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How Some Bored, Baseball-Obsessed Journalists Started a Billion Dollar Industry in a New York Chicken Shop

We trace the rise of fantasy sports from the 1980s until now.
Ashley Goodall

This article is presented in partnership with Draftstars

In the winter of 1979, young journalist Dan Okrent was self-employed, living in the country, and feeling cut-off from society. "[There were] a lot of long, lonely hours on those long, cold New England nights when the sun goes down about an hour after it comes up," he recalls in the documentary Silly Little Game (2010).

"I don't know, I was missing baseball."

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It wasn't just the action. He missed obsessing over the numbers and the details of the game, the precision of a sport where every single act is recorded—but in the dead of winter, there was no outlet for this obsession. Then, "like an opium dream", an idea came to him in the middle of the night.

Okrent envisioned a new game; a game of numbers and statistics, auctions and trades, knowledge and analysis. It was a reimagining of America's favourite pastime that would place the fan, not the franchise, at its core. This game would take the spectator beyond merely watching the games and studying the box scores. It would allow them to possess the game, to own a piece of it, without having to spend the millions required to actually own a professional sports team.

Okrent began to pore over box scores and almanacs to determine the key ingredients that made a good baseball team., He decided on eight statistical categories to represent those elements, including a new statistic he invented called WHIP. He went about recruiting other baseball fans he knew in New York, pitching his invention, throwing down the challenge to prove who amongst them was the smartest baseball fan in the room. And so it came to pass in the early spring of 1980, a group of magazine editors, journalists, illustrators, publishers, college administrators—various people stuck in jobs filled with long hours—gathered in a terrible chicken restaurant in New York called La Rotisserie Française and created the first fantasy sports league: 'Rotisserie League Baseball'.

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They didn't know it at the time, but they were laying down the foundations for a phenomenon that would permeate nearly every major professional sports league and change the nature of sports fandom forever. "Those guys just sat down at that restaurant and came up with something fairly perfect, instantly fun and instantly recognisable, and instantly challenging," Marc Potts of the Washington Post explains in Silly Little Game.

The original team owners soon discovered that fantasy sport was more than just a pastime; it became an obsession. "It got much, much worse when I began to do daily stats and I did that simply out of personal obsession," remembers Okrent in the documentary. "It was awful," he says, pausing for a moment before adding, "It wasn't awful. I loved it."

Original Rotisserie League participants and co-owners of The Getherswag Goners, Peter Gethers and Glenn Wagonner, remember how quickly the game took over their lives. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Wagonner recalls one night in particular when he and Gethers had spent hours relentlessly talking strategy, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend at the time. "Finally, she tapped me on the shoulder and asked, 'Were you planning on having sex with Peter tonight?' That ended the conversation with Gethers."

News of this game spread first through word of mouth, then through articles and books published by the original owners, before other journalists picked up on the trend with little else to cover during the 1981 MLB strike. "Because several of us were in the media, we got a lot of publicity that first year. We were on The Today Show, there was a piece about us in the New York Times [which Okrent later went on to become the first public editor of]," Okrent said, speaking with the Boston Globe.

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As a result of this coverage, fantasy sports began to develop into an underground subculture in a similar fashion, and along a similar timeframe, as role playing games did in the 1980s. Roto leagues were like D&D but for sports. "The next big leap was the arrival of the Internet. That was the thing that made it truly widespread and deep in the culture," Okrent told the Boston Globe. "It became so easy to play and the stats were there and you could follow your teams really closely and people built websites around it.''

The mid-90s—which saw a popularisation of the internet and increased access to live stats—marked a meteoric rise of fantasy sports, in particular for NFL fantasy leagues. In 2002, the NFL found that fantasy players were watching 1.8 hours more football than the average fan. "This is the first time we've been able to demonstrate specifically that fantasy play drives TV viewing," said then-NFL senior vice president Chris Russo, heralding the embrace of fantasy sports by the professional leagues after years of indifference or suspicion. By 2005 the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) reported that 12.6 million adults in the US played fantasy sports and that 85 per cent (8.3 million) took part in fantasy football.

Over the past two decades, there have been two major developments that have helped push the growth of fantasy sports to new heights. The first has been the arrival of smartphones, which have equipped players with the ability to monitor their teams and stats in real-time and on the go. The second has been the more recent emergence of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS). Like traditional fantasy sports, DFS players compete against each other by drafting a team of players from a league and the statistical performance of those players in their actual games are converted into points for the fantasy league. The difference with the DFS format is that all players are available to all teams, unlike traditional fantasy leagues where each player can only be owned by one team. While traditional fantasy leagues typically run over the course of the entire sports season, DFS leagues typically run over short periods; usually the games happen on a particular night or weekend.

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"You don't have to spend hours doing research and messing around with trades; it's just pick your team and go," Brad, a DFS player from Perth, tells VICE Sports. "You can play more by instinct because if you're wrong, you can start fresh the next weekend."

With the introduction of this short-term format, participation numbers have skyrocketed. The FSTA found that nearly 75 million people in the US—or nearly 1 in 4 people—played some form of fantasy football last season. "There has never been a bigger change in our industry than what's happened with DFS over the past two or two and a half years," FSTA President Paul Charchian told VICE Sports. This rapid increase in player numbers has translated into a rapid increase in prize money. According to a study cited in the New York Times, daily gamers generated $2.6 billion in entry fees last year and it's expected that figure will grow to $14.4 billion by 2020. Of course, this means there have been those one-in-a-million stories of people coming out on top in a very big way. Jonathan Bales in Philadelphia, for example, is a classic example of a crazy success story. He went from depositing $50 into his account to quitting his day job to play DFS full time, which he's been doing since 2013. "It's a game that, if you're smart and do a lot of research and you're dedicated to it, you can make money for sure," Bales told Tech Insider. "It's very similar to poker. But it's a game of skill. The best players win again and again over the long run."

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Here in Australia, while the numbers are more difficult to quantify, there's been a similar growth rate in people playing fantasy sports. A poll of 6000 AFL fans conducted by Swinburne University last year showed that around 12 per cent played some form of fantasy sports, which is the equivalent of about 650,000 people nationally. "For me, it just makes something I like more exciting," Donnie, who plays fantasy NBA and NFL, tells VICE Sports.

One of the side effects of the rapid growth of fantasy sports over the past decade has been the rise of more analytically savvy, knowledgeable fan bases. As more fans deep dive into individual and team stats, there has been a sharp rise in the use of objective statistical analysis to prove points and drive debate in the sports community, as opposed to the old guard's reliance on gut feelings and intangible qualities like 'being clutch'. Player contracts are now evaluated not just through the lens of past production but with regression models and advanced metrics like Win Shares. Front offices that don't employ sabermetricians and analytics departments are ridiculed and derided: the Los Angeles Lakers were infamously the only NBA team not to have a representative at the 2013 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which has become a sporting analytics mecca in recent years. It left them open to vicious mockery the next offseason when they signed a 35-year-old Kobe Bryant coming off an Achilles tear to a two-year, $48.5 million extension. The current Moneyball landscape is no country for old GMs.

Even the athletes understand how fantasy sports have changed the nature of sports fandom: WNBA legend Sue Bird noted in the Players Tribune earlier this year that, "Fantasy brings fans into the game—it's participatory. By caring about stats and performance, you learn about individual players. Caring about the players themselves grows fan investment into the sport itself." Dan Okrent agrees with the effect fantasy has had, saying it speaks to "anybody who believes that he or she can run the team better than the real people doing it. In our hearts, we're all general managers."

The rise of fantasy sports has come with the rise of the analytical sports fan, those who try to objectively quantify the complex interactions that happen on the field and the court to identify which players are truly great and which are all flash and no substance. In a similar way to the eventual acceptance of the analytics community by grizzled old-timers of the sports community, fantasy sports has earned its place at the table of fandom. Some might argue that too much of a focus on the individual player and their statistical accomplishments reduces the experience of the game to a bunch of numbers. On the other hand, it can be said that millions of people are becoming more informed about, and invested in, various leagues and codes across the globe—and fantasy sports has been their introduction.

This article is presented in partnership with Draftstars.