A Wall Street Journal writer spends a season in a fantasy baseball league to explore the inner workings and contagious passions of one of the country's most popular pursuits.

Every spring, millions of Americans prepare to take part in one of the oddest, most obsessive and engrossing rituals in the sports pantheon: rotisserie baseball, a fantasy game where armchair fans match wits by building their own teams. Starting with a player "draft" before the Major League season, contenders spend six months scouring the box scores to see if their handpicked players can outperform the opposition. It's a pastime that threatens to overtake traditional baseball in the passions it generates.

In 2004, Sam Walker, a sports columnist for The Wall Street Journal, decided to explore this phenomenon by talking his way into Tout Wars, a private league generally reserved for the nation's top experts. Using his baseball contacts and access to locker rooms, Walker spent a year trying to dredge up information that might give him a competitive edge over his eccentric cast of competitors. But in his quest for victory he also endeavored to settle the great question that divides modern baseball thinkers: Can excellence be predicted by statistics alone or is the human element more important?

Together with his crack research team, Sig (a statistician) and Nando (a baseball savant), Walker finds himself possessed by the game and determined to win at any expense, spending weeks on the road interacting with his real Major League players and trying to "manage" them. We follow his descent into sleeplessness, panic, triumph (temporarily), treachery, and even consultations with an astrologer as he keeps his ever-blearier eyes on his elusive goal. The result is one of the most entertaining sports books in years and a matchless look into the heart and soul of our national pastime.

"When Walker, a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal enters his first fantasy baseball tournament, he aims high: Tout Wars, a competition for guys who make a career out of analyzing stats to find the best Major League hitters and pitchers. He figures that because he can get to the ballparks in his journalistic capacity and talk to the players and coaches, he'll be in a better position to judge the intangibles and pull one over the pure numbers crunchers. But even with the help of a young research assistant and a NASA scientist, things quickly head south. This hilarious diary of the 2004 season includes several encounters with the players Walker has picked; from Jacque Jones's struggle to refute predictions of mediocrity to David Ortiz's razzing Walker for trading him away. Along the way there are mini-profiles of the Tout Wars competition, as well as explorations of the origins of fantasy baseball (predating even the famed Rotisserie League) and the shaky relationship between dedicated statistical analysts and Major League executives. Readers might even pick up a few tips on how to draft their teams this spring, but the real fun is in watching Walker's well-laid plans unravel." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Midway through 'Fantasyland,' Sam Walker's brilliantly funny book chronicling his season in a fantasy, or Rotisserie, baseball league, it becomes clear that the author is willing to engage in skulduggery to win. And it's only draft day.

A Wall Street Journal sports columnist, Walker has hired a phony videographer, who is actually an actress acquaintance of his, to distract his 2004 Tout..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Wars competitors during the draft. Tout Wars is an exclusive league reserved for fantasy baseball experts, men such as statistics maven Ron Shandler, publisher of 'Baseball Forecaster.'

Before the draft, Walker arranges to have the videographer interview his competitors. 'There is nothing more emasculating,' he writes, 'than standing in front of a camera talking to a beautiful woman about your lifelong fascination with fantasy baseball.' Fantasy baseball, a mildly embarrassing pastime, is baseball for math geeks. In the game, the participants act as general managers, drafting individuals from various major league teams to form their own fantasy team and then tracking the actual performance of these players on the field.

Walker understands both fantasy baseball's allure and its goofiness. This understanding gives 'Fantasyland' its tension and its power. Walker clearly sees the nerdiness to Rotisserie leagues, so-called after the New York restaurant in which fantasy baseball was first played in 1980. 'The point of joining Tout Wars was to swoop in, use my inside access to dominate the competition, and then vanish forever into the mists of legend,' he writes.

In other words, while his Tout Wars competitors rely on the mathematics of baseball, Walker hopes to use his press pass to glean information from the locker room. His absurd encounter with Jacque Jones during spring training, as he tries to assess the then-Minnesota Twins outfielder's state of mind, is the work of a talented comic writer.

As Walker, the Rotisserie leaguer, explains to Jones, the major leaguer, that he's not a selective hitter, the player responds, 'I hit .300 in the major leagues and people are still writing this stuff.' At one point in the conversation, Walker observes, 'It seems entirely possible that Jacque Jones is about to cry.'

Other players have hardened themselves to critiques. Detroit Tigers cleanup hitter Dmitri Young huffs to Walker, 'This is my livelihood. I don't give a crap about your Rotisserie team.' Walker picks both men for his team, nicknamed the Streetwalkers.

To help in selecting and running the Streetwalkers, Walker hires Sig Mejdal, a NASA scientist who would rather have a baseball front-office job, as his chief of statistics. Sambrenner, as Sig nicknames Walker, also hires Ferdinando Di Fino, known as Nando, who explores everything not quantifiable about ballplayers. Hiring assistants is an unorthodox step, but Walker is writing a book and seems to know that conflict is an important ingredient for any narrative — no matter how you create it. The dichotomy between Sig, the stats man who believes 'human perceptions are, for the most part, garbage,' and Nando, the baseball humanist, embodies the ongoing debate over the value of scouting reports vs. pure statistics in predicting performance.

Perhaps because of a draft-day strategy that goes against conventional wisdom by spending heavily on pitching, or perhaps because of Sig and Nando's baseball alchemy, Walker's team, anchored by Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, stands in second place on May 8. 'I'm feeling a brand of joy that's unfamiliar to me,' Walker writes. 'It's both intellectual and visceral.'

At its heart, 'Fantasyland' is a work of comedy, so the ball doesn't always bounce Walker's way. Young suffers a broken fibula early in the season. And near the end, one of Walker's best hitters, Anaheim Angels outfielder Jose Guillen, is suspended by his own team. Playing the Guillen situation for laughs, Walker stages a doomed protest on behalf of Rotisserie players everywhere who have Guillen on their team. Picketing in front of the Angels' hotel in San Francisco, Walker encounters manager Mike Scioscia, who reads Walker's leaflet and laughs, 'That's beautiful man, that is beautiful.'

As his Tout Wars season progresses, Walker gains a great appreciation for fantasy baseball, which, in the end, brings him closer to the real game played on the field. Many of 'his' players shine in the postseason. Most prominently, Schilling leads the Red Sox to its first World Series championship since 1918.

But it is Jones — who hits a postseason home run in Yankee Stadium in his first game after the death of his father — who awakens in Walker the realization that Rotisserie has connected him more closely than ever before to the game's human element. 'It dawned on me,' he writes, 'that I'd spent the last seven years observing the drama and pathos of sport without actually feeling any of it. Until then.'" Reviewed by Sean Callahan, co-founder of GeezerJock magazine, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

"It's all great fun, written with humor and a twinkling eye directed at the lunacy of it all....Walker gives his account of fantasy fanaticism an unexpected and satisfying depth." Booklist

"By far the funniest book written about our national pastime in the last decade....It will be appreciated by stat geeks who will see a bit of themselves in Walker's lunatic quest for roto-glory." Rocky Mountain News

"[A] vivid journey into baseball's bizarro world... Mr. Walker not only finds the humor in this world of the obsessed, he also finds the drama." Dan Barry, the New York Times

A "Wall Street Journal" writer spends a season in a fantasy baseball league to explore the inner workings and contagious passions of one of the country's most popular pursuits.

Sam Walker is a senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal and appears frequently on ESPNews.