Tout Wars recognizes the importance of fantasy baseball’s history and the impact certain members of our community have had on its creation and growth. We have created the Pioneer Award, which will be given out periodically, to honor the innovators in analysis, strategic approach, and information dissemination, those who developed or were the first to apply new methods or techniques to improve the game. These individuals have built the foundation of our industry, and their contributions continue to inspire current and future generations of our community.
Inaugural Honorees – Lenny Melnick and Irwin Zwilling
The inaugural recipients of this award are Irwin Zwilling and Lenny Melnick, who created the first regular weekly fantasy sports radio show.
How many people here have a podcast? How many people here LISTEN to podcasts? Before podcasts, there was radio, obviously. But 35 years ago, in the pre-internet fantasy sports world, the only sources of information were books, magazines and newspapers.
The origin of the partnership of Irwin Zwilling and Lenny Melnick is described in Ron Shandler’s book, Fantasy Expert, and Larry Schechter’s History of Fantasy Sports. Here is an excerpt from Ron’s book:
“Lenny Melnick ran a corrugated box company on Long Island. Once a year at tax time, he would meet his accountant, Irwin Zwilling, at the CPA’s Manhattan office and they would talk baseball. After joining their first Rotisserie Baseball league in the late 80s, their friendship grew.
Lenny’s visits into Manhattan became more frequent. On Sundays, they would buy every city’s Sunday paper from a newsstand on 34th Street. Onlookers were baffled as they’d throw down a bunch of cash, pull out the sports sections and toss the rest of the paper in the trash. The two talked on the phone nearly daily, going over the late boxscores unavailable in the local New York papers. They joked that their phone banter would make a great radio show.
In the summer of 1993, an AM radio station in Babylon, NY published an ad in the local paper: “Do your own radio show!” For $200 per one-hour slot, Lenny signed them up to host “The Rotisserie Hour” for 16 weeks. The first show at WGBB 1240 AM aired in August. Here were some of the first words uttered on a fantasy baseball radio show:
LENNY: Good evening, everyone and welcome to The Rotisserie Hour. I hope you’re all ready for this, because for the next 60 minutes, you’ll be able to talk Rotisserie Sports. You’ll be able to talk about your leagues, about your teams, your players and your strategies. This program will be designed to be a forum for Rotisserie players and it will be a chance for all you Rotisserie fans to express your views and ideas. My name is Lenny Melnick. My co-host this week, and every week, is Irwin Zwilling. Irwin, nine years ago, when we started our Rotisserie career, did you ever think that we’d be doing this?
IRWIN: Rotisserie. Well, Rotisserie is not cooking. This isn’t a cooking show. Hey, it looks like we have a caller. Mike from Valley Stream, you’re on the air.
From the very first broadcast, the phone lines lit up every week. They got baseball questions. They got football questions. Many callers thanked them for doing the show, and the word spread. For a tiny station with a signal barely reaching past the parking lot, they were getting calls from across the country.
One of them was Ann Ligouri, who hosted a show on New York’s sports-talk station WFAN. She was taken in by Irwin and Lenny’s knowledgeable local voices and invited the pair to come on her show during the overnight hours. From there, the two found themselves talking Rotisserie baseball with fans in nearly every Major League city.
In 1996, they became the first Rotisserie personalities to appear on national TV. They were on segments of “This Week in Baseball” with Ozzie Smith, and “Pennant Chase” with Fran Healy. They were invited to speak at the 1997 All Star Game Fanfest in Cleveland. Their success showed the game’s power to cross over to virtually any media.
Irwin and Lenny were founding members of the LABR experts league in 1994, and Ron Shandler first met them in 1996 at the industry’s first live experts draft in St. Petersburg, FL. Two years later, the three of them, along with Alex Patton and Peter Kreutzer, created Tout Wars.