The Tenth Inning

I swear that if I bring peace to the Middle East and find the cure to cancer that my obituary will say Okrent died, invented Rotisserie Baseball. There's no way of avoiding it. This was something that came to me in the 1979, 1980 off-season. It was loosely based on something that a very dear friend and professor of mine at the University of Michigan had done when I was an undergraduate there that was an extremely rudimentary form of it. It was almost hieroglyphs. And I had some similarly crazed friends. We used to meet on a monthly basis to talk ball at a really lousy restaurant on the East side of Manhattan called La Rotisserie Francaise. That's where we got the name, has nothing to do with the Hot Stove League. And because several of us were in the media, we got a lotta coverage, and we particularly got coverage in the 1981 strike when there was nothing else for baseball writers to write about. And it spread very rapidly, and people now say that there are millions playing it, that it costs the economy three billion dollars in lost time in the office. And, of course, I've become an extremely, extremely wealthy man from having invented it, which is to say I've made about $1.50. I think that the fantasy that most of us have about actually roaming the pastures of center field or whatever it might be, we know that these are such far-fetched fantasies that there's nothing remotely real about that. But it's really easy if you are, in my case, 59 years old and overweight and gray and have worked in business for a long time to say, I could do that. I could move into that office. I could sit behind that desk and make that trade every bit as well as Brian Cashman does. For that time, they're your players, right? They're playing on your team. You're tryin' to beat somebody else. What they do every night, you get excited about. And now, which is what's great for baseball, your fascination is viral. They're watchin' five games at once. They wanna see what's goin' on. How's my guy doin'? What's his bat about? I'll jump to this game. Their interest in the game has now become completely different than the one you grew up with, where you were just rooting for the team you cared about and maybe one or two other teams around the league. That's it. Now, there's a chance you'll be interested in games all over the country at any given time. Tip O'Neill said that all politics is local. I like to think all rooting is local, that it's really the same phenomenon. It's telling tales around the campfire and, thus, ensuring that the dawn will come, and the race will survive. I think when you no longer root for a team and you're only rooting for players, you're looking at an investment portfolio. The reason why people play Rotisserie, capital R trademark, or fantasy, lowercase f ripoff, Baseball is because it enables them to do that thing which they have always wished they were able to do as fans, which is decide how to run a team. We all talk about the trades we wish that our favorite team would make or the trades that they didn't make or why are they playing this guy instead of that guy? And here you have the opportunity to do that, the opportunity to show that you are as smart or as stupid as the people who are running Major League teams.