- November 20, 2009
- Fantasy Baseball
Fantasy BB Week 9 Planner
Amber Wilson and fantasy baseball expert David Gonos go over all the latest matchups and trends to help set your lineup and give you the edge in your fantasy league.
Fantasy Baseball Weekly: June 4, 2007
Amber Wilson and senior fantasy baseball analyst Eric Mack talk about Roger Clemens closing in on a return, and one returning pitcher that may outplay the Rocket.
Fantasy Baseball Weekly: May 21, 2007
Amber Wilson and senior fantasy baseball analyst Eric Mack go over the top performers in Week 7 and look at some interesting pitching rotation situations in the AL Central.
Fantasy Baseball Weekly: May 14, 2007
Amber Wilson is joined by fantasy baseball analyst Eric Mack to talk about the injury to Josh Beckett, who's hot and who's not, and much more in Major League Baseball.
An early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer in 1960 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron, and distributed for several years by the IBM Corporation. It allowed two teams to play one another using random number generation and player statistics to determine a game's outcome, including a play by play description. [1] In the fall of 1961 Rege Cordic, a KDKA (Pittsburgh) radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program. The game was coded for a computer with only 20,000 memory positions and was entirely self-contained.
Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball." One of the best-known was Strat-o-Matic, which in 1963 began publishing a game containing customized baseball cards of Major League Baseball players with their stats from past seasons. Participants could then re-create previous seasons using the game rules and the statistics, or compose fantasy teams from the cards and play against each other. The landmark tabletop game Pursue the Pennant (now DYNASTY League Baseball) debuted in 1985 and took baseball board games to much more realistic levels of play; it incorporated ball park effects, clutch hitting and pitching, and many other nuances of the game. Fantasy baseball was the theme of Robert Coover's 1968 darkly comic novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which dealt with themes of creationism and playing god.
Copious materials accessible since 2006 in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library show that Canadian-American writer Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) played his own form of fantasy baseball starting quite young and continued developing and playing this perhaps private version of fantasy baseball during most of his life. At the Library from November 2007 - February 2008, an exhibition on Kerouac's life and works includes several display cases of Kerouac's highly detailed fantasy baseball records, including charts, sketches, and notes.