Sometimes Baltimore seems like one big fantasy league.

The city spends other people’s money on what it thinks will succeed, as it trots out statistics – or under our current mayor, 10-Year Plans – and keeps score to try to win the urban game.

We’ve just bid a billion on new schools, banking on city revenue projections and student test scores. The Grand Prix has turned downtown into a giant game board. Then there’s the casino sweepstakes, the mega-convention hotel arena, Superblock, State Center and a host of other big-money schemes.

In potentially the biggest fantasy of them all, we’re contemplating a $2.5 billion bet on the Red Line – a transit project whose key stat is a projected 54,000 daily riders. (In 1984, meanwhile, the heavy rail Metro promised to carry over 80,000 riders and ended up with only half that, making it the urban equivalent of past Oriole bets on Glenn Davis, Albert Belle and Sammy Sosa.)

The Birth of Fantasy

In light of all this, it’s fitting that back in 1985 and continuing until the present, I organized a baseball fantasy league for Baltimore bureaucrats, to give them the opportunity to test their investment proclivities on ballplayers before trying them out on the actual city.

The fantasy league was originally comprised of planners from the City Planning Department and the Mass (now Maryland) Transit Administration.

Charter members included Victor Bonaparte, who later served as Director of the City Department of Transportation; Izzy Patoka, now a top aide to Governor O’Malley; and Ken Goon, the current Commish and only remaining original member besides me. (He subsequently became MTA Planning Director and now is the top Red Line consultant with Rummel, Klepper & Kahl.)

The league has since branched out to other top bureaucrats and baseball wannabes as well, including Frank Legambi, former Executive Director of the Board of Municipal Zoning Appeals, and David Tanner, his successor and current officeholder.

This is no ordinary fantasy indulgence. From the outset, we took our statistical analysis seriously. The formulas are based on sabermetric rates of success in creating and preventing runs, derived from Bill James’ groundbreaking research, not mere counting stats, like RBIs and Saves.

We tested our measurement model by running it with actual major league team stats, and the standings came out virtually the same. Our measures of success and failure uncannily reflect real baseball.

Back in 1991, for example, David Tanner took young city planner Andy Frank into his fantasy tutelage, as they convinced each other to spend one-fifth of their entire fantasy league budget on the ill-fated Glenn Davis, right after the Orioles had just committed the same sin in trading away three future great players, Kurt Schilling, Steve Finley and Pete Harnisch.

That was Andy Frank’s last year in the fantasy league, but he certainly learned potentially invaluable lessons for the future (moving up the bureaucratic ladder as he did, going on to make multi-million dollar deals as vice president of the Baltimore Development Corp., deputy mayor under Sheila Dixon and, currently, special assistant to the president of Johns Hopkins. )

So keep that in mind if you see any resemblance between fantasy baseball and, say, the East Baltimore Development Initiative (EBDI).

So are the Orioles for Real?

For Oriole fans, the team’s unexpectedly great 2012 performance has called the whole cold numerical analysis approach into question, since they finally produced great results despite mostly mediocre stats. Alas, the experts still aren’t convinced and have predicted a return to their losing ways.

Statistics can be used for enlightenment or obfuscation. The 2012 Orioles’ outstanding strength was middle relief pitching, which is discounted by most experts and ignored completely in most fantasy leagues, but not ours. Another major factor for the O’s is that they never let a significant weakness develop. When a problem emerged, they fixed it. In our league, as in real life, poor players hurt as much as good players help.

The glamour stat of relief pitching is Saves, which is not mostly a matter of performance, but merely reading the manager’s mind as to who he will bring in to pitch the 9th inning to protect a lead.

Yet, as Oriole Manager Buck Showalter has brilliantly but enigmatically stated, “The Save rule doesn’t carry much weight with me. I like the win rule better.” By which he meant he values team wins, not pitcher wins (another diversionary stat used in most fantasy leagues but not ours.)

In the City, ISO the Really Real

Urban sage Jane Jacobs was making a similar statement about seeing “the city” as a whole, not as a stack of statistics when, in “The Kind of Problem a City is,” her answer was: organized complexity.

Which is why the current Orioles under Buck Showalter and Dan Duquette have not gone out and built the team around an expensive savior like Glenn Davis or Alex Rodriguez.

They’ve gone for depth, an interlocking group of “nuggets,” as Buck affectionately calls them, like Miguel Gonzalez and Nate McLouth, to immediately respond to any need. They draw on support from their linkage to the minor leagues. They don’t run the Orioles like a fantasy team, and our fantasy league tries not to be that way either.

It’s that Showalter quality we’re thirsting for in our city leaders, too – an ability to see past selective statistics, consultants’ plans and strategists’ or publicists’ talking points to Our City, that team we all want to be proud we play for. It means extending the playing field deep into government offices and wide to include students and strap-hangers.

Can our fantasy league teach these lessons?

This year Jamie Kendrick has joined the league. Jamie was an MTA planner back when the Red Line was first devised, then went to the city’s Transportation Department and is now back with the MTA. The transit guys are projecting 54,000 riders per day by 2030-35, a number that has varied between 36,000 and 60,000 for the preferred alternative.

That’s a far wider range of prognostication than even when the Orioles got Glenn Davis – or even when Hopkins bought into the EBDI plan to re-engineer the communities around its East Baltimore medical campus.

The real rule for bureaucrats and baseball nerds alike is: stats should be made as revealing and useful as possible. But stats are not rules, and we should not be ruled by stats.

It’s time to play urban ball in Baltimore that’s not fantastical.