Fantasy Baseball - History

History

An early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer in 1961 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron, and distributed for several years by the IBM Corporation. It allowed two teams to play one another using random number generation and player statistics to determine a game's outcome, including a play by play description. In the fall of 1961 Rege Cordic, a KDKA (Pittsburgh) radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program. The game was coded for a computer with only 20K in computer memory and was entirely self-contained.

Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called chickens. One of the best-known was Strat-o-Matic, which in 1963 began publishing a game containing customized baseball cards of Major League Baseball players with their stats from past seasons. Participants could then re-create previous seasons using the game rules and the statistics, or compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against each other. The EMSBL (East Meadow Strat-O-Matic Baseball League) based in East Meadow, N.Y., founded in 1972, is believed to be the oldest continuously playing fantasy baseball league in the world. The league's 2012 season marked the league's 41st consecutive year of play.

The landmark tabletop game Pursue the Pennant (now DYNASTY League Baseball) debuted in 1985 and took baseball board games to much more realistic levels of play; it incorporated ball park effects, clutch hitting and pitching, and many other nuances of the game. Fantasy baseball was the theme of Robert Coover's 1968 darkly comic novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which dealt with themes of creationism and playing god.

The first public open fantasy baseball game, Dugout Derby, was developed in 1989 by Lee Marc, Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos of Phoneworks who teamed with a West Coast Ad Agency (Wakeman & deForest) to launch the game in twelve of the largest local newspapers across the country. Papers that offered Dugout Derby included the LA Time, Chicago Sun Times, and NY Post. Archives of Dugout Derby are available in most public libraries. Dugout Derby allowed readers to create a team of major league players, earn stats for those players based on actual performance, trade those players on a daily basis, and accrue points in an effort to compete against one another to win prizes.

Copious materials accessible since 2006 in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library show that American writer Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) played his own form of fantasy baseball starting quite young and continued developing and playing this perhaps private version of fantasy baseball during most of his life. His version of fantasy baseball, however, was completely fictitious, with made up players and statistics. At the Library from November 2007 – February 2008, an exhibition on Kerouac's life and works includes several display cases of Kerouac's highly detailed fantasy baseball records, including charts, sketches, and notes.