I believe Gates when he estimates that companies are realizing only 20 percent or so of the potential value of the billions of bucks spent on computer technology (and Microsoft products). The successful examples he cites from companies like Saturn and McDonald’s are only harbingers of what will come on that golden day when we get full value from our investments in silicon and fiber. But I also know about a particularly competitive segment of society that has thoroughly transformed itself from a paperbound info-backwater to a frenetic data cornucopia, much like the ones idealized by Chairman Bill. I am talking, of course, about Rotisserie League baseball.

For those out of the know, let me explain. Rotisserie is a means of vicarious participation in the grand old pastime. At the beginning of a season, fans (10 or 12 in each “league”) conduct a draft or auction, assembling a team of real major leaguers. The statistics earned by those players will accrue to the couch-bound “owner” who drafted them. If I bid highest for Mark McGwire, for instance, he’s mine, and every time he hits a dinger for the Cards, that’s one for my personal team, too. During the season Rotisserie owners trade with each other and snap up hot unclaimed players. In October, the team with the best stats wins. The game was started in 1980 by a group of writers who used players from the National League. Next year came the first American League, of which I was a charter member. In those early days, it was a tortuous process getting the scuttlebutt we needed to make player decisions. And information, as Gates would certainly understand, was everything. How serious was Kirk Gibson’s knee injury? Was rookie Cal Ripken the real thing? We found ourselves trekking across the city to get out-of-town newspapers, but even the local coverage seldom gave us the detail we wanted. Some of us were actually driven to impersonate sportswriters to get more information–one of our owners called up a Seattle Mariners’ official to find out why Karl Best hadn’t been playing lately.

Even administration of the league was tough; our league’s statistics were hand-calculated by an owner’s girlfriend. But computers changed that: another owner in our league wrote a BASIC program to do our stats. His program got around, and it was suddenly easier to operate a new Roto-league. Books were written about Rotisserie, and new fans joined in. Then came the online explosion. Services like CompuServe organized their own fantasy baseball leagues. Traditional ones like ours took advantage of low-cost standings–updated daily–on Web pages. The Rotisserie population grew to millions. The explosion has generated the biggest change of all: an information marketplace unimaginable when our league first started. In 1999, dozens of sophisticated Web sites cater to fantasy players. A site called Rotonews gives an update every time a player’s status changes. There are links to sports sections of local papers. A number of expert sites offer draft-day “cheat sheets.” You can even bring your laptop to the draft, using a program that tracks the competition while automatically suggesting what you should bid on the next player.

In other words, we’ve achieved the utopian level of knowledge that Gates suggests is crucial. It’s no longer necessary to go to spring training to figure out who will win the White Sox centerfielder job.

But have we really reached a field of dreams? Remember, everybody has access to the same information. So competitively, we’re no better off. In a sense, we’re worse off. To get an edge on our rivals, we now have to uncover exclusive factoids, so obscure they don’t appear on ESPN.com or the Baseball HQ Web site. We’re prisoners of a baseball-data arms race.

In addition, technology has changed the experience itself. The e-mails we now circulate as trade talk, while efficient, don’t allow for the freewheeling exchanges that on occasion helped brew really creative deals. Getting standings once a week by mail provided us an orderly way to deal with our transaction plans. But when they appear every day, there’s pressure to make moves now–and sometimes mistakes are made when you act at the speed of thought.

Bill Gates is an unabashed optimist extolling a positive sea change in the world of commerce. But as a Rotisserie owner, I know that the hypercharged pace of e-business can be a mixed, and disorienting, blessing. Which makes me particularly thankful for one thing–while the Internet has changed the rules of business, it hasn’t changed the rules of real baseball.