Two decades before Dan Okrent invented fantasy baseball at the Rotisserie restaurant in New York in 1980, there was John Burgeson, an IBM worker in Akron who figured out computer sports leagues long before there was an infrastructure to support them. Bess Kalb tells his story in an excellent new Grantland article. An excerpt:
‘The common narrative holds that the journalist Dan Okrent invented fantasy baseball in 1980 — and cleaving to the widely accepted definition of ‘fantasy baseball,’ it’s true. In Okrent’s vision, any fan could be the owner of a team in a fantasy league. Fantasy gamers would draft active MLB players based on whatever instincts and intangibles a real GM would take into consideration and they’d follow each player’s performance throughout the season to compete against other fantasy teams in the league. The concept was infectiously straightforward. By the end of the decade, a half million people throughout the country were deep into roto. Okrent’s version became a craze, and his game, not John’s, is why the modern incarnation of all fantasy sports exists.
While Okrent is indisputably the game’s father, John is its genetically distant forebear, and for the sake of historical correctness he recently decided to claim great-grand-paternity. In January 2009, just shy of his 80th birthday, John Burgeson logged on to Wikipedia and edited the entry for fantasy baseball to include this: ‘An early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer in 1960 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron.’ He appended some scanned documents confirming the game’s existence, and with them, he wrote himself into history. Of course, neither Burgeson nor Okrent profited from their inventions, but on that day, John earned a bit of credit for an idea lost in a filing cabinet for 50 years.
In 1960, nobody cared about a computer wonk in Akron tinkering at his desk for his own amusement, and John’s game never caught on. “
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Atari Baseball, 1979:
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Tags: Bess Kalb, John Burgeson