Browsing by Subject "Fantasy sport"

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Open Access
Major League Baseball labour conflict and the popularization of fantasy baseball
(Routledge, 2024-03-10) Ploeg, Andrew Jonathan
Fantasy sport constitutes a major force in the international sport industry, attracting 62.5 million participants in North America and millions more throughout the world. Despite the significance of fantasy sport, however, much scholarly work remains to be done on its history, participants, and relationships with the sports that make it possible. To that end, this article endeavors to shed light on the development of fantasy baseball throughout the 1980s and 1990s. While I have argued elsewhere that the advent of free agency in Major League Baseball (MLB) facilitated the invention of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980, in this article I contend that the most influential factor in the evolution of the game since that time was not primarily the increased prevalence of the internet, as most scholars maintain, but rather a series of labour conflicts in MLB during the first two full decades of the free agency era. I examine three of the most consequential of those conflicts in order to assert that they helped perpetuate a shift in fan attitudes and behaviors that began with free agency and that played a critical role in popularizing not only fantasy baseball but all of fantasy sport.
Open Access
A new form of fandom: how free agency brought about Rotisserie League Baseball
(Routledge, 2021-03-10) Ploeg, Andrew Jonathan
One of the most radically transformative shifts in sport history occurred between 1970 and 1975 with the dissolution of the reserve clause in Major League Baseball. In just five years, the legal proceedings of Curt Flood, Jim ‘Catfish’ Hunter, Andy Messersmith, and Dave McNally ruptured a system that had been in place since 1879 and brought about free agency, revolutionizing the economic relations between baseball players and team owners. Skyrocketing player salaries and increased roster turnover in the ensuing years, however, also transformed the dynamics between fans, their local teams, and their favourite players, relationships that historically had been built on roster continuity. Free agency elicited a heightened awareness of the imminent instability of teams, undermining fans’ traditional team allegiance and opening a space for a new mode of expression of their loyalty. This space facilitated the emergence of Rotisserie League Baseball, a forerunner of fantasy baseball and arguably the first fully-fledged fantasy sport. In other words, the advent of free agency constituted a watershed moment in baseball history that modified conceptions of fan loyalty, control, and ownership, paving the way for the birth of fantasy sport.