The Fantasy Illusion

The Monetization of the Modern Baseball Fan Experience

Over the past few weeks, I’ve walked through how the modern baseball stadium isn’t a ballpark, it’s a casino. How the game experience has been flattened into a series of nudges and feedback loops designed for maximum engagement and minimum reflection. Then we dug into how sports gambling monetized not just the outcomes of games, but the emotional and ethical space around them. What used to be sacred, the pace, the uncertainty, the humanity, was turned into a transaction. A bet.

But the story doesn’t stop there.

If gambling turned fans into customers, fantasy sports turned them into middle managers or so it seemed. Because before FanDuel and DraftKings and algorithmic “optimizers,” there was something far more human at the heart of baseball obsession. This is that story. And it’s where things started to shift.

Before daily lineups, player pricing, and flex spots, there was Strat-O-Matic, invented in 1961 by Hal Richman. This was baseball fandom in its purest form: dice, charts, and a deep…