Land of Fantasy
By SteveBased on a strong recommendation from fellow baseball obsessive Bill Roper of Flagship Studios, I read the book Fantasyland by Sam Walker a couple of a weeks ago on a single cross-country plane ride.
Not that I’ve sampled everything, but this is the Moneyball of fantasy baseball. Which is to say, it’s a fantastic story that’s ostensibly about baseball but reveals many truths about other things.
(Like Moneyball isn’t about building a team on the cheap using slow white guys with high OBPs; it’s about assessing your limitations and exploiting market deficiencies. It’s also about using data in more meaningful and useful ways, even if they challenge the conventional wisdom. This is useful advice for any business or personal endeavor.)
In Fantasyland, Sam Walker decides to play rotisserie baseball for the first time in his life. Only he doesn’t just join a Yahoo league; he enters Tout Wars, a cutthroat competition between guys who make a career out of analyzing stats (like Ron Shandler and others from big-name roto websites). As a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal—and presumably with an advance for this book—he decides to use his journalism credentials and a fair amount of cash to get ahead of his stats-only competitors.
He starts by spending all of spring training talking to players, coaches, and scouts. As he starts to assemble his team, he pulls in two budding stats guys—one a NASA scientist, the other a researcher, and both with dreams of landing with a big league team—to further assist him. Walker’s access to players produces some funny and sad moments. There are some players who want nothing to do with roto people, so Walker’s questions are dismissed outright (usually in a nicely profane fashion). There’s Doug Mientkiewicz wondering why anyone would pick him in a roto league—and he’s right, he’s a terrible roto player—and David Ortiz making fun of Walker for trading him for Alfonso Soriano. The latter move was perfectly rational, in the sense that Soriano delivers stolen bases in addition to other counting stats, but went south when he got injured (and Ortiz continued being a monster). Then there’s the story of Jacque Jones, a non-stathead player who Walker drafts because, well, he talked to Jones and found him to be an interesting, smart, and emotional player who seemed genuinely upset that he wasn’t performing up to his ability. (And it’s later revealed why, and it’s a touching moment in the book.)
There’s some ground that’s covered better in Moneyball, such as the battles between stats guys and traditional scouts, of “intangibles” versus “OPS/OBP/WHIP” and myriad other acronyms. But as Walker’s plans unravel, the book does an amazing job pointing out how obsessiveness can drain all of the fun and joy out of being a fan of anything. Whether you’re into your favorite sports team, a band, a TV show, or some game, you can immerse yourself too far into the minutia and detail. And once you do that, you risk never coming back.
I wonder if this is how a lot of people see games, particularly MMOs, and whether it too drains out the joy you can get just from exploring a new and alien world (I’m currently digging Lord of the Rings Online, ignoring the mechanics and systems and just taking in the amazing representation of Tolkien’s world).
In the case of baseball stat guys, are they still able to see baseball as this beautiful ballet played out on a glorious field of green by a bunch of Neanderthals, or if it’s just a bunch of numbers?
April 17th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Interesting post. I’ll move the book up my queue. If you are interested in obsession and fantasy baseball, I’ll recommend Robert Coover’s “The Universal Baseball Association”, written before the roto revolution and all about the line between fantasy, reality and madness. It’s also a religious allegory, but it has added value for the baseball fan.
I was in a fantasy league for a couple of years in grad school, but I dropped out because it stopped being fun very quickly. You end up cheering for 1-0 no-hitters when two of your starters face each other for no other reason than it will raise the trade value of one of them.
April 17th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
I’ll check out that book.
I’ve been playing Out of the Park Baseball 2007 pretty obsessively since it came out. It’s fantastic, and I think that by using fake players, you can better separate “real” versus “fantasy.”
April 21st, 2007 at 1:03 pm
But as Walker’s plans unravel, the book does an amazing job pointing out how obsessiveness can drain all of the fun and joy out of being a fan of anything.
I have an amazing talent. I can throw critical disappointment to the wind while watching a movie or playing a game (although I still enjoy an objectively masterful work any day of the week) up to a certain point that Episode 2.0 crossed over, but the other two prequel Star Wars movies did not. Then I can talk about them while I’m not viewing them in extremely critical ways. Then I go back to watching, and I toss out those critical inadequacies. In fact, I compensate for them now that I know what to look for.
April 21st, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I’ll make that more coherent:
I can enjoy things while I’m viewing/playing them, but hate them while I’m not. My thresholds (while not unreasonable) are substantial in this ability.