The Universal Baseball Association, Brian Phillips’ “The Unreal Genius of Football Manager, Greatest Video Game Ever”, and the Netflix documentary Silly Little Game all tell a story of the effects of sport simulations on a fan’s life. To some extent, all of these fantasy, abstract leagues brought about drastic changes in the players lives, outside of the imagined world they created through their game where they constructed their own baseball or soccer team(s) of specifically chosen players in a larger league to create their ideal team. All of the drafting and keeping up with statistics takes time out of person’s life that was never thought.

The documentary is about the beginnings of the Rotisserie Baseball League by a group of men that after watching this film, are like the “founding fathers” of modern fantasy sports. Dan Okrent originated the imaginary league of real players in the MLB, and later in the film after the audience see the life course of the people that partook in the Rotisserie league, it is realized that it is virtually impossible to segregate real life from their themselves in the game they play to prove that they have the skills and knowledge to outwit their competitors in the game they all cherish so highly. The game affects them to an extent that they couldnot imagine what they would be doing without it, or where all their time and thoughts would be redirected if they were not constantly on what trades or maneuvers they could make next to move their team up the leaderboard. The men in this very first group that came up with the rules and regulations of this new entity that would become the multi-million dollar business it is today often described the league as something that over the years “filled gaps in my life I didn’t even know were there.” At one point in the film, Okrent reveals how he received a call one time from a woman that thanked him for the his “silly little game” being the ultimate destruction of her marriage. The thought of a game, especially a fake one thrown together, causing a divorce between a married couple is sickening yet amusing. Even though I have never felt what it is like to use a team of players you choose to represent yourself and your dedication to a sport, it blows my mind that it can develop so far and have such lasting effects even after the season is over. Most of the men that were the firsts to play in this fantasy league eventually ended up dropping out when the fun was over and it wasn’t so new and exciting.

In the article by Brain Phillips, he describes his world of fantasy sports a little differently than the movie. For one, his fantasy team has to do with the game of soccer. “It’s a cold day in Uruguay, except that it isn’t, and rain is lashing down on the pitch,except that there is no pitch, and the soccer team I’m coaching, whose players don’t exist, has just given up a goal to go down 3-0 to their hated rival, whose players also don’t exist, and my heart is racing, and the curse words I’m uttering are purely and wonderfully real.” This provokes a feeling presented in the other literature that nothing else other than fantasy sports can be so illusory yet have such real consequences on real, tangible life.

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association coincides with these parallel works in the sense that the protagonist of this novel, Henry Waugh, takes the concept of fantasy sports to a whole other level. He makes up a whole league of players, teams, officials, and even managers, with histories that follow them throughout the seasons that turn into years he spends enormous chunks of his time evolving. His game is played by the roll of the dice, and each combination of the three numbers that result lead to a certain outcome of the batter. All of this prescribed on sheets and sheets of tables the proprietor of this sport organized has been memorized due to all the practice and experience he has put in. Like the other narratives, this entirely fictional baseball league has serious affects on the life of the man who threw himself wholly into it. In the long run, it causes him to lose his job and his sanity of knowing what is real and feasible compared to what is all a part of his imagination. He comes up with personalities for the players he disperses amongst a league of teams comparable to the real MLB we know today. These personalities must align with the names and pasts he combines to configure a person he knows so well, they are the closest thing to a friend he knows. Because of this, over time, he grows so attached to them and they are always there for him to fall back on when there is nothing else to be done, it begins to envelope his life. Over the decades of play, it transforms from an option to a necessity and he feels he has a responsibility to the men. Possibly this game provides him with a sense of importance knowing without him throwing the dice roll after roll, fates will never be decided.

The obsession with fantasy sports perfectly illustrated in these three accounts all compromise the lives of a man, for the most part. Generally, it is rightly assumed that the world of fantasy sports always had a higher draw to men than women, but there are women in the past and today that see why so many fans cannot resist.

Personally, I have never been involved in a fantasy league of any kind. If I had the knowledge and patience to track the statistics of players in a sport, it would be something I would be interested in. My dad, cousins, and uncles have a fantasy together every year, and all of the participants in that are male.