"I'm a very math-oriented guy," he admits. "I keep track of everything. I can keep track of time without a watch. I know that I breathe 11 times a minute."
If Ronz lives in an atmosphere of arithmetic, his oxygen is sports statistics -- specifically those compiled by the players on his fantasy baseball team, the inevitably named Number Crunchers.
The Crunchers, like all fantasy teams, consist of real big-league players selected in a draft that Ronz hosts each year for the 10 "team owners" in his league. Ronz's roster includes the Seattle Mariners' Bret Boone at second base and Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez as the ace of his staff.
During the course of the Major League season, the actual performances of the individual Crunchers are crunched daily to produce a set of ever-changing aggregate results. The teams in Ronz's fantasy league are then ranked by their collective proficiency in eight categories, encompassing everything from "AVG" (batting average) to "WHIP" (walks plus hits allowed divided by innings pitched). The actual crunching is done overnight by a firm called TQ Stats, which hosts websites for Ronz's league and legions of others.
Throughout the year, owners can trade players, release them, banish them to the minors and sign "free agents" to replace the unhealthy or unwanted. Adding to the intricacy is that many leagues -- whether baseball, football, hockey, basketball, golf or even auto racing -- allow owners to keep players from year to year, compelling them to manage multiyear contracts within a salary cap while factoring in players' ages and patterns of improvement or decline.
Keeping his Crunchers on top -- they were league champions last year -- is a process to which Ronz devotes one to two hours daily. Devouring sources on the web, statistical reference tomes, the sports pages and internet radio, he tracks everything from how one of his relievers is doing in real time to the development of promising minor league prospects.
"All this fantasy stuff is statistics, numbers and probabilities," says Ronz, a native Chicagoan turned compulsive Devil Rays fan, whose office marquee reads "Welcome to Piniella's County" -- homage to the Rays' new manager. "And I'm totally addicted."
Who's PlayingEstimated number of participants nationwideAt least 15 millionAverage age37Average household size2.7; 64% of participants are marriedEthnic origin94% white, 2% African-American, 1% HispanicGender92% maleAverage educationBachelor's degree; 17% have advanced degreesResidence43% live in cities of more than 100,000 peopleAverage household income$76,689Percentage of participants who are professionals45%Most popular fantasy sportFootballAverage total amount spent -- entry fees, services, publications, etc.:Baseball$174Football$154Hockey$112Basketball??$92Average number of years participated: Baseball6Football6Hockey4Basketball3Hours per week spent on fantasy sports:Baseball3Football2.75Basketball2.67Hockey2.24Source: Fantasy Sports Trade AssociationPutting up big numbers
While Ronz might seem at first blush a bat short of a rack, he is not alone -- or even atypical -- in his obsession. Fantasy leagues proliferate not only in neighborhoods, offices and barrooms, but on the internet, where Fort Lauderdale-based SportsLine.com is a major player in both stat keeping and operating its own games(See "Crunching the Numbers," below).
"Around 5% of all Americans play some form of fantasy sports," says Greg Ambrosius, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, a nonprofit body that services the hobby's participants and vendors. That would place the pool at something close to 15 million, with as many as a million players in Florida.
The numbers may be even bigger. In 1999, a study conducted by Harris Interactive estimated the constituency as closer to 30 million. Splitting the difference and applying the operative estimate of $110 per participant spent annually on related fees and materials, the total economy of fantasy sports may approach $2.5 billion, albeit with some percentage of that merely changing hands among participants.
Participants tend to be male, pale and upscale (See "Who's Playing," above). Ronz's 15-year-old league, for example, includes four attorneys, two free-lance sports writers, a marketing account exec, a business journalist and a healthcare professional.
Some leagues compete only for bragging rights; others vie for cash pots. All play for blood ... and not always figuratively. Prior to last football season, one University of Miami fan became so incensed that a writer on an advisory website had underestimated the potential fantasy value of a former Hurricanes player that he threatened through e-mails and message boards bodily harm to the author.
"He wrote that he would come to my house and 'have me for lunch,' " says the site proprietor, who wishes to remain anonymous.
Extra innings
Ronz, who is a member of both a baseball and a football league, may be more rational about his pastime, but no less impassioned.
"Almost every night, I eat dinner with my family then I go into my den and listen to the radio broadcasts of seven to 10 baseball games on the internet," he says. "I'll pick a game to listen to and have the ESPN scoreboard on my computer screen and do a crossword puzzle at the same time."
He does this not because he's a baseball purist or even because he cares who wins. "I found that's how I get the best info for fantasy. I get to pick which announcers to listen to, and that's where you find out who's coming up from the minors, who's doing well, who's going to get to play more."
On Mondays, Ronz must submit his weekly transaction list to the league commissioner. "My wife knows we have to be done with dinner early because they're due at 7 o'clock, and I have to watch for any last-minute waiver wire opportunities." Over the years, he has e-mailed his transactions in from Cancun, Mexico, the Bahamas and various U.S. cities via internet cafes, hotel business offices and his laptop.
On Tuesdays, he plays Strat-O-Matic, a baseball computer game similar to fantasy ball, with his buddies. "My office manager knows I'll be late to work on Wednesdays." The third Thursday of every month is fantasy league night at Ferg's, a watering hole a block from Tropicana Field, where the Devil Rays play.
And Saturdays? "Date night with my wife. That's not as a big a night for baseball because there are so many day games on Saturdays."
The big leagues
The passion and demographics of fantasy league participants have made the hobby big business. The industry is young, with the average player, according to Ambrosius, participating for only six years. With growth projected to be 7% annually, the business water's warm, attracting game creators, stat service providers, book and magazine publishers, advice-giving websites and software publishers.
One Pembroke Pines web-based enterprise, for example, hawks fantasy peripherals, such as color-coded draft board kits, trophies and that ubiquitous Sunshine State trinket, the T-shirt. Among its most popular is the Top 10 Reasons Girls Love Fantasy Football version -- No. 4: "The only scoring my husband thinks about is how many points Marshall Faulk had."
The growing circumference of the economic pie may be one reason states are beginning to scrutinize fantasy play, especially on the internet. A few years ago, Florida was on the eyeball end of the magnifying glass when then-Attorney General Bob Butterworth issued an opinion aimed at internet gambling that could have been broadly construed to include fee-based, prize-bearing fantasy games.
Bill Heberer, a partner with the Hall Dickler Kent Goldstein & Wood law firm in New York City, has carved a mini-niche in this area, advising fantasy game-running clients on how to negotiate the minefield of gambling and lottery laws. Until recently, Florida was on Heberer's list of "hot" states in which he discourages operations and customer harvesting.
"I'm not aware of a state where anyone has made any type of challenge on pay-to-play fantasy leagues," says Heberer. "But Florida is a state that people have avoided due to the attorney general's conclusion that fantasy leagues were chance games, not skill contests. But there has been no enforcement."
That's good news for one of his clients, Lenny Pappano, co-founder of the World Championship of Fantasy Football, an event kicked off by a draft in Las Vegas.
On Heberer's counsel, Pappano rejected entries from more than 50 Floridians for last year's inaugural, which drew 552 teams willing to "play in" for $1,350. The winners, a married couple from Wisconsin, carted off $200,000.
This year, with the state liberated from Heberer's "list," dozens will pilgrim from Florida to the Rio Hotel and Casino in September, armed with reams of references, custom computer programs and stat-crammed craniums, in search of the perfect backfield -- and a payday that could make some of their other fantasies come true.
Rites of spring
While the high-roller games attract a certain type of fantasy fanatic, it is still the local leagues that form the backbone -- and the charm -- of the hobby.
Next March, Ron Ronz and nine of his closest friends again will convene in his sports memorabilia-drenched conference room -- surrounded by Tampa Bay Bucs paraphernalia on one wall and Devil Rays mementos on the other, by a Michael Jordan-signed jersey in one spot and a banner autographed by the ESPN SportsCenter anchors in another. A day that all had circled on their calendars months before, it's the league's annual baseball draft, a sacrament of spring that for them is as rich as any free agent's contract.
They will come armed with stats and chips and books and beer and truths and lies about bygone drafts in which one overpaid for a bozo and another traded a future superstar for a stiff.
With one hand, Ronz will grab a pen. The other, he hopes, will again clutch a quart-sized bottle of Colt 45 malt liquor, the traditional beverage chugged by the league champ at the following year's draft.
"I'm not much of an athlete," confesses the head Number Cruncher, "but I love sports, and I love competition. Winning the league was just as much fun as watching the Bucs win the Super Bowl."
Bruce Herman is editorial consultant to the Topps Co. and a freelance writer and editor. He manages a team in the Tampa Bay Bar Association fantasy league.
Crunching the Numbers
Standing around a bar one night, one of Peter Pezaris' Wall Street colleagues calculated out loud that Bill Gates would have to spend $3 million a day for the rest of his life to die broke. After some whimsy about how each could solve the Microsoft magnate's "problem" for him, they realized they were barking up the wrong money tree. The question was how to make it, not spend it.
Out of that deliberation -- and a conversation with a friend who bemoaned the time drain of keeping stats for his fantasy league -- Pezaris hatched the idea for commissioner.com, which would specialize in web-based fantasy number-gnawing. In 1999, he sold the company to Fort Lauderdale-based SportsLine.com, which today is a $50-million-plus per year enterprise with Pezaris as president of operations and product development.
SportsLine, commonly known as CBS SportsLine.com based on its marketing partnership, bills itself as "the leading global internet sports media company." It operates its own voluminous site, provides primary sports content to AOL and publishes the official websites of the NFL, the PGA Tour, the NCAA, plus such mega-athletes as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
A hefty slab of SportsLine's commerce comes from its operation of fantasy leagues -- both by juggling digits for private leagues at a cost of $139.95 per season and running its own games for fees ranging from $29.95 to $249.95.
"I won't speculate that (fantasy) is half our business, but it's significant," says Pezaris. "We estimate we are currently capturing about 50% of the fantasy market." In 2002, that included the subscription of more than 80,000 leagues, each of which, he says, has an average of 10 members. On March 31, SportsLine quoted its database of registered users at 11.4 million.