[PEN-L:6288] another from SLATE

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

c'right, Microsoft, 1999.

>chatterbox
Conspiracy of Silence
By Timothy Noah

>Does Rotisserie baseball have blood on its hands? In the days since
the Littleton, Colo., high-school massacre, the media has blamed
the killings on almost every aspect of contemporary life: guns,
rock music, bad suburban architecture, atheism, high-school
cliques, the Internet, marijuana, homosexuality, homophobia, The
Matrix. About Rotisserie baseball, however ... nothing. Chatterbox
performed a Nexis search today and found no references to
"Rotisserie baseball" coupled with the word "Littleton." There were
21 references to "Littleton" and "fantasy baseball"--which is how
many people have come to refer to Rotisserie baseball. But that
isn't very many for a story this dominant. And by calling it
fantasy baseball, journalists are obscuring Rotisserie baseball's
origins. It was a journalist who invented Rotisserie baseball! But
Chatterbox is getting ahead of himself in describing a conspiracy
at least as complex as any ever perpetrated by the Bilderburg
Group, the Freemasons, or the Trilateral Commission.

>Rotisserie (or fantasy) baseball is a game in which individuals
"draft" real ballplayers into imaginary teams, keep track of
statistics on the players' performance, and win or lose depending
on how well these statistics add up at season's end. (It usually
contains a gambling component.) From the few references to fantasy
baseball in the Littleton coverage, we know the following: Dylan
Klebold, a Red Sox fan, played in Columbine High's Rotisserie
baseball league. He took part recently in a Rotisserie baseball
draft party. Apparently he was quite a skillful player. On the day
he shot up his high school, Klebold's team, the Border Hoppers, was
leading its division. "He was awesome," classmate Chris Hooker told
USA Today. "He was so awesome we thought he ought to manage a team
in real life."

>How does Rotisserie baseball encourage mass murder? By reducing
life to a stack of lifeless statistics. By breaking up social
organizations (teams) into components (players) who are
interchangeable. By fostering feelings of Raskolnikov-like
grandiosity. "Every Man a Steinbrenner" is the headline on a
feature about Rotisserie baseball that appeared in the "Tempo"
section of today's Chicago Tribune.

>Curiously, the Tribune piece makes absolutely no reference to the
Klebold connection. Some would call this an oversight. Chatterbox
smells a conspiracy. As the article makes clear, Rotisserie
baseball is played by some of the most powerful people in this
country. Mario Cuomo (former New York governor; father of the
Clinton administration's current housing secretary) has been
playing for 12 years. A Washington, DC, league included many
participants who "worked for the Federal Reserve Board." But the
Tribune "forgot" to mention the roster of media heavies who in 1980
formed the original group of players at La Rotisserie Francaise, a
now-defunct Manhattan restaurant: Lee Eisenberg, the former editor
of Esquire; Peter Gethers of Random House; writer Harry Stein; Rob
Fleder, executive editor of Sports Illustrated; and Dan Okrent,
Time Inc. editor at large, who invented the game.

>"I feel totally responsible," Okrent admitted when Chatterbox
tracked him down in the Time-Life building.<

;-)
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia now!