.45 CALEBER: Appeal of Rotisserie Baseball Academic

How did you spend your Spring Break?

Lazing on a beach in Cancun? Hopping between nightclubs in San Juan? Passed out in Acapulco?

Because I spent my week of freedom studying.

No, I wasn’t poring over the philosophy of William James or the tenets of Java programming language while my classmates blew off steam in exotic locales—my studying wasn’t of that conventional academic type. What I devoted much of the precious break to was preparing for my annual Rotisserie baseball draft, an event that I had been anticipating ever since the Chicago White Sox nailed down the last out in their shocking championship run last October, ushering in the cold, depressing vacuum of four months without baseball.

For the third straight year, in what has become my own rite of spring, I eagerly eschewed tropical lures to make the five-hour trek from Albany down to eastern Long Island to spend a couple of days holed up in a friend’s basement bunker. Armed with various forecasting publications, reams of statistics and an unhealthy knowledge of the positional depth charts of all 16 National League franchises, we set about carefully assigning dollar values to every player in the N.L. based upon our projections of their 2006 performance. The goal was to develop an approximate plan of action—something along the lines of “spend twice as much money on hitting than pitching,” or “try to buy at least two closers”—for that fateful Sunday afternoon at the end of all the preparation, the time known simply as “draft day.”

When that last day of Spring Break came, we joined with twelve other team managers in a local bar to divide our imaginary $270 budget between 24 players in an effort to collect the most points over the course of the season in 10 different statistical categories, and thus display the superior ability to assemble a baseball franchise we had believed ourselves to possess ever since beginning to talk trash about Derek Jeter’s defense in the late 90’s.

Welcome to the obsessive world of fantasy baseball, where rational decision-making has long since been overruled by the intoxicating power of owning and managing your own personal baseball team.

If by some bizarre twist of fate you have remained oblivious to the fantasy baseball revolution, you may want to hold on to your innocence and skip the remainder of this column. Any student and baseball fan that values free time or the ability to fully concentrate on the rigors of a Harvard education might want to think twice before casually committing to play in a fantasy baseball league. The result of such involvement will likely be a hopeless addiction that takes precedent over all else once that first pitch crosses the plate in early April, an addiction more powerful than caffeine (you’ll be up at 4 A.M. scouring free agents for a power bat to sub into your anemic infield) or narcotics (you’ve gotten high on Dodgers outfielder J.D. Drew’s monstrous home run power and continually draft him despite his penchant for injuries that cripple your team).

But, most likely, my words of warning are already too late. Certainly the imaginary game that was born among the literary elite has already taken irreversible root among the undergraduate population of one of America’s most elite universities. Dan Okrent, first public editor of The New York Times, thought up the cruel sport, which came to be named after the Manhattan restaurant, La Rotiss�rie Fran�aise, where he and his fellow New York cognoscenti (and members of the first-ever Roto league) gathered to lunch and talk baseball.

Indeed, Harvard’s intellectual climate helped bring about Okrent’s epiphany. According to Wall Street Journal reporter Sam Walker’s recent book “Fantasyland,” an authoritative dissection of what he appropriately calls “baseball’s lunatic fringe,” the first form of Rotisserie baseball began at Harvard way back in 1960. Bill Gamson, a research associate in social psychology at the Harvard School of Public Health, invented the “Baseball Seminar,” a precursor to today’s national phenomenon in which players spent an imaginary $100,000 in bidding for players who amassed points in four statistical categories. Okrent, as Walker reports, was inspired to create the modern incarnation of Rotisserie by helping a close friend from the University of Michigan, where Gamson moved from Harvard, make his bids for the “Seminar.”

So, the next time you find yourself letting the minutes slip away while you nervously monitor how Cubs starter Carlos Zambrano is faring in his outing on the west coast—for fantasy baseball is of course the most powerful of procrastination tools, the lazy college student’s best friend and his mortal enemy—remind yourself that you are taking part in a rich intellectual, literary tradition that has deep roots in the Harvard community.

Or, at least, that’s how I help justify my own hopeless obsession, but I’m afraid the key word in regards to that justification is not Rotisserie, but fantasy.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears every third week.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears every third week.