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History
Home » Fantasy Sports » Fantasy Sports: An Overview » HistoryPosted by Your Guide on May 2, 2006 8:37 PM
Fantasy sports have been around for a number of years, but the recent explosion of the Internet has expanded their influence significantly. The beginning of it all was fantasy baseball, which was originally called rotisserie baseball. What a funny name! It was called rotisserie baseball because the group of men who invented it did so at a rotisserie restaurant! They would select current major league players, follow their daily performance and keep track of their statistics, thus deciding who the “winner” was.
This took on several different formats over the years, and eventually people began playing other sports in this way. Football is now the most popular of the fantasy sports in America, with baseball a close second. As you can see, the name “fantasy sports” was earned because this was being played by a group of people who could never play the actual sport, but could only “fantasize” about it. It allowed fans to live vicariously through the real players.
In those early days, fantasy sports required a tremendous amount of time and effort, as someone had to track the statistics and performances of each player. Today, the Internet has made this a much simpler task, and fantasy sports continue to grow in popularity.
A gentleman from Lawrence, Kansas, is generally credited with the current popularity of fantasy sports. Bill James, a tremendously knowledgeable baseball historian, has written a number of books and articles about the statistical beauty of baseball, and statistics are what make fantasy sports function. His involvement in the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) has also been extremely influential in the world of fantasy baseball, and has even spawned a new type of statistical appreciation: sabermetrics (“saber” coming from the acronym for the research organization, SABR).
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