Back when fantasy baseball was called “rotisserie” baseball, commissioners had to do significantly more than send an email to set up a league. They’d scrounge through boxscores (or get USA Today’s Baseball Weekly) to compile all the statistics and go through a league adding up everyone’s scores. Standings and scores were on the commissioner’s timetable, the trust in them sacrosanct.

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I am now that throwback commissioner in our league, which is a true rotisserie league, The Athletic’s “Top Chef” fantasy league. In the absence of organized sport, sport is where you find it. For many – including 16 at (or associated with) The Athletic – it’s in Bravo TV’s “Top Chef,” the Emmy-winning competition show in its 17th season.

“It feels like comfort food right now in the absence of sports,” said Tom Haberstroh, an NBA insider for NBC Sports and host of the “Top Chef” podcast, “Pack Your Knives.” “I look forward to it every week way more than I did before because it is a sense of normalcy. … it feels like what sports would be like if it came back. Because right now it’s a lot of classic games, it’s a lot of Zooms of people from inside their house. But every week on Thursday nights, I get my old friends back. That’s Padma (Lakshmi) and Tom (Colicchio) and Gail (Simmons) and the rest of the crew.”

Haberstroh works in sports, so there’s a severe disruption right now in his schedule, like those of us at The Athletic. Yet, he did have “Top Chef” to fall back on, at least as a hobby. He and fellow NBA writer Kevin Arnovitz of ESPN have had their podcast since 2017, starting with season 15 of the show.

In that first episode in December 2017, Arnovitz explained they “follow ‘Top Chef’ the way fans follow our sport, the NBA. We love the storylines, we love the X’s and O’s, the preparation in the kitchen, the execution, the personalities, we love the game theory.”

Arnovitz and Haberstroh also introduced the fantasy sports element in that first episode and laid out their scoring system, awarding points for various achievements during the show. They weren’t the first to do fantasy sports for reality shows or even “Top Chef.” There are other scoring systems out there and even automated ones. But the two brought a particular knowledge of how fantasy sports work, how sports fans approach both drafting and scoring and based on my Googling, provide the most balanced, entertaining basis for conducting a “Top Chef” fantasy league. That’s how I set up The Athletic’s version because it was the best I could find, and also someone else would do the weekly scoring and make those decisions.

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“I think the fantasy side of it is just obvious because of the competition factor,” Haberstroh said.

TV has no shortage of competitions, even without sports, but “Top Chef” seems to stand apart from others. It’s more high-brow than, say, “The Challenge” on MTV and because it’s serialized unlike “Chopped” or other food competitions, you get to know the participants. And that’s why the timing of Season 17 couldn’t be any better. This season was the show’s second “All-Star” season, bringing back old favorites.

That allowed viewers to be comfortable with the chefs who returned when the season debuted on March 19, just eight days after the NBA stunningly halted its season. At that time, as a society, we were just coming to terms that no sports would return for months. Baseball had shut down spring training, the NHL had stopped, MLS training camps were ceased. There was a massive void.

“Top Chef” was there – and at least for four more weeks – is still there, perhaps bridging the gap between the end of sports and their restart. It’s been a comfort food, a substitute and nourishment.

“It’s the culmination of a decade-plus of reality TV becoming sports shoulder programming,” said Bryan Curtis, an editor-at-large at The Ringer, host of “The Press Box” podcast about media and “Top Chef” fanatic. “I used to watch game shows in the ’80s. They were fun, but you were introduced to the contestants, and then they disappear the next day. And the kind of innovation the last 10-20 years has been whether it’s ‘The Challenge’ or ‘Top Chef’ or ‘The Bachelor’ or whatever, is that you get to know the contestants and you love or hate them. That’s sort of the essence of sports. So it does become sport.”

Or, as he jokes, “Can we make a lucrative podcast about it? That is our new definition of sport.”

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“Pack Your Knives” isn’t the only podcast out there, there’s also “Pack Your Mics,” “Top Chef RHAP-Ups” and others. But maybe another test would be if we can make stats.

Lynn Fisher, a web designer in Phoenix, is the Sean Forman of “Top Chef,” launching TopChefStats.com during season 14 of the series, when she started noticing trends in some of the recurring competitions, like Restaurant Wars or the mise en place relay.

“I started kind of looking at it, like, I wonder if I could like predict who’s gonna win based on this data and so I started collecting a ton of it,” Fisher said. “I started making these kinds of really extensive spreadsheets. I’m a web designer, and so kind of naturally, I was like, ‘Oh, this could like, make a cool website.'”

Among the observations about Restaurant Wars: It pays to pick second and serve first. That’s not just helpful in a podcast conversation but in the type of arguments that make sports so much fun.

“The conversations that my wife and I have about ‘Top Chef’ are the same conversations that my friends, my sports fans friends and I have about sports, that she and I don’t have because she has no interest in why Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid cannot run an effective pick-and-roll,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the co-host of “Pod Save America,” a former senior advisor to President Barack Obama and a self-described basketball obsessive. “I’ve had that conversation with 50 people a week during the NBA season.”

But why “Top Chef” over another TV show? Why is “Top Chef” drawing two NBA writers to start a podcast, a media reporter talk about it on his or for Pfeiffer to appear on yet another podcast to talk about his love of the show?

“I will stipulate that there’s an absurdity to all the things I’m about to say, but ‘Top Chef’ is a show that is a competition between elite talented chefs who take their craft very passionately, which gets to like the absolute best part of sports,” Pfeiffer said. “There’s an element of what draws me and a lot of people to sports that exists in that show which is why I think it has been so successful for so many years.”

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It’s also relatable. Most people, especially now, cook. And just because we can all go outside and hoist up some 3-pointers doesn’t mean we’re Steph Curry. And just because we can fry chicken at home, we’re not Kevin Gillespie.

The show has been popular, but at this point, it seems even more popular, more vital than ever.

“It also speaks to the specific fantasy that during the pandemic we’re going to learn how to cook,” Curtis said. “If there’s a reality show about polishing off all the novels that we wanted to read and who could read the most, I think that might be appealing too because that’s literally what we’re doing during the coronavirus.”

While many other competition or reality shows dwell on drama or failure, “Top Chef,” like the best sports, focuses on the best of the best at the top of their game. It’s not uncommon for the judges to almost apologize for sending someone home for serving a dish that would draw praise in most circumstances but is just a dash of salt short of being “Top Chef”-worthy.

More than anything, it’s a celebration of the talents of the participants.

“We don’t get excited for people to be failing, we love it when everybody’s doing well,” said Doneen Arquines, the show’s executive producer/showrunner since season 13. “I think that’s been driven a lot by the audience, too. The audience doesn’t love necessarily all of the drama and they like to see the chefs competing at a high level.”

But like the Patriots falling on any given Sunday or a rare Max Scherzer loss, everything hinges on that singular competition that week.

“A lot of competitions do take into account, previous work from week to week and kind of think about somebody’s potential as opposed to somebody’s performance and in sports it’s not about who has the most potential who’s actually, you know, performing,” Arquines said. “And that’s really how ‘Top Chef’ is.”

(Photo of “Top Chef” contestant Eric Adjepong. Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images)