Books on Fantasy Baseball - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times
Don't have time to read The Mind of Bill James or Fantasyland?
Act like us faux intellectuals and read the review in The New York Times Book Review!
(If I get around to it, maybe I'll give my review of Fantasyland.)
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Books on Fantasy Baseball
I'll Manage
Review by HUGO LINDGREN
Published: June 4, 2006
DO you do fantasy? A fella could get punched for asking a question like that, but when a male colleague whispered it to me once as we stood on the outskirts of a meeting, I knew what he meant. He merely wanted to know if I play fantasy, a k a rotisserie, baseball, a game that unites thousands of American men in a time-wasting exercise of epic proportion. It works like this: A bunch of guys carve up major league rosters to form their own baseball teams, then use the statistics of those players to determine who has the better team over the course of a full season. It sounds harmless enough, but leads naturally to excess. Fantasy baseball has been known to supersede art, literature, nourishment, personal hygiene, parenthood and sex in the lives of its players, turning them into pitiful bores who take their laptops to bed because they can't sleep until they know the results of the West Coast games. And that's a mild case.
Fantasy baseball has flourished as the game itself has been displaced as the national sport. Football left it in the dust years ago, and even auto racing has roared past. But while those sports inspire devotional mass followings, they don't engage people's brains the way baseball does. If football has won our hearts (and certainly our adrenal glands), baseball still owns our minds. And one of the main reasons is the wealth of statistics the game throws off. The data are studied and crunched and conjectured and argued over, creating a kind of parallel universe that these two books provide a window into.
"The Mind of Bill James," by Scott Gray, is about baseball's leading intellectual. James is not a fantasy guy per se, but his work springs from similar obsessions. He emerged in the late 1970's by self-publishing an annual polemic called the "Baseball Abstract." James didn't know a thing about actually playing the game. He couldn't hit a ball off a tee. But as a nerd who'd strayed into the land of the jocks ("I just happened to discover baseball cards at the right time," he tells Gray), he set out to prove his mastery of it through writing.
James saw things about baseball that others didn't. People thought the batting average that flashed on the TV screen when a hitter came to the plate automatically told them something concrete about how good he was. Nope, James said, batting averages can be a mirage. You want to gauge a hitter's contributions; you need to look at his on-base percentage and slugging percentage. And then you have to compensate for the ballpark he's playing in. Of course, it also matters whether the pitcher he's facing is left-handed or right-handed. Sometimes it matters whether it's a day game or a night game, or if it's early in the season or late.
James dissected baseball. He took the game apart, evaluated all its pieces, then put the thing back together, rendering it more comprehensible and beautiful. He was funny and never reduced baseball to mere numbers — he had his sentimental favorites, like Amos Otis and pretty much anybody who wore a Kansas City Royals uniform in the late 70's — and one of his less heralded skills was the ability to write so vividly and authoritatively about baseball history it was as if he had been there to witness it all himself.
He could also be as mean as any call-in-show crank. He described one hapless American Leaguer as playing the outfield "like a blind man staying overnight in a friend's apartment." His all-time favorite whipping boy, though, was poor Enos Cabell, who played 15 years in the major leagues and compiled a lifetime average of .277. A respectable career, right? Hardly. Cabell had little patience at the plate and didn't hit nearly enough home runs to hold his own as a third baseman, deficiencies that offended James's sense of right and wrong. "Everybody tells me that Enos is a hell of a good guy, and you know, you can tell he is," James wrote. "His abilities being what they are, would he be in the major leagues if he wasn't?"
James produced his "Baseball Abstracts" for 12 years before burning out. By the end of his run, he was an influential, albeit polarizing, figure in the world of baseball. It was mainly his ideas that helped Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's and star of Michael Lewis's best-selling "Moneyball," to build winning teams on a shoestring budget. James himself ended up in the employ of the Boston Red Sox.
Gray, whose day job is writing Street & Smith's sports annuals, does well with the basic elements of James's biography, painting an empathetic portrait of him as a social misfit who overcame a mostly unhappy childhood by discovering baseball as a world he could understand. But about halfway through, Gray loses chronological momentum, and tries to patch his way to the finish in a discursive style that he seems to have borrowed unsuccessfully from James himself. At times, he gets embarrassingly panegyric — "Those who immersed themselves in the 'Baseball Abstract' grew up to spread Bill's influence in every arena that involves thinking or writing," he says — and when he lets James ramble on about things like the JonBenet Ramsey case, our hero starts to sound less like a genius and more like a tiresome dinner party guest.
In Sam Walker's "Fantasyland," we meet a lot of characters whose lives are as shaped by baseball as James's is. This book fits into the newly popular genre of stunt nonfiction, like the ones about reading the whole encyclopedia or saying yes to every guy who asks you out for a year. Walker's stunt is, on the face of it, not terribly impressive: he joins the toughest fantasy baseball league, called Tout Wars, which is composed of experts who make a living by telling others how to win at fantasy baseball. (You'd be amazed at how many of these people are out there.)
Walker is a writer for The Wall Street Journal, and his plan was to use his press access to major league locker rooms to help him pick up inside dope that the homebound number crunchers in his league couldn't get. But that's not all: he also hired two guys to aid him in various research and scouting capacities. If this sounds ridiculous, well, maybe that's the point. It was Walker's intention to give his life and his wallet over to fantasy baseball and see how good he could be at it.
A few comic moments ensue when Walker attempts to earnestly engage major leaguers in discussion of his fantasy team. As reporting challenges go, it's not quite up there with, say, knocking on a widow's door, but Walker's nerve is admirable all the same. It would be more admirable if any of them actually gave him useful information. But even the ones willing to play along don't have any insights that help Walker. So all his sleuthing around clubhouses pays little reward.
Which is sort of the problem with the whole book. Walker comes off as a witty, affable guy whom you'd be happy to have a few beers with and talk baseball. But his audacious enterprise can't sustain the full weight of the book. The narrative has no suspense because Walker fails to convince us that it really matters to him whether he finishes first or last. And if it doesn't matter to him, how in the world are we going to care?
The typical fantasy baseball player is a glutton for information, for anything that gives him the edge. I know this because, yes, I do do fantasy. And even though I'm not good at it (despite occasionally taking the laptop to bed to wait for those West Coast scores), I can say one thing with total authority — if you're looking for the secret to success in your league, you won't find it in this book. And what else matters?
Hugo Lindgren is the editorial director of New York magazine.
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