Fantasy baseball

Fantasy baseball is a game in which people manage rosters of league baseball players, either online or in a physical location. The participants compete against one another using those players' real life statistics to score points.

Materials in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library show that Kerouac (1922–69) 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 was completely fictitious, with made up players and statistics. At the Library from November 2007 to 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.

In 1961, another early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer 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 20 KB in computer memory and was entirely self-contained.

Other early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball". One of the best-known was APBA, which in 1951 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 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 Times, 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.

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