out of three articles on fantasy sports printed in

major publications like Sports Illustrated started off something like this:

You smell like a goat. You 're unshaven. You work endless hours in dimly lit caves. You speak a language
understood only by others of your kind. You fear women and put prices on men's heads. And legions of
enemies long to destroy you. You are, of course, a fantasy baseball geek. (Reilly)

These three play. Your neighbor plays. Your boss plays. Everybody plays. Once the secret preserve of stats
geeks, FANTASY SPORTS are now a billion-dollar business. (Ballard)

And so we see that there is another bond that fantasy sports players have the honor of
sharing with Bill James and the sabermetricians: they are all geeks. Now in Bill James’
case, there may be some merit to that charge, but what is it about new developments in
sports culture that turns the institution into the name-calling playground bully from the
fourth grade? For the last decade or so, the fantasy sports industry has been fighting
against the same “stat geek”, “number-crunching nimrod” stigmas that hounded James
throughout the 19805. And quite frankly, many in the industry are more than moderately
annoyed.

Don Banks, a sportswriter covering the NFL for Sports Illustrated, wrote an
article in 2005 about his utter detest for fantasy football and the type of fans that he

believes are attracted to the game (Banks 2005). John Georgopoulos, the owner of

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SportsGrumblings.com who was also offering fantasy analysis for Sports Illustrated at
the time, responded to Banks’ comments just days after their publication on the
September 1St broadcast of Gridiron Grumblings Live, an Internet radio program on the
Fantasy Football Radio Network (Georgopoulos 2005). Georgopoulos dedicated the first
fifteen minutes of his weekly program to responding to each charge in Banks’ ten point
treatise against fantasy football, as did Georgopoulos’ co-hosts, who made no attempts to
disguise their contempt for Banks. Banks had essentially charged fantasy football with
glorifying all that is wrong with sports, including individualism, the de-emphasis of the
team, and the accumulation of statistics. Georgopoulos admitted that Banks did concede
that fantasy football had propelled the popularity of the NFL to levels that have never
been reached by any other sport in the US. Unfortunately, Banks succumbed to
adolescent name calling, by lamenting about the “geek factor” that fantasy was bringing
to the game. And immediately after addressing that point on the program, despite
Georgopoulos’ best efforts to retain a level of professionalism, his co-hosts fell right in
line with Banks, responding with their own salvo of childish name-calling, even going so
far as to degrade Banks’ personal appearance. But their reaction is not all that atypical.
Fantasy sports participants can be very defensive about the game about which they are so
passionate.

Where does the truth lie then? Are fantasy sports participants geeky number
crunchers drawn to a game that they did not get to play in high school? Do they have no
loyalty to team sports and local team affiliation? It is a difficult question to answer
because there are many layers to such questions. I could have answered yes to all three of

those questions and been correct in some contexts. Answering no would have been

91

equally accurate given a different set of qualifiers. But one thing is certain: writers like
Reilly, Ballard and Banks are overreacting with the same hyper-conservatism that
prevented the baseball insiders like Joe Morgan and Seymour Siwoff from understanding
the genius of Bill James. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, these fantasy sports
fanatics represent much more than a geeky fascination with numbers; they represent an
evolution of the sports fan in the twenty-first century. In the same way that the “baseball
men” sought to discredit the sabermetricians, some sports writers have taken it upon
themselves to defend the sanctity of the institution themselves. Georgopoulos and his
Gridiron Grumblings Live co-hosts find themselves in a similar battle for legitimacy
within the linguistic marketplace of sports writing. It is clear from that these fantasy
sports analysts are not only defending fantasy sports as a game, but they are also
defending the legitimacy of the symbolic power that they have managed to attain through
the same processes of player valuation that NFL writers employ. Whether Don Banks
likes it or not, these fantasy sports writers and participants are an essential part of the
future of sports culture, and moreover, a microcosmic representation of American culture.
But just like any other segment of popular culture, there can be some real loonies on the
fringes.

In an article written for Sports Illustrated titled “Fantasy World”, Chris Ballard
offered some observations from the draft floor at the 2004 National Fantasy Baseball
Championship. One of the participants be highlighted was American rock star Meatloaf,
who has been a self-proclaimed fantasy addict since the 19808. Ballard wrote that
Meatloaf “once participated in 56 football leagues in a single season” (Ballard 1). But it

is not just flamboyant rock stars, arguably predisposed to addictive behavior anyway,

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who are caught up in the obsession. Thirty-five year old Greg Olson reportedly spent
close to $400 in 2003, participating in twelve baseball leagues, one hockey league, six
basketball leagues and ten football leagues—all of which were part of ESPN.com’s Uber
tournament, in which participants compete in as many as 33 games over the course of the
year—in an effort to be crowned ESPN’s ultimate fantasy champion. If there was ever a
fantasy sports player that deserved the designation of “geek”, it would be Greg Olson.
Olson, as Ballard wrote, “would be renowned primarily—and rightly—for his work on
the Mars Rover... [he] has worked with computer vision, mobile robot navigation and
terrain mapping techniques to make the Rover more effective” (Ballard 1). Other
noteworthy participants mentioned in Ballard’s article included actors Michael J. Fox and
Vince Vaughn, softball star Jennie Finch, Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino, R.E.M.
bassist Mike Mills, and Boston Red Sox Pitcher Curt Schilling, who “while with the
Phillies, started a football league and rented out a hotel suite for a catered draft that was
announced by Phillies play-by-play man Harry Kalas” (Ballard 1). Three observations
stand out in Ballard’s account: 1) The obsession is widespread and real; 2) There is
absolutely no way to pin an all-encompassing stereotype like “geek” or “number-
cruncher” on a demographic group that contained two rock stars, two actors, and three
professional athletes, even if you give the scientist who worked on the Mars Rover a little
extra weight in the average; and 3) I would suggest that the obsession of these highly
successful individuals to play these games hints at the utopic potentialities latent in these
games as actors and scientists get a chance to interactively “play” and succeed in games
that they may not have had success with in their youth. Nevertheless, that still leaves us

without a firm grasp on who these people are and how they are effecting sports culture.

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One of the primary problems these mainstream critics are having in their effort
identify just who these fantasy sports people are, is that they are not really interested in
that question to begin with. Demographic studies clearly show that there are definitely
strong indicators of exactly who these people are. They are married white men with
college educations who own their own homes and make good money (“2006 Fantasy”). It
is harder to brush off sixteen million Americans (the number of fantasy sports players) as
obsessed lunatics hell-bent on poisoning your games when they look and act just like
you. Women have more aptly characterized fantasy sports communities as gendered
spaces that celebrate male dominance, because as a reflective subculture of American
sports culture, that is exactly what they are. On the other hand, one could convincingly
argue that the gendered “locker room” trash talking that takes place on the message
boards is a way for men to reclaim some of the masculinity that has been subdued in the
“metro-sexual” environment of contemporary American culture, where men are
encouraged to look to programs such as Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy for tips
on wardrobe construction, cooking, and hygiene. It logically follows that men who have
outgrown the locker rooms and practice fields of high school and collegiate athletics
would turn to the privacy of Internet sports forums to express part of their masculinity.
But if we want to get at the truth of what this phenomenon is all about, we need to further

expand our field of vision to include a macroscopic view of the culture we live in.

A Reflection of American Culture
It has long been convincingly argued that the beliefs, attitudes, and social climate
of sport culture correlate directly with those of mainstream American culture. It should be

of no surprise to anyone, then, that the steroid era in professional sports directly

94

coincided with the era of Enron, Martha Stewart, and the hanging chad. Americans
believe that bigger is better, and over the last decade and a half, cheating was the hippest
way to turn a profit. In The Mind of Bill James (2006), Bill James offers a commentary

on the 1918 Black Sox gambling scandal that is highly a propos of our own times:

“ What is rarely mentioned about the Black Sox scandal is that it was
merely a part of its time, a time in which corruption was gaining
rapidly in American Society... the expulsion of the crooked players was
a symbolic cleansing of society... It is so odd that this is remembered
now not as the period when governors took bribes to free criminals, but
as a time when a few baseball players threw the big game. ” (Gray 67 )

Will the beginning of the twenty-first century be remembered for weapons of mass
destruction, corporate scandal, and Florida recounts? Or will it be remembered for
BALCO, Barry Bonds, and the Mitchell Report? But there is more that connects sport
and culture at the turn of the twenty-first century than scandal. Workers in corporate
America are losing the incentive to stay loyal to companies as guaranteed pensions are
becoming a thing of the past. With the onset of the free agency era in professional sports,
the players’ loyalties have likewise shifted to highest bidder with the longest guaranteed
contract. Referring back to the statement cited in the first chapter by Alan G. Ingham,
“the capitalist mode of production became so naturalized that it influenced production in
other spheres (such as sport) and became hegemonic (Ingham, 14).

There have always been larger than life superstars—Babe Ruth, Willy Mays, Jim
Brown, Walter Payton, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird—and yet, prior to the mid-eighties,
these stars’ identities were still very much connected with the teams they played for.
Babe Ruth is the Yankees and Yankee Stadium is “the house that Ruth built.” The Los
Angeles Lakers are Magic and Kareem. As I suggested in the first chapter, we celebrate

these athletes with the fervency of religious devotion, turning them into icons, turning the

95

stadiums in which they play into temples and shrines. With the marketing explosion that
sent Michael Jordan into the stratosphere at the end of the eighties, the athlete became
bigger than the game. Alex Rodriguez, a lock first ballot Hall of Famer, is now playing
with his third team. Will Roger Clemens be a Red Sox, a Yankee, or an asterisk when he
goes into the Hall of Fame? Fans of today’s game find it hard to commit to buying the
jersey of their favorite player when there are better than even odds that he will be playing
for someone else when his contract is up. But we buy them anyway, because we love the
game and because Americans love to root for superstars. How many chances for
redemption has America already extended to the likes of Britney Spears, Michael Jackson
and David Hasselhoff‘? You would think that someone would have pointed that tendency
out to Barry and The Rocket before they took the stand. Don Banks’ argument that the
fantasy participant is guilty of celebrating the individual over the team is not merely a
perverted anomaly of fandom; the celebration of the superstar in sports is clearly
symptomatic of the very same tendencies long existent in American popular culture.
With the simultaneous development of the Internet and information technology,
digital gaming, interactive and reality television, and the ever-mobile superstar athlete,
the cultural climate in America over the last decade was primed for the explosion of the
fantasy sports industry. While it might be fair to suggest that prior to the lntemet, fantasy
sports participants could primarily be depicted as overly obsessed fans, the same
perception cannot be applied to the participants of today. They are an extension of the
culture they live in. Fantasy sports enthusiasts play “reality sports” in the same way that

others in America watch “reality TV”. They collect fantasy stars on the lntemet rather

96

than baseball cards in a shoebox. They are fans of the game, and they are simply evolving

with the games as they truly exist in the twenty-first century.

The Intersection of F andom, Free Agency and the Information Age

1 have frequently stated throughout this study that fantasy sports on the intemet
are part of the evolution of fandom. There are, however, millions of sports fans that have
no experience with or connection to fantasy sports at all. Furthermore, there are a number
of individuals like Don Banks who despise fantasy sports altogether. The evolution of
fandom that I am presenting here, however, can primarily be understood as the
juxtaposition of the commodification of spectatorship with the growing number of
knowledgeable, better informed spectators that are a direct result of the information age
and the free availability of statistics. The evolution of fandom is a process that
demonstrates the valorization of spectatorship as depicted by Ingham in Chapter 1, in
which it is argued that “a sustainable industry... requires a quality product to realize
exchange- and surplus-values” (Ingham 21). The evolution of fandom in this context,
then, is the process by which the fan’s desire for greater levels of interactivity and access
to the statistical instruments of linguistic capital in sports culture are valorized in an effort
to sustain profitability.

With the development of the lntemet, fantasy sports became practically feasible
on a massive scale. The only thing limiting their popularity prior to that technological
boom was convenience and a market place. With STATS Inc.’s legal victory over the
NBA, John Dewan had already secured unrestricted access to the data necessary for
scoring the games instantaneously. The technology and databases that created and hosted

Web sites not only had the power to supply the data, but they could parse it, tabulate it,

97

and present it as finished score sheets for fantasy sports leagues. The cumbersome
process of tallying up box scores from USA Today was forever rendered obsolete. Once
the leagues were picked up by major Web portals like Yahoo!, CBSSportsline, and
ESPN, the flood gates opened. What better place could there be to advertise an interactive
sports game than on Web sites already known for their sports content like ESPN and
CBS? And when the sabermetricians started staking out their own territory on the Web,
the inevitable cross-pollination of these two mutual beneficiaries of the liberation of
statistics was sure to happen. Fantasy baseball players used sabermetrics to get an
advantage in game play, and the sabermetricians used fantasy sports as an outlet for their
work, which would not gain institutional sanction until almost a full decade later when
Bill James’ Abstracts began filling the bookshelves of baseball executives such as
Oakland’s Billy Beane.

The other characteristic offered by the Web that these two growing communities
shared was a way to express their fandom more fully. Both communities were formed as
a direct result of a compulsive love for the game of baseball, and now there was a way to
connect with others who shared that passion all over the world. It is not likely that a
sabermetrician will have much luck rounding up a group of fellow sabermetricians from
around the neighborhood, but there is a fair possibility that there is someone out there
with Web access who is running into the same problem. The same principle applies to the
fantasy sports participant to lesser extremes. I have been playing fantasy sports for more
than twelve years now, and only twice during that whole time did every member of the
league live in the same state. In one league I play in, we have members in New Zealand,

New York, North Carolina, Connecticut, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Lansing,

98

and more. And that is one of the most significant features of the fantasy sports
phenomenon: the development of close friendships with people all over the world. Just
weeks ago when I was in San Francisco for an academic conference, I was able to
participate in our league draft with friends on the west coast whom I had never met in
person before. But when we got together it was as if we had always known each other
because we have talked over instant messenger every day for the ten years that we have
been in the league together.

The lntemet is of course incredibly vast, and the very idea of contemplating just
how much information it holds is mind-numbing. And yet, it is that limitlessness that
works to make everything smaller, closer, tighter, more intimately known. My immediate
circle of friends includes anyone within ten inches of my face while I am logged into the
Internet. As fast as I can type, they can read what I have to say to them. It is really no
different from the cell phone, with one very important distinction: with only a cell phone,
I would never have met these people. That I have friends in states and countries that I
have never been to is a direct result of the perfect cultural storm that brought Bill James,
STATS Inc., fantasy sports, and the Internet to fruition all at once. If even one of those
elements had been removed, then I would never have met these friends that I talk to every
day. And in my non-virtual, immediate circle of friends in Lansing, Michigan, that would
mean that I would have no more than four other people to share my love of baseball with,
four people that I most definitely do not talk to everyday. Sadder still, I would be the only
Cubs fan without cable television in a town that only gets Tigers games on the radio.
Fantasy sports have also given me an opportunity to stay in touch with my Cubbies, and

the game in general. Moreover, fantasy sports have actually made me a more

99

knowledgeable fan, enabling me to follow the game with an intelligence and depth of
knowledge that otherwise I would never have had.

On the one hand, fantasy sports are another example of the systemic ideological
domination of capitalism, as Adomo’s “Celebration of the Subjected” is realized in this
new incarnation of the valorization of spectatorship. On the other hand, one can argue
that the latent utopic potential hinted at by Adorno and Horkheimer exists in fantasy
sports communities as that valorization has also led to the redefinition of community and
personal interaction within fantasy sports on the lntemet. As noted in the previous
paragraph, those utopic potentialities only exist because of the relatively simultaneous
arrival of Bill James, sabermetrics, fantasy sports and the intemet. Even as the
valorization of spectatorship in fantasy sports advances the systemic ideological
domination of capitalism, the open-source social nature of the forum communities, the
fan’s acquisition of linguistic and symbolic capital, and the development of lasting
friendships across the Web suggest the existence of latent utopic possibilities that in
many ways counter that domination.

The arguments that suggest that fantasy sports degrade the game, by glorifying
individualism, are ludicrous if for no other reason, because they are diagnosing the
treatment for rather than the cause of the disease. Referring back to the quote by Sam
Walker at the beginning of this chapter, “free agency had [already] switched off the
gravity that once held teams together” (Walker 70). The fact that superstars leave our
favorite teams with a great deal of frequency does not in any way mean that we are now
going to stop rooting for superstars. Nor does it suggest that if we do continue to root for

superstars, that we must suddenly abandon the team of our youth. When I was living in

100

Chicago at the end of the 19905, I was enthralled with Barry Sanders. I had grown up on
Walter Payton, and when Neal Anderson, Rashaan Salaam, Curtis Enis, Ki-Jana Carter
and the rest of the first round disappointments selected by the Bears failed to live up to
the legend of “Sweetness”, I fell for Barry. He was the most amazing runner I had ever
seen, and I loved the fact that I wound up laughing hysterically every time I watched him
play. But my love for Barry Sanders did not replace my love for the Bears, any more than
my love for the garlic crust at Hungry Howie’s replaced my love for big fat authentic
Chicago deep dish. American culture inculcates the fascination for superstars starting
with the first time we watch a television program as children. Why does my daughter
have to have a Dora toothbrush? Clearly this is because she has sold out her true love, the
Oral-B.

What the critics of fantasy sports too often overlook is the depth of knowledge
that this new generation of fan has. In his article against fantasy football, Don Banks
argues that “fantasy football transforms average fans into quasi-general managers”
(Banks 2). How exactly, is that a problem? An over-simplified analogy to counter Banks’
argument would go something like this: hnagine that Don Banks really likes motorcycles.
He grew up riding a 750 Honda Shadow. Because of his love for motorcycles, he decided
to become a mechanic, so that he could work on the bikes and get a better understanding
of how the parts all work together. During his career as a mechanic, he had the
opportunity to work on and ride a Ducati Superbike 1098, and he fell in love with its
power and performance. Eventually the owner returned and took the Ducati back. Don
was left only with his Honda Shadow. He still loved the bike, but boy was he glad that he

had an opportunity to experience a true performance bike like the Ducati. Furthermore,

10]

 

he now knows much more about bikes, their design, and performance than he ever had
before. It makes no more sense to suggest that Banks should not want to experience
greatness as it was represented in this analogy, than it does for him to suggest that Twins
fans should not get a rush out of watching David Ortiz punish the Yankees. Nor does it
make any sense for Banks to suggest that there is something wrong with Vikings fans
who know that Gibril Wilson is one fantastic safety.

Fantasy sports fans are simply adjusting to the games that they love as they truly
exist in the twenty-first century. Free agency is a permanent fixture of modern sports, and
what fantasy sports enable fans to do is to reclaim some level of attachment with these
mobile superstars. They get to know the league and how it works, and they begin to
understand what kind of manipulation these general managers have to do to get the most
production out of limited resources. In one section of The Mind of Bill James (2006),
Gray sites a portion of the 1986 Baseball Abstract in which James advocated training
professional baseball managers with simulated table games like Strat-O-Matic. However,
James knows they (managers) would never agree to such thing because “those games are
for fans. .. we’re professionals. .. [who] don’t have anything to learn from these fans. . .”
(Gray 126). Clearly the Boston Red Sox might have something different to say about that
now that Bill James is working in their front office. Perhaps Mr. Banks would like to tell
Vords McCracken that fantasy sports are a waste of time. Fantasy sports exist on a plane
somewhere between the cutting edge of fandom and scientific player valuation. I would
much rather watch a baseball game knowing who the players are, and whether or not they
are any good. And I definitely do not want to have to rely solely on sportscaster Joe

Morgan’s authoritative word to understand the game.

102

The last significant aspect about fantasy sports that makes them uniquely a
product of the times is their highly interactive quality. This has been touched on a bit a
number of times already, but its importance really needs to be underscored. With the
incredible growth of reality programming and the more recent resurgence of prime-time
game shows, the American public are expressing a desire to be more directly and
emotionally involved with their entertainment. Fantasy sports satiate the same desires for
control and personal investment as these television programs. In the same way that
television viewers find themselves rooting for the skinny kid on CBS’ Survivor, a big part
of the fantasy sports experience is picking out sleepers and prospects to root for. Matthew
Berry of ESPN.com, otherwise known as the Talented Mr. Roto, recently said that what
excites him most now in fantasy is when a prospect that he touted pans out. There is a
real adrenaline rush associated with picking the underdog that wins or performs beyond
expectations. Again, it is that interactive quality to the experience, a sense (though
admittedly false) that we have a hand in the success of the underdog when we choose to
support them against the odds.

Conclusion

It is my hope that this study has effectively demonstrated that fantasy sports on
the lntemet are not just another mindless diversion for sports fans. Nor are they just
another way for teenagers to waste time playing video games. We need only look back to
the very beginnings of the hobby, at the men who created the games, to see that these
were the product of successful, intelligent individuals who were merely looking for more
than spectatorship. They wanted to play the games themselves on some level. And to

those who would suggest that these individuals are merely seeking a more socially

103

 

acceptable way to gamble, I ask that they study the history of this game. Gambling is an
inevitable consequence of competition, and it has made its way into the fantasy sports
industry as well. But just as gambling has no claim to the birth of America’s major team
sports, neither did it have such a role in the creation of fantasy sports.

As I have demonstrated in this final chapter, the fantasy sports experience is the
evolution of fandom in the age of free agency and the Internet. But make no mistake, the
essence of the fantasy sports experience is community interaction. These communities
thrive because they have successfully found a way to balance the celebration of
competition and achievement, with the selflessness of effective collaboration and
peaceful coexistence in a society based upon the rules of instrumental rationalization. The
accumulation and transfer of symbolic power in the fantasy sports community serve to
benefit the community, not just the individual or the institution. Perhaps that will change
in the future if the industry grows to the point where Web sites like
SportsGrumblings.com and F antasyBaseball.com can afford to employ full-time staffs
like ESPN.com. But for the present, many of the most symbolically powerful men in the
industry, like Todd Zola, have to hold a day job. Like Bill Gamson, Wink, Daniel Okrent,
Bill James and Verbs McCracken before him, Zola devotes his time and energy to proper
analysis and sound projections because he loves the game. Just ask Bill James, who
thanked Zola himself in the acknowledgements for his 2008 Bill James Baseball
Handbook. Now that the walls of the institution have been cracked, I do not believe there
is a real rush to seal them back up.

My own experiences working toward becoming a guru within the fantasy sports

industry differ from those of the individuals listed in the previous paragraph in two

104

significant ways. The first difference is that at the point where I was beginning to gain
some symbolic capital of my own, I was forced to “unplug”, as the need for theoretical
research began to demand more of my time. In an effort to look at the industry
objectively by applying the social theory that was necessary to give balance and depth to
the study, I no longer had the time to keep up with the kind of research on players and
such that it takes to speak with the authority of an expert in the community. I was still
acquiring information that endowed me with a level of symbolic capital and authority;
however, it was authority on the social dynamics of the community rather than on game
play.

The second major distinction between myself and individuals like Zola and
McCracken is due to the way that I think. Zola, McCracken and James think
scientifically, drawing enjoyment from the process of working in the numbers in a way
that a humanities guy like myself cannot. With enough time and effort I can utilize the
numbers in the same ways to arrive at my own projections, but I am merely applying the
methods and tools that those individuals create. There is clearly a place within the
industry for a guy with good writing skills and a love of the games; however, one thing
that has been made perfectly clear in the process of researching for this study: there are
gurus like Todd Zola, and there are writers like me who steal their shtick.

This work focused exclusively on fantasy baseball and fantasy football, but if you
can imagine a competition that individuals would want to be able to experience in the
same way as these sports, it is out there. There are fantasy leagues for basketball, hockey,
soccer, cricket, golf, bowling, fly fishing, NASCAR, poker, bull riding (yes bull riding),

and even Supreme Court decisions. If there was ever an argument against the “stat geek”

105

 

designation, 1 would think that fantasy bull riding would do it. Fantasy sports are here to
stay, and they are a central part of the future of fandom, no matter what the context is or
what the contest is about. American culture is too committed to profiting off of the
desires of the consumer, and the consumer clearly desires a stronger and more personal
connection to the games. If submitting player bids via the mail and tabulating box scores
by hand could not slow down the inevitable grth of the fantasy sports industry, I can

only imagine how faster computers that fit in your pocket will accelerate involvement.

106

 

 

 

Major League Baseball Newspaper Box Score
Sports Section- Lansing State Journal May 3rd, 2007

 

late Wednesday
Mariners 3, White Sox 2
CHICAGO SEATTLE

abrlhl Ibrllil
Erstadlb 4010l$uzukict 3000
lguclri2b 401OBeltre3b 3000
Paynsc 4000Vidrodh 3110
Knetkodh 4121lbanezll 4011
Dyed 31115emnlb 4000
Ozuna pr OODOIGilIenrf 4111
Mckwklf 4000El|isonrl 0000
096030 30001hjimac 3010
RSwnyct 3000YBtcrtss 3111
Uribess 301010Lpez2b 3010
TM 322 “Tut‘s 303 03
m 010 100 ON—Z
m 010 001 10x4

DP—Seattle 1. 106—Chicago 4, Seat-
tle 6. 2gB—lbanez (4), Jotopez (2).
HR—Konetko (4), Dye (6). lGuillen (3),
YBetancourt (3).

I? ll trauma
cum
DanksL04 62-3 6 3 3 2 4
MacDougal 11-3 0 0 0 1 0
Seattle
MBatistaw,32 71-3 5 2 2 0 1
Sherri" 2-3 1 0 0 0 1
Putz 8.5 1 0 0 0 1 1
Umpires—Home, Rick Reed Fl

Chuck Meriwether Second, Alfonsd
Marquez Third, Tim Timmons.
T—2203. A—16,555 (47,447).

lnfiansLBlueIaysGal)

 

TORONTO CLEVEIMO
abrllhl abrllbl
6011Szmorecl 5010
50100Iluccilf 6220

Rios rt
Lind If

Appendix

0 Rays 4, Twins 3 (10) ,

 

i

urnnrsorr TANPABAY 1
abrhhl rhhl

ICstillo 2b 411083ldellicf 4100
PuntoBb 400000kesdh 5121‘}
Mauerc 501lcnrtlrdll 4030
Mmeaulb 5120ngntn3b 5032
THntercl 51320Yongrl 5000
Kubellt 5010Uptoan 4010
Cinllodh 402OCPenalb 4010
Rabedh IOOOZobristpr 0100
Tynetrl 40103Hansss 3120
Bartlettss 4020Paulc 4000
Nvan'oph 1001

To“: 413133Totds 394124

m can coo 100 0—0 ’

Tm Buy 000 010 002 1—4
One out when winning run scored.
E-Upton (8). DP-Minnesota 2.

Tampa Bay 1. LOB—Minnesota 11,1ampa 3

Bay 13. 2B-BHarris (3). HR—TI-lunter (6)

SB-Punto (3), TI-lunter (6).

I? IEIIIIN4
mm ' ‘
Bonser . 6 811 4 2.;
Neshek 12-310 0 0 3
Crain 1-3 0 O 0 0 0
Nathan 13 2 213
GuerrierLO-l 1-3 2 1 1 0 0 .
Tamil” 4
Sec 6 'l 2 213.,
Camp 2-3 2 110 0-
Stokes 11-330002,
Salas 10 0 012‘
ReyesWJ-O 1 1 0 0 0 2

HBP~by Bonser (Crawford), by Sea
(Tynet). WP—Nathan. Balk—Bonser.

Umpires-Home, Larry Young First,
Angel Hernandez Second, Jerry Layne
Third, Mark Carlson.

T—3z35. A-9,101 (43,772).

107

 

Appendix B
The Rules and Rosters for Standard Rotisserie Baseball

The scoring system, roster sizes, and game rules for Rotisserie baseball can be modified
to fit whatever is agreed upon by the league. However, there are a few configurations that
have become recognized as “standard” for the most part, and I have listed the details to
those variations below.

Player Universe — The first decision made when setting up the league involves which
players will be used and by how many rosters. Typically leagues are comprised of 10-12
teams, though, 15 is the standard for the National Fantasy Baseball Championship, and
as many as 20 have been used effectively. The league must also decide on whether they
wish to use both leagues (Mixed) or whether they would prefer to be league specific,
perhaps limiting the player pool to either the American League (AL Only) or National
League (N L Only).

Head-to-Head Variation — Prior to listing the most common scoring formats for
Rotisserie baseball, it should be noted that there is scoring format that has grown very
popular in recent years called Head to Head (H211), which was borrowed from the
manner in which fantasy football is played. H2H scoring uses the same scoring categories
as Rotisserie, however the aim is to “win” the most of those categories versus a single
weekly opponent. The categories are then tallied head-to-head, and the team with the best
record for the week (6 categories won to the opponents 4) wins for that week. At the end
of the season, the teams with the best head-to-head records are seeded into a playoff
format to determine the league champion.

Standard Rotisserie Scoring — An even number of categories are included for offense
and pitching. The statistics are tallied up continuously over the season, and at the end
who ever has the most points across all categories wins the league. The points are
distributed according to rank; 50 in a 12 Team League, the team with the most homeruns
will have 12 points for that category. The next highest total will receive 11 points, on so
on down to 1. The goal is to score the most points in as many categories as possible.
There are two primary variations to Rotisserie scoring, which make a distinction between
the number of categories that should be included for scoring.

4x4 Scoring (Which is recognized as the traditional form):

AVG - Batting Average

HR - Homeruns

RBI - Runs-Batted-In

SB - Stolen Bases

W - Wins

SV - Saves

ERA - Earned Run Average

WHIP - Walks plus Hits per Innings Pitchers

108

 

5x5 Scoring (Which adds Runs on offense and Strikeouts for pitchers)

AVG - Batting Average

HR - Homeruns

RBI - Runs-Batted-In

SB - Stolen Bases

R - Runs

W - Wins

SV — Saves

K — Strikeouts

ERA - Earned Run Average

WHIP - Walks plus Hits per Innings Pitched

Standard Roster Configuration — Standard Rotisserie rosters are comprised of 23
starting positions (14 hitters and 9 pitchers), and anywhere from five to ten reserve (or
bench) slots. Three significant notes: 1) Teams two catchers, two additional infielders
(one eligible at the comer positions and one eligible at the middle positions), and 2
additional outfielders; 2) there is no positional designation for outfielders (such as left,
center or right); and 3) the pitcher slots can be filled with any combination of starters and
relievers. The key distinctions between standard Rotisserie and other formats for fantasy
baseball are the expanded roster and the $260 auction salary cap that forces economic
efficiency in roster construction. Here is the standard roster format:

"U’U'U‘O’U’U'U’U

 

This format forces a deeper knowledge of baseball rosters,
and Rotisserie players fill these slot in various way depending
upon their adopted theory of roster creation. Stars and
Scrubs, for example, is a strategy which favors paying top
dollar for superstars and then filling out the rest of the roster
with cheap “scrubs” who are easily replaced from the waiver
wire. Another popular strategy is the LIMA Plan created by
Ron Shandler of BaseballHQ.com. LIMA stands for Low
Investment Mound Ace, and the premise of the theory is to
spend very little on pitching, focusing on cheap players with
good skill sets (K/9 > 6 for example), thereby allowing the
team owner to allocate the majority of his resources to hitting.
Hitting is typically a much more stable investment, and so
variations of this philosophy are extremely popular.

 

 

 

 

109

 

Appendix C
Fantasy Sports Web Sites

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association: The FSTA was created as an official
organization for the promotion of the fantasy sports industry. It was formed after
representatives from CDM Fantasy Sports invited a number of other fantasy sports
businesses to discuss the pending legislation that could severely limit the growth of the
industry. The first FSTA conference was held in 1999.

http://www.fstacrg/indexphp

 

League Host Sites: The following is a listing of the websites where the leagues are
actually hosted, and where the games are played. Each site has unique interfaces,
structural layouts and different levels of customization. Features that determine where an
individual chooses to play include cost, available analysis and research tools, ease of

navigation, and the ability to customize league settings and scoring.

CBS Sportsline Fantasy Leagues

http://wwwsportsline.c0m/fantasy

ESPN Fantasy Leagues
http:/:’gamcs.cspn.go.com.="fr0ntpagc‘.’&lpcs=gl0balnav&lid=gn Fantasy Fantag
MLB.com Fantasy Leagues
http://mlbnrlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mIbffantasy/indcx.isp

My Fantasy League —- League Pages

http://football8.myfantasvlea gue.com/2005/home/ 75402

Yahoo Fantasy Leagues

http:llfantasysports.yahoocom/

 

110

 

Information, Expert Guidance, Online Communities: The sites listed below do not host
league play themselves. Rather, they offer sources for gathering player and team news,
game theory and strategy discussion, direct expert advice and social communities for
networking.

CREATIVESPORTS.com

http://creativesports.c0m

F antasyBasebaIl.com

http://fantasybaseball.com/

FantasyBaseball.com - Forums
hung/forums.fantasvbaseba“com/index.plrp?act=idx

F ootbalIDiehards.com

http://www.footballdichards.c0m/index-g00d.cfm

F ootballguys.com

http://f00tbzflguys.com/

 

RotoTimes.com

 

http:/,v’www.rototimes.com/indcx .php
RotoWorld.com

http://www.rotoworld.com/

 

SportsGrumblings.com
http://www.sportsgrumblingscom/
SportsGrumblings.com - Forums

http:l/www.sportsgrumblingscom/forumlindex.plrp

Ill

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116

   

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