Rotisserie baseball, nicknamed roto, proved to be popular despite the difficulties of compiling statistics by hand, which was an early drawback to participation. The traditional statistics used in early rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box scores or weekly information published in USA Today.Okrent credits the idea's rapid spread to the fact that the initial league was created by sports journalists, telling Vanity Fair in 2008 that "most of us in the league were in the media, and we got a lot of press coverage that first season. The second season, there were rotisserie leagues in every Major League press box." According to Okrent, rotisserie baseball afforded sportswriters the opportunity to write about baseball-related material during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike, saying "the writers who were covering baseball had nothing to write about, so they began writing about the teams they had assembled in their own leagues. And that was what popularized it and spread it around very, very widely."
How did Rotisserie baseball become popular?
Rotisserie baseball became popular because it allowed sportswriters to write about baseball during the 1981 Major League Baseball strike.