A fantasy sport is a game where participants can manage imaginary teams of almost every major sport. It’s not as easy as it seem though, like playing some online or video game where you get to control players, in fantasy sports the real performance of the players you select is the basis for scoring allowing you to create your very own NBA celebrity all star game. During a match with another fantasy sport team, the actual statistics of the individual real players in the opposing fantasy teams are calculated to determine a winner. Just where did this increasingly popular sport originate and who came up with the idea in the first place?
The birth of Fantasy sports as we now know it can be dated around twenty five years back in time to Rotisserie League Baseball in the 1980’s with the magazine writer Daniel Orkent mostly recognized for being the first New York Times public editor. Daniel learned the concept of selecting players from real teams and running a competition from his professor at the University of Michigan, Bob Sklar who in turn got the idea from his colleague, William Gamson. The two professors treated the game as a hobby and Orkent, who was then a student, brought the idea with him. He and his friends used to meet and play at New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise, thus the name “Rotisserie League Baseball”. Their game was far more challenging as the players statistics they based the scores on weren’t from previous seasons but from the ongoing season allowing the players to make predictions on the outcome of the players. The same concept is employed until now to predict NBA celebrity all star game winners. Since Daniel was a journalist, the media showed interest in the sport and soon a special column was included in newspapers.
After Orkents’ popularization of the hobby, more experts emerged like John Benson, Alex Patton and Ron Shandler. Patton published a book containing dollar values that was included in the USA Today Baseball Weekly's fantasy annual all through the 1990s entitled “Patton's 1989 Fantasy Baseball League Price Guide”. Shandler too published “Baseball Super STATS" book in November 1986 and Benson became a very popular figure for his development of the first draft-software stimulation program in 1989.
While fantasy sports was originally applied to baseball, it now encompasses all most of the commonly played sports including basketball, soccer and hokey. With the popularity of the internet in the 1990’s, fantasy sports since become more sophisticated allowing players to easily compute statistics online. Not only is it become a hobby but because of its growth, many businesses have emerged to form the multi-million industry, as the president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSDA) put it:
"It used to be thought of as (something for) just geeks and hard core fans. But this isn't a small closet hobby anymore. This son of b***h is a big, big industry, and it's all due to the Internet."