Fantasy baseball

Early simulations The history of fantasy baseball games can be traced back to the 19th century. The tabletop game Sebring Parlor Base Ball, introduced in 1866, allowed participants to simulate games by propelling a coin into slots on a wooden board. Later games featured outcomes determined by dice rolls or spinners, and some were endorsed by professional ballplayers. Individual player cards and dice roll simulations were also emulated in the Strat-O-Matic game, which was first released in 1961. Daniel Okrent, who would later be credited with developing modern fantasy baseball, was an avid Strat-O-Matic player, telling Sports Illustrated in 2011 that "if there hadn't been Strat-O-Matic, I still think I would have come up with rotisserie, but unquestionably it helped." Gamson would continue to play the game as a professor at the University of Michigan, where another competitor was Bob Sklar. One of Sklar's students was Daniel Okrent. According to Alan Schwarz's ''The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, Sklar told Okrent about the Baseball Seminar league. The game was coded for a computer with only 20 KB of computer memory and was entirely self-contained. In the fall of 1961, Rege Cordic, a KDKA (Pittsburgh) radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program. Magazine writer-editor Daniel Okrent is credited with introducing the rotisserie league concept to the group and inventing the scoring system. Players in the Rotisserie League drafted teams of active MLB players and tracked their statistics during the season to compile their scores. proved to be popular despite the difficulties of compiling statistics by hand, which was an early drawback to participation. The traditional statistics used in early rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box scores or weekly information published in USA Today''. Okrent credits the idea's rapid spread to the fact that the initial league was created by sports journalists, telling Vanity Fair in 2008 that "most of us in the league were in the media, and we got a lot of press coverage that first season. The second season, there were rotisserie leagues in every Major League press box." The game launched in 1989 in a number of newspapers throughout the United States, including the Hartford Courant, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Tampa Bay Times. Players selected their teams by calling a toll-free phone number and entering four-digit codes for each of their choices. Dugout Derby is considered an early predecessor to modern daily fantasy sports, awarding weekly vacation packages to top-scoring participants. because it enabled fantasy sports participants to instantaneously download tabulated statistics, rather than having to search for box scores of individual games in newspapers and keep track of cumulative statistics on paper. In 1995, ESPN launched its first entirely Internet-based fantasy baseball game, with other major sports and entertainment companies following suit in the ensuing years. Daily fantasy sports are accelerated versions of the traditional fantasy format in which contests are conducted over shorter periods than a full season, often lasting one week or even a single day. The first major daily fantasy sports company, FanDuel, was founded in 2009 as a spin-off of a Scottish prediction market company. DraftKings, now the other major daily fantasy firm, was founded in 2012. In April 2013, MLB invested an undisclosed amount in DraftKings, making it the first professional sports organization in the United States to invest in daily fantasy sports. In 2015, DraftKings became the official daily fantasy game of MLB, a move that Business Wire called "the most comprehensive league partnership in daily fantasy sports history" at the time.{{cite web|title=DraftKings Becomes the Official Daily Fantasy Game of Major League Baseball As of 2022, an estimated 62.5 million people played fantasy sports in the United States and Canada, per the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, and around one out of five fantasy participants played fantasy baseball. ==League types==

A fantasy baseball league may be organized in a variety of ways. The original rotisserie leagues, as well as their modern counterparts, rank each team in a number of statistical categories at the end of the season. Points are then awarded based on these rankings. A league using these statistics is known as a "4×4" league because it uses four hitting stats and four pitching stats. Some leagues use a "5×5" format, with runs scored and strikeouts added as hitting and pitching stats, respectively. The rotisserie format can theoretically be expanded to encompass any number of statistics, though online support for such expansive leagues is limited (for example, CBS Sports only offers 4x4 and 5x5 leagues). Head-to-head variations There are three major configurations for head-to-head play: • Head-to-Head Rotisserie: Also called head-to-head each category, this format assigns wins, losses, and ties based on each team's performance in individual categories. For example, in a 5x5 league, if Team A performs better in six categories, Team A receives six wins and four losses for that week's matchup, while Team B receives four wins and six losses. The number of teams that make the playoffs and the existence of a consolation bracket for teams that miss out may vary based on the website used and the customized settings employed by a particular league. For example, Yahoo allows leagues to have four, six, or eight teams make the playoffs. In the first season of a keeper league, the draft is performed in the same way as any other standard league draft, however, in all subsequent years, the draft only involves players not selected to be kept on their team. Keeper leagues may allow each team to retain as few as one player or as many as every player on the roster except one. • In dynasty leagues, each team keeps all players on its roster from one year to the next. Rosters are replenished with drafts of rookies and players who were not on a team the previous year. After teams have set their rosters via the draft, owners may add free agents, players who are not currently on any team, to their roster if the roster is not already full. There are a few possibilities by which teams may acquire these players: • Under the waiver wire format, which is also commonly used in fantasy football, teams may place claims on free agents until a predetermined deadline, at which time the team with the lowest position in the standings with a claim on a player gains that player. Teams with lower positions in the standings are therefore said to have higher waiver priority. After acquiring a player, a team is moved to the bottom of the priority list. • Under the Free Agent Acquisition Budget (FAAB) format, each team has a predetermined budget that may be used to bid on available free agents. If a team uses its entire budget, it will be unable to acquire new free agents until the league budgets are reset, which may occur on a weekly or even daily basis. • The First Come, First Served (FCFS) format allows any team to add any free agent at any time with no restrictions. ==Draft==

Before each season, fantasy baseball leagues hold a draft in which each team drafts MLB players. These players are kept on the roster of the team that drafted them unless they are traded for other players or are dropped, whereby they enter a pool of unowned players that any team may claim. The order of draft picks may be determined randomly or by the league standings from the previous year, in which the team with the worst record picks first, followed by the team with the second-worst record, etc. In some cases, owners retain the same draft position in each round. One proposed advantage of auction drafts is their ability to offer every owner equal access to every player, whereas in a traditional format, a certain owner's desired player may be selected by another team before the owner's next turn to pick. Regardless of the format in which a draft is held, each team owner may employ a variety of strategies when making their selections. In order to select the best possible players, owners must evaluate the talent and forecast the performance of each player for the upcoming season. A variety of resources may be used to this effect, from rankings released by fantasy baseball journalists and websites to algorithms created by professional daily fantasy competitors. ==Team rosters==

A fantasy baseball roster is conventionally composed of players from each position. Each team is allowed a set number of players on its roster, as well as a specified number of starters at each position that can be used in a head-to-head matchup. Owners may determine which players will start and which will be "benched" on a weekly or even daily basis. Only players who are designated as starters will have their statistics count towards the team owner's totals in the weekly matchup. Just like in real baseball, players who are usually benched can become starters for various reasons: due to a starting player's injury, poor performance, or if the starter's team is not playing on a particular day. Whether to sit or start a player is also based on strategic considerations, such as the player's past and expected performance and the team he is playing, specifically its starting pitcher. If a league does not have head-to-head matchups, then there may be no distinction between starters and bench players, as a team's end-of-season results are derived from the cumulative statistics of the entire roster. The precise positions included in online rosters vary widely, along with the number of players allowed at each position and on each team's bench. For example, ESPN's default roster includes one middle infielder, one corner infielder, and one utility player. A default Yahoo roster includes two utility players, neither of which is designated as a middle or a corner infielder. DraftKings, which operates a variety of daily and weekly games, does not have utility slots on its rosters for some games, but does for others. The following table lists the default roster settings for head-to-head leagues managed by ESPN, Yahoo, and CBS Sports, A note next to a position's name indicates its definition. The injured reserve is used to store players with real-life injuries who are unable to compete for an extended period of time. Fantasy leagues usually only allow players to be placed on injured reserve if they have been placed on the injured list by their MLB team. Some leagues limit teams to a certain number of free agent transactions or trades per season or per week. Such limitations are commonly used to prevent team owners from artificially inflating their statistics or otherwise achieving an unfair advantage by using an excessive number of players during a matchup. Another common limitation on roster moves is the adoption of a list of "undroppable" players, generally those selected in the first few rounds of the draft or those who are generally deemed too valuable to be allowed to freely change teams without being exchanged for other players. ==Demographics==

According to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association (FSGA), an estimated 62.5 million people played fantasy sports in the US and Canada in 2022. ==Notes==