Fantasy Baseball

Fantasy baseball is a game where players manage imaginary baseball teams based on the real-life performance of baseball players, and compete against one another using those players' statistics to score points. It is the oldest form of fantasy sports, and arguably one of the most difficult and time-intensive due to the 162-game season of the MLB

and the inconsistency of players. An early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer in 1960 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron, and distributed for several years by the IBM Corporation. It allowed two teams to play one another using random number generation and player statistics to determine a game's outcome, including a play by play description. In the fall of 1961 Rege Cordic, a KDKA (Pittsburgh) radio personality, produced a radio show based on the program. The game was coded for a computer with only 20,000 memory positions and was entirely self-contained. Early forms of fantasy baseball were sometimes called "tabletop baseball." One of the best-known was Strat-o-Matic, which in 1963 began publishing a game containing customized baseball cards of Major League Baseball players with their stats from past seasons. Participants