Lords of the games

Before there was Okrent there was Gamson.

Before Dan Okrent founded Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980, Bill Gamson dreamed up a primitive forebear of the addictive fantasy game in 1960 with two old Antioch roommates in his place at 72 Foster St. in Cambridge.

Even if he were to find a cure for cancer, Okrent has cracked for years, the first paragraph of his obituary would still identify him as the progenitor of Rotisserie. He has, after all, created a game played by millions. (Those of us who don't run screaming out of the room when confronted with Rotisserie palaver.)

Gamson, in contrast, will be remembered for his distinguished career as a sociologist. While Okrent freely credits Gamson for his pioneering efforts, the man is as familiar to most Rotisserie psychos as Arnold Stang. Gamson is a past president of the American Sociological Association and one of the poobahs in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books, papers, and awards fill roughly the same space as ''Bleak House." Yet few know his fantasy prototype, formally called The National Baseball Seminar, is now in its 46th year.

Gamson came up with the name ''seminar" to avoid suspicions at the post office in Cambridge that he was running a bookie operation. In those days, an ice age or two before e-mail, league members mailed their fantasy bids to him. At the time he was a lecturer in the social science unit of the Harvard School of Public Health and he needed a dry title to escape postal interest.

''This was stuff I did all the time, keeping statistics and inventing games," says Gamson, a retired Boston College professor living on Martha's Vineyard. ''I didn't think anything of it. I've been doing this kind of thing since I was a child."

Ever so briefly: Seminar baseball revolves around four categories, two batting stats and two pitching stats. Points are assigned to each one. Every member works with a mythical $100,000 at spring auctions to acquire real players and manage a team in each major league. There are 25 league members who pay $12 a team. No trading during the season. No need to field a whole team. The owner with the most points wins.

Rotisserie is Okrent's Cadillac to Gamson's Model T. Players routinely pony up $260 in real money to bid on major leaguers at spring auctions, though some leagues -- there are lots of them -- involve side antes in the thousands. Players field entire teams and trade feverishly throughout the season. Points are assigned in eight standard categories. Whoever has the most wins.

Gamson has also created games in his professional life that are widely played by adults. His ''Simsoc" (Simulated Society) is used today in leadership training programs and college classes from the United States to Africa to Japan. In it, players deal with issues such as social order and abuse of power in an imaginary country with no government.

Okrent, in turn, has had a boffo career in publishing and magazine editing. Most recently he took years off his life by serving as the first public editor -- ombudsman to most of us -- of The New York Times. The copyrighted name ''Rotisserie," by the way, comes from a now-defunct Manhattan restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise on 52nd between Third and Lex where he hatched the scheme with a pod of baseball fanatics.

The history of Rotisserie baseball is rather like the Tolkien Trilogy -- arcane, unfathomably layered, and cultish. It is replete with legend and counterlegend. Okrent's stature is Frodo-like among the millions of true believers who have ruined perfectly good lives playing it. He dreamed up the rules in 1979 on a flight to Austin, Texas. In Rotisserie lore, this trip rivals Lenin's ride in a sealed train to Finland Station in 1917 to kick-start the Russian Revolution.

Seminar and Rotisserie baseball are different cultural animals. Seminar has been dominated by numbers people who also love the game. The current Seminar commissioner, Harvey Schubothe, is a budget analyst with the Oregon Department of Corrections.

Rotisserie, in contrast, is composed of people besotted by the game who must traffic in statistics to play. A disturbing number of them have been media types, males you pray your daughter never brings home.

The University of Michigan was the Petri dish of fantasy baseball. Schubothe was there. Gamson arrived from Cambridge in 1962 and brought Seminar with him. It spread to the likes of Bob Sklar, a young assistant professor who happened to be Okrent's freshman adviser. Sklar may be the only person to have played both Seminar and Rotisserie, which makes him the key link in the spread of this virus.

Wall Street Journal sports columnist Sam Walker, who alerted me to Gamson, resurrects him nicely in his book, ''Fantasyland," about the ubiquity of fantasy sports games in America today.

Gamson, for his part, dismisses his role in the evolution of fantasy baseball. ''It was so inadvertent," he says. ''Okrent is the one who really founded it. It's hard for me to take what I did seriously as an accomplishment."

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@ globe.com