Rotisserie League 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 national fantasy baseball competition, Dugout Derby, was developed in 1989 by Lee Marc, Robert Barbiere and Brad Wendkos of Phoneworks who teamed with west coast ad agency (Wakeman & deForest) to launch the game in 1990 in a number of newspapers throughout the country including the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Tampa Bay Times, Morning Call, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun Times. Archives of Dugout Derby are available online and in most public libraries . Dugout Derby is what current Daily Fantasy Sports are modeled after being the first game to allow large numbers of participants to compete against one another for prizes. Most importantly, Dugout Derby was the first game to convert games statistics to a basic scoring system. Participants created a team of major league players, earned stats (converted to points) for those players based on actual performance, traded those players on a daily basis, and accrued points while competing against one another to win prizes. The group filed and was awarded US Patents 5,018,736A and 5,263,723A, for Interactive Game System and Method; Interactive Contest System.

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