Gamson, sociologist and inventor of Games, dead at 87
Bill Gamson, an eminent sociologist who explored the structure of social movements and whose childhood love of games led him to create one that became an inspiration for the fantasy sports industry, died March 23 at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was 87.
The cause was sarcoma, a type of cancer, his son, Joshua Gamson, said.
While a young research associate at Harvard, Bill Gamson indulged his enthusiasm for baseball and his attachment to games by creating what he called the National Baseball Seminar, a simulated game in which each person in his group (originally three) had a budget to draft major leaguers for a team. The players were measured throughout the season based on batting average, runs batted in, earned run average and wins.
“We felt these statistics reflected productivity, but in truth there wasn’t a tremendous availability of statistics back then,” Gamson told ESPN the Magazine in 2010. “We knew these four would be published in all the papers.”
When he moved to the University of Michigan in 1962, he recruited about 25 people to his game, including Robert Sklar, a history professor. In 1968, Sklar mentioned it to Daniel Okrent, a student he was advising. A decade later, Okrent invented the more complex Rotisserie League Baseball, which lets its “owners” make in-season trades; it is considered the closest ancestor to today’s billion-dollar fantasy sports industry.
“There’s no question that the flowering of Rotisserie baseball arose from very rough seeds scattered a dozen years earlier by Bill Gamson and Bob Sklar,” Okrent, a writer and editor who was the first public editor of The New York Times, wrote in an email. “Would something like Rotisserie have happened otherwise? Probably — but it wouldn’t have been started by me.”
Gamson thought of his game as a minor part of a career that included authorship of “The Strategy of Social Protest” (1975), a data-driven examination of the success, failures and leadership of 53 social movement organizations from 1800 to 1945.
“What preceded him were studies that saw movements as irrational reactions to stress in society, and his innovation was to flip that and treat the behavior of movements as rational and subject to scientific analysis,” Joshua Gamson, a sociology professor at the University of San Francisco, said in an interview.
The elder Gamson participated in a protest himself in 1965, when he helped lead a teach-in against the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The teach-in is believed to be the first against the war, staged as US military involvement in Vietnam was accelerating. It began at 8 p.m. March 24 and lasted 12 hours as professors and activists gave speeches and seminars to more than 3,000 students. Bomb threats, reportedly by a pro-war group, twice interrupted it.
“There was a sense of a general mass movement,” Bill Gamson said in an oral history interview in 2015 by the University of Michigan, adding that President Lyndon Johnson’s “betrayal” of his promises during the 1964 presidential campaign not to escalate the war “fueled a kind of anger and righteous indignation.”