Fantasy Land? Daily fantasy is taking over the sports world.

So far, I’ve been to two baseball games this season. The Red Sox lost both, but I nonetheless enjoyed myself.

Baseball is the name of the game.

It’s been years since I’ve seen the Celtics and the Bruins play. I’ll go to a Revs game when invited, but soccer is not a sport that I’ll seek out. I’ve never been to see the Patriots – although it could be fun this coming season, given the likelihood that tailgating could well involve burning Roger Goodell in effigy. But I never let a baseball season go by when I don’t get to Fenway for a couple of Sox games, which I can enjoy with the other old fogeys who like baseball in general, and baseball in person in particular.

These days, younger folks enjoy baseball (and the other major sports as well) by proxy, by participating in fantasy leagues, where it doesn’t really matter whether the actual pro team you follow wins or loses. It depends on how the individuals that you’ve drafted into your virtual team do.

A month or so ago, there was an article in The New Yorker on fantasy sports, which has become quite a big business, with an awful lot of fans. Fantasy sports has:

…forty million participants in North America, including eight million women. (Source: New Yorker – may need a subscription to see the full story.)

The article focuses in part on writer Daniel Okrent, who way back in 1979, invented Rotisseries League Baseball.  “Club owners” would develop their rosters and keep a close eye on what “their” players were doing:

Within a few years, baseball officials had a genuine nuisance on their hands: “the number of people calling the P.R. department and pretending to be journalists, asking whether the pitcher’s arm was still hurt,” as Okrent put it. Those callers weren’t gamblers, either; they were Okrent’s proliferating disciples, looking for inside intel to exploit on the virtual trading block.

The fantasy sport concept kept growing, moving onto other sports as well, and all of a sudden, fantasy sports was a real industry with its own trade association and hall of fame.

Okrent, of course, was one of the first inductees. Not that he cared: he didn’t attend his own induction ceremony. And, given how these things go, he’s made very little money out of what’s become a large and (potentially) lucrative business. But what Okrent regrets most about having invented the concept is what it does to you as a fan:

“…by your fourth or fifth year, the actual game has lost meaning for you. You’re engaged in the numbers that the game spins out and engaged with millions of others in the same way. It has no relationship not just to the fan attachment that you may have had to a particular team but to the physical thing that’s taking place on the field. It’s the representation of it in a number that’s what’s important. I’m thinking of our original group. A couple of them really don’t give a shit about baseball at all anymore.” He added, “When people say, ‘How do you feel, having invented this?’ I say, ‘I feel the way that J. Robert Oppenheimer felt having invented the atomic bomb.’ I really do. I mean, pretty terrible!”

J. Robert Oppenheimer!

Now that’s what I call regret…

Fantasy sports has also transmogrified from the Field of Dreams that was Okrent’s Rotisserie League into massive online gaming increasingly dominated by “daily fantasy.” 

Forget rooting for the home town team! Forget worry about free agency! Forget knowing and loving “your” players. Forget all the palaver about the season being long. For the “daily fantasy” picks, the season lasts an evening, and players are unceremoniously dumped. Just as unceremoniously as they were “signed.”

The actual outcomes of real games, no one cares about. You just need the core events so that the fantasy leaguers have something to base their league on. (And the professional leagues themselves like it because fantasy players watch an awful lot of televised sports so they can keep track of what’s happening in all the remote outposts of their franchise. Me, I just have to keep an eye on the Red Sox, with an occasional glance at the league standings, in which the two most evil of empires, the Yankees and the Dodgers, are currently astride the top of their divisions.)

Maybe major league sports will end up playing to empty stadiums as a matter of course, just as they did a few weeks back in Baltimore during the riots, when the Orioles took to Camden Yards before nobody.

Two companies dominate the daily fantasy business: FanDuel and Boston’s own DraftKings.

Neither FanDuel nor DraftKings is currently profitable, although both are increasingly mentioned as possible “unicorns,” a term used by venture capitalists to refer to startups valued at a billion or more dollars on the basis of fund-raising alone. In the race to attract customers, both companies have been spending more money on radio and television commercials, and on the whopping prizes that those ads promise, than they’ve been taking in via the rake—a cut, around ten per cent or less, of all the user entry fees. Nonetheless, their combined revenues have increased by nearly twentyfold in the past two years, and ESPN is said to be close to acquiring a twenty-per-cent stake in DraftKings.

Love when the VC get involved with the no-real-societal-value but potentially big buck companies. Capitalism – venture or otherwise – is, indeed, a wondrous thing when it can keep coming up with ideas like daily fantasy sports.

There’s a lot to like about watching sports. It’s entertaining. It’s engaging. It gives you home town good feeling – even folks I know who don’t give a hoot about sports tend to get a bit jazzed when “their” team is in the thick of things. It gives you something to chat about with the man in the street – or the man in the gym . (Although these days, in these parts, DeflateGate and St. Thomas of Brady’s time on the cross pretty much dominates sports conversation at the gym.) Oh, yes, and you can nap during it and wake up to find that something “big” has happened. But not to worry. If it’s that big, it will be run in such an endless loop that by the time you’re ready fro bed-bed, you’ve seen “it” so many times you not only feel that you were there, you feel that you were one of the actual athletes who took part in “it.”

And – weather aside – sports are so much the better when you’re there in person, where you can develop instant camaraderie with those seated around you, boo more lustily than you do at home, sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and eat a hot dog, Sports Bar, and Cracker Jacks. (And, yes, still get a bit of a nap in.)

I hope all this doesn’t go away…

There’s a song from the musical Gigi, in which – in the movie version at least – the odious and smarmy Maurice Chevalier sings “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore.”

If the only baseball that’s going to be played is fantasy league, you can sing that again.