In New York: Big League Fantasies

Optimistic as ever, the Nattering Nabobs are there; so are the Rubin Amaros and the Burn Bags. Half the Fine Tooners have flown in from London. The dangerous Moose Factory shows up, without Rickey Henderson for the first time in years. Forsaking children, spouses and all significant others, twelve contentious clans have gathered this daylight-savings Sunday in the sporting confines of O'Reilly's Pub in New York City for the most sacred event of their baseball calendar: not opening day or the seventh game of the World Series but draft day for the American Dreams.

Batter up! It's time for the season's first pitch to Rotisserie League Baseball, which in just seven years has grown from a rookie gleaming with promise into a full-blown phenom with all the tools. No one knows exactly how many fantasy leagues have sprung up across the country since Journalists Dan Okrent and Glen Waggoner invented the game at the now defunct La Rotisserie restaurant in Manhattan, but guesses run to more than 5,000. Statistical services catering to the voracious needs of Rotisserians, for whom the stats are the life, have flourished. There are even books: Okrent and Waggoner's original Rotisserie League Baseball, published by Bantam in 1984, and How to Win at Rotisserie Baseball by American Dreamer Peter Golenbock, just out from Vintage. "If I were to discover a cure for cancer, my obit in the Times would still read, 'Dan Okrent, invented Rotisserie League Baseball,' " notes Okrent, editor of the regional magazine New England Monthly.

Rules vary from league to league, but basically each team starts the season with a set limit of real dollars (in the American Dreams, $260) with which to assemble an imaginary team of 23 real major leaguers, hired at a cutthroat auction that is equal parts puzzle and poker game. Up to 13 players can be held over from the previous year; the rest are purchased on draft day. The players -- nine pitchers, six infielders, five outfielders, two catchers and a designated hitter -- compete, in aggregate, in eight statistical categories over the course of the 162-game regular season. The winning team is the one with the highest totals in each category: batting average, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, wins, saves, earned-run average, and the ratio of hits plus walks to innings pitched.

Rotisserians are drawn, as the cliche goes, from all walks of life. Iowa Congressman Fred Grandy, who played Gopher Smith on the TV show The Love Boat, is a player; so are former Major League Pitcher Jim Kaat and Today-show Host Bryant Gumbel. The American Dreams, the second oldest league in existence and the first to play the game with American League ballplayers, consists mostly of New York City journalists and writers. Tony Lukas of the Palukas has won Pulitzers both for his reporting for the New York Times and for his recent book on Boston race relations, Common Ground. One of the Amaros' owners (most teams have two), Dave Rubin, is co-director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media at New York University. There are editors and writers for TIME, Newsweek, GQ, Fairchild Publications and Random House, as well as a couple of authors and a lawyer. Disparate as their personalities may be, each of the owners holds two truths to be self-evident: he can run a team better than the lords of baseball, and each of his rival owners is a conniving fool.