BRJ is SABR’s main research publication, and has become one of the premiere places to publish ground-breaking research into both baseball history and statistical analysis. (SABR = Society for American Baseball Research).

SABR was founded in 1971, and it’s probably not a coincidence that the society’s formation came about just as many other changes were coming to the game. So this special themed issue will have some (not all) of its articles focused on baseball from 1971 to the present. Consider the following upheavals & changes we’ve seen in our lifetimes:

• SABR was born just after the mound’s height was reduced, and just before the game’s economics were changed forever by free agency.
• SABR was still young when the first players’ strike occurred (1972) and when the first designated hitter took his swings in 1973.
• We witnessed Babe Ruth’s home run record fall to Hank Aaron, and then Aaron’s record fall in turn.
• The role of the relief pitcher has changed; in 1974, Mike Marshall was the first relief pitcher to win the Cy Young Award, yet we didn’t see a spate of relievers in the Hall of Fame until just recently.
• Advances in technology have changed the way players train, and sabermetrics itself has changed the way teams acquire players, how they value them, and how they train them for major league performance.
• Speaking of performance, advances in performance-enhancing substances have not just changed baseball, they’ve necessitated a change in the way the game is governed.
• Baseball has had several expansions in the SABR era, as well as at least one crazy flirtation with contraction, abandoned when the Twins were presented with this era’s version of the marry-me-forever diamond ring: a new baseball stadium.
• SABR arrived around the same time as Astroturf, and it appears we will (happily) outlive it by a wide margin. New stadium construction has been a huge part of the past four decades, along with advances in field preparation, drainage techniques, etc.
• Even the minor leagues are changing, with more franchises coming to urban areas with fancy training facilities, and fewer in rural communities with “rustic” fields. Is this changing the players and the game, or having no effect?

SABR has always presented a synergy of quantitative analysis and historical context in our research, helping us (and the world) to understand the game as it both was and is. Looking at our recent past should be no different than looking at the far past, except that we need to be even more exceptional at setting aside our preconceptions to examine the facts than we usually are.

When you’ve lived through an era, it’s different from peering through the mists of time, where lost information may obscure the story. Instead, we may have too much information at our fingertips and our own memories may cloud the picture. However, if there is one quality I have prized in SABR researchers at the many conventions and research presentations at chapter meetings I’ve attended, it’s a passion for ‘getting it right.’

So what I’m looking for in this journal is articles which tackle these and related themes as research and analysis subjects. What I’m not looking for is a bunch of opinion pieces about how baseball “used to be better when comic books were a dime” and the like.

The BRJ does not pay for articles, but some college professors whose research has appeared there have told me that it “counted” as a scholarly publication for them. The contributors to the Journal are mainly SABR members, looking to share their research with other members and drive baseball knowledge forward. One does not have to be previously published to be considered.

SABR is the vanguard writing the history of our own era for future researchers to read. So I’m psyched to see what lines of research will not only populate the pages of this anniversary issue of the Baseball Research Journal, but future general issues and convention presentations.

Please send all pitches, ideas, suggestions, drafts, and questions to my SABR email address: ctan@sabr.org. Abstracts, queries, and proposals will be accepted until the end of April. All assignments should be made no later than May 1, and first drafts of papers are due no later than June 1 unless by special assignment.

One tip: When querying with an article idea, please include not only an overview of what the article would be about, but why you are interested in the topic or why you’re uniquely qualified to research the topic. Include what sources and resources you’d be hoping to use and approximately how long you guess the article might be.

The reason I took the Duren assignment for the Bioproject, honestly, is because I was hoping to have another great chat with Ryne like the one we had back in 2003 when I was working on The 50 Greatest Yankees Games. He winters in Florida like many people, and so I met him one February when I went down for pitchers and catchers. On that trip I interviewed a lot of former Yankees, including Tom Tresh (who also sadly passed as well) and Phil Linz (still kickin’). Ryne wanted to know if I could meet him at a greasy spoon near Lakeland. This wasn’t that near either his home nor where I was, but I readily agreed.

When I got there I found out why he wanted to meet there–because of the proximity to several large pawn shops. In his dotage, Ryne had become something of a junk connoisseur, and apparently it’s more fun to hunt for junk with company that without. I happily went with him to pick through piles of used lawnmowers, lamps, stereo equipment, etc. We found no gems, but it was fun, and then we settled into the little diner nearby to have a bite to eat and talk baseball.

At the time I was working on The 50 Greatest Yankee Games, so I had a bunch of questions about Duren’s teammates to ask him (he played with the Yankees from 1958-1961) but sometimes you never know what you’re going to find if you just let a fellow talk. And Duren was a talker, that’s for sure.

In our conversation he told me stories about how Lefty O’Doul helped him with his pitching control, how alcoholism probably hurt his control, meeting Marilyn Monroe, getting batting tips from Joe DiMaggio, how having an infected heart as a child turned him into a baseball fan, Whitey Ford, Ralph Terry, and much more. What follows is pretty much a verbatim transcript of that afternoon:

Ryne Duren: Did you know I just wrote a book, too?

Cecilia Tan: No, I had no idea.

RD: I’ll get you a copy. [goes out and gets one from the car] I’m going to go down and autograph copies at the museum in St. Pete [where the "Baseball as America" Hall of Fame exhibit was showing at the time]. I don’t know how much research you did about me but I’m known for two things, I have real bad eyes and I had terrible alcohol problem. Anyway, this is kind of a play off of both. [The title of the book is "I Can See Clearly Now."]

CT: Did you really hit a guy in the on deck circle in the minors?

RD: Oh no. That’s a myth. But what I did do was Jim Piersall got out of the batter’s circle, and got close to home plate as the on deck hitter, so I threw a ball that almost hit him and he ducked out of the way and started hollering at me. Now when you played Boston, Ted Williams would come up and he’d stand there and he would look from just about the same place that Piersall was. He wouldn’t be in the batter’s box but he’d stand there and watch the pitches as you warmed up. So he was Ted Williams. But Jim Piersall was Jim Piersall. So I threw the ball near him, and he said “What’s the matter with you? What are you doing?” and I said “What are YOU doing? You got yourself confused with a hitter.” (laughs) But then everybody played off of that. You’ll hear guys at banquets or wherever you go telling Ryne Duren stories. And anything that’s blind or kind of crazy, they stick me in it. That’s okay. Keeps my profile up.

CT: Did you start out a starter and shift to the bullpen?

RD: Oh yeah. Pretty much everyone did back then. What happened was I never was a reliever all the way through. And I always had a control problem. So they suffered out with me in the minor leagues. It was fairly typical the first year I led the league in hit batsmen and wild pitches, and the second year I pitched decently and I was on a good ball club, a pennant-winning ball club, and I was 15 wins I think, but yet, 9 or 10 base on balls and maybe 12-13-14 strikeouts, the kind of thing that just drives people mad. They watched me for a couple of years and although I got a little bit stronger, the control never came around.

The next year after that I won 17 games in A ball but it wasn’t a strong A league. I’d go out there and I probably had 7 or 8 base on balls. But as soon as I got to a little higher elevation, what happened when I was in the Pacific Coast League in 1955, my arm was bad, I pinched a nerve in it, in ’53 and ’54 I was in the Texas League, and just hanging in there every year, 12-13 wins, and about as many losses with a bad ball club, and I just could not improve. There were a lot of things happening, now that I look back on it. One of them was I think how disgusted the managers were with me, with all that talent, I could throw it so hard, and I’d stand out there, and I’d throw 250 pitches, the last one as hard as the first, and they were all saying–and this is the cleaned up version–’you jerk, what’s the matter with you, if I could throw like that I’d be making thousands of dollars in the big leagues.’ So it was a frustrating time.

As I write about in my book, I had such a high priority for alcohol, not to use it to get high or to get drunk but as the mark of a man. So I initially didn’t drink for a fix, I drank to belong and to be somebody. Oh now if you understand alcohol addiction, for most people, like me, it can just grow. It wasn’t until I got into treatment in Milwaukee, the seventh one I was in, the tenth time I was hospitalized, that I understood the nature of my problem. They had a Catholic priest who had been through the same problem and he said gentlemen, we are drug addicts as sure as if we are hooked on heroin. And that was the first time that I heard the nature of my problem, that I was hooked on a drug. So before that I was an alcoholic and I would say that but I had no idea what that meant. I couldn’t get past the stigma thing. So the reason I’m telling you that, is that after I got on top of it and in subsequent studies, I realized that that was part of the problem of [pitching] control. In the central nervous system, when it’s being affected by alcohol, it kept me from developing that muscle memory sense that you need. [I] never had any coaching in pitching [and] wasn’t allowed to pitch until I was 19 years old. They wouldn’t let me pitch in high school because I threw so hard, nobody wanted to be responsible for it, until we played amateur ball in our small towns up there after I got out.

So then in 1956, two things happened that I think are noteworthy. The first one was that through that winter, I told you I had the pinched nerve in ’55 and it never did get better, and so over the winter something happened and that was that subconsciously there was so much pain connected with my throwing toward the end of ’55 that I think subconsciously I couldn’t turn the ball loose with reckless abandon with my arm like I had earlier. So I’m out in the PCL, and I run into a guy by the name of Lefty O’Doul. One day he got me aside and he said, Ryney old boy, the reason that you can’t throw strikes is because you don’t know how to “move the ball.” That was his term, like it was yesterday I can hear him say that. I said well what are you talking about Lefty, “move the ball?” He said go warm up and I’ll show you. So we’re standing there in front of the dugout, on the third base side up in Vancouver, BC. And he says are you loose Ryney? I said yeah. Now in those days you used to warm up right in front of the dugout. There was another home plate there where the fans could watch you warm up. They don’t do that anymore, now there’s the bullpen or down the sidelines. So I was warming up and loose and everything, and he said, okay, now. I had a catcher, Lennie O’Neill, and he said Ryney, throw the baseball high and tight. So I threw one up about there (holds hand about head high) for Lennie, and he caught it about there. And he said, no, high and tight. So I threw it up a little higher and he caught it a little higher, and he said, no, I mean throw one high and tight. So I threw it so high he jumped for it and couldn’t get it, and he said no Ryney, high and tight, and I looked at him and I said what’s wrong with you? So then I cranked one right out of the stadium, threw it right out of the ballpark. And he said, now you got it!

Now the regular home plate, the game home plate, is way over there, so he says now throw one low and away. So I just went over and threw it and he says, that’s it. Now high and away, so I threw another one out of the ballpark, we’re just kind of kidding and having fun, and he says now throw one low and in, and I hit the screen right over here. So all of a sudden it’s HERE and THERE and THERE and THERE, instead of here and there and there and there. And he said now look down here. And I had four distinct steps in the dirt on the mound. I had these four distinct marks. He said look, your body is doing something a little different every time, doesn’t it. And he said, and you have a pretty good idea what you have to do to throw the ball up here, or over here, right? And he says well, that’s what’s wrong. You’re trying to make an adjustment in here, where you can’t really distinguish between here and there. It’s logical, it makes sense. This guy was a gifted man, a genius, and I could tell you more about him or you could look him up as Casey used to say. But anyway, he said that’s all there is to it, Ryney, all you have to do is throw it here and here instead of trying to go out and throw down here every time, now you develop a sense. He said, I’ll bet you that you can win pretty soon.

But there was something else happening at that time, and I told you that subconsciously at that time I couldn’t throw so hard. So my next start coincided with that, we’re at San Francisco Seals stadium, and that was the name of the club before the Giants moved out there, and so we’re in the 8th inning, and we have a 7-1 lead, or 6-1, something like that, and I’ve got one or two out already, and finally there are two or three errors and maybe a base on balls or the umpire blew one or something, or whatever happened, when I was usually pitching a bloop hit, for whatever reason I couldn’t get that guy out, the third guy in the inning. So Lefty came out after a couple of errors and with two or three runs scored he said to me, you know, I think the fix is on. He was just trying to be light and laugh at it. And I said well if it is Left’, I don’t know about it. So he said it’s all right, I’m not taking you out, I thought I’d just come out here and break things up a little bit. And then I said, you know, I’ll take care of it, you go on back. And that was my kind of rapport with him. He went back to the dugout, and now, another error, another error, a bloop hit, and he came out and said I gotta take you out now Ryne, I’m sorry. I said why? I’m pitching great. I don’t want to come out. He said well, this is my second trip to the mound, so I have to take you out. I said no you don’t–you can take yourself out of the game. And I don’t know why I knew that, but I did, and I said just ask the umpire. So the umpire came out, and Lefty called him out there, and the umpire said that’s right, but you’ll have to leave the game, off the bench. And Lefty said that’s all right, I’ve had enough already, I’ll go have a beer. So he went up to the clubhouse, and Lefty liked his beer more than I did at the time which is sad to say. Now I’m not kidding at all, I’m mad as hell inside, and I’ll bet he didn’t even make it to the clubhouse before I struck that next guy out on three pitches. I didn’t give a damn if my arm fell off, It’s true, and there I was, I broke through that mental barrier I had about it. Now understand, I was throwing hard, but I don’t know if you know anything about my ability to throw, it wasn’t just hard, it was extra extra hard, compared to other pitchers, even fastball pitchers. I led the league in strikeouts or within one or so with less innings than the next guy. But anyway, that’s kind of the story, and then I went, I don’t know 50 some innings without giving up a run. At the time I had a real losing record, 1-6 or 2-7 or something, and I finished 11-11, from that point on. And the team I was on finished in 8th place. The funny part about that was that at the end of the year I got traded to Kansas City. Baltimore must never have sent a scout out or looked at me the last half of that year. So I was traded for practically nothing to Kansas City, and my first start on May 10th of 1957 was against the Yankees. They beat me 2-1, I drove in the only run that we got with a two out, two strike drag bunt, and if I’m not mistaken both their runs were unearned. So consequently I impressed them enough that I was to be traded.

CT: Back then wasn’t Kansas City considered almost like a farm club unofficially for the Yankees?

Yep, And in those days Billy Martin obliged us by having the Copacabana fight, so they wanted to get rid of him, so I got traded in essence for Billy Martin. There were some other guys involved in the trade too. Harry Suitcase Simpson went to the Yankees as did Bob Cerv… I don’t know. Anyway, that’s kind of the story.

So now I’m at Denver [the Yankees' Triple A affiliate], and I’m a starting pitcher, and I guess this is where we came in, now at Denver I was mad as hell for having to go to the minor leagues. Lou Boudreau was the manager there (KC) and he said I didn’t have anything to do with this. I had nothing to do with this–you are, as far as I’m concerned, the best one on my staff. You’ve done well and as well as you throw, you’re the last one I want to get rid of. And I really was trying to do the right thing there. So in the office where they told me to go to see about the deal, all the mucky mucks from the two teams were there, and Lee McPhail was there, and he said well, Ryne, we’re going to send you to Denver, and I said why Denver? Lou Boudreau told me I’m the last pitcher he wanted to get rid of. So in other words, you’re taking the best pitcher off the Kansas City club in his mind, and you’re sending him to the minor leagues! I said I don’t think so. “Now, Ryne, please understand, this is the New York Yankees and we do things differently here. Just go down and get your feet on the ground and we’ll have you right up.” So I relented and said okay, I’ll go, I went to Denver and my very first game was a no-hitter. And it’s the only one to this date in the history of baseball in Denver that was pitched by the home team. I think Nomo pitched one there for the Dodgers. So consequently, I went 13 and 2, got beat 1-0 twice on unearned runs, one of them was my own error, and at that point we were making a run for the championship and into the playoffs and the World Series. So down the line, I’m not sure where it started, I was 13-2 from June the 20th until then, when that season ended, September first let’s say, so I now had the opportunity a couple of times Ralph [Houk] came to me and he said you throw harder than anybody the Yankees had while I was there, and he caught a fellow by the name of Joe Page. Page was the guy who was kind of the closer at one point a left hand pitcher, and he said you throw harder than he did and your control is as good or better. He said you could be a hell of a reliever for the Yankees if you wanted to. Now I said I don’t know about that Ralph, but you know, I was open to it, I thought why waste the pitches that I throw in between starts? So after two days rest I’d go down to the bullpen and crank it up and if I felt good which I always did I’d just take off my hat and give Houk the sign that I was all right. So if you had me warmed up in the bullpen, and you had a lead to protect or you were really in a close ballgame, you’d be a damn fool if you didn’t use me. So he’d bring me in and I’d do the job. I don’t know right off hand, but let’s say I saved 8 or 10 games for him. Then we went to the playoffs and I think I won a game or two in each round, and one in the (Triple A) World Series, so at that point boy… He recommended to the Yankees that I go.

So here’s the payoff to the whole thing. What happened was that the Yankees scouts came down, a couple of them I think it was Lou McWallis (?) who said go home and pack, I’m telling the Yankees they have to bring you up, that’s all there is to it, you can help them. They were hurting a little bit in that department, they had Bob Grim, and Bob was all right but he was not a Ryne Duren or a Mariano Rivera. Nothing like that. So he says I’m calling the Yankees right after the game so go home and pack and get ready so you can get out of here tomorrow. Well, so I went home, but nothing happened. So then I did that a second time, and kind of the same thing. The next morning I grabbed the newspaper and I’ll be damned if they didn’t buy Sal Maglie. The guy who was Larsen’s opposition in the perfect game in ’56. Now we’re talking ’57. And then they got beat by Milwaukee in that World Series. I think I could have helped them in that. But irregardless, here’s the thing I want to get to, so without going there, I always kind of curious and upset about it, thinking well, these people cost me time in the big leagues, and why? why did this happen? was it Houk that wouldn’t let me go? or what was the deal? And while I was down there there was an incident where I got into not a bar fight. Somebody that was in the bar that I walked away from but in the coffee shop later started up again–there was a staged thing where he had a cop sitting next to him and he said something smart enough to me that I had to grab him, and then the cop hit me and I ended up in the hospital and in jail. And Houk was the manager there and so I thought maybe that was it. So let’s say maybe ten years ago now I was out at a charity function in Denver and Bob Howsum was there, Bob Howsum was our general manager at that time. So I said Bob, this has always bothered me, what happened, at that time, how come I didn’t go up, in spite of the fact that this scout said I was going to go and they told me to pack and all that. He said Ryne it’s very simple, and I said well, I’ve been confused all these years so would you straighten me out? He said you pitched too good. If we had taken you out of here we would have had a rebellion of the fans and we were doing so well and everything that we convinced the Yankees that if you were pitching there was an extra thousand people or whatever in the stands. And so I suppose that in a sense he was right about that. That’s the Denver story.

Anyway, Houk was right, I could relieve with the Yankees. I sat on the bench a long time before I ever got a chance to make my first appearance, and when they did this is the funniest thing ever, it’s amazing how that happens, but Ralph Houk and I were in the clubhouse early, we would go in those days and come in and sit around the clubhouse for a while, and I’m dressed and everything and I said to Ralph, “Would you do me a favor? Would you take the fungo stick and just hit some balls back at me on the mound? You know, I haven’t been in the game in a long time…” and you know, at least you’re doing something and looking good and I always tried to impress people. So he came out and hit a bunch of ground balls back and I stabbed this way and that way at them. So now they bring me in in the ninth inning with one out and the tying run on third. We were playing Baltimore, and the winning run is on first with one out. Jim Marshall is the hitter. And I threw Jim Marshall a fastball way from him, he drilled it back to the mound, boom, one hop, right there in my glove: to second, to first, we go into the clubhouse a winner. So I saved that first one with my glove! (laughs) Then Casey afterward he was you know, “Oh he’s an amazing man, isn’t he? He knew just what to do with it.” Well, you know, nine years in baseball, you better know what to do with it! So anyway, you know, that kind of gets you up to date. And from there on I’d come into the game and it was a little different than it is today. I didn’t pitch the ninth inning, I’d be in there the 8th and the ninth, many times in the seventh, and a lot of times maybe even the sixth. In the sixth game of the World Series, which is probably my crowning moment, I was in there in the fourth inning, and I was still in there in the tenth. Pretty good for a short man! (laughs) That was, of all the games I was in with the Yankees, that was the biggest game that I was in. And the biggest one I WASN’T in was the seventh game of the 1960 series. I should have been in that game for a couple of reasons. And I think I know the reasons I wasn’t in that game.

CT: What do you think those reasons are?

Well, in-house politics. The guy Jim Coates that was Eddie Lopat’s buddy, Lopat brought him along through the organization, and he threw the three-run homer to Hal Smith, and he brought into the game in a bunt situation and Bobby Shantz was taken out, and Shantz was the best fielder in baseball with a left hand hitter up, and Coates was not the greatest fielder–I shouldn’t get into all of that.

The other one was that maybe my drinking reputation by then had soured people on me, because it had progressed some, but at the same time they had already had me in the series earlier and I had pitched well, and I could still throw good then. I think more than anything else it was politics. And the other thing was that Casey was gone, he knew it, and he really didn’t care. He started Ditmar in the series and he should have started Whitey Ford, you know. Everybody, you know it was just a screwed up thing. Ralph Terry autographed a picture to me that was the moment where he’s pitching, Johnny Blanchard by the way is catching, and Maz hit the ball… so that’s kind of a classic picture. And Ralph Terry autographed it “To Ryne, where the hell were you?” (laughs)

CT: Ralph told me that Stengel had his warm up four, five times that game.

Well, that wouldn’t bother me in that they usually let the bullpen call you. Here’s the way it worked with me. They call the bullpen and they say, you’re in there. You’ve got time now to stretch your arm to the max with two or three pitches, because the guy leaves the dugout and he heads out to the mound, and you’ve got three or four pitches. The only thing you want to do before that inning is just get your blood flowing and so forth. So as a relief pitcher I know that, so that wouldn’t affect me. But it would affect somebody like Ralph, who was a starting pitcher. So so many things enter into it. But the whole thing about that and about life is you have to be good on acceptance or it just kills you.

CT: So tell me more about Ralph Terry.

He was a very conscientious guy. He was my roommate, a very fun guy to room with. Too analytical, maybe. You’ve heard that before, he was quite analytical. He was a single guy, for the most part when we were rooming. He was a good egg.

CT: What did he throw?

He had a good curve ball and a slider, and he was sneaky fast. I think he had fairly good control.

CT: You outgunned Pittsburgh and yet they managed to scratch a series of low-score wins — was that frustrating?

Well, I think the problem was that after that first couple of high scorers, maybe the confidence was… we became overconfident. I never really saw the Yankees as an overconfident team. They went out there and grinded it out pretty good. But the breaks were so bad in that game, the ball that hit Kubek in the throat, and there were a couple of other things. I forget all the details now, because it’s so centered around [the home run]. Here was the thing that kind of broke us, was that Hal Smith had been my roommate. my friend in Kansas City. I knew Hal Smith real well, and as much as I didn’t pay a lot of attention to hitters, I threw hard, I threw the hard sinker, a good slider, and a riding fastball, and later I got so I could cut the fastball, but not… well in 1960 I was already doing that. But the thing that kind of got me was that we all knew that Smith was a high fastball hitter, but Coates gave him three high pitches, right up there in his wheelhouse, and he had the first two timed! Whitey was standing right next to me in the bullpen and he just went, oh god, get out of there, there’s another one! And when he hit that ball out we had them beat, but when he hit that ball out it changed the whole thing. But I don’t know, Whitey should have started that game, do you know why?

CT: You mean other than because he was Whitey Ford?

Yeah. He was hurt, he didn’t have a great year in numbers, but he was the reason we were even in the series. He beat Baltimore twice in four days. And of course Stengel was gone, and he decided he was going to start Ditmar because Ditmar had won the most games for him, and being true and loyal to him I think he was disloyal to the rest of the guys. If you’re going to play to win and you’ve got both Whitey Ford and Art Ditmar both rested, boy, it isn’t even a contest. And then Ford would have been ready for another game later. Who knows how it would have come out? In fairness to Ditmar, hell, you take the ball when they give it to you, you go out there and he always did. I’m not belittling him in any way, I’m just saying that you know… and then Casey I heard him say this: he said I manage this club and I’m going to manage it until this season is over and nobody is going to tell me what to do, because other people were telling him to start Ford. I don’t know if that came from the [front] office or the coaches or what.

CT: Or the writers…

Yeah.

CT: So were you still there in ’61 for the Maris-Mantle race?

No, I was with the Angels. I got traded in May some time. I knew I was gone. I think by then my drinking… there were a number of things that had happened. And you know in ’59 coming off the field I broke my arm. It’s another story, but some kid threw a block into me and I fell, and I was trying to hurry across the field rather than going under the stands and some kid threw a block into me and down I went and I lit on this hand and broke a little bone in there and my season was over.

Oh, but I have to tell you this. My earned run average, just before that, we were eliminated from the pennant, Cleveland finished second and the White Sox won it, we were 9 or 10 games back, it was a bad year, anyway, going into the time when we were eliminated from the pennant, my ERA was 0.68. This was the Yankees of this era — and I don’t know what you’re going to write about but please don’t belittle the Yankees — but you know, we can say baseball was different then. Were they really taking a look at me as a starting pitcher then? That ERA was tremendous. So they came by and said we’d like to see if you can start, I was in the game for quite a few innings, and my earned run average got blown up, I gave three or four runs up, and it went all the way up to 1.83. I always figured they left me in the game just to have my ERA go up. I was making $16,000 at the time, and at four o’clock in the afternoon on Christmas Eve I got a contract with a four thousand dollar cut in it. And yet, with the Yankees I went 37 innings in a row without giving up a run. In the late innings. I went 45 innings without the Yankees getting me a run in the same time. The New York Thunder and Lightning Yankees. Can you believe that? So my record was 2-4. I think that was the cruelest thing that ever happened to me in baseball, they not only gave me a cut but they ruined Christmas.

CT: That was the way they treated everybody then.

You hear George Weiss stories.

CT: I’ve heard them from everybody.

Yeah.

CT: And not just him but other guys who learned from him.

His underlings, right. That was the structure at the time.

CT: They cut DiMaggio’s salary.

And Mantle’s after he won the triple crown!

CT: Unbelievable.

But here’s a good quote I think. Ralph Branca, he said, you know who these guys, modern day ballplayers, have got to thank? I said who Ralph? And he said George Weiss. Branch Rickey. Walter O’Malley. I said, what are you talking about? He said well, they made the union necessary! (laughs)

CT: Bouton says the same thing. He said if they had just paid decently, players would have been too complacent to do anything. Though I think eventually entertainment industry conglomeration would have led to agents moving in and demanding more.

Well they could have still kept that control. At our time, you’d better not have an agent, or you could get blackballed.

CT: So tell me about Mickey Mantle.

Unfortunately, he had the same mindset as I did about the drinking and stuff and he’d probably became even deeper addicted. But I’m not sure, subconsciously I think he was using alcohol to escape the pressure that was on him from all ends like it is on all celebrities. He was an honest, good true friend. He was very generous to his friends. He was a wit, he was full of humor. He was a fierce competitor, he was his own worst critic. We carpooled for a year so I got to know him very well. I speak to his widow weekly or every two weeks or so.

CT: Where did you carpool from?

New Jersey.

CT: I used to live in Englewood.

That’s where we played golf. The Englewood Golf Club. It’s not there anymore. But that was a fun thing because the celebrities of New York show business all played there. I met Ed Sullivan there, comedians, Buddy Hacket, Phil Foster, Pat Boone, three or four others. My favorite was Betsy Palmer, she was making the game shows at the time, variety shows. Highlight of my career was meeting Marilyn Monroe.

CT: Not on the golf course…?

No, she came to spring training with Joe. There she is, sitting outside the clubhouse on the bench, I walk up the first day and it’s Marilyn Monroe. And I don’t know why but I guess it’s just me, I sat down and made small talk with Marilyn Monroe. Joe and I always had a good relationship. We always talked, especially in later life when after she had died and everybody knew I had gotten on top of the problem and was running a hospital and I had been quoted in the papers a lot, a lot of people had done stories on me, Joe wanted to spend some time talking with me and we did about the mixtures of different drugs and alcohol and so forth. I don’t care what anybody else says, she died from Valium mixed with alcohol. I truly believe that.

CT: But people always want to make a conspiracy theory out of it when it’s an American icon who dies.

Oh yeah.

CT: So tell me some more about Joe DiMaggio. A lot of the guys don’t really say much about him.

Well, everybody sees him differently. I went down to the batting cage one day, and he had been down there helping guys hit. we were in St. Petersburg at the old Miller Huggins Field, way down in the corner we had a batting cage with a pitching machine. So I went down there and Joe was down there just kind of hanging around, and the last honest batter came out and got through, so now I say, hey Joe, can you help me some? And he kind of laughed and said why? You can’t hit. You’ve got to have good eyesight and coordination. So I said aw, c’mon Joe, at least help me with my stance or something. And he says Ryne, it’s a waste of time! Please, why would you want me to do that. So I said, you know, Joe, if I could at least look good striking out, that’d be a help, right? And it just cracked him up. But he did finally tell me how to stand and swing and so forth. So now, I’m down there hitting balls and he went back to the bench. So evidently he was proud of the fact that he had me with a pretty good looking swing, so they’re sitting up in the dugout and he’s playing a game with someone down there. He’d make a little bet with you and so on. So he says, who is that guy hitting down there? He looks pretty good. They can’t see my number from there. Joe then says, well, that looks like Ryne Duren to me. And they laughed at him. No, I think it really is. So then they made a little bet, and sure enough I finally turned around to pick up the balls and it’s me. So he did make me look good anyway, and he always got a kick out of that.

CT: One question I have, no one seems to agree on this. Was the old park in Baltimore hard to hit home runs out of?

Yes, it was. The old stadium, Memorial Stadium. It was a good-sized ballpark. But, I don’t know much about hitting home runs… I didn’t pitch much there.

The summer of 1945, I was 15 years old, and I had rheumatic fever, and the only treatment for rheumatic fever after they were able to figure out what it was was antibiotics. We didn’t have any antibiotics in ’45. Penicillin had just shown up, but who could afford it? And at that time, if it was around, the people who should be getting it were the war wounded and soldiers. So the only treatment for me was nine months in bed. No exercise on the heart while it was infected. Now I have a bad valve in my heart, I’ve always had it, and I don’t think it’s a problem. Some of the doctors fuss over it today, but it’s always been there. The insurance companies after many years took the rider off about it. So being a kid in Wisconsin, WGN from Chicago is a very powerful station carried the Cubs. So I listened to the Chicago Cubs every day and became a great baseball fan and hero worshipped everybody you know. I’d keep score, I had a tablet where I’d draw the lines, that would be something to look forward to every day. My mother was working in the post office and my father, who was the post master, they took care of things there, and I had a baby brother at the time who was born in ’44, and a lady by the name of Mrs. Stuck, she would come by and pick the baby up and take the baby to her house so my mother could work. And then the house would come back together in the evening. But for the most part I was one my own. They would come home at lunch time, but that [baseball] had me something to look forward to every day. That in a sense made me a tremendous baseball fan. I knew every player in both leagues. We could also get the White Sox but the Cubs were my team. Back in those days it was practically all day baseball, so I’d listen to everything, from spring training right through to the World series. Well the Cubs won the pennant and played Detroit in the World Series. But the absolute favorite of all the players was Phil Cavaretta. Stan Hack was third base, Cavaretta first, Mickelson in right… all the guys. One of them was Pinas Laurie who was the coach with Philly when I played with the Phillies. I knew everything about them. Even the announcer said hello to me because somebody had told him about me, how I listened every day, I was bedridden and all that. So Cavaretta was my hero, he probably had the best average on the club and so forth.

So in 1954 I had my first cup of coffee in the big leagues with Baltimore, that was their first year in Baltimore, and Phil Cavaretta was just ending up his career. He went over to the Chicago White Sox just to finish out his career, and I come into a game, they’re going to have me do the 8th inning in Baltimore, we’re playing the White Sox, so I come in and the very first hitter I faced was Phil Cavaretta. Isn’t that amazing?

CT: And did you get him out?

I walked him. (laughs) I wouldn’t dare get my hero out! I was just hoping he didn’t see my knees rattling. You know people say I wonder what’s going through their minds out there, well, I’ll tell you this and try to keep it in the right perspective. I’ve told this… this thing about being a starting pitcher versus a relief pitcher. Being a starting pitcher’s got some edges and the first one is … okay, all right, here’s the whole thing. Have you ever been out to the ball park and noticed that the whole team is out on the field except the pitcher when they play the national anthem? They play the national anthem, now the pitcher walks out. That’s the way it was in my day, anyway. So they say well, what would you like better? And I said relieving is a much tougher job, because it’s unpredictable. You never know. The starting pitcher gets a chance to, while everybody else is out there during the national anthem, you go in that little toilet right behind the dugout and you get rid of the nervous… uh, you know. (mimes stomach heaving) As a reliever you don’t have that luxury. You get up and warm up and all of a sudden you’re in there. Now you’re out on the mound, and well, what do they say when you come in? What does it feel like? Well, it’s like this, will you guys hurry up and get out of here so I can get this guy out, because I want to get to the bathroom! And it’s true! It got to be where you’d be on edge and ready to go with adrenaline flowing, and then later when it became kind of ho hum with the appearances, you almost wish you could psyche yourself up to get that rush, because you know you pitched well, and you performed well with it as an athlete.

CT: David Cone said almost the same thing in an interview I read about why the bigger the game, the better he pitched. Bouton too talked about how he had to convince himself sometimes that there was more at stake, like if he didn’t pitch well, millions were going to starve in Africa.

It’s hard to see it as important as other people. When I got home from the ’58 series this good friend of mine, who had pitched for the St. Louis Browns, had a cup of coffee, I went to spring training with him, and he said, did you realize what was going on in that sixth game of the world series in Milwaukee? We’re down three to one and came back to win, and I got the ball from the fourth inning on. Anyway, I go home and my friend Hal Hudson says Jesus, didn’t it make you nervous to be out there knowing it’s the World Series, and a hundred thousand dollars difference on every pitch? I said, oh, you don’t think about that. He said, oh, what do you think about? I said how to get the guy out. What’s the next pitch. Your mind is locked into the game situation. That’s what you think about. Well, I can’t believe that (he says). Well, that’s how come I’ve had 13 or 14 years of doing that. What you have to learn is that as a pitcher, if you’re not the most relaxed person in the Stadium at that point you’re in trouble. So you have to learn, one of the biggest things about pitching, at the big league level anyway, or anywhere for that matter, because every game is the same whether it be in the minors or whatever, you’re out there, the game’s on the line and so forth, and the number one thing that you have to be able to overcome is the human instinct to get uptight. So what do you have to do? You have to learn to relax. If you get tense, then your stuff ends, and your control ends, so you have to know how to relax on the mound. And stay within yourself. So I think that’s something where your concentration is at that time, because you’ve trained yourself to do that. I’d stand on the mound knowing that if I got any more relaxed, I’d drop the ball.

It’s absolutely the truth. A lot of people don’t see it like that. I’ve talked to other professional athletes, too. If you’re playing relaxed, your endurance is so much better.

CT: So tell me more about the book. (I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW)

The book was written through kind of the desires of the author. What it’s really written for is to share the… well, are you familiar with Winning Beyond Winning?

CT: Not really.

It’s my charitable foundation in New York. I have a golf tournament up there in my name, and the foundation puts on an awards banquet in the fall. This past year honored Don Newcombe for his work in awareness and everything. We honor local people and Mrs. uh…. oh I hate it when I can’t remember names… Mrs. uh… Mrs. Gil Hodges, she’s the honorary chairman of our banquet. We raise funds and put on camps for kids and then we go into schools and on the weekends we have on Saturdays camps for kids, and we bring instructors in who are former pros, and some like myself have had a problem and teach kids about sports and sportsmanship and the necessity for social skills and then alcohol and drug awareness, which I do the most of. We do a pretty good job. I’m quite proud and quite happy with it. I didn’t start it. Tom, really, started it and then a guy who was having problems like I did by the name of Rusty Torres–he was in the big leagues for a while with the Yankees–so he was involved, and then Frankie Tepedino, a former Yankee who was on the New York fire department, he’s there, Felix Mantilla a New York Met… and I always have trouble thinking of this guy’s name… he’s the harmonica player.

CT: Phil Linz.

Yes, Phil Linz! He’s been there quite a bit. Don’t tell him I had trouble thinking of his name, but that’s the state of my mind these days. There are a number of other guys. Look on the web site and you’ll find more. About the second year they were involved I was at an organization for retarded kids…. I’ll think of it…. in New York… we have that tournament every spring. And while I was there I met Tom and Rusty, and when I heard what they were doing and they knew what I was doing, especially in Rusty’s case, I think it was paramount to Tom that Rusty and I get together. I was probably the most notorious of the recovering guys and I wrote about it in the other book. So we got together from then on. It’s their efforts as much as mine. I was someone who had some notoriety and the whole thing just snowballed to where our banquet today is $150 a plate and we get 500-600 people.

CT: So what about the book?

Anybody reading this that has kids that have got some false ideas about alcohol and drinking and so forth, it approaches it like some of the things I’ve told you. There are a lot of people out there hurting that don’t know they’re hurting. They are hurting other people by their lack of knowledge or by their attitude about it. From that standpoint, I think it’s a good book, and there are some good stories in it. There’s some… the thing that makes it better than anything else is that my son read the manuscript at age fifty, and now he’s reflecting how it was in his life at every age and stage, so… and then a lot of my teammates and former ball players are quoted in there. We sent out questionnaires and a lot of them wrote back some very decent stuff. So that’s good. It’s a pretty sentimental book, too, the parts dealing with my first wife and so forth. Alcohol was a heartbreaker for the family, and that’s in there.

My dad was a wonderful man, a World War I hero, real honest, good work ethic, wounded in the war, you’d like him as a neighbor and everything. All of those things. He was stern but that was the German heritage and there’s nothing wrong with that. But he was so mis-informed about alcohol and manliness, you know? I had the occasion to have him hear me speak after I was sober for a while you know, and ride back home in the dark in the car where people talk and say things without seeing each other’s eyes, and he was able to tell me that it was great what I had done for the family since I got sober and how wrong he was about alcohol. He admitted it. Both of my brothers have died this past year, they both got a chance to read the book and loved it. They were both alcoholics, and there are uncles and aunts on my mother’s side who have died of it, too. And I know there were deaths related to it on my father’s side, too. Within the family there is some pretty tragic stuff that is alcohol-related… I don’t want to get into that. The bigger picture here is that the number of people who have had problems among my kids and nieces and nephews and so on by their numbers is a hell of a lot less than in the generation before, so you have to be able to weigh progress in the right perspective. You can’t change everybody overnight, but in a sense I’m lucky to be here.

Are there many people who can say I’m glad I had this godawful problem? Because in essence it gave me the opportunity to do something a lot more positive in life than just strike out the side or something like that. It’s a much better gift to humanity. I mean, we have hero worship in this country for people who play professional sports, and that’s good because it has helped me to do something. So I’m just happy and tickled about the whole thing. The only problem is I’m seventy five.

CT: Anything else to add?

To me, the sixth game of the 1958 World Series, when we were 3-1 down, that belongs on your list.

–
And that was it. We had been sitting in that diner for a couple of hours at that point. As I discovered was de rigeur when interviewing men of Ryne Duren’s generation, he would not let me pick up the check. Rest in peace, Ryne.

Caillault presents for every pitcher in the Hall of Fame, their career won-lost totals in head-to-head match-ups with other members of the HoF. His results date back to the beginning of the National League in 1876 (when Al Spalding and Candy Cummings were 1-1 against each other) and extend up to and including 1987 (when Don Sutton beat Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro beat Sutton). There have been no such matchups since, although that will change as more pitchers are inducted.
J-P Caillault (jpc1957@msn.com) is a professor of astronomy at the University of Georgia, where he also teaches classes on the physics of baseball, the history of the major leagues, and sabermetrics. He is the author of A Tale of Four Cities (McFarland 2003), The Complete New York Clipper Baseball Biographies (McFarland, 2009), and has written articles for Baseball Digest and Baseball Research Journal. He lives in Winterville, Georgia.

Of the 40 judges, they were very much in agreement on this being the best poster.

And now for the oral presentations. There were a total of 40 presentations, and five that were seen as really head and shoulders above the others. A grudging consensus was reached, and we have four honorable mentions, and one winner.

First, the four honorable mentions:

Robert Fitts, for “Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura, and the War”
Michael Haupert for “Earning Like a Woman: The Gender Gap in Professional Baseball 1944-1954″
Alan Nathan “Revisiting Mantle’s Griffith Stadium Home Run”
Mark Stang “The Barnum of the Bushes: Chattanooga’s Joe Engel”

And the winner is:

Ross Davies for “Long Before Ping-Pong: Chinese-US Diplomacy Before the Great War”

I am pleased to say I did see this presentation and it is recapped in an earlier post. Since Ross wasn’t there, but Neal did have his slides, I gave a brief recap from my notes and Neal showed the slides, so the folks who missed it could get the gist.

Official description(s):
Magnolia Chapter member Ken Fenster moderates a discussion with Dorothy Seymour Mills, David Block and Tom Swift about the ups and downs of the research process, from the formulation of original ideas all the way through to publication. The panelists will use examples from their own works to illustrate the difficulties researchers must face, and the strategies that were useful in meeting those challenges.

Ken Fenster is a Professor of History at Georgia Perimeter College, Clarkston campus. He joined SABR in the early 1990s. He has published articles and book reviews in The Baseball Research Journal, The National Pastime, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, and The New Georgia Encyclopedia. He is co-editor of the 2010 convention publication. He received the McFarland-SABR award in 2004 and was awarded a Yoseloff-SABR grant in 2009.
Dorothy Seymour Mills is the co-author with Harold Seymour of the classic scholarly histories of early baseball for Oxford University Press (Baseball The Early Years; Baseball: The Golden Age; and Baseball: A People’s Game). She has detailed their work together in a memoir, A Woman’s Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour (McFarland 2007). During the convention she will be autographing her latest book, Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places (McFarland 2010), which is already in its second printing. Dorothy is honored by the annual presentation of the “Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Award” and received the first medal herself. In 2010 she was among the first group of recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award, which honors the most important scholars of the game. Dorothy has published 25 books, not all in the field of baseball history, and at 82 years old is writing another.
David Block is a baseball historian and antiquarian whose research and writings have shed new light on the distant origins of the game. His landmark book on the subject, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game is generally recognized as the authoritative work on the subject of baseball’s origins. It was the recipient of the 2006 SABR Seymour Medal, the 2006 NASSH book, named to the New York Times Reading List of sports books (2005), and was designated an “Outstanding Academic Title of 2005″ by the American Library Association. David is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, and serves on the editorial board of “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.” He lives with his family in San Francisco.
Tom Swift is an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines. His book, Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star, won the 2009 Seymour Medal, which honors the best work of baseball history of the year. The book tells the true story of Charles Albert Bender, the first Minnesota-born man inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the most accomplished American Indian player of all time. Tom and his wife, Carrie, live with their two terriers, Barry and Tobias, in Northfield, Minnesota. Like boyhood hero Kent Hrbek, he throws right and bats left. His web site: Tom Swift.

Ken begins by introducing Dorothy’s work, pointing out that Dorothy will now be listed as a full co-author on the Oxford University Press re-issues of the Seymour volumes.

Dorothy speaks. “I think most people think that writers come up with the theme for a book, and then go out and research it to write the book. And then write the book. That would be logical! But mostly it happens that while you’re researching, the theme or idea for a book emerges, and you start writing, and you’re writing and researching at the same time, and it doesn’t happen quite so neatly. You find other things out as you are going along, and you have to change your ideas and reaarange as what you discover may differ from your expectations.”

Dorothy ended up having to re-arrange the whole section on women playing baseball in her book Chasing Baseball, because what she discovered about the game turned out to be quite different than her original expectations.

Research can also take you off on tangents you don’t expect. “While working on The People’s Game I learned that baseball was played in the 1870s in schools for Native Americans. Baseball was also being used in mission schools. To understand the childrens’ experience, I found some biographies about people who had grown up in those schools. And then I found the federal reports from the Department of Indian Affairs, which brought me to the government reports of the school superintendents, which led me to the discovery that some of the schools were still in existence. That led me to some important primary sources. Ultimately it became a whole chapter in the book that wouldn’t have been there in the original plan.”

“Research is like a treasure hunt, each thing leads you to another thing.”

“You might think that an autobiography would be easy, just remember everything and write it down! But I didn’t want to fall into the trap that some writers have run into where they get things wrong in their own books. So I had to travel to Cornell, where the Harold and Dorothy Seymour papers are archived. I discovered there that there were plenty of things I had forgotten that I had done, and that there were places I forgot I had gone. I studied the footnotes in the PhD thesis that I helped Seymour to write. Later, a reader came up to me to say it was remarkable how well I remembered the past. Ha! Fooled him! When you’re writing autobiography or biography, you have to fact check your subject. People’s memories are imperfect.”

Dorothy calls for a comprehensive update of the works she and Harold Seymour did, which ends in the 1940s. She describes work she did on military baseball, but what about how military baseball is doing now? Baghdad has a civilian baseball league now, but it must be related to the military somehow, isn’t it? What about prison baseball? I was able to write to the penitentiary directors who sent me copies of the prison newsletters written by the inmates themselves. Those kinds of primary sources are vital. You can start in the card catalog of your local library, but you can go so far beyond that.

Some more of Dorothy’s tips:
You can email Dave Kelly, the librarian at the Library of Congress who specializes in helping sports historians. Dave’s email dkel@loc.gov
Sign up for Google alerts.
Always check Wikipedia with another source.
Use the SABR Guide to doing Baseball Research, which is available free to SABR members in email from Peter Garver at the SABR office: pgarver@sabr.org

David Block is up next.

David: It was a great honor for me to win the Seymour Medal because it bears the name Seymour, which was very significant to me. As Ken mentioned, Dorothy and Harold transformed the way baseball research was done. Before them, baseball history was treated as storytelling, and although the stories were good, they were not always very accurate. The work we do now in SABR is really in the footsteps of the work they did.

I took an early retirement about 10 years ago, and discovered retirement wasn’t as easy as I thought it was. I didn’t have a schedule to follow and I was kind of rattling around the house and my wife threatened to send me back to work if I didn’t stop complaining. I had a hobby at the time on baseball memorabilia collecting, and I started collecting books in particular. I started a modest project to make a bibliography of old biographies and books before 1860 that mention baseball. While proceeding on this bibliography I thought well I’ll write an introduction to it on where baseball came from. I knew Abner Doubleday hadn’t invented it. I started reading a lot of books the talked about the origins of baseball, and discovered that most of it was anecdotal and much of it was contradictory. This really puzzled me, since baseball history since the Seymours it has been studied and dissected as much as any other sport. Every other era of baseball history had been focused on except the beginning.

I got into researching it and discovered so much of what had been written was inaccurate. Eventually my research for this introduction ended up turning into a whole book.

Because the era of baseball I was researching many people didn’t even know existed, I had to look in a lot of little corners. I started by gathering all the baseball histories I could find, and itemizing all these pieces of information, and then going off and seeing which ones I could corroborate. Many I could, but many I couldn’t. I looked in sources like the Oxford English Dictionary and English regional glossaries. Trap ball, hand in hand out, stop ball, and many other games that led to the development of baseball. Many of these would list “first usage” which would lead me to a primary source. At the time I had to visit a lot of libraries in the course of my research, since it was before the digitization of library catalogs and sources. I would find in the card catalogs things like children’s books that were a major source of information for me, as well as books on folk games, et cetera. Many of the illustrations from the very early game come out of books for children.

It was really fun. It was really a treasure hunt. I would see a reference someplace and I would try to follow it as far as I could. Many of them were dead ends, but sometimes you’d find a pot of gold at the end of it. Robert Henderson had done some good work in the 1940s but he had barely scratched the surface, plus he did all ball sports, not just baseball. When you stumble into an era of baseball history that no one else has done serious extensive work in, it’s a privilege and a responsibility, because you’ll be reporting on something that no one else has before. The people in the SABR chapter in the UK has done a lot of work now, and Tom’s essay A Place Level Enough to Play Ball was a very inspiration piece for me.

Obstacles in this area of research were formidable. The previous 150 years were packed with misinformation and the opinions on baseball’s origins were largely based on things other than facts. National chauvinism, politics, opinions, falsehoods, and many other assumptions, yarns, and stories — I had to wade my way through to find out how the game really started. I don’t know if I successfully wove my way through all those obstacles. Sometimes there were partial truths. The whole debate between Chadwick and Spalding about whether baseball was English or American in origin. It was an important debate a hundred years ago, but neither of them was quite right. Chadwick argued it was English, which is correct, and that it developed from rounders, which is incorrect. Baseball actually pre-dated rounders in the early 18th century, rounder came in the 19th century.

There are great gaps in what we know. How did it migrate to the New World? There’s a lot of that history that remains to be uncovered. I encourage anyone who is interested to get involved. With the increase in digital databases, it’s possible to research much more than when I started.

Be skeptical. I constantly ran into things that weren’t what they purported to be. Even this past year as I continue to do research, I was in England and I saw a reference to a diary from Lancashire that had been transcribed from the 17th century and mentioned baseball, but I eventually found the 1870s transcription and it wasn’t baseball. It was a game called prisoners bars or prisoners base, which is a form of tag. This guy who transcribed it in 1870 substituted the word baseball incorrectly. You get a lot of false positives.

Tom Swift

“Writing a book is a horrible exhausting struggle. One would never undertake such a thing if not driven by a demon one cannot exist or understand.” said George Orwell, and quoted by Tom to open his remarks.

I do not, alas, have the level of experience (of Dorothy and David on the panel), but what I lack in longevity I make up for in the ability to concentrate years of trials and tribulations into a short period of time.

The impetus behind me book. I am from Minnesota, “you betcha.” And for 50 years Charles Bender was out lone representative in the Hall of Fame. And when Paul Molitor and Dave Winfield were inducted, the newspaper articles would keep mentioning Bender. I even wrote a magazine article about him, but the more i learned about Bender the more I wanted to learn about him.

He pitched in 5 World Series, he may have invented the slider. But I was drawn to his life story as a compelling human interest story. This question of where did you get the idea is appropriate since I get that one more frequently from journalists and readers. It’s all a lot less complicated that people think. What interests you? You live with your subject, for years in my case, so you better like him or her. Bender fascinated me and if he didn’t there’s no way I could have written the book.

I’ve been a writer all my professional life, on mostly un-glamorous stuff. It could become mere drudgery. I had to skip a few stones on the pond to see if it would interest me. Reading and then following your curiosity. Were I to catalog all the challenges I faced, most of them self-inflicted, you’d probably miss your flights or your ride home. Every aspects of it was a challenge to me. I actually consulted that SABR How To Manual.

My journalism background helped. But most of the stories and articles I had written in my career were in the hear and now. I was interviewing subjects and writing in the present. But this was a steep learning curve. It took me far longer than I think it would take most people. But in some ways I had the advantage of ignorance. The road to baseball research is littered with apocryphal tales and preconceived notions. But since I was learning it all new, I was able to come to it without trying to fit it into a preconceived tale and ask very basic questions.

I was very inefficient. I gathered from a lot of sources, many of them were not essential. I read well beyond what I needed to, but it was important to me to gather up as much as I could. It was a slow process for me, and not always an emotionally easy one. I had to restructure my life in some ways. There are those who can do it just on evenings and weekends and still have jobs and kids and grandkids. I couldn’t. I ended up working fewer hours and earning less, and putting a lot of pressure on myself so that the people in this room would find it good. I thought about abandoning it more than once, I suppose, and I wrote in fits and starts. My spouse talked me down from the ledge more than once. One time my computer hard drive fried. I lost a lot of writing, some typing of notes, and fortunately as I was going through all those microfilm reels I was printing a lot of stuff out. So I could retrace my steps. But here’s one bit of advice. Back up your files! Every night!

Also, be hyper-organized. Looking back on it, I wasn’t sorting my stuff well. Every minute you spend placing things where you can access them and noting where they came from and where they go, is a minute well spent.

Cast a wide net. It was important to me to get a sense of what Philadelphia was like when Bender lived there. That all infused my understanding of where he lived. I felt closer to my subject and I understood him a little bit more. He also struck a pedestrian with his car and killed him. I found every scrap of information about that as about the World Series. It was obviously an important chapter in his life.

Once you do all this stuff, immerse yourself in your details, read your notes until your sick of them, then set them aside and see what you can write without referring to them, to get into a flow that you can craft a good story. You sacrifice acuracy for nothing, but it’s important to tell good stories.

I’ve heard from some readers who say I don’t read baseball books, but I enjoyed yours. It’s important to reach a little broader audience than just SABR.

One of the things I asked myself is, what was it like? What was it like to stand on the mound in the Polo Grounds, with people hurling racial epithets at you and John McGraw standing in the dugout? There’s no definitive answer to that question, but you still have to ask the question.

Tap into SABR’s deep well of intellectual capital. I received so much from people who wouldn’t know me on the street, good book recommendations, an article they wrote, information and facts and leads. I became around this time much more active in my local chapter, the Halsey Hall chapter in Minnesota.

Questions.

Ken: Dorothy, in your book Chasing Baseball, you advocate for a professional women’s baseball league.

Dorothy: I thought about that for quite a while. What it will take is a structure. Boys have easy access to a structure and girls don’t. Justine Siegal has started one, but it’s not nationwide. Boys have it at every age starting at age 6 or 7, but even if girls have a youth league, they are unlikely to be able to play at the high school or college level. The only way it’s really going to happen would be if Major League Baseball would support it, and give money as they do to Little League aimed at boys. MLB’s efforts toward women are about developing women fans, but not women players.

One way would be like they do it in Australia, with men’s and women’s sports clubs, who offer many sports, and baseball would be one of them. The government of Australia supports the clubs, not the individual sports. Some teams eventually develop stars who could play professionally. That would be the feeder system.

If a stand-alone professional league is started, there are no feeder teams to bring the talent in. A formal structure is vital to a strong league.

Ken: David, have you determined any better the use of the bat in the origins of baseball?

David: I had made the assumption that the bat was as essential to the game as the ball. But in the 18th century there was a book published in 1796, a German book, that included a two foot long bat described as “English baseball.” So I assumed a bat had always been a part of baseball.

My thinking since then has changed somewhat. I’ve analyzed other mentions of English baseball written in the English language and none of them mention a bat at all. The 1744 book that mentions it has an illustration, but there’s no evidence of a bat in the picture or the description! The game of English baseball that grew into rounders and American baseball, it was likely the girl who was the runner would just hit it with her hand. And I say her because it was a game played by girls and young women.

When the bat was introduced is unclear. It’s pretty sure it happened very early in the United States, but we’re not sure exactly when. Illustrations from early 1800s show it. The earliest text information that mentions the bat is from 1834.

In England my hypothesis is that rounders distinguished itself from English baseball by using the bat, in fact. It’s now my speculation that the German book in 1796 which mentions the bat, was describing baseball in a transitional state, and that it was the beginning of rounders. Until more evidence is uncovered we may never know when the bat first appeared.

Ken: Tom, you begin your book with Bender’s performance in the 1914 World Series and you anchor the book on that performance. Yet you argue in the book that this was an atypical performance for him, so why did you choose it?

Tom: You know, it wasn’t an intellectual decision. I was well into the research, and I was looking at some microfilm from the day before that performance. And I just knew it. It was a demarcation point in his career, he became in his manager’s eyes the greatest “money pitcher,” it was his final game with the A’s. Everything that happened before was one part of the story, and after that everything changed. I didn’t sit there and think “this is how it should go.” It was a rare case of me just reading over something and it just kind of occurred to me. Once I thought of it, I didn’t consider any other way to go about it.

(Followed by questions from the audience. My wrist hurts so I’m not going to type all of those.)

This was during the same MLB all-star tour of Japan on which Moe Berg did some of his infamous spying. The MLB team played 10 games on the tour and won them all, but the game Fitts described, which the young Sawamura pitched, was a near thing. Sawamura held the big leaguers in check, ending up losing 1-0 on a solo homer by Lou Gehrig.

I ducked out of the room just as Fitts was reading an ironic quote from some optimistic observer of the baseball tour of Japan, claiming that these nations would never be wracked by war again. (World War II was just around the corner.)

As it turned out, I needn’t have rushed to get to the bus on time, as when I arrived in the lobby, no bus was in evidence, and a heavy downpour, with thunder and lightning, was. Radar showed a storm front working its way through, and it looked for sure like the start of the game would be delayed. Eventually buses did pull up and we made our way through the flooded driveway to get into them.

By the time we arrived at the park, the rain had lightened, at least long enough for us to walk to the park.

The SABR group was broken into a few different sections (and price points) and I’d apparently chosen, months ago when I bought my tickets to the convention, a seat by the left field foul poul that included $10 worth of food in the ticket price. Sweet! I circumnavigated the concourse with my friend Joanne Hulbert from Boston, surveying the food options. Joanne’s ticket was in yet a nother section, of All You Can Eat seats, so I left her off there and then went to the SmokeHouse barbecue stand myself, where for $8.25 you can get an entree with two side dishes. Quite a bargain. I got ribs, mac & cheese, and corn.

They had glitches in the system scanning the tickets, though. Apparently with all the lightning strikes and such the computer systems needed to be rebooted. Eventually it was all straightened out at the central computer banks and off I went. I found a picnic table indoors and settled down to eat and watch the first few innings of Yankees/Red Sox on my iPhone. Yes, I now take every MLB TV and radio broadcast with me in my pocket wherever I go. I love living in the future.

A lovely rainbow appeared in the sky on the first base side some time later, as the sun set and the rain started to clear. The game was ‘delayed’ still further by the actual Tom Glavine induction ceremony to the Braves Hall of Fame and the retirement of his #47. Glavine looked dinstinctly uncomfortable up there on the podium, probably holding in a lot of emotion. He gave a short speech, saying he knew the players had had a really long day already, between the earlier ceremony at the CNN Center, and then the delay, and now they had a ballgame to play.

The opponents were the San Francisco Giants, and I have to say I am really spoiled from the American League East. I felt like pretty much no matter who got up to bat for either team all night long that none of them would have batted higher than eighth in any AL east lineup other than Baltimore’s. What the hell has happened to Chipper Jones? Just getting old suddenly, or off the juice, or what? (Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and might even be related, I realize.)

Barry Zito pitched for the Giants, which meant I sort of went against my usual policy of rooting for the home team whenever I’m not seeing the Yankees play. I’ve been to Turner Field before, though, and rooted for the Braves then.

Zito pitched great. He appears to have abandoned that big 12-6 curve in favor of a bunch of other baffling junk. There were only three big hits off him all night. Chipper had a double in the first but was stranded. Later, Alex Gonzalez hit a homer off him, and then Chipper took him deep an inning after that, but that was it. Seven innings, 10 strikeouts. But I bet Zito misses the days when he had Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez putting up three-run bombs behind him on a regular basis. The Giants didn’t managed to tie the score until the ninth.

When they did, they did it off Billy Wagner. I have to say, as a Yankees fan, that I felt somewhat the Wagner deserved this, for the hubris of having co-opted Mariano Rivera’s “Enter Sandman.” At the end of the eighth inning, all the scoreboards go completely dark. Then, flames start to appear. The opening strains of “Enter Sandman” play. And then the word WAGNER appears all over the stadium IN FLAMES. Ooooh. And then Wagner jogs to the mound. It’s all quite overblown and I am not the only person in my section who remarked, “Mr. Wagner, you are no Mariano Rivera,” at that point.

All that buildup, all that hoopla, and then Wagner laid an egg. Ooops. At least he didn’t cough up the lead run, as well, though it was a near thing. There’s a poster presentation downstairs making the claim that Wagner is the best lefthanded relief pitcher of all time. I wonder if by now someone has tacked on a page that says “But is no Mariano Rivera.”

The Giants eventually won the game, which actually was VERY briskly played, despite going into extra innings. However, because of the two hour delayed start, it was after midnight when the game ended, and because of local noise laws, the fireworks were cancelled. Disappointing, but ah well. By the time the bus pulled in to the hotel, it was so late the bar was already closed. I went right back to my room and was so exhausted I slept through the morning research presentations and the Joe Jackson Black Sox panel, which supposedly had new revelations to share. I’ll try to get the scoop on those later and post what people said, if I can.

Now it’s time for the luncheon with John Shuerholz. I’m too poor to attend the banquet part so I’m having a cup of ramen noodles in my room and then I’ll go down just to hear the awards and speeches.

EDIT: I should add that the one scoreboard shot of the SABR group at the ballpark focused on Mike Conlon, and it was fitting that at his moment of glory, he wasn’t looking at the scoreboard at all, but actually using his smartphone to look up a fact on Retrosheet. Cheers, Mike!

This afternoon it is really difficult to choose which presentation to see, but I decided to start with Vince Gennaro because every year he comes up with something very sharp and insightful. It means missing Gary Gillette’s presentation on disappearing Negro League ballparks, but I figure I can get Gary to give me the gist of it later if I see him in the bar or at the game.

The slate:

Vince Gennaro – Measuring the asset value of players: A framework for evaluating trades

Geri Strecker – Whose dream was it?: Revisiting the formation of the Negro National League in 1920

Ross Davies – Chinese-U.S. baseball diplomacy before the Great War

Will Dahlberg – A tool for diplomacy: Baseball in occupied Japan 1945-1952

Robert Fitts – Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura and war

Measuring the asset value of players: A framework for evaluating trades
Vince Gennaro

In particular, Gennaro here focuses on the trade deadline deals, when teams are making those trades to fix up their rosters for the end of the season, the time value of players as teams re-set their rosters for the stretch drive.

Gennaro has the ability to make economics seem simple and straight-forward, at least while you’re listening to him. It’s a bit like when Richard Feynman would explain particle physics, making it all crystal clear… at least until you try to repeat it to someone else and realize how much depth of understanding goes into what was said, because even if you can parrot it, it isn’t always as clear later. I will, however, try to lay out the facts as presented by Vince. They’re quite convincing to me.

You used to see name players traded straight up for each other, Tris Speaker for Sad Sam Jones, Colavito, etc. You see some of these today but they are not the predominant form of trade. They are more about reallocating playing assets to help a team reach the playoffs. Some are dumping salary and restocking the farm system while others are renting a player looking for the financial boon of reaching the postseason.

Recent examples:
Abreu to the Yankees in 2006
Carlos Lee to the Rangers in 2007
Teixeira both times
Sabathia to Milwaukee
Manny to LA
etc etc

Why has the style of trade changed?

Free agency has created higher salaries. Rising salaries and revenue growth are taking place at vastly different rates for different teams. When the Yankees went into their new ballpark, the delta change in their revenues alone was greater than [the total revenue for] about 8 teams. From a revenue standpoint it’s as if the Yankees annexed the KC Royals without taking on additional costs.

Team revenues are highly sensitive to winning. $25 to $50 million in revenue can be got just by reaching the postseason ONCE. (As anyone who has read Vince’s articles in the Yankees Annual already knows.)

It’s no longer about TALENT evaluation and today is about a little talent evaluation PLUS asset evaluation. Roster management is about having ENOUGH good players to contend for the postseason and reap the big postseason boon. Playing assets should be shifted to where [or when] they have the highest return. Not about having the BEST players you can have, just have enough to place you in contention in order to reap best financial reward for minimum cost.

Teams tend to be in one of two scenarios at the trade deadline.
1) no chance to contend: trade today’s win for future wins
2) need last piece of puzzle: trade future wins for today’s wins

GM’s job is more like a portfolio manager of investments.

Player’s Value as a Team Asset:
the dollar value of having control of a player is based on
-number of years remaining*
-expected performance of the player
-financial impact of the performance

(*residual value when control ends, ie Type A free agent, gets draft picks)

Vince then shows the Win-Curve graph about how teams make more if they win more games in the regular season. People who read his piece in the Yankees Annual a few years ago or his book DIAMOND DOLLARS are very familiar with this graph. (I think he won the SABR research presentation award for the first presentation he gave that included this, a few years back.)

The Postseason Effect: The Game Changer
Fans get dissatisfied with seat choices and the price of playoff tickets or how hard they are to get. The result of that is:
-strong season ticket renewals
-high demand for new season tickets
-advance sales are strong
-stronger broadcast ratings
-corporate sponsor demand
-suite demand increases
-ticket prices overall increase

In the wild card era, postseason teams tend to raise prices 5% for the following season.

Guess what? The economic bump is not just a one-year effect. Multi-year revenue stream effect from reaching the postseason. Vince shows a graph showing the effect falling off only gradually as the years go on. Uses White Sox as an example, where season ticket base doubled and although they haven’t gotten there again, they have not dropped off all the way to where they started.

The Brewers did get the payoff for renting CC Sabathia.

And then even looking at regular season, if a team thinks they’re going to win 89 games, and then they look at their win-curve graph and could improve to a 93 win season, they could bring in, say, $21 million more dollars. (The graph is going to look different for different teams, but as an example.)

Let’s look at Cliff Lee. Former Seattle LHP to Rangers at the break
To Seattle his value was his marginal revenue of about a million per win, whereas Rangers he’s probably worth $5 million per win.
To Seattle, Lee total worth $2.5 million Asset
-owed 4.5 million in salary
yielded $3 million in draft pick compensation
generates $4 million in revenue with 4 wins
nets out to $2.5

Now to the Rangers:
Cliff Lee: $19.5 million asset
-owed $4.5 million salary
yielded $3mil in draft picks
generates $21 million in revenue
increases postseason chances by 47% x $36 million

Asset values:
Seattle gave up Lee $2.5 million, plus $2.5 million in cash
Mark Lowe is a wash

Rangers gave up $16 million: Smoak, Beavens, Lueke, Lawson, mostly in SMOAK’s value

So, the Mariners gave up $5 million and received $16 million in value
The Rangers gave up $16 million in value received $22 million in value

So it’s win-win. It’s not just about who is right about the talent, it’s about how the players and assets can affect the teams positively.

Vince then shows a graph with
Roy Oswalt for JA Happ and prospects: value created for HOU $15 million, PHL get $8 million
Edwin Jackson for prospects, follows suit
Miguel Tejada for prospects. follows suit

Admits that may not be valuing the risk of prospects properly, but it can be debated.

Conclusions:
-Deadline deals have as much to do with financial management as talent evaluation
-Player’s true value is different to each team
-July trades are about swapping the timing of expected wins now vs. the future
-Teams need to incorporate risk into their valuation of prospects

(questions from the audience)

Whose dream was it?: Revisiting the formation of the Negro National League in 1920
Geri Strecker

(This segment has been removed by request of the presenter.)

Chinese-U.S. baseball diplomacy before the Great War, 1902-1907
Ross Davies

Edit: This is the presentation that would win the award for best presentation at the conference.

Ross opened his remarks by saying “This is a small debunking exercise. I’ll tell you a piece of convention wisdom and then correct it.”

The term “ping pong diplomacy” to refer to the technique of using sports as a strategy to thaw tense relations comes from the Nixon-Kissinger era, when in 1971 the Chinese invited an American ping pong team over. This is thought to be, as evidenced by the name, the first time such a thing happened. But as Ross shows in the presentation, not only had it happened before, it was China that had previously used the technique on the US, all the way back in 1902.

Back in 1902 anti-Chinese sentiment was very high in the US. Mutual hostility was at a peak then. Ross describes how both candidates running for president (Grover Cleveland versus Benjamin Harrison) had anti-immigration and anti-Chinese rhetoric in their campaigns. Likewise in China the Empress Dowager speaking out. Quick recap of The Boxer Rebellion. Western military power moves in, the eight nation alliance, wins and demands reparations. The US portion of the reparations equals about $41 million, three times again what had been spent by the US on the military operation.

At that point, China is weak, and has no diplomatic apparatus, since it had been the center of the universe for so long, it was only tributary nations to it before that. In 1901 the eight nation alliance basically forced China to establish a State Department and forced to engage with the west.

Now back up to 1863, the Chinese watched the Americans play baseball. (Shows historical photos.) And from 1872 to 1881 they would send Chinese boys to the USA to learn engineering… and they would also learn baseball while there. They would then come back to China, and would in fact beat a team of Oakland boys on their way back to Asia. (Newspaper clippings about that game.)

Here’s where Ross got very analytical, even statistical, for a history presentation. He shows a graph on use of pejorative terms for the Chinese in newspaper from 1882 – 1901 labeled “The Least-Hated Chinese.” It quantifies that in stories on opera, baseball, and museums there were relatively few pejorative terms, while those on labor, etc. there were many. Baseball seem to show the Chinese in their “least-hated” context. For contrast, another graph showed an analysis of Congressional precedings, which seemed to have pejoratives used in all contexts.

So, who are they going to send to the US to repair relations? Ross contends that the Chinese could read the American newspapers and knew that a baseball context would serve their image. They send a guy, Sir Chintung Liang Cheng, who is reported in the newspapers “at six feet in height, famed as a right-fielder and batter on the Philips Andover baseball team.” He had been one of those boys who was sent over to learn engineering, and the newspapers could not get enough of the story. They would tell over and over an Andover vs. Exeter story, with a photo of him in his old school uniform. (For those not familiar with the prep schools in New England, the Andover/Exeter rivalry is longstanding, heated, and legendary. Think Harvard/Yale only it’s prep school rather than university.)

A friend of his remembers him getting a game-winning home run. In fact, it was a triple, but he is a diplomat, and didn’t correct his friend right away. Subsequent stories would recount it as a triple. Because of the baseball connection, Liang was not seen as alien; he had an American love of baseball. With the help of the newspapers, Liang kept the story alive. It became a Horatio Alger story.

Liang was in fact the kind of man who walks softly and carries a big stick. Teddy Roosevelt had used the phrase in a speech just six months before Liang’s appointment. Liang’s recounts of the story included many elements that would disarm (or modestly chastise) American listeners. He described fans yelling pidgin English at him from the stands, making fun of him, says he got angry at that, showing that he was passionate and not “inscrutable,” and he delivered the goods, the game-winning hit, essentially saying to Teddy Roosevelt “you must respect me.”

In 1905 Liang suggests to the secretary of state that the amount of money be revised, because it would be in the “spirit of fair play.” (Not coincidentally, the Chinese people were boycotting US goods in 1905.) By 1907, the US gave back $27 million of the $41 million that had been paid.

After he gets called back, the next two replacements they sent were also touted as baseball fans. Another graph then, showing the use of pejorative words for the Chinese in 1902-1915 news stories. There are still plenty of pejorative stories, but Liang was able to personalize his own relations with the government enough to deliver the goods.

Further reading suggested: Taking in a Game, Joseph Reaves

A tool for diplomacy: Baseball in occupied Japan 1945-1952
Will Dahlberg

Will opens by saying that academia there is the “so what?” factor. Today, August 6th is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “I hope my research will illuminate how such catastrophic and devastating events can be followed by a bonding tie between the occupiers and occupied. This will be a significant part of my masters thesis at Dartmouth. This period sets the stage for our current state of baseball both in the USA and in Japan, where baseball is fanatically followed.”

MacArthur faced a tough road in rebuilding Japan. For him it was the great experiment in liberation from totalitarian rule, and in liberalizing government from within. One million Japanese soldiers had been killed, two million homes had been destroyed, factories were gone, and seven million more soldiers were repatriated. The people had been told all throughout the war that their victory over the barbaric, rapacious Americans was assured. And then they lost.

MacArthur thought Japan needed to be purged of its old military leadership and hyper-military culture. His closest staff, “the baton boys,” were his inner circle in running the country.

When it comes to baseball, though, Major General F. Marquat was MacArthur’s second hand man, He was seen as a simple-minded man, but he might have been smarter than you think. He was charged with re-doing the educational system, and he instituted two years of physical education. But they were not allowed to do the old budo pursuits of judo, kendo, etc… and they replaced it with baseball. (Interesting side note: this isn’t the first time that the Japanese took up baseball in place of budo. In the 1890s when the samurai way of life was outlawed, there were those who turned to baseball then, as well! I have a young adult book called Samurai Shortstop on the subject. I should probably drop Will Dahlberg a note about it.)

It took some time though to build the baseball fields and import the equipment. “wholesome, democratic games” were to take the place of the war-like sports and “reduce the problems of the occupation.” (quoted from a request to requisition the equipment needed to put the physical education plan into place). “Without this equipment they will not be able to institute democratic games for the budo sports.”

In setting out to get the equipment, they got donations from major league baseball, MLB players, the leagues, as well as schools and universities.

Before they could get hardballs, they had 30,000 teams registered of “rubber ball” teams.

Many cool photos shown which I can’t recreate of course. Even the Japanese Diet played games. (The House of Representatives won 32-2 in the photo shown.) Photo of the Emperor’s personal guard playing outside the palace.

“It is the duty of the people in Japan to reconstruct their society as a democratic society.” And sports plays a role in that. National Athletic Meet, had tens of thousands of participants.

Marquat was also approached by the Yomiuri newspapers and the national commission on juvenile delinquency. How to deal with the leisure hours of the youth? Baseball was seen as one of the best sources of recreation to promote juvenile welfare. In 1950 they held a 3 day meet for juvenile baseball, with students arriving from all over the country, with thousands and thousands of players all taking an oath. They gave prizes to every child that played.

As baseball caught on more and more, their official efforts could die out because they had become self-sustaining.

All culminates in the tours of Joe DiMaggio and Lefty O’Doul, and adoption of American baseball heroes, and then the creation of the truly professional Japanese baseball major leagues.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay to see Robert Fitts speak on “Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura and war” because I had to run to put my computer away before getting the bus to the ballgame!

An intriguing look at one of the most iconic moments in the career of one of baseball’s most iconic figures. Lots has been written about the famous homer, as written about in the book CLOUT by Dan Valenti. The characters: Yankee publicist Red Patterson, Mickey Mantle, and Donald Dunaway. The places: Griffith Stadium and 434 Oakdale Place. But the claim that the homer carried 565 feet has been “debunked” before.

(Nathan shows an overhead shot of the stadium, the street, and the house.)

The undisputed historical facts: Dunaway was a 10 year old kid playing hooky, who ran out of the stadium to get the ball. Patterson also ran out of the stadium, paid the kid for the ball, and paced off the distance to the sign that the ball had glanced on its way out. He came up with 562 feet (later revised to 565 feet) and the whole incident spawned the term “tape measure home run” despite the fact that he didn’t use a tape measure. (Language is wacky that way.)

Previous “debunking” efforts by other SABR members/scholars: Bill Patterson said more likely 515 feet. Physicist Bob Adair said 506 feet.

What is the real likely distance if the ball had not hit the sign and where did it really come down?

What we Know:
460 feet to the sign that was hit.
Sign was 50-60 feet above ground level. We’ll assume 60.
Donald Dunaway got the ball behind the house that faced 5th St. NW (565 feet away).
Wind was blowing steadily out at 20 mph.

What we Don’t know:
batted ball parameters (speed, spin, etc)
how long it took to hit the sign
precise wind speed or direction
precise height of the sign

How do we constrain the trajectory?
Ball hit the sign. BBS batted ball speed and vertical launch angle (VLA) that will allow to hit sign.
Ambiguity would be nearly removed knowing flight time. But we don’t know that. There’s no video or film of the feat.

With a bigger arc, the shorter the distance. The more “pop-uppy” it is. Likewise the more “line-drivey” one goes further. Without knowing the angle or the amount of time it took to get to hit the sign how can we determine? (Nathan shows diagrams of various arcs and projections.)

We need more information.

How about the fact that the ball was retrieved behind the row houses? The ball had to have CLEARED A TWO STORY BUILDING to get to where the boy picked it up. It couldn’t have bounced over, so it had to have cleared on the fly or hit the roof.

Nearest house was 512 feet. Roofs were 22 feet high. As researched by Jane Leavy for her upcoming biography of Mickey Mantle. Turns out that is enough info for us to update the trajectory info.

If the ball at least hit the roof of the house, the VLA has to be less than 31 degrees and the final distance comes to 535 feet as the lower limit, and 542 as an upper limit. And there is still the possibility it could have cleared the roof and gone farther, just no evidence if it did. So the 565 foot claim is actually possible, and we can definitely say that the previous “debunkings” were bunk. 535 at least, and possibly 542 feet.

Is this a credible result? Let’s compare it to a home run hit by Wladimir Balentien in Cincinnati in 2009. Almost identical shown by the Hit Tracker data. So yes, this is a credible result.

Without the wind, probably “only” 460 feet.

For more info: a-nathan@illinois.edu

EDIT: This presentation was given honorable mention by the judges at the end of the conference.

I’m late to the Braves Player Panel. I would have been on time, but something I had at the breakfast buffet didn’t agree with me. I’m there now, though…

Phil Niekro, Mark Lemke, Bobby Cox, Ron Gant, and moderated by Pete Van Wieren

Recapped below!

Mark Lemke is telling the story of his drafting. He grew up in upstate New York and had been watching a lot of the Braves on TBS. He remembered the Plexiglas home run fence. He hoped to get into pro ball but didn’t get drafted at all in his first eligibility, and then did get drafted the next year with one of the Braves last picks, but didn’t expect to sign. He thought he was going to Purdue, but the Braves then would fly all their draft picks in. So he flew to Atlanta with his parents and ended up signing there.

Moderator Pete Van Wieren then asks Ron what he thought about his signing. “I thought I was going to get a new car.”

Pete asks Bobby Cox why he came back to Atlanta after all the success he had in Toronto. Bobby says it was Ted Turner, and it was a hard sell to his wife and kids to stay in Canada when they had stayed in the Atlanta organization.

Bobby Cox now saying three owners really shaped baseball. George Steinbrenner, Bill Corbett in Texas, and Ted Turner with the Braves. In those days the Winter Meetings always had rumors coming out of those teams. Nowadays the owners don’t even go to the winter meetings.

The guys tell a bunch of funny stories about the day Ted Turner decided to get in uniform and manage the team. Apparently he couldn’t figure out how to get his stirrup socks on and then still wore his loafers. Phil Niekro pitched that game and supposedly joked, “Hey, Skip, you still got me hitting ninth?”

One of the first things Cox did on coming back to Atlanta was implement a 5 year plan to improve the organization and to build up the minor league system. “Our philosophy was ‘if you like ‘em, we’ll sign ‘em’ and build them up. We had more minor league teams than any other team.” They added more instructors in the minors, too.

Ron Gant in 1990 was the first Brave to have a 30-30 season. “What were you thinking when you first came up?”

Ron: We were thinking our chances were slim to none. I came up through the organization and if you talk to any major league payer who came up through it you know it’s a top notch organization. We were able to hone our skills because of that. I came up as a second baseman, and they decided I would play third base in Puerto Rico. Bobby Cox showed up down there to check on me. I could see on his face he was thinking “I hope he doesn’t play third base as bad as he plays second.” Well. The next time I appeared in a game [in the US] it was in center field.

Cox describes what it was like going into 1991, and then talking about at the All Star Break being 9.5 games back and in third place.

Lemke: I remember that night before the break I think we were in Los Angeles, thinking man, what do we have to do? And some guys were like “We’re not out of this. We can do this.” And when we came back we went on a streak. Terry was like “We can do this.”

Ron: Yeah, we were thinking we were out of it. But we had some guys like Mark, Dave Justice, every night there was someone different coming up with a big hit. There was a lot of talent and a lot of guys who got along together. We saw the Dodgers starting to slip backwards and thought we can stick the knife in.

Lemke: And it really showed what a good manager Bobby Cox was. He never panicked.

Pete: You stuck with John Smoltz that year even though everyone was getting down on him. He ended up with a winning record that year.

Cox: He was a young kid but he was a great competitor. You knew he was going to win more ballgames. Those red tomahawks came out around that time. We were playing a game against the Dodgers. John is the type of guy who always has to be doing something, hyper type guy, but there was energy everywhere that day, the stands were full, people were honking their horns at us. And John went out and shut them out that day.

Pete: Phil, there were a lot of nights when you played here when you would have loved to have the Braves in a chance to get a crowd like that.

Phil: I think back then this (indicates SABR audience) would have been a good crowd.

Ron: I think back then you could get a seat in the dugout. (laughs)

Lemke: It was such an exciting time. Even driving to the ballpark was exciting. The fans were getting there before the players they were so excited.

Pete: If you weren’t here in 1991 it’s hard to describe what it’s like. People had tomahawks for their mailbox flags, big office buildings had signs on them. Phil, did that excitement filter down to the minor league level?

Phil: You know our biggest thing was just keeping everyone healthy in case they needed them in the big leagues.

Pete: I used to get to the ballpark early because I thought this is something special. I didn’t want to miss a moment of it. I didn’t have any idea that it was going to be the start of 14 consecutive postseason series.

Cox: We thought we had good young talent and thought they would be around for a long time. We thought we had enough pitching. And then in 1993 we signed Greg Maddux and that really stabilized everything.

Pete: And that started the Maddux Smoltz Glavine era. What was it like playing behind them. Got a Maddux story?

Lemke: There were times he would call you to the mound and he would tell you, okay, this guy is going to foul off a couple and then he’s going to hit one right to you if you move over just a little. And sure enough three pitches later it would come right to you.

Cox: I would be down in the radar room and Greg would come in with the lineup and he’d be like okay, in the fifth inning, this guy is going to be looking for something, so give me two pitches if the count goes 2-1…. et cetera. And I’m thinking wow I’ve got eight other hitters to worry about. There was the year Luis Gonzalez was hitting 50 home runs, and Greg said to me, I want two pitches on this guy before we walk him. Sure enough in the 8th inning the guy comes up, and I go out of the mound and say “Mad Dog, this is the guy you said you wanted two pitches on.” Maddux says “Yeah it is. Don’t you remember? I’m going to pop him up to the third base side on the second pitch.” I go back to the dugout and I told Leo, he’s going to pop him up on the second pitch. Well, you can look in the record book what happened. [As predicted by Maddux.]

[EDIT: I was later talking to some folks in the hall who said they tried to look this one up, and Cox has it wrong, it wasn't Luis Gonzalez he did this to, but Jorge Posada in the World Series. I wasn't able to get details on why they thought Maddux might not have done this to BOTH Gonzalez and Posada...]

Gant: There were days he pitched when I could just bring an Emery board with me to the outfield because there would be no action out there.

Cox: But when you weren’t playing for us, when you were against us, Maddux told me he didn’t want to face you. His exact words were “He scares me.”

Pete: We’re retiring Tom Glavine’s number tonight. Anyone with Glavine stories?

Cox: Larry Bowa is the one who gave him that nickname “The Machine.” He could throw it in, out, up down, throw that changeup whenever he wanted. Bowa was like when’s The Machine pitching? I’d say “He’s pitching Sunday because it’s getaway day and we want to get out of here with a win.”

Lemke: There was one day Jay Howell called me into the mound. Jay says hey could you do me a favor. Turn around and tell Gant and Justice to move back. Move back? Why? And Howell tells me, Because I got nothing. And you be careful out there tonight, too.

Niekro: I’m really looking forward to polishing some chairs for other Braves in the Hall of Fame. It’s just me and Hank Aaron. But Maddux is coming in. Glavine is coming in. Dale Murphy has very close numbers to Kirby Puckett and Andre Dawson. I will be pushing for him.

Questions from the audience.

I”m a SF Giants fan so the 1993 season is of particular interest to me.

Lemke: We had quite a double digit deficit to the Giants that year. And in the end I remember we had lost the coin toss and would have had to fly to San Francisco if we lost… no wait, we lost that day and we had to wait around the stadium waiting to find out what would happen with the Giants and Dodgers. Fortunately for us, the Dodgers took care of business.

Gant: I’m still trying to figure out why we were in the West.

Todd Van Poppel said he didn’t want to play for the Braves. How would that have changed the franchise?

Cox: Van Poppel didn’t want to sign with ANYBODY. So he was easy to pass over. Whereas Chipper Jones said to us, “No matter what anyone says, don’t let anyone tell you I’m going to college.”

A SABR member comments he wants to thank the players and especially Bobby Cox that this is the first time he can remember the manager of the team of the major league franchise in the city we had our convention actually coming to speak to the convention when he had a game to manage that night. Much applause in agreement.

More on the 1993 pennant race:

Lemke: We had a really uplifting feeling when we got Fred McGriff.

Gant: In fact, it was like an omen. The day McGriff got there, the stadium caught on fire. And so did we.

A question about Phil Niekro pitching for the Yankees at the end of his career.

Niekro: When I got to the American League, all I knew was the mound was still 60 feet six innings, there are still nine guys you had to get out, and whoever scored more at the end of nine innings won the game. But I enjoyed my time there. No matter what team’s uniform you put on, you feel blessed to be going out there.

Resting the Pitcher: How Useful are Pitch Counts and Days of Rest?
Sean Forman and JC Bradbury

Where have You Gone, Tony Lazzeri?
Lawrence Baldasarro

Pitchers As Fielders: A Quantitative Analysis or… Why Kirk Rueter is the best-fielding pitchers of all time
John Knox

21 Facts You Didn’t Know About 1921
Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz

Resting the Pitcher: How Useful are Pitch Counts and Days of Rest?
Sean Forman and JC Bradbury

JC did the oral presentation of the data he investigated with Sean Forman of baseball-reference.com
JC’s own site is sabernomics.com. He has put the slides and a draft of the paper up on his site if you’d like to see more detail than I can provide in this liveblogging recap. Here.

How have pitch counts changed over time?
You hear announcers say that pitchers don’t pitch as much as they used to.
Good data goes back to 1988. Data shows that since then, anyway, pitch counts haven’t changed at all, really. Everyone tops out around 99-101 pitches. Median number around 99 all along. There isn’t this declining trend, or is there?

What about maximum pitch loads? Here we see a radical decline. In the 1990s pitchers exceeded 149 pitches 49 times. In the 2000s, only 3 times. Why? Injury concerns, performance concerns, “wuss factor” — exacerbated by financial stakes.

Frequency of high AND low pitch counts has declined. So there is a quick hook late, but there is also more patience early nowadays.

Effect of Pitch Count on Performance, looked at three situations
1) Immediate Effect: impact of previous game’s pitch count
2) & 3) Cumulative effect: impact of avg pitch counts from multiple preceding games (used previous 5 and 10 game average)

Data: game data 1988-2009, major league pitchers, who had fewer than 15 days of rest (those with over 15 days before a start were typically coming off the DL, or just called up, etc… would skew the data)

Measuring Impact of Pitch Counts
performance is a function of several explanatory factors

We’ll use ERA, plus DIPS components (defensive independent pitching statistics) — don’t have time to go into DIPS today but they are in the appendix to the paper online.

Explanatory factors: pitches thrown (immediate and cumulative, days of rest, ability (season ERA), age, year effects

Fractional polynomial regression estimation
-estimates hypothesized non-linear effects
PAP system assumes increasing impact (cubic)

These regressions take 5 to 15 minutes to run on modern computers, which is a lot of time and a lot of crunching. But nowhere near as bad as the days of punch cards.

Impact of Pitches Thrown on ERA
JC showed a graph of previous game, versus previous 5 games, versus previous 10 games
All the lines cross right around 99 pitches — they all look like linear relationships!
In other words, EVERY pitch you throw, increases ERA in the future.

It takes 38 extra pitches to raise a pitcher’s ERA 0.25 in terms of the previous game, but only 19 pitches in the 5 game mean, and only 11 pitches in the 10 game mean.

Divided by age, though, amazingly, the older pitchers are NOT bothered as much by a one game ramp up as the young guys. Maybe a selection bias problem. BUT in a cumulative effect in 5 or 10 game averaged, the older group suffers more.

Older pitchers may have more know-how on taking on one heavy game.

Impact of days of rest on performance:
Each day of rest improves performance by 0.015 ERA
Not statistically significant
Lower ERA by 1% for a 4.50 ERA pitcher
Impact on pitching on less rest is likely larger than estimated, but the impact is not picked up

Summary:
There is a positive relationship between pitch count and future performance. Small, but real, effect.

The cumulative effect is greater than the immediate effect.
38 extra pitches in one game raises ERA by 0.25
10 extra pitches average over 10 games raises ERA by 0.25

Days of rest have little impact on performance. Heavily influenced by small variation.

Will look at relief pitchers next. This time only had time to look at starting pitchers.

Where Have Your Gone, Tony Lazzeri
by Lawrence Baldassaro

Lawrence says: I got interested in Tony Lazzeri when I was working on a book on Italian-Americans in baseball. This inevitably meant I had to study the New York Yankees, which at first I didn’t like, but I eventually came to appreciate the team’s history and the efforts that they made.

None of the players I researched and wrote about impressed me as much as Lazzeri, not even DiMaggio. He was an interesting study as one of the first ethnic superstars in baseball. He was the third most dangerous hitter behind Ruth and Gehrig, and only Charlie Gehringer ranks as an infielder of equal offensive prowess. Why is he forgotten? The infamous strike-out in the World Series haunts his legacy, even mentioned on Alexander’s hall of fame plaque, the only failure of another player mentioned on any Hall of Fame plaque. He was one of the elite sluggers of his era. He once hit two grand slams in a game and was the only infielder in a list of RBI leaders for his era that included Ruth, Gehrig, Goslin, and Foxx.

Lazzeri was recognized by writers of the time as a leader and a sharp baseball mind. Some called him both “mental and instinctive” (Jeterian, perhaps?) and a key leader on the team that won 5 World Series and 6 pennants in the 12 years he played.

He also played his entire career while suffering from epilepsy.

He was brought to the Yankees as part of a concerted campaign to recruit a player who would appeal to the United States’ largest Italian-American community. When he debuted with the Yankees, he had never even seen a major league game before. His role was to be not just a promising rookie, but to live up to the hype of being the first major Italian player. Italians of the time were discriminated against, stereotyped, et cetera… as in 1915 president of the United States saying in a speech “there is no room for hyphenated Americans.”

Lazzeri had considered boxing as a career. But if he got into fights during baseball, he’d be reinforcing negative stereotypes of Italians as dangerous thugs. Writers dubbed him the “walloping wop” and “the wonderful wop,” as well as “the swarthy Italian” and “Italy’s favorite sun.”

Lazzeri was almost as big a drawing card as Ruth, and everywhere the Yankees played, the local Italian-American clubs would fete him.

Lazzeri was also a calm, soft-spoken person, counter to stereotypes of Italians being loud, expressive, passionate types. One writer said trying to get great, colorful quotes out of him was like mining coal with a nail file. (Another quality Jeter-like?) Lazzeri’s photos resemble those of immigrants of the time, doleful eyes and serious, perhaps insecure, expressions. Very different from the flamboyant Ruth.

Lazzeri was supposedly a clubhouse prankster, but that side did not come through to the public. Lazzeri’s stoic demeanor, and being a prominent and respected figure in a quintessentially American pursuit, helped to overcome the fact that anti-immigrant sentiment was still rampant and the most famous Italian-American of the time was Al Capone.

Lazzeri came along 10 years too early. He came too quickly after anti-immigrant laws and sentiment to gain the kind of fame that would belong to Joe DiMaggio. He deserves to be remembered for more than being a footnote on Alexander’s plaque.

(Questions from the audience.)
How did his epilepsy affect his career?
The Yankees kept it quiet, the writers either didn’t know about it or didn’t write about it. He tended to have them in the morning, and his wife told his roommate to take care of him and just make sure he didn’t swallow his tongue. But it never affected him on the ballfield.

Where did the nickname Push ‘Em Up Tony come from?
Supposedly a restaurant owner in Salt Lake City (where he was playing in the minors) with a loud voice shouted out, in his Italian accent, “Poosh Em Up Tony!” and one of the writers there latched onto it.

What did he do after baseball and how did he die?
He managed in the minor leagues for about four years. He died at age 42 of a heart attack. I’ve seen reports that say it was an epileptic seizure, but the actual medical report says heart attack.

Pitchers As Fielders: A Quantitative Analysis or… Why Kirk Rueter is the best-fielding pitchers of all time
John Knox

Knox is a meteorologist and teaches geography at the University of Georgia, but worked on this on nights and weekends

Fielding is hard and relatively unappreciated.
Many pitchers don’t work on fielding much although there are the athletic pitchers

Does pitcher’s fielding matter?
Well, the Tigers would say so. Five pitcher errors led to seven unearned runs including the deciding runs in the final two games of the 2007 World Series, which the St. Louis Cardinals won. (Or you might say Detroit lost.)

Knox reviewed his methodology, using RF9 (range factor standardized to 9 innings) and then that standardized to the league factor lgRF9.

Some challenges to correct for:
Fielding percentage is skewed to the top because even horrible fielders still get it right 90% of the time
Career RF9 not available for all pitchers in all eras
Typical values of FP and RF9 may chance over time
Neither FP nor RF9 seem to capture all aspects of pitchers fielding
Any way to account for bias of ground ball versus fly ball pitchers?

Invented two new metrics, DP/E double play to error ratio, and DPd9, Double Plays Turned per 9
Ended up with three different grades:
Range Bias Score (60% RRF9R + 30% RCFR +5% DP/E = 5% DPd9)
Sure-Handedness Score (30% + 60% + + )
No-Bias Score (45% each plus 5% + 5%)

Pitchers had to have over 1500 innings pitched, and one of four different accolades that could include them.

Pitchers range monotonic going down over time. Range shrinking.

The Top 30 All Time Fielding Pitchers
no matter what metric used, Kirk Rueter comes up every single time
Maddux comes up #2. Maddux got 18 Gold Gloves. Reuter none.
Reuter is way up in fielding percentage, DP/error ratio, DPd9, etc.
Also no bigger gap than between Reuter and Maddux!

Full list of top 100 is in the paper available for download.

Where is Jim Kaat? Where is Bob GIbson?
Well, in the list of 287 eligible pitches, both those guys are near the bottom. Kaat #272, Gibson #277

Some surprising trends: range factor went UP at end of their career: Rueter, Maddux, and Bobby Shantz

Gene Garber at #34 was surprising because he tends to face away from the batter in his delivery.

Jim Abbot made the list #73, despite having only one hand.

Ground ball versus fly ball? Did not have room to include that.
How about errors? Can now start looking at that — Maddux let 30 men on in his career by bad throws, which is a lot. Rueter did not put people on. Also Maddux bad at fielding bunts while Rueter was death to bunts.

Conclusions:
Fielding by pitchers historically under-researched
Simple statistical aanalysis of 287 good-fielding pitchers using FP, RF9, and DP mettrics
Key result: Reuter the best
Unable to determine why Kaat and Gibson were considered so good

John_Andrew_Knox@yahoo.com or johnknow@uga.edu

–

There are so many presentations on Yankees history here this year I actually decided to skip some. After the Tony Lazzeri presentation came one on Bobby Richardson which I skipped so I could see John Knox’s one on pitchers fielding, and then I was falling asleep so I ran to get some tea and a snack and missed Steve Krevisky’s talk on Spud Chandler. Hopefully I can get a recap of it from Steve later. Coming up next in this room is another Yankee-centric talk by Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz on 21 facts about 1921.

Speaking of the Yankees. First place, baby. Minnesota pwned the Rays today (although the Rays did have a 6-run uprising in the 8th) and the Yankees are off, so we are now in first place by half a game.

And now the presentation, based on their new book 1921: The Yankees, The Giants & The Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York (which, by the way, is on sale at Amazon for 32% off…)

1921 hasn’t been written about a lot. Decided to concentrate on 1921 for the book because it was the first Yankee pennant, it was the clash of titans in terms of Babe Ruth versus John McGraw, the clash of the styles of baseball, small ball versus long ball, and the change of Rosie O’Grady New York to Jazz Age New York. And here are 21 surprising things Steve and Lyle learned:

1. People usually think Babe Ruth was slim when he was younger and got fat later. But no. Babe Ruth was heavy in 1921 and was often called “fat.” “He is a large fat man and growing fatter.” “Ruth can run faster than any fat man in the country since Taft ran for president.”

2. US President Warren Harding had a personal connection to the 1921 pennant race. He was rooting for Pittsburgh, because of their number one pitcher Wilbur Cooper. Harding had been part owner of a minor league team that Cooper played for and he had gotten him a tryout with the Indians. The Indians didn’t take him but he ended up being the best pitcher in the World Series in 1921.

3. The Yankees had every AL home run leader of the deacde of the 1920s on their 1921 squad. Babe Ruth led in several years, but Braggo Roth led in 1915 with 7, Wally Pipp, et cetera.

4. Baseball may have been the second best sport for Frankie Frisch, an All-American football in college.

5. Yankees manager Miller Huggins wistfully wished for what is now the Designated Hitter rule, as a way to have a big bat in the lineup (Bob Meusel) even though he had trouble fielding. Huggins suggested it to the press.

6. Two of the games’ best outfielders in 1921 would die in the next few years, of a McHentry of a brain tumor and Ross Youngs of Wright’s Disease.

7. Ruth pitched two games in 1921, one as a starter and one as a reliever, and both had fascinating stories behind them. He started one game wanting to beat Ty Cobb, winning 13-8. He also won 7-6 in 11 innings when Waite Hoyt had handed him a 6-0 lead. It would have been Hoyt’s 20th win and he would have had a nice bonus if he had gotten that one, but Ruth squandered it.

8. For the first month of the 21 season, the Giants’ George Kelly and Babe Ruth ran neck and neck in the home run race. (Kelly had 8 after only 15 games, after hitting only 11 all of 1920. But he fell back to Earth by the end of the 1921 season.)

9. Tris Speaker’s success as a manager is one of the overlooked stories of 1921, perhaps a greater achievement than winning the World Series in 1920. Speaker overcame injuries to many key players.

10. Despite his gruff exterior, John McGraw’s loyal, caring side came out in 1921. There were numerous players he kept on the payroll out of the goodness of his heart.

11. Arliss Taylor pitched only two innings in his major league career, and struck out only one man, Joe Sewell, the hardest man to strike out by far in all of major league history.

12. Auto pioneer Henry Ford’s anti-semitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, accused the Jewish owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates of letting the Giants win the N: pennant in exchange for money.

13. Carl Mays’s controversial and suspicious meltdown in Game Four of the World Series can be understood in light of his regular season performances, including several late season meltdowns and several late-inning meltdowns all year long, but relief pitchers just were not in use. He had a large lead in 9 different games but would lose it in the 8th and 9th innings.

14. Amos Rusie looks into the past and compares Babe Ruth to part sluggers. “The game surely has taken soe strides… none of them could hold a candle to Ruth, and I mean Waner, Lajoie, [etc]”

15. Tens of thousands of fans would gather to see the games on “player boards” on the buildings of the newspaper companies. Some considered it more exciting then watching the games at the ballpark.

16. With virtually no film of games, key plays were seen but once, and seen differently by different observers, including veteran reporters. Mike McNally’s steal of home in Gae One of the 1921 World Series was reported quite differently by each man.

17. 22-year old Waite Hoyt’s pitching performance in the 1921 World Series was arguably the greatest ever in the history of the postseason. No earned runs at all in 27 innings against the best offense in the game, and only two unearned runs kept him from equaling Christy Mathewson. Holding the 1921 Giants down was amazing, but largely forgotten because the Yankees lost the series.

18. John McGraw was altering his approach to go for the big inning, recognizing that the game was changing.

19. Carl Mays exhibited the incredible control to not give up a walk in three complete games in the World Series.

20. Contemporary accounts say that John McGraw signaled every pitch from the dugout in the 1921 World Series.

21. Frank “Home Run” Baker looked into the future and compared the Babe to future sluggers. “There never has been anybody like him and I don’t think there will be. Sometime, someday, the ballparks will be smaller than now… but if you put the Babe in there he would average a homer a game.”

I’m looking forward to reading Steve and Lyle’s book, and I am considering excerpting a chapter for the Yankees Annual this year. What I’ve seen so far is top notch and deserves to be shared with more Yankees fans.

Just wrapped up two more research presentations:

Sanctioned Post-Season Series by Marty Pankin and Mike Canton

Using Marcel the Monkey to Help Understand Different Eras in Baseball by Andy Andres

These are kind of raw reports, and I apologize for any typos. I’m typing as fast as I can most of the time. For those of you who have never been to one of these things, each research presentation is 20 minutes long, with 5 minutes for questions, and then bam, the schedule turns over to the next one.

Sanctioned Post-Season Series
Marty Pankin and Mike Canton

These sanctioned post-season series between local rivals were very important. They often drew over 40,000 fans, the newspapers covered them extensively, and players took the games very seriously (often getting into fights). This is very overlooked part of baseball history, and its very significant to be getting the play by play info up on Retrosheet at last. The players’ records are valid and meaningful, as well.

These types of games took place between rivals within cities like the Cubs and White Sox. They all took place between 1905-1942, all after 1917 in Chicago. 24 games in Chicago, 3 Ohio (1910, 1911, 1917), 2 Giants vs. Yankees 1910, 1914, and other such examples.

190 games total count as sanctioned.
We now have PBP for 155 of the 190 games.
Unsanctioned games were played as early as 1882.

What’s the difference between sanctioned and unsanctioned? Sanctioned games were certified by the National Commission.

National Commission formed in 1905
-established World Series conditions
-authorized other interleague series

Sanctioned Series had to be:
-Played under same condition as WS
-best of seven (or nine in 1921)
-no games after the winner determined
-umpires chosen by the national commission
-rosters could only include those who played in regular season

Basically these were not “exhibition” games and were taken seriously.

Chicago played one best of 15… except there was one rainout and it was tied 7-7, and the player kts only ran through October 15th
The White Sox proposed a doubleheader to break the tie, but the Cubs didn’t want that, as Joe Tinker was already planning to leave town to get married in Kansas City so it ended up tied

Unsanctioned example 1913 St. Louis — two worst teams in baseball, ended in a tie so we didn’t find out who was the worst

Comparative attendance versus World Series versus the City Series
1908 – 1917 very comparable in attendance, not quite as good as WS for Cubs, not as good for White Sox
1928-1933 attendance was down except on weekend games, plus the Depression
1935 – 1939 — attendance definitely much worse for City Series than world series, which was likely why these series’ did not continue after WWII

The Cubs did actually blow a 3-0 lead before the red sox in 2004. In the 1912 Chicago series. White Sox Ed Walsh was the pitching star. Over the course of 10 days he started 4 times plus 2 relief appearances. And after that he went downhill.

Many tales of Cubs failure follow, and then the story of Grover Cleveland Loudermilk.

There would have been more New York city series except that the Giants kept getting into the World Series which put the kibosh on playing their local rivals.

Using Marcel the Monkey to Help Understand Different Eras in Baseball
(Andy Andres)

Andy is a college professor at Boston University, but he also teaches a course in sabermetrics at Tufts University. They all read Moneyball and they all read the famous article by Stephen Jay Gould about how there will not be any more .400 hitters. Gould claims in the article that batting average has stayed steady throughout the ages. But is that really so? Well, there is some consistency but the data is also pretty noisy. Even noisier is look at runs scored per game averaged by year.

Andy shows a chart of all runs scored over all leagues for all time. And it doesn’t look that consistent. The 19th century had many different changes in the rules and it shows drastic inconsistency so we’re going to cut that out and start around 1901.

We look at runs per game because that’s the currency of the game. Looking at the chart from 1900 on, it’s still a lower run scoring environment in the deadball era. Trick pitches, dirty ball, large stadiums, etc. Then came the live ball era, Babe Ruth, and Ray Chapman dies and they decide to start replacing the baseball with clean balls (and also it doesn’t get as squishy) and records get shattered. 1920-1940 seems to be a grouping.

Then the data starts to get sketchy about how to group things. 1941-1960 we had the war years changing things drastically, plus integration. War years definitely make it dicey.

And then what do we call 1961 to the present? The expansion era might be counted? Questionable that expansion always leads to run scoring environments. The DH era? The free agency era?

Most recently the mid-90s to the present, Interleague and/or Wild Card Era? The Steroid Era, the Power Era.

Next Andy showed a graph splitting out the run scoring trends by league. Big difference between AL and NL in the 1930s. The separation of the leagues in the DH era didn’t actually start to have a visible difference until 1979 (even though started in 1973).

Home run trend upward and a clear pattern in recent years. Strikeouts have gone up, too. They sure seem to correlate. (R-squared value 0.7202)

Now look at graph of sac bunts, stolen bases, and home runs on one graph. And then each team averaged out since 1900.

Marcel the Monkey — he is an actual monkey, has appeared on Friends and in the movie Outbreak. He is the inspiration for a baseball projection system:

Marcel is a projection system developed and described by Tom Tango (www.tangotiger.net/marcel) “so simple a monkey can do it”

-Takes 3 previous years of data for a player
-regress these data to the league average for those years
-perform a simple age adjustments (29 years old for peak performance)

Simple, but the minimal needed to perform good baseball projections

Andy took data from 1901-2009, computed batting Marcels, got 29663 projections, and then found the following:

Outliers:
Hank Greenberg was projected to hit 42 hr in 1941. Got hurt and only hit 2.
Lou Gehrig, same thing.

Babe Ruth and Harmon Killebrew also did it the other way.

Andres Galaragga1993 up.

Sooo, if you took all the marcels, which year would be the year that would be the most off from the projections?

The audience shouted out many possibilities, 1969, 1931, and many others. But the worst? Was 1981. Strike year. Severe decrease because of lost ABs. But that also gave a ringing effect.

Some other years 1931 definitely stuck out and 1947 as well, but they average out to zero.
1969 does show way up in slugging.
1946 drops. Hitters who stayed then suddenly had to face pitchers coming back from the war.

One suggestion from the audience: can you pull out DHs, pinch-hitters, etc and see if that takes out some of the noise? Andy suggests someone try that for next year, and make other Marcel projections.