Fantasy players also missing competition, camaraderie
In a normal year, Bret Sayre plays in an astounding 17 fantasy baseball leagues.
Yes, Sayre is employed. The 38yearold is CEO of Baseball Prospectus. And yes, he still has enough leftover cranial storage to remember the names of his wife and two children.
Like millions of other Americans who cannot pursue hobbies and pastimes that are shut down during the COVID19 pandemic, Sayre has a lot more time to bond with his family.
“I talk to people in the fantasy leagues I’m in regularly throughout the year,” Sayre said from his home in New Jersey. “That’s something I’m not doing right now. I do miss it a little bit, but I also love having the extra time to spend with my family, which I’ve always tried to do anyway.”
Professional and amateur sports disappeared six weeks ago. The 2020 majorleague baseball season, which was to begin March 26, is postponed indefinitely. The most optimistic forecast has games beginning in late June. Even that could be a pipe dream.
Most fantasy players are not as hardcore as Sayre, but many say they miss the camaraderie, challenge and sometimes the financial rewards of competing in these leagues, which were organizing their annual player drafts when Major League Baseball suspended spring training March 13.
“People are looking for connections, not only to sports, but each other,” said Adam Richman, president of StratOMatic LLC, which for six decades has sold a baseball simulation game that his father,
Hal, invented as a child.
Fantasy sports has grown into a $7 billion industry that some 60 million Americans play, according to the Wisconsinbased Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association.
Leagues revolve around actual statistics. That’s why they have to shut down, too, with league managers scrambling to devise ways to save their makebelieve seasons if baseball returns with an abbreviated campaign.
Bragging rights are a big deal. In fact, many leagues have no financial prizes, just trophies players can lord over their friends for a year.
Steve Sanchez, a Hayward native and Cal grad who teaches history at a San Diegoarea high school, plays in several baseball leagues and last fall joined an NBA fantasy league that has no entry fee or prizes.
Unlike fantasy baseball, which hasn’t gotten off the ground in 2020, Sanchez’s basketball league was nearing the playoffs for its 201920 season.
“I was actually winning the league,” Sanchez said. “I was in first place when it shut down. That was tough.”
He then said, only halfjokingly, “If there was money involved, I think I would have made the argument we should stop where we were.”
Like other players interviewed for this story, Sanchez was quick to offer perspective on losing fantasy sports amid a pandemic.
“My first thought wasn’t my fantasy league, because you’re caught up in the reality of the situation. But there were some people still making moves (to pick up new players) on the waiver wire. I was like, man, that’s really disturbing that people are still grinding this out.”
Daniel Rathman, a 29yearold high school registrar and baseball coach in San Francisco, plays in and helps run the fantasy National Pastime
League, which has 23 teams spread around the United States, with one in Japan.
Each team, which usually consists of two partners, tosses $200 into a prize pool that is disbursed after the season. The team that wins the league’s “World Series” can earn as much as $1,000, with smaller payouts to other playoff participants.
Rathman’s league requires voluminous research because each team drafts 85 players, not just bigleaguers, but minorleague prospects they can keep year to year. In any given week, they can activate 30 players.
Rathman coowns a team called Defenestration of Prague — offthewall names are part of the fun — and admitted he has thought about dropping out because of the time commitment.
Now, Rathman said, the league is on pause, “which is ironic because people have more time on their hands than they normally would.”
Though fantasy football attracts more serious gamblers, just as the NFL does in Nevada, baseball leagues tend to run more collegially. Following players throughout the NFL is easier because they play once a week and all games are televised either nationally or regionally.
Baseball is a more provincial sport. Fantasy players really have to do their homework to draft good teams.
“It just adds some stakes to what you’re watching,” Rathman said. “I watch the Giants pretty much every game, but I have (Milwaukee outfielder) Christian Yelich on my team, so I have extra interest in the Brewers that night.”
Rathman’s league is as complex as they get. It follows the MLB rules for acquiring and trading players, sending them to the minors and releasing them. It even holds an annual draft of high school and collegiate players to hold onto for the future.
It’s so realistic, some partici
“I watch the Giants pretty much every game, but I have Christian Yelich on my team, so I have extra interest in the Brewers that night.”
Daniel Rathman, fantasy baseball enthusiast
pants admit they “tank” their fantasy seasons so they can pick higher in subsequent drafts of high school and collegiate players. Real teams such as the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros did exactly that to build recent World Series winners. Some accuse the Giants of doing that, too, after three straight losing seasons.
Kaz Yamazaki, the 27yearold who competes in Rathman’s league from his home west of Tokyo, admitted he’s tanking after finishing with a losing record in each of his first three seasons in the league.
Yamazaki confessed he does not miss actual baseball as much as he thought he would but said, “I enjoy keeping up with my team and the league. I miss that part.”
Some folks who miss baseball, real and imagined, have gotten their fix through simulation games such as StratOMatic and Out of the Park Baseball, which is produced by a German company.
StratOMatic is not a fantasy game in the common sense because you can play it with or without actual baseball. Also, all of its iterations use dice, real or virtual, to initiate the plays on the field, although the player cards that the dice activate are based on wellcrafted data sets based on real stats.
StratOMatic reports sales of its board game and Windowsbased product were up 50% year over year for the final two weeks of March. The company’s Baseball 365 online game, which is the closest to resembling a true fantasy league, rose 75% year over year, March 1731.
“StratO,” as it’s called informally, also reports an exponential spike in website hits tied to its daily simulation of the 2020 bigleague season (which is not going well for the 1120 Giants, much better for the 1913 A’s).
Soon, StratO plans to let entire sidelined fantasy leagues move to its 365 platform and simulate seasons, including 2019.
“The reactions we’re getting are, ‘Thank God for this,’ ” Richman said. “This is the only game in town right now.”