Fantasy Team Logos

[mjrbaseball]

I was sorting through my bookshelves, and came across a copy of the first edition of "Rotisserie League Baseball" from 1984.

Unlike the more recent editions, this book focuses less on player stats, and almost exclusively on how to play this version of fantasy baseball. It was written by the people who invented fantasy baseball, and since they were the only ones playing it at the time, they had to teach everyone else. (They had been playing since 1980, but it was four years before they got around to publishing a book about it.)

Rotisserie baseball got its name because the founders first thought of it while having lunch at a Manhattan restaurant, La Rotisserie Française.

The book also details the results of the original Rotisserie League's 1983 season, with a small section devoted to the three prior seasons.

Anyway, the founders of the Rotisserie League ? and of fantasy sports as a whole ? devoted a lot of space in the book to nomenclature and logos. They considered giving fantasy teams good names and logos to be as important as tracking statistics. (Although they spent a lot of pages on how to tally fantasy statistics, that being important in those pre-computer days.)

The chapter entitled "Team Nomenclature, Heraldry and Propaganda" notes:

Everything else in a Rotisserie League team is borrowed from reality; you can juggle your players but you can't create them, and stats are stats, fixed and invioable, beyond your control. But you can create and control every detail of your team's style and personality, limited only by your own imagination.

The orginal Rotisseriarians decided that ? like real baseball ? a team should have a city name and a nickname, except that the city should be the player's last name. They also emphasized that a nickname should play cleverly on the player's name, in an attempt to make the most ridiculous pun possible.

The book includes possible Rotisserie team names for some famous people, such as the DeGaulle Stones or the Mao-Tse Tung Depressors.

There is also an explanation on how each of the original players came up with their names and logos. I won't go into the details here, but I will show each logo and the name of the player it belonged to.

ROTISSERIE LEAGUE BASEBALL ? League logo:

EISENBERG FURRIERS ? Lee Eisenberg, editor of Esquire magazine

FLEDER MICE ? Rob Fleder, editor, Playboy magazine

GETHERSWAG GONERS ? Pete Gethers, editor, and Glen Waggoner, Columbia University executive (co-owners)*

OKRENT FENOKEES ? Daniel Okrent, baseball author

POLLET BURROS ? Michael Polletm attorney

(continued next post)

[mjrbaseball]

(... continued)

SALAMBIER FLAMBÉS ? Valerie Salambier, sales manager, USA Today

SKLAR GAZERS ? Robert Sklar, professor, New York University

SMITH CORONAS ? Corlies "Cork" Smith, book editor

STEIN BRENNERS ? Harry Stein, journalist and author

WULF GANG ? Steve Wulf, associate writer, Sports Illustrated

(Occupations are those listed in the 1984 book; I'm sure they are no longer accurate.)

*Later editions of the book note that when one of the other players dropped out, Gethers and Waggoner split up into two teams to keep the number at 10. The two new teams were called the Gethers Ye Rosebuds and the Waggoner Wheels.

[Waffles]

STEIN BRENNERS ? Harry Stein, journalist and author

What a great name.

Nice find, mjr.

[winters in buffalo]

Spectacular find. In the religion of fantasy sports, that book is an original stone tablet.

[paynomind]

Thats amazing. Thanks for going through the trouble to post. I'm very glad to read, particularly glad to see the logos.

I really like the logo for the SKLAR GAZERS... the A looks like it is about to whump that ball a mile.