and Oh, Hey everybody welcome to another episode of Purple Insider as we continue

Fantasy Football Week and I have a very special guest here he's not gonna

offer all the projections for the Green Bay Packers and so forth, but instead we will dive deep into the history of where fantasy sports came from with Larry Schechter, who is the author of the history of fantasy sports and the stories of the people

who made it happen.

And Larry, I am enjoying the heck out of your book because I'm going to tell you the truth.

If you asked me, I would have said, I don't know fantasy football probably started in 2006 with the

internet or something and instead I found in your book that it goes back way way farther so why don't we talk about the

beginnings of fantasy sports where this started to come from and the background

and then we'll get into the complicated world of fantasy sports as it exists right now.

I found it super interesting that you talked about how it was kind of just different pockets

of people who found different ways to do this including of course

rotisserie baseball I'm sure people are familiar at least to some extent with what

rotisserie baseball is but I never knew why it was called that, that it was started in a restaurant by a couple of guys who are fantasy icons now.

So maybe you could kind of take me back to the early beginnings and what the first fantasy sports looked like.

Sure, that there were precursors to modern fantasy sports I mean you know depending on what your

definition is of fantasy sports but it goes back like the 1800s were like

first like tabletop games where you'd have like a you'd roll a ball and it and it would like like an automatic

spring activated bat would hit the ball into a hole for a single double or out or whatever.

And then it advanced to games like Pataco, Ellis All-Star Baseball,

which was a board game and then in like the 50s roughly you had APA baseball,

APA football, which was based on real Major League players

and NFL football players based on their stats from the previous year.

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