Brendan Roberts, ESPN.com

Like many of his opponents in Tout, Brendan’s love of baseball was gleaned from simulation baseball games and on the ballfield itself. His sim game addiction was Strat-O-Matic, and the fields were on the, ahem, talent-rich black soil in Iowa.

Nevertheless, he was able to turn his Strat hobby into a profession and his love of playing it into a decent NAIA college career. And he’s a bigger fan of baseball than ever before. He still plays it (in a competitive men’s league), still loves watching it and still loves going to games. It’s in his blood now.

Journalism is also in his blood. His father was formerly a newspaper editor and part-time media coordinator for NASCAR, and he now is a newsman for WOC, the AM talk station that serves the Quad-Cities (where Brendan grew up). Brendan started at one of the local daily newspapers, the Quad-City Times, while still in high school and worked there through college, when he was able to make it back home.

Then it was on to the well-known Sporting News magazine in St. Louis. He started in the books division in 1996, moved over to the weekly mag side and, shortly thereafter, was promoted to oversee the day-to-day content (and write) on SN’s Fantasy Source when it launched in August 2000 … and the rest is history.

Well, kind of. Eleven years at Sporting News, an FSWA Fantasy Baseball Writer of the Year award (2006) and a free-lance development that included MLB Publications (the preseason and All-Star guides) later, he was honored to join Matthew Berry’s heralded team over at ESPN Fantasy on Sept. 2007. Talk about a place where you can let your baseball (and creative) mind run free, and He says he doesn’t take that for granted one second. You can check out Brendan’s work (for free), including his award-winning Hit Parade each week, over at ESPN.com.

His fantasy baseball career began back in 1992 when he played, get this, a 12-team, AL-only daily, points, head-to-head league for the daily newspaper he worked at. That’s right. Says Brendan: “We had a game against a different team each day, complete with three-game series, wins/losses, etc. And we’re talking way before online, so we had to do ‘boxscores’ by hand. I did OK my first year, but I took my lumps playing in an NL-only league against the ol’ newspaper guys the next several years.” And now here he is in his 18th year of fantasy baseball, competing against the best of the best.