Book cover: "Rotisserie League Baseball" (1984)

Preface: Creating fantasy baseball worlds took on many different forms for me in the 1980s and 1990s. It probably started for me, as with thousands of kids, when my friends and I played backyard wiffleball. The batter might declare himself to "be" Mike Schmidt, while the pitcher "was" Nolan Ryan or Tug McGraw. Circa 1982, we had Intellivision's Major League Baseball cartridge, and I would write out lineups featuring actual MLB players, keep score and compile the players' pitching and hitting statistics over multiple games. Baseball is the No. 1 reason for my love of math. I love calculating batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage and ERA. I love using algebra to project how many doubles a player might finish the season with if he has 17 doubles through 45 games. Sometimes, to occupy myself during a quiet afternoon, I would create imaginary players out of whole cloth and write out their entire 20-year career statistical arc, Baseball Register style, calculating each season's batting average (or ERA) and then the career totals. As I went along, I'd make up a story in my head for how the player's career went with injuries, trades and accolades. There was an intense period in Florida of laying out the cards and playing Statis Pro Baseball. Then came computers. I spent countless hours with fantasy teams I constructed on MicroLeague Baseball in the late 1980s and then APBA Baseball for Windows in the mid-1990s through early 2000s. But what about "fantasy" or "Rotisserie" baseball, as most people know it? The process of getting together with a group of friends, having a rollicking, daylong preseason auction to build rosters, making roster moves and trades throughout the season to chase stolen bases, home runs, saves, etc. I only had the pleasure of doing that for four or five years in the late 1990s, as a member of a Maryland-based league called the NWBL (my team was named the Jeltz Fan Club). But I had been aware of "roto baseball" for a long time before that, thanks to today's featured book...

• Title: Rotisserie League Baseball
• Secondary cover text: "The greatest game for baseball fans since baseball"
• Editor: Glen Waggoner (died in 2019 at age 78)
• Introduction: Daniel Okrent 
• Designer: Nicola Mazzella
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Year: 1984
• Pages: 211
• Format: Paperback
• Price: $5.95 (Converted from 1984 dollars, that's about $18.25 today)
• Back cover excerpt: "Here is the only official guide and rulebook for the exciting new nationwide sensation — Rotisserie League Baseball! Featured on The Today Show, in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Chicago Tribune — it's the greatest game for baseball fans since baseball! You become a team owner. You scout, sign up, draft and trade; keep the stats; call up players from the minor leagues."
• Dedication: to Sandra Kempasky
• First sentence: Was George Foster worth bags of money?
• Last sentence: When we meet again, perhaps a theater near you showing "The Rotisserie League Goes to Japan," let's just say, "Yoo-Hoo."
• Random excerpt from middle #1: The Furriers are a perennial Rotisserie League power because of an unwavering belief in two principles: (1) You can never have too much pitching, and; (2) You must never be too loyal to players.
• Random excerpt from middle #2: Never mind that the news of the world is desperate, as usual. If you're coming down the stretch in a pennant race and the paper says Alan Wiggins stole four bases for you, it creates a kind of euphoria that a grim front page can't take away.
• Random excerpt from middle #3: Pat Putnam delivered 19 home runs for his $1 salary in 1983. Lonnie Smith was once a $2 ballplayer, Dickie Thon is still $3, and journeyman-reliever-turned-ace-start Joe Price will take his 2.88 ERA in the 1984 season for just $1.
• Random excerpt from middle #4: From the section titled "Five Things You Should Never Do": 3. Don't let your computer tell you how to play. Just because you can manipulate numbers virtually without limit doesn't mean who you should.
• Random excerpt from the middle #5: There is a further, transcendent reason why your Rotisserie team's name and heraldry and propaganda merit thought and effort: they can greatly intensify the silliness quotient. (This book was definitely the inspiration for the fact that my MicroLeague Baseball team the Wallingford Smashers had yearbooks.)
• Further reading: "Untold stories of 40 years of fantasy baseball," a 2020 article by Matthew Berry on ESPN.com. It mentions the importance of this 1984 book, with its "weird green cover."