Book Review: Fantasyland by Sam Walker

One night a buddy of mine and I attended an Atlanta Braves game. After the game the crowd started to empty into the parking lot when I had realized I left my wallet inside. I told my friend to go ahead and get the car while I returned inside. As I approached my seat I saw something that I wasn’t supposed to see. Two shady looking characters were making some kind of swap. I don’t know what it was they were dealing and I didn’t ask all I know is that they had spotted me and were now running my direction.

I ran onto the field and was tackled at home plate. One of the shady characters pulled a gun on me and I thought for sure this was the end. Then suddenly I hear someone yell “Hey!” The gunman and I looked up to see Atlanta Braves closer Chris Reitsma standing on the mound with a bucket of balls next to him.

Reitsma pulls one of the balls from the bucket and hurls it towards the gunman. The gunman and I both watch the ball as it goes flying over our heads, missing by about three feet. Reitsma launches another pitch, this time it’s in the dirt and bounces off my knee. Finally the gunman realizes Reitsma is trying to save the day and knock the gun out of his hand. The gunman pulls the trigger and everything goes black.

Suddenly the phone rings. I awaken to realize I had fallen asleep at my desk listening to a baseball game. On the other side of the phone is my friend, he asks me “guess what just happened?” I took a wild guess, “Someone had a gun to my head and Chris Reitsma could’ve saved me if he could throw a decent pitch?” My friend paused briefly taken aback by my answer but eventually continued. “No it’s worse than that”, he said. “Reitsma gave up four runs in two thirds inning.”

This may sound like a peculiar dream but this is pretty common for anyone who has gotten involved in Rotisserie baseball. In the book Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball’s Fringe by author Sam Walker, Sam, a sportswriter with a weekly column, decides to give rotisserie baseball a try. Sam throws himself right into the fire as his very first attempt at rotisserie baseball is in Tout Wars, one of the toughest rotisseries baseball leagues in the world.

If Sam was just the ordinary Joe checking out customers at the local seven-eleven then it wouldn’t really be all that interesting. However, Sam goes about his fantasy team a little bit differently than anyone else. Since Sam is a columnist he has connections. He knows players, coaches, scouts, even general managers and he plans to use those resources to help him when drafting his team and making trades throughout the season.

Sam takes us on a journey that begins at the winter meetings where he notices there are two approaches to evaluating a player. There is the new school, which is made up mostly of nerdy math majors who think you can predict a players output by looking at their past statistics. Then there’s the old school, usually made up of grizzled old veterans. They’ll tell you can’t believe the numbers, that the only way to know how good a player is you have to simply watch them play.

Sam takes us with him as he goes to spring training and quizzes players on why he should draft them for his fantasy baseball team. He then takes us to the fantasy draft, where we get detailed descriptions of all the different characters that play in this game we call rotisserie baseball. Sam then uses his wonderful story telling skills to lead us through the ups and downs of his team’s season.

Along the way Sam hires the help of two assistants. The first is Sig. Sig works for NASA as a biomathematician in the Fatigue Countermeasures Group. Sig uses a program he invented to enter the name of any player and it will predict his outcome for the season. The second assistant is named Nando. He’s there to find other information on players and to find out if any of this information is actually useful based on the patterns of how past players have reacted. Some of the things he searches for includes: whether a player got married during the off-season, if he found religion, did he do any time in jail, they even check players Zodiac signs to see if the “stars are aligned properly.”

These two have two completely opposite views, Sam describes it himself in the book, “I’ll have Nando in one ear telling me that he likes Seattle outfielder Raul Ibanez because he’s been taking karate lessons to improve his balance. In the other ear, Sig will ask, ‘How do you spell’ Ibanez? Then he’ll type his name, run a forward stepwise multiple-sigmoidal regression with linear weights, and tell me there’s a 76.3 percent chance that Ibanez will have a career season”. It’s up to Sam to take the two opinions and find a middle ground to determine who should be drafted and who should be traded.

The most intriguing part of the book comes when Sam tells us about the performance of his team and when he visits his own players personally to talk to them about the season. In one instance Sam is mulling over the possibility of picking up Bubba Crosby from free agency. Twenty four hours later he is standing inside the New York Yankees locker room asking Bubba why he should draft him. Later on in the season, when Sam is considering trading David Ortiz, he gets advice from Big Papi himself. Sam passes out team shirts to all the players on his team and even awards Jacque Jones with a player of the month trophy.

At the beginning of each chapter there is a quote about a paragraph long about several outrageous Rotisserie league stories. In one story a rotisserie player reads every magazine possible to soak up all the information he can. He finally decides to bid 32 dollars on Jim Gott, only to find out there was one source he didn’t check. According to the newspaper that day Jim Gott would be injured for the season. Another story tells about a man, who traded Vince Coleman for a woman’s phone number and yet another story tells us about a groom working trades on his wedding day. These stories alone are worth the price of the book.

Sam does a great job of vividly painting a picture of how addicting rotisserie baseball can become. Sam Walker himself becomes addicted and he is still playing in Tout Wars today. He’s currently sitting at fifth place and all I can wonder is: When he’s got a gun pointed to his head, does Bobby Jenks save the day?