Major League Baseball labour conflict and the popularization of fantasy baseball

Abstract

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.