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Document Type

Introduction

Abstract

[First paragraph]

In 1989, my uncle invited me to join his rotisserie baseball league. I was thirteen years old at the time, and, already an avid sports fan, extremely excited to play. As the game was new to me, I prepared for the draft by combing through my baseball card collection and ranking players in my notebook at every position. The auction draft was held around my uncle's dining room table with a handful of his friends, many of whom were armed with the most recent edition of Glen Waggoner's guide to player value. Each of us bid on players, using funds drawn from our allotted budgets of virtual money, with the highest bid securing that player's services for the season. The process of rounding out each team's twenty-three-man roster consumed the vast majority of the day. Throughout the rest of the season, team management and trades were undertaken via phone calls, and official league correspondence, including updated standings, arrived in letters that were typed, printed, and mailed by my uncle, the "commissioner." In order to follow my team's performance that summer, I biked to the nearest convenience store every week to buy a copy of USA Today, which published the statistics upon which rotisserie baseball relied. My team finished in third place that season, and I was hooked. Over the years, my enthusiasm has enticed many friends and family members, including my co-editor, Mihaela, to play what are today most often termed "fantasy sports." From an obscure hobby that dates back in some form to the early 1960s and that claimed just over 500,000 adherents during my "rookie" year, fantasy sports have grown into a cultural phenomenon that drew more than 57 million North American participants in 2016 ("Industry Demographics"), with that number increasing annually across the continent and around the globe.

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