Issue link: https://trevordayschool.uberflip.com/i/1495887
This is a story about the early 1980s at The Day School and the birth of an entire industry. The Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association (FSGA) estimates that 20 percent of North Americans play some form of fantasy sport. This equates to over 62,000,000 people, up from just 500,000 in 1988! Fantasy sports are also known as Rotisserie or abbreviated to Roto. Its earliest practitioners met for lunch at La Rotisserie Française, a New York City restaurant, and the name stuck. The modern fantasy baseball game dates back to the first Roto Baseball league in 1981. Alex Patton, a former Day School faculty member and ever-present friend of the school, was one of these first practitioners who shepherded the rise of Roto leagues. Mr. Patton taught English to Upper School students (6th through 8th grades back then) from 1975–1978. There he met Eric Lindow—Trevor's longest tenured teacher—and they connected partly through their love of baseball, forming a friendship that continues to this day. Mr. Patton left The Day School at the end of the 1978 academic year, but their mutual interests continued and fostered the invention of something unique. The idea that sparked their creation came from a simple question: What if we adopted Strat-O-Matic (Strat) onto a computer? Strat was a predecessor game to Roto Baseball. It is a game in which each player creates their own baseball team using cards for each individual baseball player and, each game is played using only dice to determine success or failure of the selected team strategy. It provides the player the opportunity to mimic being an actual baseball manager. Mr. Lindow was already working into his second decade (now over half a century) of service, having held Upper School teaching positions in math, science, and computer science; he also founded Trevor's technology department. Mr. Lindow translated Strat into code on a computer. When I was in 8th grade (1983–1984), I became a manager of one of the teams in this baseball Strat-O-Matic computer league. It was a role passed down to me from an 8th grader the previous year. In retrospect, this was my first introduction to the The Trevor Roots of Roto Baseball by Mason Stark '84, Director of Alumni Relations & Planned Giving 46 / TREVOR MAGAZINE WINTER 2022–2023