Fantasy Baseball's Neanderthal Man

This guy might not have invented fantasy baseball as we know it, but his invention is a distant forebear:

he common narrative holds that the journalist Dan Okrent invented fantasy baseball in 1980 — and cleaving to the widely accepted definition of "fantasy baseball," it's true. In Okrent's vision, any fan could be the owner of a team in a fantasy league. Fantasy gamers would draft active MLB players based on whatever instincts and intangibles a real GM would take into consideration and they'd follow each player's performance throughout the season to compete against other fantasy teams in the league. The concept was infectiously straightforward. By the end of the decade, a half million people throughout the country were deep into roto. Okrent's version became a craze, and his game, not John's, is why the modern incarnation of all fantasy sports exists.
While Okrent is indisputably the game's father, John is its genetically distant forebear, and for the sake of historical correctness he recently decided to claim great-grand-paternity. In January 2009, just shy of his 80th birthday, John Burgeson logged on to Wikipedia and edited the entry for fantasy baseball to include this: "An early form of fantasy baseball was coded for an IBM 1620 computer in 1960 by John Burgeson, IBM Akron." He appended some scanned documents confirming the game's existence, and with them, he wrote himself into history. Of course, neither Burgeson nor Okrent profited from their inventions, but on that day, John earned a bit of credit for an idea lost in a filing cabinet for 50 years.
In 1960, nobody cared about a computer wonk in Akron tinkering at his desk for his own amusement, and John's game never caught on. It didn't have Okrent's breakneck season-pegged time frame, it was played on a prohibitively expensive machine — about $120,000 for the 1961 model, or just over $900,000 in 2012 dollars — and it wasn't social. John's version was a simulation game — you're still the owner of a fake team made up of real players, but instead of gaining or losing points based on those players' actual future performances, a computer generates its own outcomes based on the relative strengths and weaknesses of those players' preexisting stats. It's less about creating a dynamic competition grounded in real-life outcomes and more a hypothetical scenario run through a computer's mainframe, which essentially makes it a digital version of Strat-O-Matic. So although John's game certainly relied on elements of fantasy ("What if DiMaggio, Grove, and Dicky all played for the same team?"), it isn't fantasy baseball as it exists now.

 Pretty cool stuff.