Senior marketing major Chris Sargent has a pretty steady morning routine. When the alarm goes off, he gets up, showers and dresses. Then he jumps online and checks his fantasy baseball teams.

“I usually check my team twice a day,” Sargent said. “I check in the morning and set my lineups, then I go on and see how the team did at the end of the day.”

Sargent is one of the millions of people who play online fantasy sports. According to CNN Business News, about 15 million people participate in fantasy sports, with an estimated quarter of them playing fantasy baseball, making it the most popular.

“Fantasy baseball requires much more time than other fantasy sports,” said Chris Hagerman, junior corporate communications major. “You need to check the lineups, the pitching matchups, who is playing where and more.”

Hagerman usually plays fantasy baseball, but is taking this season off.
“I’ve found that having a team takes up a lot of my time and distracts me from school,” he said. “I decided to take at least the first part of the season off until summer break.”

Adam King, assistant professor of sociology, said fantasy baseball is an example of the displacement effect.

“The displacement effect involves having a certain amount of time in a day to accomplish what you need, and then something else comes along and takes up a bulk of that time,” he said.

This displacement could cause a lack of productivity in and out of the classroom. Whether students are pouring over box scores in their newspaper during class or skipping their homework to catch the latest updates on ESPN’s recap show “Baseball Tonight,” less time is being spent focusing on schoolwork during the crucial time approaching finals.

“It is pretty easy to get caught up in it, but the way I play doesn’t take too much time,” Sargent said. “It’s all about knowing when you need to get your work done, and then you can play.”

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