Customer Reviews

Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sam Walker's "Fantasyland" is a terrific book that will appeal to baseball fans, rotisserie league players and anyone who appreciates a great story beautifully told. Walker has the uncanny ability to make us root for him as he seeks to become a star rotisserie-league player (that's a fantasy baseball game, for those who don't follow this addictive hobby) using his insider's pull as a Wall Street Journal sportswriter. Walker is a hapless and hilarious everyman, with the kind of access sports fans dream of. Like a sports-minded Bill Bryson, Walker asks us to join him on his quixotic quest for a nutty kind of immortality. He's also the kind of writer it's a joy to read: lively, smart and self-effacing. Even if his rotisserie days could be hit and miss, Walker is a major new player on the literary front. First rate -- and you don't have to be a sports fan to love it.

Efficiency experts are always telling corporate boards of directors (such as at Enron, say), that the way to run a business is by the numbers.

Since the publication of Michael Lewis's MONEYBALL, various baseball executives have taken this philosophy to heart, and this book takes a sample season to show how the numbers are applied variously by the FANTASY BASEBALL experts, several of whom are employed to consult big league baseball clubs.

Sam Walker, baseball columnist for the Wall Street Journal, hired a numbers cruncher on the one side, and a traditional inside scout on the other, and he set about trying to win the TOUT WARS Rotisserie Baseball League, which included some of the nation's top "experts," lawyers, engineers, scholars, zen masters, data crunchers. Walker even hires an astrologer, just to see what she'd say (and whose baseball predictions he found "remarkably accurate").

The efficiency expert's baseball philosophy "is that human perceptions are, for the most part, garbage. When humans watch a baseball game, they give too much weight to first impressions, recent events, and unusual occurrences. They make causal connections when they don't exist, rely too heavily on existing theories, and give too much weight to evidence that confirms them."

"All human observers, the scouts included, are sort of like drunks in a bar brawl: their abilities are severely limited, but the more they indulge, the more confident they become."

But the trouble with numbers is that they do not measure everything and hence they also often lead management astray. Which of course is exactly what happens in the book, and it is a highly humorous ride, full of baseball lore and with many surprises.

This book may indeed become a movie (let Jim Carrey and Johnny Depp star). Many of those written about here are literary--such as Trace Wood (whose interests run to James Joyce), and such as pitcher Miguel Batista, poet and author of a detective novel to be published in the spring. I was inspired by this book to try my own hand at Rotisserie Baseball and put some of the inexpensive players in here on my team. Last night, Batista and the Diamondbacks beat Colorado and as I type this he leads the majors in strikeouts.

People who loved this book and Michael Lewis's MONEYBALL might also try CURVE BALL: BASEBALL, STATISTICS, AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE IN THE GAME by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book but I consider myself somewhat of a rotogeek and I'm not sure how much the casual baseball/sports fan would enjoy it. A significant part of the humor of the book was its ability to so accurately capture the highs and lows of watching "your" players perform (or not) over the course of several months. The author had the added benefit of being able to spend $50k traipsing around the country not only following his players but talking with them about the fact that they were on his fantasy team! Most of us dream of being able to tour around the country to *watch* the games and here he is chatting with the players. On top of that, he's in a fantasy league with the who's who of fantasy research, guys whose websites I pay money to read! He does a great job of bringing these individuals to life as well as relaying the impact of fantasy baseball on his career, his marriage, his ego, you name it. I found it to be an enjoyable ombination of shared experiences and lay person's dreams but I wonder if someone who doesn't do fantasy baseball could relate to many of the anecdotes and characters in the story.

This is a genuine, 5 star book. I'm a sports fan, especially baseball, but don't play fantasy sports. What I enjoyed was the great storytelling, details on his hands-on research process, humor, interesting characters (both players and others), and in-depth info on baseball. It's definitely worth the time to read and will make others wonder why you keep laughing out loud.

The book is very well written and entertaining even if you never played Fantasy Baseball. It's a nice contribution to the current debate between the traditional approach on baseball and the new SABRmetrics way of thinking the game

Fantasy baseball has become a billion dollar industry. Personally, I gave it up two years ago for some of the same reasons I've read that others have given it up. I got tired of going through box scores not to see whether my home town Tigers won or lost, but to see how many strikeouts Jeremy Bonderman had because I had picked him up late in my draft. At times, especially in 2003 when the score didn't matter, I was forced to actually root against the Tigers in favor of players on my fantasy team. I played in my first league in 1988, way before the Internet or even Microsoft Excel was used to track our league's standings.

"Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe" is a book detailing Wall Street Journal columnist Sam Walker's wild initiation into fantasy baseball. Instead of signing up for his work league, he decided to go all out and join one of the most prestigious expert leagues around, Tout Wars, which was started by Baseball Forecaster author Ron Shandler.

This was the funnest baseball book I've read in a while and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Walker pokes fun at his adversaries and himself throughout the book and he even hires a staff to help him out, including a person who specializes in the astrological evaluation of ball players. The chapter on the auction draft is priceless, and Walker pulls out every trick in the book to try to get a leg up on his opponents.

Along with being a fun story on his experiences in the league, the book is also about his struggle between objective analysis and statistical analysis. He did his own spring training scouting, but he also hired a statistician to help him evaluate players using advanced statistics. His media access to the players also makes for some interesting side stories. He has a great dialogue with David Ortiz (after trading him) and even goes as far as handing out team shirts to the players on his team. When he wondered whether to trade for Tigers pitcher Jason Johnson, he sends Tigers' pitching coach Bob Cluck an email asking him about Johnson's blister on his throwing hand. When he got the green light from Cluck, he pulled the trigger on the trade.

Overall, I found myself not wanting to put the book down. With experience in my past leagues (which also had auction drafts), I found myself having several "ah-ha" moments as well. A fantastic book, and very timely with March being the time most fantasy baseball drafts happen.

Only took one full day to finish. Recommended for anybody that plays the games, especially auction leagues. Good baseball book in general and should entertain anybody that likes baseball. Great storylines, well written. Definitely gets you in the mood for the upcoming auctions in 2006.

I'm an avid fantasy player and reader and this book captured two of my favorite hobbies and combined them into one: it's the equivalent of a Reese's Peanut Butter cup! Sam Walker's book chronicles his rookie year in an expert AL-roto league, and Sam is able to devote thousands of dollars into his pursuit of the championship. The book is an extremely funny look into the world of fantasy baseball, giving us a history of the game as well as keeping us up to date with the season in question. Walker's prose never slows, and the book is a winner.

Each year I enter into 4 or more fantasy baseball leagues, and devote countless hours studying teams, making trade offers, and looking for the next hot FA off the wire. This book almost makes me look sane!

Fantasy baseball was developed more than 20 years ago by a group of bored guys in the publishing field who decided they could do a better job of putting a winning team together than the jokers who actually do this sort of thing for a living.

The first group of intrepid souls, led by Daniel Okrent, named the invention "Rotisserie" baseball after the pub in which they used to meet. Since then, the concept has grown outrageously, both in variations on that first theme and number of participants.

What gives? Why would otherwise (relatively) sane people (mostly middle-aged white males) waste their time on this stuff? That's what Sam Walker, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, seeks to discover in FANTASYLAND: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe.

I must say, as big a baseball fan as I am, I've never "gotten" fantasy baseball. The idea of agonizing over your real favorite players and/or ballclubs when tangible outcomes actually count for something is tough enough. To work up the same sweat for an ersatz team just strikes me as a bit silly. I'm just saying. Obviously there are plenty of folks who think otherwise: A quick look on Google reveals more than 38 million mentions for the search term "fantasy baseball."

These armchair general managers spend countless hours (and in some cases dollars) to choose their players in hopes of beating similar hobbyists in hundreds, if not thousands, of leagues around the world. Some play for money, some merely for bragging rights. The idea isn't just to put together an all-star team, but a more realistic ensemble, including second stringers.

Walker picked a particularly hardcore brand of fantasy baseball called Tout Wars, meant for the best of the best. To that end, he hired two assistants to help in his research and statistical analysis, bought numerous reference works, and traveled to spring training sites in both Florida and Arizona in an effort to get the inside dope from players, managers and front office personnel. He even hired a baseball astrologist to see how the stars aligned as he prepared to choose his roster of players.

"Rotisserie baseball may be the most ridiculous duplication of effort in the history of human beings, but that's hardly a concern," Walker writes, as he gets dragged deeper into the unholy circle.

He presents the 11 other team owners in his Tout War league with a combination of respect and head-shaking. What would compel these educated, otherwise accomplished gents to occupy themselves with such a time-consuming, often frustrating, and ultimately futile hobby?

Walker also depicts the desperation involved in seeking edges over the competition, rooting for your players, railing against the real-life decisions managers make that affect your roster. One observation: The line between fantasy and reality blurs from time to time. For example, who do you root for when one of your top batters faces one of your pitching aces? Or when two of your pitchers face off against each other?
You have to give him credit, though: he certainly dives into his subject, going through absurd lengths to find who would complement his team the best, planning drafting strategies, and even psyching out his opponents by methods that are, let's just say, less than professional.

Walker claims to have spent thousands of dollars to research and select his players. (His team finished eighth out of the 12 teams) One would imagine the other owners are similarly passionate, but what he fails to do is show the reader what makes these guys tick. Why do they go through such seemingly nutty lengths?

Overall, FANTASYLAND is full of fun and self-deprecation. But if Walker isn't careful, one can easily see him as a character in another book, THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION, INC., J. HENRY WAUGH, PROP., the popular Robert Coover novel in which the protagonist loses grips with reality as the fantasy takes a firmer and firmer grasp on his life.

--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

If you are a fantasy baseball geek you MUST read this book. This will not make your team better or you a better manager but if you have fantasized about going up to players and managers to ask them about your team this book will tell you what would happen. The author did everything you have thought about in draft-prep from hiring staff to do some research to full-fledged scouting trips to Florida and Arizona. Many managers in my league have read this book and all are glad they did.