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In 1986, while working at KCBS-TV, Channel 2 in Los Angeles, California, my newsroom buddies and I made up a "fantasy" basketball game, drafting a bunch of NBA players, using their real life stats and vying for the title of best basketball owner in our workplace. However, because baseball is my favorite sport, I remember saying to the guys in my league, "It's too bad we couldn't figure out how to do this with baseball!" Well, wouldn't you know it, the power of suggestion kicked in, and the very next weekend after saying that, I was browsing through a bookstore in the mall and found a book entitled Rotisserie Baseball. I took it off the shelf immediately, and read the whole thing while still in the bookstore. I was hooked. I purchased the book, took it home, and the following Monday at work announced to my guys, "Hey, I know how to do this now for baseball." For the past two decades, I've been having the time of my life as commissioner of many different types of fantasy baseball leagues. Expanding from the "classic" version of roto-ball – you know, using those original eight statistical categories – to a full-blown version of playing a 162 game schedule of head-to-head competition in a league of 22 teams, waking up every morning to daily standings and box scores generated by our fantasy players using real life statistics.  Are you a fantasy baseball player? If not, would you like to be? If you are, are you completely satisfied with the way your final results and league champions are determined? Are you looking for new challenges in your game? Do you have the courage...and the skill...to take it to the next level? I believe all versions of the game are great. If you're having fun playing your own type of "Hot Stove" baseball, then that's all that really matters. Of course, if there are ways to boost your fun to a much higher level, and you just aren't aware of how to do so, you may not know what you're missing. Using the classic eight categories of Batting Avg., Home Runs, RBIs, Stolen Bases (for hitters), and Wins, ERA, WHIP and Saves (for pitchers) was always a blast. But hey, for a baseball aficionado like myself, I was always searching for ways to enhance the pleasure of playing this incredibly enjoyable recreational sport. More categories, such as On Base Avg., Slugging Percentage, OPS (a combination of the preceding two), Winning Percentage, picking a major league manager and using his real life record, picking a major league team, and somehow incorporating its home attendance into your salary cap, are all other options available in playing fantasy baseball. Does it ever bother you though, knowing that one bad outing by one of your starting pitchers can destroy your ERA or WHIP for the entire season? In major league baseball, a pitcher may have a couple of bad outings, but that won't necessarily prevent his team from winning it all at the end of the year. Is it the best way to build a team by stockpiling hitters who slug tons of home runs and collect loads of RBIs, or to load up on closers? Those are very common strategies to winning in many forms of fantasy baseball. Have you ever built a fantasy team where every hitter in your starting lineup, from the leadoff guy, to the cleanup hitter, to the 8th guy in the order, each has equal importance? Do you think MLB GMs consider these types of things to be vital? Have you ever built a fantasy team where your middle relievers are every bit as crucial to your success as your starting rotation and your closer? Just watch a major league game today, and you can see how critical it is to have those middle relievers who can either keep a lead for you, or keep you close enough to get into a position to win, while setting things up for your closer to come in and slam the door on the opposition. How about your defense? Does the ability of your fielders to catch and throw the ball matter to your team's success? How do you mix all of these elements into a fantasy baseball game? Imagine not only being able to do so, but also doing it 162 times every season, and again in the post-season if you're good enough to make it to the playoffs. There are plenty of computer simulations out there, which will allow you to do this, and they, too, are great fun. That is, if you don't mind your team's or players' success relying upon the computer's "roll-of-the dice", or "spin-of-the-wheel" in generating the outcome of your game.
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