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Leor Rabe and Jeffrey Klein were connected by the national pastime when they met as ������ɫ students in 2001.

“Our friendship was anchored through baseball,” Rabe says. “We discovered that we had similar sports interests, and once we realized that we shared a love of baseball and the New York Mets, the friendship clicked. We would go back and forth about players — who was good and who wasn’t. There was a lot of baseball banter.”

The banter continued after Rabe and Klein graduated in 2004 with degrees in technology/finance and philosophy, respectively. But there was now more at stake than winning a fantasy-baseball league or celebrating Bobby Bonilla Day or watching minor-league Mets play in downtown ������ɫ.

In January 2013, the pair launched , a fantasy-sports website offering news and advice to fans. Twelve years later, RotoBaller is one of the most prominent fantasy-sports companies in the country, covering 10 sports with more than 150 contributors through its website (which drew 50 million organic page views in 2024), podcasts, YouTube videos and SiriusXM radio show.

“We’ve built it brick by brick over the past 12 years,” says Rabe, the company’s CEO. “It gets better and better every year.”

Early innings

In 2011, Rabe was about to move from New York to California when he, Klein and two others (friend Alex Roberts and Rabe’s brother Raphael) met to discuss how to start a fantasy-baseball website as a side project.

“I had an entrepreneurial mind,” Rabe says. “As I played fantasy sports, it was clear to me that there was an opportunity for more in this space. We sat in my empty apartment after the movers came and had our first official meeting. No chairs. No couches. Just four people in a circle eating chicken sandwiches. We spent an hour throwing around names: Roto-this and Roto-that. Then Jeff said: ‘RotoBaller.’”

The RotoBaller domain name was soon purchased, and the quartet spent more than a year building the site.

“We each have specialties that complement each other,” Klein says. “I have a degree in philosophy, but I did a lot of work on the technical side on the site — server management and development operations.”

Klein, the company’s chief information officer — who learned to code and program on his own — also recalls the team’s early content strategy: The four were responsible for writing all of the site’s content.

“We tried doing that, but it meant we were each writing only two articles per week,” Klein says. “That was a big wake-up call.”

By the middle of the site’s first year in 2013, Rabe and Klein had already found fans and readers interested in contributing.

“It was the jet fuel for the early years of the site,” Klein says.

Midgame adjustments

It also didn’t take Rabe and Klein long to understand that sports fans can’t get enough fantasy football.

“The traffic numbers showed us what the country was most interested in,” Rabe says. “It opened the landscape in a way that we are able to provide content for all of the major sports.”

Hiring additional experienced writers enabled RotoBaller to then go beyond the “big four” (football, baseball, basketball and hockey) into sports such as golf, auto racing and soccer.

A turning point for the company came during COVID in 2020–21, when many fantasy-sports companies were suffering because of league shutdowns.

“It was a successful time for us,” Rabe says. “We’re one of the few fantasy-sports sites that can say that. The thing that showed us what a transformative company we could be was e-sports. We launched a division that wrote about professional video-game players. This drew huge traffic and sales to the site. People needed it. This kept our company afloat and changed our mindset about what’s possible and how nimble we needed to be.”

Rabe and Klein also point to Korean baseball, NASCAR and golf as being other key sports during the COVID era.

“The curveball was coming: We were gearing up for a fastball and made the adjustment,” Klein recalls. “That was when I felt we had built something that was about to stand on its own two legs. The company was showing us something. Things accelerated after that.”

A scoring streak

RotoBaller is on a roll: Profitable since day one, the company has grown an average of 40% per year over the past five years. The company’s SiriusXM radio show (on Channel 87) moved in February to a more “drive-time”-friendly 7–9 a.m. EST time slot. RotoBaller also received 13 award nominations from the Fantasy Sports Writers Association, the fourth straight year with more than 10 nominations.

And the site continues to grow — up to 150 original articles a day, with content delivering everything from injury updates to draft tools and rankings. Premium subscriptions even provide fantasy-sports players with expert chat-room access and the ability to sync real-time team and lineup advice to leagues set in places such as ESPN and Yahoo.

Football continues to draw the most eyes. The sport accounted for 60% of the site’s page views in 2024.

“On a Sunday morning, we’ll get 25,000 concurrent users within a 30-minute period on the site,” Rabe says.

But Rabe and Klein say auto racing and golf are two fantasy sports showing a surge in popularity.

“In January and February of recent years, we’ve earned as much revenue from golf and NASCAR as we did from baseball and even football,” Rabe says. “They are much smaller markets, but people love them. They have rabid fans.”

RotoBaller will expand its Formula 1 coverage this year by partnering with the sport’s fantasy platform in Europe. This will help provide more news, tips, videos and driver interviews.

Rabe, who left a software-development position four years ago to devote all his energy and time to RotoBaller, has a vision for the company that goes beyond fantasy sports.

“I want to expand into the sports-entertainment world and be a trusted source of mainstream news,” he says. “I want us interviewing players. We already have [writers] with press credentials for the Mets, the Orlando Magic and the PGA. I want us in every locker room and clubhouse.”

In the meantime, RotoBaller will focus on continuing to provide a depth and breadth of high-quality content to a growing base of users.

“Our biggest asset is our stable of [contributors] who love what they’re writing about, have unique insights into what they’re writing about and like working with us and for the site,” Klein says.

“Readers get an authentic feel when they go to the website,” Rabe says. “When fans read a story, they get a sense that it’s sophisticated and nerdy, but that we’re also delivering the facts clean. It’s not too long. It’s not intimidating. We are approachable