By host Tom Ashbrook:

For better and for worse, it’s a big sports moment. College basketball heads into its thrilling home stretch this week. Barry Bonds heads into a major league baseball storm over steroids. Spring training is in full gear. Baseball’s opening day is just weeks away.

And fantasy baseball — the “rotisserie league” parallel universe that obsessively shadows the pros, the parallel pitched battle played by millions and millions of American, is in full draft season.

Sports reporter Sam Walker spent a year playing the game behind the game, happily engulfed in what he calls the “lunatic fringe” of baseball fandom.

Hear a survivor’s story from baseball’s booming fantasyland.

Guests:

Tim Kurkjian, covers baseball for ESPN, regular contributor to NPR’s “Only a Game”

Sam Walker, sports columnist for The Wall Street Journal, author of “Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball’s Lunatic Fringe”

Dan Okrent, founder of the Rotisserie League

Betty Wade Coyle, fantasy baseball player

Donald Levy, sociologist at West Virginia Wesleyan College