Read our interview with AJ Mass here.

What do Harry Potter, the U.S. Electoral College, psychic John Edwards, Stephen Hawking, and James T. Kirk have to do with fantasy sports? How are Oakland GM Billy Beane and Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper alike? And can Jesus and Darth Vader help you win your league?

Whatever your answer, AJ Mass, a professional sports analyst for ESPN, provides winning (in both senses) advice in his new book How Fantasy Sports Explains the World . The playful subtitle tells it all: “What Pujols and Peyton can teach us about Wookiees and Wall Street.” His thesis is that we can obtain an edge in all our dealings from “these hidden nuggets of wisdom [that] are all around us—in classic works of literature, in our legal and political systems, in the very molecules that make up the air we breathe.” Mass argues that the lessons we can derive from evaluating these situations apply equally to fantasy sports and real life, citing Martin Cooper, inventor of the cell phone, being inspired by the Star Trek communicator.

HFSEtW showcases his encyclopedic knowledge but this is no mere Mr. Know-It-All’s How-To self-help guide. An erudite Renaissance thinker, Mass draws inspiration from such disparate influences as Shakespeare and Schrödinger’s Cat, as well as from his own far-ranging resume from Atlantic City dealer (no, not that kind) to über-mascot Mr. Met to member of an off-Broadway improvisational troupe. He’d likely give Jeopardy’s Ken Jennings a run for his money, using subversively sophisticated intellectual bait-and-switch examples to illustrate his points. But he also possesses the gift of rendering heady abstruse concepts comprehensible without condescension. The chatty, anecdotal format allows Mass to spin yarns with the deadly accuracy of a Drew Brees spiral or Verlander two-seamer, though he’ll throw you a curve to keep it honest.

Who else would discern the common thread between Manny Ramirez, Kanye West, and Sylar from Heroes (all conform to his witty description of The Narcissist, one of 12 instantly recognizable archetypes necessary in the ideal fantasy league and indeed, every circle of friends)? Or manages to utilize Mithra and Mothra (that’s the Zoroastrian deity and the winged insect/Godzilla nemesis) in one sentence?

Mass’s wonderfully demented free-association had me thinking outside the box right from the start as he explains gambling, probability and the odds vis a vis fantasy sports, the first of many illustrations of why supposed sure-thing strategies take us only so far. When he defends the concept “never bench your studs” via comparison to a would-be Miss Cleo “divining” in hindsight that hitting on 16 would make 21, I was hooked. He then relates the time he dealt Three Card Poker to Allen Iverson on Christmas Eve, with amusing digressions to the fictional Star Trek game Fizzbinn and the infamous 2009 Maurice Jones-Drew incident (dropping to one knee to run out the clock rather than score the uncontested touchdown and killing many a fantasy season including MJD’s own). The point being that “ultimately you have no control over the outcome.”

By the third chapter, Mass offers a brilliant example of cherry-picking stats (Tony Romo’s 2009 season, good and bad) that will aid in any trade negotiations, then compares the voir dire (jury selection) to the statistical concept of small sample sizes. He not only draws from his own jury duty experience but interviews a legal consultant, which puts veto power in perspective with the real-life repercussions of trial by jury and establishing burden of proof.

Each chapter’s journey yields humorous analogies and insights into human behavior. How Dwayne’s fantasy football pool methodology in What’s Happening? relates to the search for Planet X (Pluto). Why Steve Ward (professional matchmaker on VH1’s Tough Love dating boot camp and huge Philly sports fan) compares speed dating with drafting. That Nero’s name in Hebrew and Aramaic is 666—the same figure if you add up all the numbers on a roulette wheel (perhaps explaining “why so many gamblers have a devil of a time coming out ahead”).

My favorite discourses? Using an analysis of Lincoln’s secretary of state William Seward (he of the famed Alaska purchase dubbed Seward’s Folly) to conclude: “The moral of the story is that you can’t judge a deal at the time it is made.” It’s all a matter of perspective and, usually, hindsight. This leads to an interview with Yau-Man Chan, the popular Survivor contestant and information systems manager for UC-Berkeley, discussing “fair” versus “unfair” trades and why it’s so difficult to consummate them. Mass revisits trading a few chapters later, using the convoluted presidential electoral process devised by our Founding Fathers to launch an examination of the other Bush-Gore (debating the merits of Reggie Bush versus Frank Gore for the 2006 season) and inquiry into which was better, the team that scored the most overall points or the one that beat the other head to head. This segues into how Bill Belichick exploited loopholes to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and the issue of collusion, veto ethics, and manipulating deals to your advantage.

The truly stunning analogy is explaining Schrödinger’s Cat paradox through Armando Gallaraga’s near-perfect game June 2, 2010 (in the moment before the scorer’s decision, both outcomes were equally possible). The concept leads to musings from astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium and Yankees fan, on the possibility of predicting outcomes. No surprise he doesn’t believe in luck and opines, “Statistics, the backbone of fantasy sports, also governs our universe… the more statistics you have, the more reliable is the prediction you make from it. In other words, the more likely your predictions will follow the integrity of the statistics you’ve collected."

Throughout the book, Mass respects statistics yet also evinces a healthy skepticism about taking sabermetrics too far. At one point he convincingly argues against regression to the mean. “I’m not saying these stats can’t be useful, but you can’t use them in such a simplified way and declare them to be absolutes. Just as you can’t expect that after ten consecutive coin tosses coming up heads, the next ten are likely to have more tails than heads as things start to ‘even out over the long run,’ you also can’t assume that just because a pitcher has ‘an ERA lower than his FIP’ and ‘a FIP lower than the league average’ that we should automatically expect a regression the following season."

The book's bravura conclusion interrelates the Columbine shootings, cult series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (quoting TV writer/show runner Jane Espenson), the “appeal of competitive reality shows where viewers can have a say in how the show ultimately ends” (providing at least the illusion of greater control), and Dan Haren defying expectations in his move to the American League and posting better second-half numbers in 2010. All tied into the chilling trial(s) and tribulations of the real-life West Memphis Three (the teenagers standing trial for homicide despite lack of method, motive and physical evidence).

The latter reveals the gutsiest conclusion of all: “perhaps the greatest thing fantasy sports can teach us is how to feel.”  Mass has a sneaky knack of putting things in perspective.

Though at times the constant stream of trivia resembles a series of bloop singles dinging a pitcher to death, Mass mostly hits them out of the park. Occasionally the analogies and lessons are variations on the same theme (albeit from a different, equally enlightening and entertaining perspective). And given the maze of associations, an index would be nice (though on second thought that might double the book’s length). Still, the finest anecdotes leave us musing about the life outside the margins of the pages; at such moments Mass proves to be not merely an analyst and entertainer but also a perceptive essayist on the human condition.

And that’s ultimately even more magical than any example of prestidigitation in the book's dazzling bag of tricks.

Check out How Fantasy Sports Explains the World at Amazon.com for as little as $13.49