April 2006

Covering baseball’s Fantasyland

Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe, Viking Press, $25.95, 472 pages, hardcover, 2006. By Sam Walker ’92.

As an undergraduate, Sam Walker spent his $1,000 Arthur Miller Creative Writing Award profiling 11 U-M alums who lived in remote regions of North Dakota, Oregon, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Louisiana. (See "Ah, Wilderness," Dec. 1991, Michigan Today.)

That 12,000-mile backroads odyssey prepared him for the 19,000-mile road trek he made covering the phenomenon of Rotisserie League baseball, a game played by statistics fiends who draft teams from the major leagues and then determine who won by compiling and comparing numerical achievements at season’s end. The game is estimated to involve a billion dollars in informal online contests annually.

"Fantasyland was a huge undertaking that involved weeks on the road, tons of research, lots of reporting and some enormously complex logistics," Walker told the NewsE. "I don't think I could have pulled it off if I hadn’t spent the summer of 1991 doing something similar: traveling across the country writing my story about some alumni who lived in the least populated zip codes. Doing that  piece for Michigan Today gave me the courage to think big."

Walker, who covers the economics of athletics in his Wall Street Journal column, says of his more recent quest, "For the better part of a decade, I resisted every invitation to play fantasy baseball. The older and busier I got, the less interested I became in the idea of devoting myself to assembling an imaginary ball club and spending six months pretending to ‘manage’ it by making phantom roster moves and make-believe trades. To me, this sort of behavior seemed, for lack of a better term, stupid." (Another U-M alum, the journalist Daniel Okrent, is credited with founding the craze via the "Rotisserie League Baseball Association.")

Despite his initial disdain for baseball fantasists, Walker wound up competing in the most exclusive league—one involving statistical gurus who wrote about baseball numbers and even advised some major league teams. Whether he indicted himself as "stupid" for doing so is something readers will have to find out.

But what drew him to write the book was "a poll I read, one suggesting that as many as five million Americans played the game" also, covering the business aspects of the sport had given him a "case of professional burnout." In short, he had come to envy these "nut jobs" because they, as he had in his youth, maintained a keen emotional investment in the outcome of every pitch—and not just an emotional investment, at that.

Walker, who grew up in Ann Arbor and is the son of late political science Prof. Jack L. Walker and Linda Robinson Walker, joined a league called Tout Wars, the nation’s top expert competition. "To earn a spot in Tout, as it’s known to intimates, you have to have a foothold in the baseball information business—whether it’s running a fantasy sports advice site, publishing a book of projections, working for a statistics company, or writing a column for some prominent newspaper, magazine or fantasy sports organ. In other words, you need to be engaged in the business of touting ballplayers."

Among his rivals were three lawyers, an MBA, a Hollywood screenwriter, a pair of computer engineers "and a guy with a master’s in Victorian literature." Fantasyland is the story of his attempt to beat those touts by getting the inside dope from managers, scouts and players during spring training and the regular season. For more information about Fantasyland

The reviewer for the Internet publication Roto Authority, fantasy baseball’s "first daily fantasy baseball blog, said Walker succeeds in pleas[ing] both crowds—the rotogeeks and the newbies" by employing "all sorts of quirks to keep the less geeky reader engaged: parading a hot chick around at the draft to distract other players, staging a protest of Jose Guillen's benching and even hiring a psychic to dispense roto advice. … In other words, it's a crowd-pleaser."