A league called the Universal Baseball
Association, or UBA, dates back to 1984.
I have been playing in the UBA since 1986.
So while I won’t claim to have been present at the creation, I was just 3
blocks south and 5 years late. There can’t be more than a couple of hundred
guys who have played this fanatical game longer than I have. In fact, I do
believe that the UBA founder actually has an aging sheet of paper, laced with
the requisite faux self-importance, certifying the UBA as one of the first ten,
or dozen, or hundred, rotisserie leagues ever formed, and signed by the game’s inventors.
A (very) little history first. The game was named Rotisserie Baseball
because it was conceived by a bunch of Manhattan magazine guys (and one woman)
at a restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise. As I recall, it was on Third
Avenue at 52nd Street. I worked back then at an advertising agency
on Third Avenue and 49th Street.
I don’t think most of us can claim to have heard of this game until
1983, when the founders published a very entertaining rulebook that included a
history of their first few seasons. These were, remember, magazine writers and
editors.
Apart from developing the rules, known now
by millions, they also created a legacy involving showering the season’s winner
with Yoo Hoo, a watery chocolate drink once hawked by Yogi Berra, and oddly
clever team names. These were, remember, magazine guys. They were not, however,
clever enough to have figured out a way to monetize this huge, game-changing,
world-changing creation. They own the rights to the name Rotisserie Baseball,
and apparently not much else. This is
why the world at large now plays something called fantasy baseball, no
royalties required.
Fast forward, no doubt on a VHS tape, to
1984. One of my ad agency’s music directors, and a great baseball fan, founds
the UBA. He was also quite well-read,
and those who are similarly well-read will already have noted to themselves
that The Universal Baseball Association is the title of a terrific
Robert Coover novel about a boy who invents… an imaginary baseball game. The
original UBA comprised the founder, a couple of other guys in our agency’s
creative department, and a bunch of New York studio musicians who had a lot of
time on their hands between gigs and sessions. These were very good music guys.
One was in one of the incarnations of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Another was in
The Knack, but only after “My Sharona.” Still another was one of the great jazz
trombonists in New York – sadly, he passed away a few years ago. And one is
still in Conan O’Brien’s band.
None of them are still in the UBA. It is
today a league of younger guys whose jobs I’m not really for the most part
clear about. I do know that they are ferociously well-informed baseball guys –
one is even the editor/director of one of the best fantasy baseball info sites,
called Fake Teams. Check it out sometime.
But I digress, because what I want to do
now is describe what playing roto ball was like in the prehistoric, pre-web
days.
First, stats, because this game is nothing
if not stats-driven. The bible, small b, was USA Today. This was where we each
turned each morning to see how our team had done. Many of us kept a notebook in which we would
update, by hand, our stats for that week. Once a week, we would get a tally of
stats from our crack stats service, comprised of standings and roster moves for
the week that had actually ended three or four days before this all came in the
mail. Or by snail mail as it’s now snidely, snarkily called.
The other important thing about USA Today
was that no claim could be made, or roster move approved, until the player’s or
players’ own actual movement had been duly noted in the pages of America’s
national newspaper. If you simply heard on the radio that the Reds had called
up a catcher from Triple A, you couldn’t act on it until USA Today had
published that fact.
Another thing to note about no ‘net is
that the huge amount of information to be found online was actually hard to dig
up back then. The game today is one of making good guesses and sound judgments
based on a ton of info that everybody has. Back then, proprietary info could be
a huge trading advantage. If you knew
that the Padres were thinking of making a change at closer, that was a great
piece of intelligence. But how could you get that before it appeared in USA
Today or that other key source, The Sporting News? Here’s how: We all
surreptitiously hit out-of-town newspaper stands. There was one just north of
the main branch of the public library, on 43rd Street just west of
Fifth Avenue. Many a rainy night, I dropped ten bucks on papers from places
like Cincinnati, Houston, and San Diego.
And weekend box scores? USA Today didn’t
publish on weekends, leaving us all to figure out what local papers were most
likely to have even west coast box scores. The New York Times was hopeless, The
Post was a little better. The Bergen Record was quite good.
So now, say you think you have a trading
advantage, or simply a need to unload some spare offense for some pitching. How
did we trade without email? By phone, of course. We would close the doors to our offices – yes,
we had offices back then – and barter over lunch or between meetings. I would
have piles of phone message note sheets with cryptic notations like:
CALLER: The
Compozas
MESSAGE:
Steve Sax?
It could have been a message from a music
production company, a completely legitimate business hours message in an ad
agency. But it wasn’t.
And when I speak of phones, of course I
mean land lines. I have no idea how much of my phone bill went to roto ball
trades, or how many quarters I dropped into pay phones. But I do believe that
pay phones were no less important to roto ball players than they were to
Superman.
Today, the game is a web-based
information extravaganza, and that happy fact is what has kept me playing. It’s
also of course why fantasy sports have exploded. There aren’t ten million
maniacs willing to walk in the New York rain to buy an Atlanta newspaper.
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