My Best Friend in 1988: Earl Weaver Baseball

I knew about Rotisserie baseball and how you could simulate your own games with friends, but damn if I was going to wait more than a week to get back results in the mail. I tried Strat-o-matic and Earl Weaver for Apple ][, but there was something about playing with a big group of friends that was most appealing about the potential of "fantasy" baseball.

I made up rules and manually scored a league for my friends early in high school. I can't say it made me the coolest kid in school, but it was fun. Don't worry, I still got chicks because I played trombone and was in advanced math.

League Zero

In college I met two things that changed me. The first was a dude on the track team named Jeffers who was named after a poet, was way more worldly than me, wore dog collars, and dyed my hair obscene colors on the regular. The second was the Internet.

In our college cross country coach's basement, we decided we needed something competitive (other than the running) to keep us busy for the winter. Jeffers wanted to start a fantasy basketball league from scratch. In 1994, the Internet wasn't much. But, we had "high" speed dorm connections and I'd had some luck building a joke (at first) Vlade Divac Fan Club that was featured on Yahoo!'s first What's Cool list and later on actual NBC TV.

The First Boxscore

Fantasy sports were coming into existence online, but only baseball and football were available, and they certainly weren’t mainstream. So we had to invent our own rules for basketball. We counted +1 points for the big categories (points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks), let each team start one player at each position, have a sixth man, then two more count half-points. Two more on the roster could ride the pine. We added a one-point advantage/disadvantage for home-court. One catch: if a player didn’t play at all, the next in line would sub-in automatically (maybe the most important rule we added). If you play today, you’ll notice it’s a very crude version of the default game Sports.ws offers.

Rethinking Fantasy Sports

If you’re not versed in fantasy sports, you may wonder what the big deal is. Why so popular? Here’s my view: it’s the ultimate way to keep score. Take NFL Football and think about how many millions of hours are wasted spent watching games every Sunday. When friends watch together, the banter between plays usually revolves around what will happen next and postulating what the coaches, players, cheerleaders, trainers, and groundskeepers are thinking. There’s no score, it’s just argumentative fun. Fantasy sports is a way to keep track of this: winning is a proxy for a way to say “I’m a bigger fan than you.”

I think fantasy sports fans are underserved by mainstream rules. They’re just crappy and way too arbitrary. Let’s break down my six biggest gripes, and the guide I’ve used to create Sports.ws:

• Mainstream sites call game play “head to head” because they add up scores for a certain time period and score you against some else in your league. In fantasy football, you’re usually subbing out whoever’s not playing that week; for basketball you’re just picking players that play 4 games instead of 2. Actual good play isn’t rewarded enough.
• The default categories mainstream rules reward were seemingly selected because they’re available. In basketball, every major site counts shooting percentage for big points. You know who had a high field goal shooting percentage? Shaquille O’Neal: great player, one of the worst shooters in history. Add some value to stats if you use them. Kudos to any site that lets you customize point values, but offer meaningful stat values as a default.
• For leagues that draft, 99% of mainstream sites steer you towards doing them live, over just a few hours. I’d argue half the fun of a league is in the draft. It’s the one time of the year when everybody is equal, where anybody can win the championship. I’ve done live drafts, and they’re great, but why not at least offer the option to not rush bad picks? To make more trades mid-draft? To not force someone that can’t make it to choose auto-draft? Let leagues customize how they draft players.
• “Snake Order” drafting has been antiquated since it was invented. It’s a nice idea — give teams that get a first pick in the first round last pick in the next — but in every major sport, talent is not evenly distributed, and the first overall pick always has an even bigger advantage even with the added risk. The math is sound: Make the draft as fair as possible.
• How many sites let you have a league of more than 12 or 16 teams? Incredibly few. Don’t limit league size if you don’t have to.
• Team defense is still a thing? Seriously? Let game players identify with people, not teams or concepts.

94Feet.com

Arvydas Sabonis, Finals MVP: The 1995 Site

94Feet.com in 1998

It wasn’t long before I graduated, hated my first job, and quit to move in with Jeffers to try to go pro with a fantasy site.

Sports.ws

I got an offer to buy 94Feet.com in 2000 by a clothing manufacturer with the same name. I sold it for cash plus a huge assortment of amazing basketball clothing. Jeffers and I played around with the domains FinalBuzzer.com and Gametime.ws but ultimately won the Sports.ws domain from the newly minted TLD .ws registrar by convincing them “we are to fantasy sports what .ws is to .com.”

"Office": 1999

Things I learned quickly:

1) I had serious feature ADHD. I had some luck inventing a few games, but I should have stuck to a slimmer feature-set and communicated with users more.
2) I had no idea what I was doing from a business perspective.

Evolution, The Black Era

The Site in 2004

By this time, our interests were to address all of the fantasy sports gripes above and to keep our own league (7 seasons in) alive. By focusing on basketball, we kept bugs at a minimum and grew faster than ever. By 2004, we were getting as much traffic and basketball teams as the biggest fantasy sites.

We call the era the black era because of the raw obnoxious black backdrop — it was a design that people complained about later saying “everybody thought I was watching porn at work.” But also, I was focused on so many other projects by then that it took a backseat at a time when it really could have taken the world by storm. In 2006, I turned it to auto-pilot for a season to focus on other things and because I couldn’t find an easy way to make a lot of money staying true to the mission.

The Renaissance

I had a hankering to inject some new ideas into the site for a while, and in 2009 overhauled it to function like it does today. I leveraged the powered of communal sharing to develop organic news feeds generated almost entirely from Tweets by journalists and players. I also broke down the wall between leagues. Chatter, sharing, and profile building kept users occupied between games. I also added one of my favorite features, the “props” buttons.

Facebook Has Likes: Sports.ws Has Everything Else

Gestures have long been a fascination of mine — user actions that require very little effort, unlike adding a comment. If you’re a user, you see these props available on draft picks, trades, and news items, but they’re built to be completely dynamic so that some day (cross fingers), you can choose your own amongst your leagues.

Exodus and The Good Point

The site has grown every year since 2008, but apart from playing with my own league, I don’t have the passion to support it the way it needs. Complicated rules mean complicated documentation, and that requires technical help. The millions of teams on the site need the TLC of someone that understands them.

I’ve had offers to buy the site to strip it for parts, mostly to mine the email lists for gambling offers. I’ve refused them to date because this is still the ultimate side passion project and the kid with the sports page would kick my ass if I killed that.

As of the first of this year, I’ve decided to sell to digital media juggernaut The Good Point. From their press release:

“What does it mean for regular Sports.ws users?
We all know that you’ve been loyal to Sports.ws for years. Now the site that you’ve been so committed to over that time will be evolving from the No. 1 fantasy basketball game on the internet, to the No. 1 most engaging fantasy sports community period. We have professional credentials here at TheGP, one of the many perks of working in news, and a team of 50+ writers both past and present delighted to give this site and this community the attention it deserves. The brilliant Patrick Butler and his team of former Sports.ws developers have created this gem that we’ve all grown to love, now we at TheGP have come together to accept the baton and complement that dream.”

Austin Kent and the staff of The Good Point have, first, been users themselves for many years. Second, the sensibilities of their content is right in line with the anti-establishment nature of the site. Lastly, the final piece of the puzzle to making the site really shine is good, original content and I’m excited to see what they can offer as I enter my role solely as end-user for the first time.

If you’re a user, I owe a huge amount of thanks to you for supporting and using the site, for sticking with it through experiments and tech hiccups, and for being willing to take a chance on the oddball rules before there was documentation. I don’t take that commitment lightly. In return, I’m hoping that handing it over to passionate people that will only improve upon it brings you solace.

I look forward to playing year after year… if just to take down Jeffers and his Manu Ginobili fascination.

If you’re a fan of Chicago sports, you may be aware of the amazing string of championships rung up by moustachioed coaches and managers. The last nine major sports championships won by Chicago teams were helmed with lip fuzz.

Exactly how much better are moustachioed managers? The breakdown since 1980, when moustaches emerged regularly:

Team
Bulls	545-193 W-L .738 pct Postseasons: 9 (100%) Championships: 6	792-1006 W-L .440 pct Postseasons: 12 (52%) Championships: 0
Blackhawks	370-294 W-L .557 pct Postseasons: 8 (80%) Championships: 1	721-728 W-L .498 pct Postseasons: 13 (62%) Championships: 0
Bears	146-118 W-L .553 pct Postseasons: 8 (47%) Championships: 1	119-121 W-L .496 pct Postseasons: 4 (27%) Championships: 0
White Sox	1151-1067 W-L .519 pct Postseasons: 3 (21%) Championships: 1	1447-1391 W-L .510 pct Postseasons: 2 (11%) Championships: 0
Cubs	569-619 W-L .479 pct Postseasons: 1 (11%) Championships: 0	1859-2018 W-L .479 pct Postseasons: 5 (21%) Championships: 0
City Total 1980-2011	2781-2291 W-L .548 pct Postseasons: 29 (33%) Championships: 9	4875-5264 W-L .480 pct Postseasons: 25 (26%) Championships: 0

Every team has performed better when led by moustache. The exception are the Cubs who do equally poorly in any condition, but they have Billy Goat, Black Cat, Vance Law, Steve Bartman and a whole bunch of other curses to offset the magic of the moustache.

While it’s obvious from the numbers that Moustaches are Moneyball v2.0, take a look how every Chicago sports champion did it:

Champion Team	Coach/Manager		Moustache?
2010 Blackhawks		Joel Quenneville The Walrus
2005 White Sox		Ozzie Guillen The Swamp Otter
1998 Bulls		Phil Jackson Coiffed Beard
1997 Bulls		Phil Jackson The Italian Plumber plus Soul Patch
1996 Bulls		Phil Jackson The Chevron
1993 Bulls		Phil Jackson The Lampshade
1992 Bulls		Phil Jackson The Selleck
1991 Bulls		Phil Jackson The State Trooper
1985 Bears		Mike Ditka Hurricane Ditka
1963 Bears		George Halas Clean
1961 Blackhawks		Rudy Pilous Clean
1946 Bears		George Halas Clean
1943 Bears		Hunk Anderson and Luke Johnsos Clean
1941 Bears		George Halas Clean
1940 Bears		George Halas Clean
1938 Blackhawks		Bill Stewart Clean
1934 Blackhawks		Tommy Gorman Clean
1933 Bears		George Halas Clean
1920 Staleys		George Halas Clean
1917 White Sox		Pants Rowland Clean
1908 Cubs		Frank Chance Clean
1907 Cubs		Frank Chance Clean
1906 White Sox		Fielder Jones Clean

And for fun, the top 50 Chicago teams since 1980:

Year	Team	Record	Pct.	Postseason	Coach/Manager	Hair	Stache?
1985	Bears	15-1	0.938	Won Super Bowl	Mike Ditka	Moustache
1996	Bulls	72-10	0.878	Won NBA Championship	Phil Jackson	Moustache
1986	Bears	14-2	0.875	Lost Quarterfinals	Mike Ditka	Moustache
1997	Bulls	69-13	0.841	Won NBA Championship	Phil Jackson	Moustache
1992	Bulls	67-15	0.817	Won NBA Championship	Phil Jackson	Moustache
2001	Bears	13-3	0.812	Lost Quarterfinals	Dick Jauron	Clean
2006	Bears	13-3	0.812	Lost Super Bowl	Lovey Smith	Clean
1998	Bulls	62-20	0.756	Won NBA Championship	Phil Jackson	Beard
2011	Bulls	62-20	0.756	Lost Eastern Conference Finals	Tim Thibodeau	Clean
1988	Bears	12-4	0.750	Lost NFC Conference Championship	Mike Ditka	Moustache
1991	Bulls	61-21	0.744	Won NBA Championship	Phil Jackson	Moustache
1987	Bears	11-4	0.733	Lost Quarterfinals	Mike Ditka	Moustache
2010	Blackhawks	52-22	0.703	Won Stanley Cup Finals	Joel Quenneville	Moustache
1993	Bulls	57-25	0.695	Won NBA Championship	Phil Jackson	Moustache
1990	Bears	11-5	0.688	Lost Quarterfinals	Mike Ditka	Moustache
1991	Bears	11-5	0.688	Lost Wildcard in Playoffs	Mike Ditka	Moustache
2005	Bears	11-5	0.688	Lost Quarterfinals	Lovey Smith	Clean
2010	Bears	11-5	0.688	Lost NFC Conference Championship	Lovey Smith	Clean
1991	Blackhawks	49-23-8	0.681	Lost NHL Division Semi-Finals	Mike Keenan	Moustache
1983	Blackhawks
1990	Bulls	55-27	0.671	Lost Eastern Conference Finals	Phil Jackson	Moustache
1994	Bulls	55-27	0.671	Lost Eastern Conference Semifinals	Phil Jackson	Moustache
2009	Blackhawks	46-24	0.657	Lost NHL Conference Finals	Denis Savard, Joel Quenneville	Clean, Moustache
1993	Blackhawks	47-25-12	0.653	Lost NHL Division Semi-Finals	Darryl Sutter	Clean
1984	Bears	10-6	0.625	Lost NFC Conference Championship	Mike Ditka	Moustache
2005	White Sox	99-63	0.611	Won World Series	Ozzie Guillen	Goatee
1983	White Sox	99-63	0.611	Lost ALCS	Tony LaRussa	Clean
1988	Bulls	50-32	0.610	Lost Eastern Conference Semifinals	Doug Collins	Clean
2002	Blackhawks	41-27-13	0.603	Lost NHL Conference Quarter-Finals	Brian Sutter	Clean
2011	Blackhawks	44-29	0.603	Lost NHL Conference Quarter-Finals	Joel Quenneville	Moustache
2008	Cubs	97-64	0.602	Lost NLDS	Lou Piniella	Clean
2007	Bulls	49-33	0.598	Lost Eastern Conference Semifinals	Scott Skiles	Clean
1984	Cubs	96-65	0.596	Lost NLCS	Jim Frey	Clean
1994	White Sox	67-46	0.593	Missed Playoffs	Gene Lamont	Clean
1996	Blackhawks	40-28-14	0.588	Lost NHL Conference Semi-Finals	Craig Hartsburg	Clean
2000	White Sox	95-67	0.586	Lost LDS	Jerry Manuel	Moustache
1990	White Sox	94-68	0.580	Missed Playoffs	Jeff Torborg	Clean
1993	White Sox	94-68	0.580	Lost ALCS	Gene Lamont	Clean
1989	Cubs	93-69	0.574	Lost NLCS	Don Zimmer	Clean
1989	Bulls	47-35	0.573	Lost Eastern Conference Finals	Doug Collins	Clean
1995	Bulls	47-35	0.573	Lost Eastern Conference Semifinals	Phil Jackson	Moustache
2005	Bulls	47-35	0.573	Lost Eastern Conference First Round	Scott Skiles	Clean
1995	Bears	9-7	0.562	Missed Playoffs	Dave Wannstedt	Moustache
2008	Bears	9-7	0.562	Missed Playoffs	Lovey Smith	Clean
1994	Bears	9-7	0.562	Lost Quarterfinals	Dave Wannstedt	Moustache
1995	Blackhawks	24-19-5	0.558	Lost NHL Conference Finals	Darryl Sutter	Clean
2006	White Sox	90-72	0.556	Missed Playoffs	Ozzie Guillen	Goatee
1990	Blackhawks	41-33-6	0.554	Lost NHL Conference Finals	Mike Keenan	Moustache
1992	Blackhawks	36-29-15	0.554	Lost Stanley Cup Finals	Mike Keenan	Moustache
1998	Cubs	90-73	0.552	Lost LDS	Jim Riggleman	Clean
2004	Cubs	89-73	0.549	Missed Playoffs	Dusty Baker	Moustache

If Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer want to start winning, an obvious solution would be to hand over the 2012 Cubs to ex-Cub Warren Brusstar, but understandably there’s a transition phase.

Restrictions: we’re all flying to the same place, there are four conference semis to watch over two days, everybody needs to be able to participate at any level at any time, we’ve only got a five hour flight with in-flight Wifi to invent the game.

Challenge accepted.

Download every play from the regular season, create a board with payouts that offset the probability of each event not occurring.

292-1 payout for predicting an overturned penalty? Don’t mind if I do!