Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe

The book is very well written and entertaining even if you never played Fantasy Baseball. It's a nice contribution to the current debate between the traditional approach on baseball and the new SABRmetrics way of thinking the game

This is a genuine, 5 star book. I'm a sports fan, especially baseball, but don't play fantasy sports. What I enjoyed was the great storytelling, details on his hands-on research process, humor, interesting characters (both players and others), and in-depth info on baseball. It's definitely worth the time to read and will make others wonder why you keep laughing out loud.

Efficiency experts are always telling corporate boards of directors (such as at Enron, say), that the way to run a business is by the numbers. Since the publication of Michael Lewis's MONEYBALL, various baseball executives have taken this philosophy to heart, and this book takes a sample season to show how the numbers are applied variously by the FANTASY BASEBALL experts, several of whom are employed to consult big league baseball clubs. Sam Walker, baseball columnist for the Wall Street Journal, hired a numbers cruncher on the one side, and a traditional inside scout on the other, and he set about trying to win the TOUT WARS Rotisserie Baseball League, which included some of the nation's top "experts," lawyers, engineers, scholars, zen masters, data crunchers. Walker even hires an astrologer, just to see what she'd say (and whose baseball predictions he found "remarkably accurate"). The efficiency expert's baseball philosophy "is that human perceptions are, for the most part, garbage. When humans watch a baseball game, they give too much weight to first impressions, recent events, and unusual occurrences. They make causal connections when they don't exist, rely too heavily on existing theories, and give too much weight to evidence that confirms them." "All human observers, the scouts included, are sort of like drunks in a bar brawl: their abilities are severely limited, but the more they indulge, the more confident they become." But the trouble with numbers is that they do not measure everything and hence they also often lead management astray. Which of course is exactly what happens in the book, and it is a highly humorous ride, full of baseball lore and with many surprises. This book may indeed become a movie (let Jim Carrey and Johnny Depp star). Many of those written about here are literary--such as Trace Wood (whose interests run to James Joyce), and such as pitcher Miguel Batista, poet and author of a detective novel to be published in the spring. I was inspired by this book to try my own hand at Rotisserie Baseball and put some of the inexpensive players in here on my team. Last night, Batista and the Diamondbacks beat Colorado and as I type this he leads the majors in strikeouts. People who loved this book and Michael Lewis's MONEYBALL might also try CURVE BALL: BASEBALL, STATISTICS, AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE IN THE GAME by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett.

Fantasy baseball has become a billion dollar industry. Personally, I gave it up two years ago for some of the same reasons I've read that others have given it up. I got tired of going through box scores not to see whether my home town Tigers won or lost, but to see how many strikeouts Jeremy Bonderman had because I had picked him up late in my draft. At times, especially in 2003 when the score didn't matter, I was forced to actually root against the Tigers in favor of players on my fantasy team. I played in my first league in 1988, way before the Internet or even Microsoft Excel was used to track our league's standings. "Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe" is a book detailing Wall Street Journal columnist Sam Walker's wild initiation into fantasy baseball. Instead of signing up for his work league, he decided to go all out and join one of the most prestigious expert leagues around, Tout Wars, which was started by Baseball Forecaster author Ron Shandler. This was the funnest baseball book I've read in a while and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Walker pokes fun at his adversaries and himself throughout the book and he even hires a staff to help him out, including a person who specializes in the astrological evaluation of ball players. The chapter on the auction draft is priceless, and Walker pulls out every trick in the book to try to get a leg up on his opponents. Along with being a fun story on his experiences in the league, the book is also about his struggle between objective analysis and statistical analysis. He did his own spring training scouting, but he also hired a statistician to help him evaluate players using advanced statistics. His media access to the players also makes for some interesting side stories. He has a great dialogue with David Ortiz (after trading him) and even goes as far as handing out team shirts to the players on his team. When he wondered whether to trade for Tigers pitcher Jason Johnson, he sends Tigers' pitching coach Bob Cluck an email asking him about Johnson's blister on his throwing hand. When he got the green light from Cluck, he pulled the trigger on the trade. Overall, I found myself not wanting to put the book down. With experience in my past leagues (which also had auction drafts), I found myself having several "ah-ha" moments as well. A fantastic book, and very timely with March being the time most fantasy baseball drafts happen.

Sam Walker's "Fantasyland" is a terrific book that will appeal to baseball fans, rotisserie league players and anyone who appreciates a great story beautifully told. Walker has the uncanny ability to make us root for him as he seeks to become a star rotisserie-league player (that's a fantasy baseball game, for those who don't follow this addictive hobby) using his insider's pull as a Wall Street Journal sportswriter. Walker is a hapless and hilarious everyman, with the kind of access sports fans dream of. Like a sports-minded Bill Bryson, Walker asks us to join him on his quixotic quest for a nutty kind of immortality. He's also the kind of writer it's a joy to read: lively, smart and self-effacing. Even if his rotisserie days could be hit and miss, Walker is a major new player on the literary front. First rate -- and you don't have to be a sports fan to love it.