You flushed after the wrong print. <SOCK> is blocking because the GET is never sent; it's stuck in a buffer. flush forces the buffer to be sent and emptied, so the web server can see the request and reply to it.

use Socket;

sub connect_host {
   local *SOCK;

   my $remote = gethostbyname("football.fantasysports.yahoo.com")
   || die("Error resolving host name: $!\n");

   my $proto       = getprotobyname('tcp');
   my $port        = 80;
   my $remote_host = sockaddr_in($port, $remote);

   socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)
   or die("Error creating socket: $!\n");

   connect(SOCK, $remote_host)
   or die("Error connecting to remote host: $!\n");

   print SOCK "GET / HTTP/1.0\015\012\015\012";
   flush(SOCK);

   local $/;  # Read until end of file (as opposed to end of line).
   return scalar(<SOCK>);
}

sub flush { select($_[0]); my $t=$|; $|=1; $|=$t; }

my $page = connect_host();
print($page);
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