A New Monthly Magazine Brings Fantasy Baseball Back to the Printed Page

Fantasy baseball began on paper. In 1980 the writer Daniel Okrent and a circle of New York friends launched the Rotisserie League, named for La Rotisserie Francaise, the Manhattan restaurant where they first gathered, and they kept score by adding up each day's newspaper box scores.

The hobby now lives on phones, and fantasy sports generally has made the same move. The Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, the industry's trade group, estimates that 500,000 people played fantasy sports in 1988. A 2025 survey done for the group put the count near 57 million across the United States and Canada. The same survey found that 66 percent of season-long players between 13 and 20 years old adjust their lineups every day. Those figures span the years in which managers moved from printed box scores to phones and apps. Trade offers and injury news now arrive as push alerts, often before a game has even ended.

The internet has expanded the pool of people playing the game. Romantics who have been playing for decades get nostalgic, however, for the "old times" of in-person drafts, sheets of analysis with handwritten notes, and months of winter studying the handful of fantasy magazines that existed. Many of those are now gone.

A new company has sprung up intent on bringing back some of the old. Based in Connecticut, FBaseball has launched a monthly magazine printed on paper. On Nov. 9 the site's account on X announced the first issue: "Hot off the presses: Issue #1 of the FBaseball magazine is here! Fantasy baseball analysis in print, every month. Subscribe now and get through the long, cold winter with FBaseball in your hands at all times."

Having access to an early copy, we can objectively say that the content is smart, informative and entertaining. Those of us who play fantasy baseball religiously will acknowledge that there is a sub-culture to it all. We love the game of baseball, for sure, but how the real-life players evolve through the course of a season, with all of the ups and downs, against a set of projections we poured over all winter... it provides for a sub-plot that isn't visible unless you are immersed in the fantasy game yourself. FBaseball seems to have captured the essence of that culture and that sub-plot, making it a fun read irrespective of how die-hard you happen to be about the game of fantasy.

An example of the humor can be found in their "Top 5 Buys" page, where the authors outline a handful of players who are either young players expected to continue a surge, or veterans expected to bounce back from disappointing seasons. Vlad Guerrero Jr. is listed among these players and his excerpt reads:

"Cmon man. WTF. If you are over 40 and can remember his dad and the videos of young Vlad hitting batting practice bombs in Montreal when he was 3 years old, you salivated when he finally got the call. A generational hitter. It is in his blood. They moved him off of 3B because his "body type" didn't seem to work there long term, and you thought "maybe just lay off the cheeseburgers and the problem is solved", but the bat plays at 1B too. Then he showed flashes of eite elite. "That's the guy!" you thought, and so did Toronto. They laid out $500 million to lock him down long term, and here we are. Did he take that money and buy more cheeseburgers? Whatever he did, it didn't work. 9 bombs. A .688 OPS. But Vlad makes this list for two reasons: that ugliness should keep many away in a stacked position, and we know there is an elite bat in there. Get ready for the Vladdy comeback tour."

The magazine is filled with short writeups like this, embedded around analysis and stats. A fun and informative read for any fan.

For the romantics among us longing for a simpler time, FBaseball is a nice throwback. A solid source of information about the game we love, but also filled with laughs. A monthly magazine won't have the real time updates of the app you have downloaded on your phone, but perhaps hours of reading something in your hand on a long flight, with your morning coffee, or for many of us, while sitting on the can, is exactly what the doctor ordered.

More publications like it would be welcome in a hobby whose early devotees found their daily scores in newsprint. Welcome FBaseball.