COMMENTARY : Love It or Hate It, Rotisserie Gains Steam

Not long ago I was visiting with some friends when one of them happened to mention something about Johnny Ray being dead. My heart did one of those suddenly painful and explosive things that hearts like to do just before they stop ticking forever.

“Johnny Ray?” I gasped, my face turning the shade of a freshly brushed home plate. “Dead?”

“Such a wonderful singer,” said the friend.

“Oh,” I mumbled sheepishly, the pink slowly returning to my face. “That Johnny Ray.”

“What other Johnny Ray is there?”

“The Johnny Ray I own,” I said, and the image of the California Angels’ infielder flashed across the Diamond Vision in my brain. “The second baseman.”

“You own a second baseman?”

“Actually, I own a whole team,” I said. “The McGuire Sisters.”

“I thought the McGuire Sisters were singers.”

“They’re also a rotisserie team.”

“I thought a rotisserie was a thing you cooked meat on.”

“It is and it isn’t.”

“I thought you were sane.”

“Not since I drafted Johnny Ray,” I said. I remembered only too clearly his current stats, which suggested little power or speed and a batting average hovering near .200.

“Well, at least your Johnny Ray isn’t dead,” said the friend soothingly.

“Yes,” I sighed, though I started to wish that I’d drafted Johnny Ray the dead singer. At least his records were fun to listen to and were solid gold.

But hey. Such is the anguish of being a general manager and team owner in a rotisserie baseball league. If it were easy everyone would be doing it.

On the other hand, it sometimes seems as if everyone is doing it. By the hundreds of thousands, baseball fans all across America are emerging from their closets -- actually the preferred term is lockers -- to admit their participation in one form or another of rotisserie league baseball.

They are following the lead of six pioneering zanies of a decade ago who gathered in a New York restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise and devised the perfect mental game for helping idle-minded fans survive the long, hot summer.

What those six original rotissarians did was divide up the pool of real-life major league players among themselves, assigning them to mythical teams. They then spent the summer comparing with each other the output of their team’s players in categories such as home runs, stolen bases and earned run averages. At the end of the season they totaled up the results, and the guy whose fantasy team did the best in the most categories had a bottle of Yoo Hoo chocolate drink poured over his head.

Now, are we talking a blast or what?

As word of their novel pastime spread around the country, other groups of like-minded fans with too much time on their hands began forming their own fantasy leagues. At the same time people like baseball statistician Bill James and the Elias Sports Bureau began revolutionizing the simple baseball stat, inventing dozens of new ways to calculate whether or not your particular Johnny Ray should have stuck with singing or not. Thus fans may now find the ground ball to fly ball ratio of their players, they may assess how their favorite star does on artificial turf as opposed to natural grass and whether he hits best with tobacco in his right or left cheek.

Newspapers have jumped into the act as well, printing bigger and better box scores and regularly publish the complete stats for all major league players. Newsstand and bookstore shelves are crammed with hundreds of titles purporting to show how best to draft a rotisserie team and trade your way to the top of your league, as well as how to tell if those up-and-coming 8-year-old Little Leaguers you see everywhere might one day be worth drafting for your team.

But was that enough? Heck, no. Dozens and dozens of companies -- stat services -- have sprung up offering to do all the calculating for you. Send them your team and anywhere from $20 to $75, and each week they will mail you -- or even fax you -- your players’ statistics and calculate how you are doing in your particular league. There are even software companies that sell a program so you can do all the number crunching on your own home computer.

The hobby is not without its big names. New York Governor Mario Cuomo is said to be a rotisserie player. As is hockey star Wayne Gretzky and radio interviewer Larry King and television bigwig Bryant Gumbel. And the rotisserie lore is filled with stories of surgeons placing calls to their stat services during crucial surgery. Or of the New York accountant who stayed on the phone for nine consecutive hours this spring keeping in touch with his friends in Rockville, Md., who were conducting their annual draft of players.

“These guys just like watching ballplayers and wish that they were one, I’m sure,” says Joni Pfennig, president of Walter Mitty Sports, in Burr Ridge, Ill., one of the nation’s first and oldest stat services. “When you talk to them they are just like little kids. If you don’t get their stats to them on time they are furious. And they like owning the ballplayers. About four years ago we went to New York to a Mets game. Bryant Gumbel was sitting behind us. He and the couple we were with, they were all screaming at each other all night: ‘I own him!’ ‘I only paid $2 for him!’ It was really comical.”

But not everyone thinks rotisserie is funny.

As in anything trendy, a certain familiarity-saturation level has bred some contempt for fantasy baseball. Among the sharpest of critics of the game are the nation’s sportswriters and sports columnists who have written both with humor and barely concealed grumpiness about this new brand of fan.

Baltimore Sun sports columnist John Eisenberg, for instance, threw down his fielder’s gauntlet not long ago, stating 40 reasons he does not play rotisserie. Perhaps the reason that hurt us the most here in Fantasyland was his claim that he did not own a pair of plaid pants to go with his striped shirts. Sigh. It is always sad to see otherwise intelligent people like sportswriters getting in over their heads in something as complex and completely beyond their grasp as fashion. For a sportswriter to complain about any other human being’s clothing style would be like, well, let’s face it, it would be exactly like a barnyard porker -- a pig if you will -- complaining to the farmer that the chickens were not keeping their coops very tidy. If you get my drift.

Of course, Eisenberg and others have raised more substantial complaints about fantasy baseball, the most serious centering on the insatiable national appetite for statistics. Basically they suggest that all of this focusing on numbers sucks the plasma, humanity, and not least importantly the poetry, out of a red-blooded pastime.

Oh what poop, blurt rotisserie players in one extended Bronx cheer. For in the most famous baseball poem of all time, Ernest L. Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” what do we find in the very first lines?

“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day

The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play ... “

Ho ho! Numbers up the base path!

“I think the critics miss the point,” says Glen Waggoner, one of the original six founding fathers of rotisserie and the co-author of the game’s bible, the 1990 edition of “Rotisserie League Baseball.” “The stats we use are the same stats I used when I first started collecting baseball cards as an 8-year-old. If it demystifies baseball to go to the roots of the game I played, then I plead guilty. I think it reinforces the roots of the game. Numbers are basic to the game itself. Babe’s 60 home runs, the idea of winning 20 games or stealing 100 bases. We harness that poetry.”

There is much sentiment for Father Waggoner’s teachings.

“Rotisserie has renewed my love for baseball,” states Bill Cleary, a computer programmer at Social Security who plays now in five different rotisserie leagues. “That love was waning. If there was a National League game on TV, what did I care? But now it’s gotten to the depth that I can name every pitcher on the Chicago White Sox.”

Another knock on the fantasy version of baseball is that native team loyalty gets all screwed up. There is some truth to this, as evidenced on opening day in our own rotisserie league here at The Sun. The Orioles were battling the Kansas City Royals in that game; Joe Price was on the mound for the Orioles, pitching to the Royals’ Frank White. For most fans in Baltimore, watching the game on TV, there was no doubt about the hope: Price must strike out White. But to reporter Mike Ollove, owner of the Ollove Pits, this was the ultimate existential dilemma. As he so aptly expressed it in a computer memo to his commissioner at the time: “I own both Price and White. What do I do?”

“Yes, it’s the classic awkward situation,” admits Father Waggoner. “Who do you root for? I’m a traditionalist myself, and I like to think original loyalties will prevail. Though I can’t say it for sure.”

Nor could the Pits, whose fortunes have been in decline since that very moment. Price was released from the Pits shortly after White homered. White later went on the disabled list, and Ollove has become increasingly interested in tennis.

“No, no,” says Cliff Willis. “The worst case scenario is for you to have a guy on the other team and he does poorly but they still beat the O’s. So I always root for the O’s. I just suspend rotisserie when they play. It’s still an appreciation of baseball as a whole.”

Whatever the case, there remains perhaps the biggest complaint of all about rotisserie ball -- that players are turned into little more than numbers by calculating, stat-mad fans.

We go first to the New York home of the owner of the Glenwag Goners:

“I have a fondness for Von Hayes,” says Waggoner. “I’ve had him on my teams since 1982 when he was in Cleveland. I buy him more out of preference and out of what I think he will become than what he is worth in money terms. I think most rotisserie owners get ballplayers they like to have on their teams. This makes for a better fan, no question. You learn to understand the importance of a Joe Orsulak or a Mark Williamson and not just a Gregg Olson. Without rotisserie I’m not sure I’d know Joe Orsulak’s name. We are creating a new loyalty.”

But almost the opposite viewpoint comes from Doug Burke, another Social Security employee who has both American and National League rotisserie teams.

“I don’t find players individually that important,” he says. “As long as the team wins, that’s what I want. I don’t go out to see an individual player.”

“I find it very hard to relate to ballplayers who get a $2.5 million contract and say they did it for the security of their family,” adds Willis. “Jose Canseco’s attitude is, ‘What’s a million here or there?’ And how well do we really know these people anyway? If anything, they are a picture on a baseball card. You don’t get to know these people. It might not be nice, but all they are is one-dimensional people. A number or a name in a box score.”

Rotissarian Bob Coggins, a human rights investigator, goes it one step further. “The real reason I enjoy rotisserie is that despite a player’s overinflated idea of what he is worth, I can put a price on him,” he says. “And if he’s not worth diddly squat to me, I can dump him. This gives the fan control over players. Instead of being used by players, we are using the players.”

A little bitter, perhaps?

“I think if anyone does translate players into numbers then they are wrongheaded,” cautions Waggoner. “On the other hand, players haven’t shown a hell of a lot of loyalty in staying in their home teams.”

Even within the world of make-believe baseball there are complaints. The most common is that the original eight statistical categories suggested by rotisserie’s founders distort baseball realism. (The categories are: batting average, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, earned run average, wins, saves, composite ratio -- walks plus hits divided by innings pitched).

Thus, many fantasy leagues require owners to check weekly some fairly esoteric statistics -- times grounded into double plays, times caught stealing, and a variety of other new-fangled performance indicators that require formulas so complex that, if misused, could blow up the world.

“I wish all power to people who want to make baseball a science,” says Waggoner. “I don’t. We wanted to use the very familiar indexes of performance that most of us grew up with. We realize stolen bases and home runs are not equivalent. We are not stupid. But we have another agenda -- to have fun and not turn ourselves into number crunchers.”

“We are not trying to duplicate baseball,” adds Cleary. “It still exists. We’re just having fun.”

Almost all rotissarians agree that the most fun in any season is the day the league conducts its annual player draft. While some leagues simply meet and divide up the available players the way football does -- in a draft with each team selecting in order -- the real rotisserie way requires an auction system. Team owners are allotted a certain amount of mythical money (usually $260) and the process of bidding on and purchasing up to 23 players (standard for rotisserie teams) usually lasts an entire day. For many it is the ultimate Monopoly game.

“My husband started his league 10 years ago,” says Joni Pfennig, of Walter Mitty Sports in Illinois. “We had the first draft in my living room with hot dogs and apple pie and peanuts. And even though several of those guys have moved all over the country, we always meet every year at spring training in Arizona for our new draft.”

Among the favored publications that rotisserie players use to bone up for the draft is a 10-year-old weekly published in Durham, N.C., called Baseball Weekly. It is a report on college baseball and the many minor league baseball teams in the country.

“There is no question that a tremendous number of our subscribers play rotisserie baseball,” says editor Allan Simpson. “We’ve sort of grown with rotisserie. Originally, when we first started, a lot of rotisserie people felt they had an edge on their competitors by getting our paper and getting insight into new players coming along. Unfortunately that edge has been lost because of the tremendous number of rotisserie people out there now aware of who we are. It’s a phenomenon.”

Although not even die-hards like Cleary believe they really know enough to manage a real-life team. “Essentially we know we don’t have enough information to be real general managers,” he says. “But we can certainly appreciate how really bad George Steinbrenner is.”

“It’s fun,” adds Doug Burke. “Before I started, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t totally grasp what was going on. But the next thing you know I’m picking up the paper every day, looking at box scores. It’s just a high.”

“This may sound nerdish,” says Willis, “but baseball to a normal person is watching. It’s couch potato time. Rotisserie allows you to become a participotato.”