Like thousands of other Utahns, Rick Spohn loves baseball. Like most avid fans, Spohn has a favorite team that he naturally pays special attention to. Each day when the newspaper comes to his doorstep, he's anxious to look at the box scores to see how his team did the night before.
But Spohn's favorite team isn't the Yankees, Mets or Dodgers - it's the Sacramento Prospectors. And he's not just an ordinary fan, he's the owner of the ballclub.The Pros, as they're know in California's capital city, are led by veterans Andy Van Slyke and Bobby Bonilla along with a corps of talented youngsters like Jeff Bagwell, Moises Alou and Eric Karros. Spohn is hoping this will be the year his team goes to another American Series.
"The guys have been playing well so far. Hopefully we have a chance to win our first world championship since '86," said the Pros' owner, who's working on an MBA from Westminster College and is the East Coast sales manager for a Utah based computer company when he's not dealing with the day-to-day operations of running a baseball franchise.
The Sacramento Pros are members of the 13 year-old United States Baseball League, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City of all places. The USBL owes its existence to the Rotisserie League, which began 14 years ago by a group of baseball fans in a Manhattan restaurant called La Rostisserie Francaise.
Since the inaugural 10-member Rotisserie League season in 1980, millions of baseball fans nationwide have become major league team owners and/or general managers.
While the teams, like the Sacramento Prospectors, and leagues, like the USBL, may really just be fantasies, for an estimated two million Americans, fantasy baseball in the summer of 1993 is a reality.
George Steinbrenner, the real owner of the New York Yankees, once said, "It's every boy's dream to own a baseball team." Thanks to Daniel Okrent and friends, that dream is at least partially being fulfilled with regularity now.
Okrent, the managing editor of Life magazine, is the father of Rotisserie, or fantasy, baseball. In 1980 he developed a game for would-be baseball general managers using the real statistics of major league players in eight categories (four pitching, four batting). Like the real game, each player could only be on one team and all the field positions had to be covered.
The original 10 owners held an auction in April to field their roster positions with $260 the maximum that could be spent per 23-player team. That meant that the average player salary was about $11, but the big stars of the day went for much more. Okrent spent $36 to get the Reds' George Foster, for instance. Each team picked nicknames, developed logos and "hired" managers. At the end of baseball season in September, the first-place team received half the money from the pot with the other 50 percent divided three ways to the rest of the top four finishers.
Never in his wildest dreams did Okrent believe his game would catch on as it has. "This has just gotten to be nuts," the founding father of Rotisserie told USA Today this year. "I'm with the people who say, `Get a life.' "
Still, Okrent's Fenokees are in the middle of their 14th consecutive season in the original Rotisserie League.
Fantasy baseball is like smoking - once you get started, it's a hard habit to break.
Randy Hollis has been in an Ogden-based Rotisserie League for six years using American League players. This year he joined a second fantasy league using National League stars.
"My wife doesn't know I joined a second league, and she better not find out or she'll kill me," Hollis said.
While some fantasy leaguers are more compulsive than others, dissecting the box scores from daily newspapers is the bare minimum a winning owner must do. Others a bit more obsessed may schedule evenings around ESPN's Baseball Tonight and Sports Center. Still others call the actual major league teams to find information they can't get from TV, newspapers or magazines.
"I hate that word," Bob Pellegrino, a Yankee's public relations official, said of "Rotisserie." "They start calling at 9 in the morning. `How is this guy?' `Why isn't that guy playing?' If a guy struck out three times the night before, they want to know why. They drive me nuts. And there's more of them every year."
Author Peter Golenbock, who wrote a book on the strategies of Rotisserie, relates a story about how an owner in his league called another owner with a trade proposition, but the deal needed to be done in a hurry. It seems the owner proposing the trade had left his new bride in the honeymoon suite to call from a pay phone so she wouldn't know his priorities.
Valerie Salembier, publisher of Family Circle magazine, was the only woman in Okrent's original Rotisserie League. After becoming completely obsessed with the game, she quit cold turkey after the 1984 season, vowing never to do business with her fellow founders in the real world. "They're garbage. They'd sell their mothers for a promising rookie," she said.
Rotisserie players come from various walks of life. "This thing crosses all lines," said Paul White, editor of USA Today's Baseball Weekly. "We are talking big people involved in this. CEO's, doctors and lawyers all play."
There is one distinguishing trait, however, as fantasy owners are almost exclusively male.
Bryant Gumbel, the host of the Today show, is among the Rotisserie-obsessed men in the country. "The sheer pleasure of Rotisserie Baseball comes from proving to everybody - yourself included - just how baseball smart you really can be," Gumbel once wrote. "When I own a player, he takes on a new and magnified importance in my life. Let one of my guys go 0 for 4 and I'm at least as upset as he is."
Tom Werner, the producer of such television hits as "The Cosby Show" and "Roseanne," was so addicted to Rotisserie he headed up a group of investors and bought the real-life San Diego Padres. After he sold off many of the Padres' higher-priced talent in the off-season, many San Diego fans wish he'd go back to just being a fantasy owner.
Meat Loaf, the rock singer and actor, uses a laptop computer to keep track of his Rotisserie team. He reportedly worked on his fantasy-league draft so much this spring that he didn't have time to do his 1992 income taxes so he filed for an extension.
Robert Olen Butler was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in fiction May 24, but he told Baseball Weekly he'd be more thrilled if he won his Rotisserie League. "I found out about the Pulitzer Prize on Tuesday morning and that afternoon I still made sure to stop and check my American League stats," Butler said.
Not all celebrities who adore baseball have given in to the Rotisserie epidemic, however. NBC sportscaster Bob Costas said on his weekly radio show, "I just don't get (the fascination with fantasy leagues). I don't need an extra reason to look through the box scores in the newspaper each morning. It's just something I've done since I was a kid."
Conservative columnist and baseball nut George Will has said, "fantasy baseball is to baseball what Monopoly is to capitalism."
One of the major concerns baseball purists have with fantasy leagues is that they corrupt team loyalties.
For instance, if an owner considers himself a Dodgers fan, but the Giants' Matt Williams is his third baseman, whom does he cheer for when Los Angeles plays San Francisco? The choice becomes even more complex if Williams comes to the plate with the winning baserunners in scoring position.
"It's a dilemma when your players play against your favorite teams," veteran Rotisserie owner Jim Burton said. "Usually I end up cheering for the players on my (fantasy) team, though."
Another problem for Rotisserie owners is helping their significant others understand why otherwise sane adults are so engulfed in childish games. Many girlfriends and wives see it as a waste of time.
"Women don't seem to have any concept as to why this is so much fun, but then again most men don't understand why women like to shop so much," said Hollis, whose Throbers have won two consecutive titles. "My wife gets disgusted with the amount of time I put into it. Since I'm the commissioner I get a lot of phone calls with people telling me about their trades or wanting to know if a player is eligible at a certain position and stuff like that. When I get off the phone sometimes I realize I've been on for 40 minutes when I could have been out mowing the yard or doing something constructive."
Not all wives dislike their husbands' involvement in Rotisserie games, however. Janice Mackintosh, whose husband is an owner, believes that unlike women, men have difficulty calling one another to chat.
"Men need some sort of excuse for having contact," Mackintosh said. "(Fantasy baseball) gives them a reason to call a buddy and talk for two hours about players they want to trade. It promotes an intimacy among men they wouldn't get any other way, but it is all packaged so the guys can say they are just talking about sports."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Basic Rules of Rotisserie League Baseball
- 12 owners select teams from either American or National League rosters.
- Free-agent draft or auction takes place on first weekend after opening day in the majors with a maximum of $260 spent per team.
- 23 players are taken: nine pitchers, five outfielders, two catchers, one second baseman, one shortstop, one shortstop or second baseman, one third baseman, one first baseman, one first baseman or third baseman and a utility player(NL) or designated hitter(AL).
- Cumulative team performance is tabulated in four offensive and four pitching categories:
1. Composite batting average
2. Total home runs
3. Total RBI
4. Total stolen bases
5. Composite ERA
6. Total pitching wins
7. Pitching ratio (walks + hits / innings pitched)
8. Total saves
- In each of the eight categories, teams are ranked from first to last. For example, in a 12-team league, the first place team in batting average receives 12 points, the second place team receives 11 points, the third place team 10, on down to one point for the last place team.
- The team with the most total points at the end of the major league season in September wins the pennant.
- Prize money is distributed as follows:
50% for first place
25% for second place
15% for third place
10% for fourth place
Source: The Official Rotisserie League Baseball Book
Starting lineup
Player values of an average starting lineup for a 1993 Rotisserie team using national league players with a $260 maximum 23-man roster.
RIGHT-HANDED PITCHER: Andy Benes $20.00
LEFT-HANDED PITCHER: Steve Avery 15.00
RELIEVER: Randy Myers 9.00
FIRST BASE: Jeff Bagwell 24.00
SECOND BASE: Bip Roberts 16.00
THIRD BASE: Steve Buechele 8.00
CATCHER: Tom Pagnozzi 6.00
SHORTSTOP: Wil Cordero 7.00
LEFT FIELD: Barry Bonds 40.00
CENTER FIELD: Derek Bell 12.00
RIGHT FIELD: Sammy Sosa 9.00