LABR
fantasy sports league
LABR was the first high-profile fantasy sports experts league of its kind. Formed by John Hunt, the fantasy baseball columnist for USA Today Baseball Weekly, the league was first formed in 1994 and featured such celebrities as Peter Gammons, Keith Olbermann and Bill James.
LABR stands for League of Alternative Baseball Reality and was given that nickname and the pronunciation ("labor") by Olbermann as a play on words with the labor strike in baseball at that time. Hunt ran the league and published the results of the LABR league in the Baseball Weekly's (now USA Today Sports Weekly) fantasy baseball preview issue each March from 1994 through 2006. He opted not to return for the 2007 league and was replaced with in-house staff. The dollar values players were sold for in the fantasy league are used as a benchmark for readers in their own fantasy drafts.
On its 20th anniversary in 2013 Steve Gardner of USA Today published the LABR of love: Experts fantasy league begins 20th season documenting its first two decades.
The LABR has lost its early status as the premier experts' league, as in 1997 a rival fantasy baseball experts league, Tout Wars, was created by Ron Shandler, who was fed up with the lack of promotion USA Today gave the LABR league.
The LABR Mixed league, AL-Only league and NL-Only league are online and can be viewed by the general public.
The 2020 Major League Baseball season was a 60-game pandemic shortened season.
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This entry incorporates text from “LABR” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.