Sunday, May 12, 2002
Baseball History - You could look it up
By HAL BOCK
AP Sports Writer
When Casey Stengel gave lectures on baseball history, much of which he witnessed firsthand, he was fond of closing his speech by saying, “You could look it up.”
And you could.
There is, in fact, an army of people doing exactly that.
Baseball's rich history is chronicled in volumes of books on the sport's evolution from its modest beginnings in 19th century America as a game played by transients to its role as the country's national pastime.
Every at-bat is recorded, every inning pitched is indexed.
“We have the day-by-day statistics of every player who ever played,” said Jeff Idelson, a vice president of the baseball Hall of Fame.
Elias Sports Bureau, official statisticians for major league baseball, has the same kinds of records. That means those folks can tell you that Eddie Brinkman went 2-for-4 for the Washington Senators in an 8-7 loss to the Boston Red Sox on June 9, 1967. Or that Rick Manning went 1-for-6 as Cleveland beat Seattle 5-4 in 14 innings on May 11, 1982.
David Smith wants to know more.
Smith, a biology professor at the University of Delaware, is cataloguing every play of every major league game. He's not satisfied with bare-bones statistics. He wonders where Brinkman's hits went and who caught the ball on Manning's outs.
And he is determined to find out.
This is a daunting task that began in 1989 with a handful of dedicated researchers operating under the label Retroseek. They have gathered a ton of information, which means they are about a ton short of completion.
Smith, however, presses on, like a man counting grains of sand.
“There's a difference,” he said. “Grains of sand have no end point. This has an end point. It's an awful lot of games, but an awful lot is not forever.”
The last 20 years are no problem. Those games are well documented. The other eight decades of modern baseball history are more of a challenge.
Smith said he has chronicled 60 percent of all the games played from 1901-83, about 105,000 play-by-play accounts, some of them duplicates. “We've done so much more than I ever thought possible,” he said. “But it won't be finished in my life time.”
He devotes about 20 hours a week to the task, working the phones and computer, seeking information. “There's no deadline and that helps a lot,” he said.
The sources are varied. Individual clubs have helped, but some teams have remarkably little in their archives.
“You go to every team,” Smith said. “You get what they have. Cleveland has everything from 1947 on, and that's wonderful. Atlanta has nothing before 1974, and that's terrible.”
That means the Braves' previous incarnations in Boston and Milwaukee are nothing more than a rumor in Atlanta. What material Smith has gathered on those years has come from the records of the teams they played.
Smith acquired all the scorecards of longtime Dodgers statistician Allan Roth and got help from retired sports writers and in some cases their widows, who kept their scorebooks, never knowing exactly why. He and his people spend long hours in libraries, poring over newspaper accounts, trying to fill in the gaps.
Lyle Spatz is chairman of the baseball records committee for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and appreciates the scope of the task.
“What is readily available is not much and it is spotty,” he said. “Digging gets scorecards and play-by-plays. It's hit and miss. You might find every game for 1944 and one game for 1943.”
Sometimes, you might not like what you find.
“You discover new things all the time,” Spatz said. “In 1929, Bing Miller was supposed to have had a 30-game hitting streak. There was a discrepancy. His day-by-day record showed two hits for one day and the newspaper account showed no hits and two putouts. The putouts number was entered in the wrong column.”
So now, Miller has a 29-game streak instead.
These are the things that turn up now and then because record keeping was a lot more casual in those days.
Because of that type of research, Hack Wilson's 1930 record of 190 RBIs was changed three years ago to 191. Baseball endorsed that change. It has not, however, accepted some others, like Ty Cobb's career batting average dropping one point to .366 and his total hits being reduced by two to 4,189.
“Hack Wilson went up and Ty Cobb went down,” Spatz said. “In Cobb's case, the same game was entered twice. Unless it's clear-cut, we don't change records. But if we discover Walter Johnson was 5-foot-9, not 6-foot-1, do we hide it? It happened.”
Not to worry. Nobody has discovered anything that would change Johnson's height. No yet, anyway.
And as far as baseball is concerned, Cobb's numbers remain .367 and 4,191. However, his record is different depending on which book you open.
“Wilson was changed because there was no dispute about it,” said retired sports writer Jerome Holtzman, the game's official historian. “They also changed Honus Wagner's and Cap Anson's batting averages. We never OK'd any of that other stuff.”
Smith endorses SABR's work although his project is quite separate from what that organization does. He is less concerned with the cold, hard numbers than he is with how they were achieved.
“When you have a scorecard and it says 4-to-3, then you know how an out was recorded,” he said. “I've wanted to do this since I was 10 years old. This was my passion.”
And it now has become his mission.
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Baseball History - You could look it up
