I am happy to announce the launch of our Fantasy Book Review series here on Fantasy Ethos. The series with cover new and classic fantasy sports books. Some we will love, some we will not. To kick off the series, I am going to start with the classic Fantasyland by Sam Walker.

Sam Walker did everything that a fantasy player could only dream about doing to win. He hired not one, but two scouts to help him draft his team. He got the chance to go toe-to-toe with the biggest names in fantasy sports. He spoke to actual players about their fantasy value. He traveled around the country trying to make deals happen. All the while, he got paid to do it. Fantasyland: A Sportswriter’s Obsessive Bid to Win the World’s Most Ruthless Fantasy Baseball chronicles Sam Walker’s journey during the 2004 fantasy baseball as he attempted to win the 2004 American League Tout Wars title. While doing so, he penned the quintessential book on being a fantasy player.

As a reader, you realize how ridiculous Walker’s season is going to be when he hires two scouts, Nando Di Fino and Sig Mejdal to help him. Nando helps him scout players the traditional way, by gut and feel, while Sig, a NASA engineer, helps him crunch the numbers to find out on whom, from a purely statistical perspective, Walker should focus. These were not glorified co-owners. These were guys that Walker actually paid to do fantasy baseball research for him.

Walker splices in experiences of other fantasy players throughout the book, but it is his profound insight about (and resulting frustrations with) fantasy baseball that really resonate with the reader. A pre-judge punching Sidney Ponson was Walker’s biggest mistake on Draft Day and continued to be a royal pain. No matter how good your fantasy season is going, there is always that one player that makes you say, what was I thinking?

The most interesting part of the book is when Walker captures what has become a lost art–pressuring someone into a trade. With fantasy leagues interacting almost completely online and making it easy to say no to a deal, that art has been lost. Walker traveled around the country during the season to get some face time with his fellow fantasy owners making deals that his co-owners would have surely rejected had the offer appeared via email only.

Fantasyland is, without a doubt, the best fantasy sports book on the market, and definitely deserves a place of prominence on your bookshelf. It is a great read and you can cannot call yourself a true fantasy player until you read it.

Since and as a likely result of the publication of Fantasyland, Nando Di Fino went on to be a fantasy writer at ESPN and now the Wall Street Journal. Sig Mejdal is now a Senior Quantitative Analyst for the St. Louis Cardinals where he brings statistical analysis to the Cardinals’ scouting department.

You may purchase Fantasyland at Amazon , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).