In New York: Big League Fantasies

By Michael Walsh

Optimistic as ever, the Nattering Nabobs are there; so are the Rubin Amaros and the Burn Bags. Half the Fine Tooners have flown in from London. The dangerous Moose Factory shows up, without Rickey Henderson for the first time in years. Forsaking children, spouses and all significant others, twelve contentious clans have gathered this daylight-savings Sunday in the sporting confines of O'Reilly's Pub in New York City for the most sacred event of their baseball calendar: not opening day or the seventh game of the World Series but draft day for the American Dreams.

Batter up! It's time for the season's first pitch to Rotisserie League Baseball, which in just seven years has grown from a rookie gleaming with promise into a full-blown phenom with all the tools. No one knows exactly how many fantasy leagues have sprung up across the country since Journalists Dan Okrent and Glen Waggoner invented the game at the now defunct La Rotisserie restaurant in Manhattan, but guesses run to more than 5,000. Statistical services catering to the voracious needs of Rotisserians, for whom the stats are the life, have flourished. There are even books: Okrent and Waggoner's original Rotisserie League Baseball, published by Bantam in 1984, and How to Win at Rotisserie Baseball by American Dreamer Peter Golenbock, just out from Vintage. "If I were to discover a cure for cancer, my obit in the Times would still read, 'Dan Okrent, invented Rotisserie League Baseball,' " notes Okrent, editor of the regional magazine New England Monthly.

Rules vary from league to league, but basically each team starts the season with a set limit of real dollars (in the American Dreams, $260) with which to assemble an imaginary team of 23 real major leaguers, hired at a cutthroat auction that is equal parts puzzle and poker game. Up to 13 players can be held over from the previous year; the rest are purchased on draft day. The players -- nine pitchers, six infielders, five outfielders, two catchers and a designated hitter -- compete, in aggregate, in eight statistical categories over the course of the 162-game regular season. The winning team is the one with the highest totals in each category: batting average, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, wins, saves, earned-run average, and the ratio of hits plus walks to innings pitched.

Rotisserians are drawn, as the cliche goes, from all walks of life. Iowa Congressman Fred Grandy, who played Gopher Smith on the TV show The Love Boat, is a player; so are former Major League Pitcher Jim Kaat and Today-show Host Bryant Gumbel. The American Dreams, the second oldest league in existence and the first to play the game with American League ballplayers, consists mostly of New York City journalists and writers. Tony Lukas of the Palukas has won Pulitzers both for his reporting for the New York Times and for his recent book on Boston race relations, Common Ground. One of the Amaros' owners (most teams have two), Dave Rubin, is co-director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media at New York University. There are editors and writers for TIME, Newsweek, GQ, Fairchild Publications and Random House, as well as a couple of authors and a lawyer. Disparate as their personalities may be, each of the owners holds two truths to be self-evident: he can run a team better than the lords of baseball, and each of his rival owners is a conniving fool.

The word is out: the unpredictable Veecks (as in wrecks) are going to make Free-Agent Henderson, the Yankees' peerless lead-off hitter and champion base stealer, their first selection. (The new book by Veecks Owner Golenbock is looked at somewhat askance by his fellow owners. Newcomer Golenbock finished in twelfth place last season, 68 points behind Mark Starr's victorious Nova, and his lodge brothers wonder where he gets his expertise.) This does not necessarily mean the Veecks will sign Henderson; merely that as last season's last-place team, they have the right to kick off the action. The rumor is the bidding will open at a record-high level for a single player, $57, and top out somewhere at a hitherto unthinkable $70, more than a quarter of a team's entire budget. The view around the league is that the Amaros, the preseason favorite with a formidable squad of returning wall bangers, need only to sign Henderson to have a nearly preemptive claim on the pennant.

Surprise: the first name thrown out by the Veecks is Brett Butler, the speedy Cleveland centerfielder. Because the American League has a scarcity of base stealers, speed is a highly prized commodity; Butler, a .278 hitter with little power but who swiped 32 bases, goes for $22. Yankee Slugger Don Mattingly goes for $45; Baltimore Catcher Terry Kennedy for $14. Henderson, year in and year out the Rotisserie League's Mr. Everything, comes up fourth. The bidding is fierce, quickly passing Rickey's previous salary of $53. Given the finite money pool of $3,120, the large number of top players in this year's draft would seem to make each one less valuable. But Rickey is immune to the iron laws of economics, and he boldly goes where no man has gone before: $60, then $65 and finally $69. The auctioneer intones his ritual "Going once, going twice . . ." Everyone looks at the Amaros.

Without hesitation, they pass. "It would ruin our salary structure," they explain. The high bid belongs to Hugh Sweeney's Wssox, so attention now focuses on the Moose Factory, Rickey's employer the past two seasons and the holder of topping rights to his salary. For $1 more, Mooser Alex Patton, the league's winningest owner, can have his star player back for two more years at $70. But Patton passes too. The league breathes a double sigh of relief.

And out comes the cash: Cleveland's potent Joe Carter, who hit .302 with 29 home runs, 121 RBIs and had 29 steals in 1986, fetches $46; Detroit's injury- prone slugger-speedster and amateur airplane pilot Kirk Gibson goes for $41. More than five hours later, the auction closes with the march of the scrubeenies, the cheap players who fill out everyone's roster. There are still some good buys for those who have husbanded their money, either by design or dumb luck. The Moosers grab Milwaukee's Cecil Cooper for $3, the same price that Nova pays for Catcher Ron Hassey. Pitiably, the once mighty Reggie Jackson commands merely a single buck as the Hackers' designated hitter.

As the meeting breaks up -- it is the only time during the season the owners ever see one another face to face in a group -- the postmortems are immediately held. The Amaros are still the favorites, but they didn't put it away with Rickey; the Nova, the Hackers and the BB Guns are going to be tough; the pesky Moose Factory will probably be there at the end, as usual. Prices for the best players were surprisingly high, everyone agrees, and there were amazing bargains at the end. "I feel we've created a misshapen monster," says Patton, who contributed two chapters on intelligent pricing to Golenbock's book, then saw them contradicted by frenetic, trading-floor reality.

As the season progresses, a new phase of the game will begin -- trading. Phones will ring at all hours. Wives will issue ultimatums. Owners traveling in Europe, Asia or northern Canada will search desperately for box scores. The circulation of USA Today, the best day-to-day source of baseball intelligence, will soar. Thousands of man-hours will be expended thinking about baseball, talking about baseball and contemplating baseball. But until tomorrow, when the major leagues start play, things will be quiet. "You've read the book," quips the Tooners' Larry Fine, traded by Reuters from New York to London during the off-season. "Now play the game."