Word: okrent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most likely, my words of warning are already too late. Certainly the imaginary game that was born among the literary elite has already taken irreversible root among the undergraduate population of one of America’s most elite universities. Dan Okrent, first public editor of The New York Times, thought up the cruel sport, which came to be named after the Manhattan restaurant, La Rotiss�rie Fran�aise, where he and his fellow New York cognoscenti (and members of the first-ever Roto league) gathered to lunch and talk baseball...
Nagourney and Calame praised Okrent for being straightforward and unassuming. “He’s cool, open to all kinds of possibilities and very much fun to talk with because he has a very wide range of knowledge,” Calame said...
That range of knowledge encompasses not only journalism but baseball as well. In the offseason of 1979-1980, Okrent drew up the rules for a new type of fantasy baseball and pitched it to a group of friends at the Rotissérie Française restaurant in New York City. That game would become known as rotisserie baseball, familiar to the millions of fans who now play fantasy sports online. The invention would earn Okrent one of the first two spots in the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame...
...Okrent said he still plays rotisserie baseball with a group of 11 friends, some of whom were part of its inaugural season in 1980. “We’re all a lot older and fatter,” Okrent said...
...four other spring fellows joining Okrent are: Kimberly Gross, assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University; Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity; Robert Picard, professor of media economics at Jönköping University in Sweden; and Cristine Russell, a freelance science writer...