Thorn: Woodrow Wilson, the first fantasy baseball player?
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on February 24, 2014:
Yes, it’s a provocative title but a startling new find has me believing it’s true. Like the protagonist in Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the 14-year-old Thomas Woodrow Wilson—known as Tommy—created a whole universe of players, statistics, and a pennant race, with or without the aid of dice. But unlike Waugh—who invented a table game using three dice, a “Stress Chart,” and an “Extraordinary Occurrences Chart”—the young Wilson did not create players or teams. He used only the cast of characters in the real-life National Association of 1871, which he surely read about in the sporting weeklies. And now, from deep in the archives of the Library of Congress, we have come upon Tommy Wilson’s complete handwritten record of that fantasy season. George Wright, Al Spalding, and Cap Anson cavort on an imaginary field, along with all the other worthies of that first year of professional league play.
How do we think of Woodrow Wilson today? Professorial, idealistic, sickly—the President of Princeton University, he became the nation’s 28th President in 1913. He promised us peace but took us into war “to make the world safe for democracy.” We recall his Fourteen Points and his belief in the League of Nations; some will reflect on his Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918. We think of his stroke in October 1919 that largely incapacitated him for the last year of his Presidency, when his second wife, Edith, whom he had married in 1915, sort of ran the White House; this scenario gave rise to the 25th Amendment, regarding the disability of a President.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2014/02/24/woodrow-wilson-the-first-fantasy-baseball-player/
Originally published: February 24, 2014. Last Updated: February 24, 2014.