A Wall Street Journal writer spends a season in a fantasy baseball league to explore the inner workings and contagious passions of one of the country’s most popular pursuits Every spring, millions of Americans prepare to take part in one of the oddest, most obsessive and engrossing rituals in the sports pantheon: rotisserie baseball, a fantasy game where armchair fans match wits by building their own teams. Starting with a player "draft" before the Major League season, contenders spend six months scouring the box scores to see if their handpicked players can outperform the opposition. It’s a pastime that threatens to overtake traditional baseball in the passions it generates. In 2004, Sam Walker, a sports columnist for The Wall Street Journal, decided to explore this phenomenon by talking his way into Tout Wars, a private league generally reserved for the nation’s top experts.
