Roto Rage: A Look Back at 1984

The year was 1984, and I was a freshman in high school. A guy in one of my classes had bought a book called Rotisserie Baseball and was trying to get some people together to play. So he recruited a bunch of avid baseball fans, and after buying and reading the book, we all got together in an apartment complex rec room right around Opening Day and started the auction.

Information back then was a little different from the way it is today. Bill James' Baseball Abstract was just gathering steam but there were no player projections to speak of, as there was no real market for that sort of thing. Prospects were mostly a matter of guesswork. If Baseball America was around, none of us knew about it. The minor-league scouting process consisted of scouring the old Green and Red books (I don't even remember what they were really called), and maybe Maybe Mazeroski, looking for guys who had good stats. By good stats I mean hit for a good batting average and/or stole a lot of bases. Age was not a consideration. To give you an idea, we each drafted four rookies that year. Mine were Steve Farr, RHP, Cle; Joel Skinner, C, ChA; Steve Lubratich, INF, Ana; and Dwight Taylor, OF, KC. Farr ended up having a decent career, the others didn't do much.

During the season, there was no Baseball Weekly; there was only The Sporting News and an upstart newspaper called USA Today. There was no Baseball Tonight on ESPN, and no World Wide Web. There was little talk of things like command of the strike zone for hitters or pitch counts. The point is, we were operating in a much less sophisticated era of baseball fandom. For the younger among you, this might sound like one of Dante's planes of hell, but believe me, the game was still great. And Rotisserie Baseball, true to its claim, was the best thing to happen to the game since the game itself. At least it was as far as we were concerned.

We played an AL-only league and drafted 23 big-league players for a total of $2.60 (we were, after all, only high school kids). [The franchise fee was more than $2.60 but we can't recall the exact amount; gettin' old we are. --Ed.] I don't remember my entire team, but I do recall having Lance Parrish (35 cents), Toby Harrah, Alan Trammell, Kirk Gibson, LaMarr Hoyt, Milt Wilcox, Jim Beattie, Rollie Fingers, and the inimitable Ken Schrom play significant roles, with Otis Nixon and Ray Searage also fitting into the mix. I believe that was the year I also released Joe Carter to pick up Brian Dayett (which sounds bad until you realize that a year later, in an NL league, I chose Chris James in the minor-league draft over some kid named Bonds).

I finished in the money my first season, either third or fourth out of either 10 or 12 teams--my memory has dulled somewhat since then. But I was hooked. And I played Roto for several years before giving it up about a decade ago for more sophisticated fantasy and simulation games (my longstanding addiction of course being to Scoresheet). Playing these games has enhanced my enjoyment of a sport I had already come to love. And it has brought me into contact with some very cool people over the years. For one thing, I met the best man at my wedding in that league back in 1984. Dan and I are still battling each other in fantasy baseball nearly 20 years later. (And, he is quick to remind me, he won that initial season, with the likes of Dave Righetti, Bob Stanley, and the late Dan Quisenberry in the bullpen; with Charlie Liebrandt and Steve Balboni playing key roles as free agent pickups; and despite getting only 46 at-bats from Paul Molitor, who seemed to have been a bargain at 4 cents.)

What a long, strange trip it's been. And it's fun to look back on those early days of Roto ball, when we genuinely believed that Vince Coleman was a star because he so utterly dominated one relatively insignificant aspect of the game. And it's amazing to see how far baseball analysis has come since then, in large part thanks to the minds of guys like Bill James and Pete Palmer, among others, but also because of the need for deeper information by Roto junkies such as myself. I like to do a little research every now and then, but it's never as sophisticated or far-reaching as stuff being done by the pros over at Baseball Primer or Baseball Prospectus or on any of the various newsgroups. But I like to think that my hunger for better information has helped to fuel such research over the years and helped to make us all better fans of a truly remarkable game.