The competitors select their rosters by participating in a draft in which all relevant Major League Baseball (MLB) players are available.
Fantasy points are awarded in weekly matchups based on the actual performances of baseball players in real-world competition.
[1] In 1930, Clifford Van Beek designed the board game National Pastime, which contained customized baseball cards of MLB players.
[1] After rolling a pair of dice, participants would consult the card of the MLB player "at bat" to determine an outcome, which could range from a single, double, triple, or home run to a strikeout, putout, walk, or error.
[1] A notable example of such games was APBA, which was first released in 1951 and also contained cards of MLB players with in-game outcomes correlated to their stats from past seasons.
"[3] In 1960, sociologist William A. Gamson developed the Baseball Seminar league, in which participants would draft rosters of active MLB players and compare results at the end of the season based on the players' final batting averages, earned run averages, runs batted in, and win totals.
The computer would then use random number generation and player statistics to simulate a game's outcome and print a play-by-play description of it.
The league was named after the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Française, where its founders met for lunch and first played the game.
[7] Magazine writer-editor Daniel Okrent is credited with introducing the rotisserie league concept to the group and inventing the scoring system.
Rotisserie baseball, nicknamed roto,[10] proved to be popular despite the difficulties of compiling statistics by hand, which was an early drawback to participation.
[11] The traditional statistics used in early rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box scores or weekly information published in USA Today.
Dugout Derby served as an early version of today's daily fantasy sports by rewarding each week's highest-scoring participants with vacation packages.
[12] The growth of the Internet during the 1990s brought a "broad demographic shift in fantasy sports participation"[16] because it enabled fantasy sports participants to instantaneously download tabulated statistics, rather than having to search for box scores of individual games in newspapers and keep track of cumulative statistics on paper.
[17][18] In 1995, ESPN launched its first entirely Internet-based fantasy baseball game, with other major sports and entertainment companies following suit in the ensuing years.
The original rotisserie leagues, as well as their modern counterparts, rank each team in a number of statistical categories at the end of the season.
Major fantasy websites, such as ESPN and Yahoo, hold single-elimination playoffs over three or four weeks towards the end of the MLB regular season.
Often, owners who are not present at the chosen time of the draft will "auto-draft" while the rest of the league makes their selections live.
[notes 4] If a league does not have head-to-head matchups, then there may be no distinction between starters and bench players, as a team's end-of-season results are derived from the cumulative statistics of the entire roster.
The following table lists the default roster settings for head-to-head leagues managed by ESPN,[41] Yahoo,[42] and CBS Sports,[27] as well as in DraftKings' MLB Classic weekly competitions.
The injured reserve is used to store players with real-life injuries who are unable to compete for an extended period of time.
Such limitations are commonly used to prevent team owners from artificially inflating their statistics or otherwise achieving an unfair advantage by using an excessive number of players during a matchup.
[19] A 2023 FSGA survey found that 64% of fantasy sports players were male, 48% were between the ages of 18 and 34, and 84% had a college degree or higher.