Welcome to the "Original" Dynasty Rankings Fantasy Football Blog

This blog was born out of a Dynasty Rankings thread originally begun in October, 2006 at the Footballguys.com message boards. The rankings in that thread and the ensuing wall-to-wall discussion of player values and dynasty league strategy took on a life of its own at over 275 pages and 700,000 page views. The result is what you see in the sidebar under "Updated Positional Rankings": a comprehensive ranking of dynasty league fantasy football players by position on a tiered, weighted scale. In the tradition of the original footballguys.com Dynasty Rankings thread, intelligent debate is welcome and encouraged.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Quote of the Day | June 10, 2008: Baseball's Creation Myth

From 2002's The Faith of 50 Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture by Christopher H. Evans.


The twin virtues of baseball, as a rural "pastoral" game played by young boys and as a manly professional sport, came together around the remarkable career of one man, Albert Goodwill Spalding. Almost single-handedly, Spalding manufactured one of the great myths that remains to this day the centerpiece for understanding the civil religion of baseball: the belief that the game was "invented" in 1839 by the future Civil War hero General Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York.

The alleged invention of baseball by Doubleday not only gave to baseball a compelling creation story, it also gave the sport a sacred place of origin that corroborated claims that the sport was uniquely American. As Benjamin Rader notes, "As Jews and Christians have their Jerusalem and Moslems their Mecca, baseball fans now had their special place, the pastoral village of Cooperstown."


Tags: The Faith of 50 Million, Baseball, Religion

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