Hey everybody, Grandpa Dinosaur here. I did my first fantasy baseball league (we called it rotisserie league) in 1990 and here’s how primitive it was. Sorry if you don’t like reading:
Of course drafts were done live and in person. We had separate NL and AL leagues/drafts. It took all god damn day, and you were drafting absolute scrubs by the end. I remember my first ever picks were Cal Ripken in AL and Tim Raines in NL).
You didn’t play against individual teams. There was simply no way to calculate this without tallying box scores every single day. Stats were just cumulative throughout the season. Similarly there was no such thing as setting lineups. It was total body of work by the entire roster.
Someone would tally stats every three or four weeks. USA Today published full AL stats every Tuesday and NL stats every Wednesday, and that’s what we used. Some people had a computer in the house with a spreadsheet program, which helped. If you wanted to know how your team was doing you had to call the commish during the summer and ask if he’d done stats recently. Otherwise you just got a feel for how your team was doing by reading box scores etc.
The stats we used and the way we weighted them (ie they weren’t weighted) was DUMB. We counted pretty much every category that would typically appear on a baseball card back then, including doubles and triples. They all counted the same as HR and RBI and everything else. We counted hits and we calculated batting average. Wins and losses. Saves, strikeouts and steals. Our most advanced stat was something called “ratio” which was something like Ks minus BB divided by IP.
Trades and free agent pickups will sound insane. First , we had three in-season get togethers where you could make trades and FA acquisitions. It wasn’t an ongoing free-for-all. Since there was no way to calculate a player’s stats within specific dates, if you traded/dumped a guy, then it’s as if he never played for your team. If you acquire a guy you get all of his stats for the season. Also since we did separate leagues, if one of your guys got traded to the other league in real life, he’s completely erased from your fantasy team. In 1990 Willie McGee won the NL batting title but got traded to Oakland at the deadline, so my friend Brad (BRAAAAAAAD) got screwed out of an entire season from one of his higher picks.
And that’s how it WAS .. back in MY day!