Book Review: Fantasyland by Sam Walker

As a devoted player of fantasy sports, I was excited to pick up a copy of Fantasyland by the Wall Street Journal's Sam Walker. I finally got around to reading it and the book did not disappoint. In 2004, Walker did what millions of fantasy players can only dream of -- he made managing a fantasy baseball team his full-time job. And he did so with a team in Tout Wars, the private Rotisserie League played by the experts of fantasy baseball. Spending over $50,000, which included travel to watch games and hiring two employees, and exhausting the patience of both his wife and dog, Walker lives and breathes fantasy baseball for the entire season.

Whether you are a baseball aficionado, the manager of three fantasy teams, or just a fan of sports in general, it is impossible not to get sucked into Walker's description of his quest. I laughed at his rookie mistakes, including a costly mistake at the draft and knee-jerk trades, comparing them to similar blunders I have made throughout my fantasy "career." It is hard to put this book down, as Walker weaves stories about his team in with meaningful insights about the battle being waged in baseball between old-school "purists," that rely on gut reactions and insider knowledge, and the new generation of economics-driven baseball executives, for whom statistics and hard data are the only way to objectively evaluate performance. Walker even personifies these two camps through his employees: Sig, the master of Excel spreadsheets and Zoladex, a program he creates to determine optimum player value, and Nando, whose Hunchmaster system combines accepted metrics such as scouts' opinions with unconventional data ranging from a player's marital status to religion and arrest records. Walker is careful not to pick one side over the other; he balances the power of numbers with his own feel for the intangibles in making the final decisions on player selection and trades.

Despite the undercurrent of the baseball debate, the book's central message is the impact of fantasy sports on the real sports around which they revolve. Walker's job as a baseball writer gives him unique access to players and executives. As he interviews these baseball insiders and admits to them the purpose of his questions (i.e., helping his Rotisserie team), some scoff and castigate Walker for elevating a parlor game over their livelihood. Others, however, embrace the "fake" game that have heightened the interest of so many fans in the "real" game.

These players and executives seem to understand that in a world of ever-increasing entertainment options, anything that keeps fans interested is good for the game. Walker's devotion to his team -- staying up until 1 am to watch a Blue Jays-Devil Rays game, making repeated trips to the ballpark to see his players in action, and keeping a constant vigil at news and statistics websites -- is not uncommon in the fantasy sports world. Walker sums it up best when describing a slump by his "team": "I haven't cared this much about sports -- or been this despondent about a setback -- since the fourth grade, when Michigan blew the 1979 Rose Bowl. (I locked myself in the bathroom.)" This is the same logic that leads the NCAA to look the other way, if not downright encourage, participation in bracket pools during March Madness. Anything, even if not "real," that keeps people as interested in sports as they were when they were young and had no other worry in the world, is undeniably great for the game.

In the end, Walker learns what many fantasy players already know: that it is often luck as much as skill that determines the ultimate winner of a fantasy-sports league. This makes fantasy sports much like the real-life counterparts on which they are based, and it serves as a reminder that winning or losing, while perhaps the goal, is not the only barometer of a successful season. After all, as with all sports, it's often not the outcome that matters, but rather how much fun you have playing the game.

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