FOREWORD

Statistics (or as they are known in their circumcised, smaller version of the word, “stats”) have been a part of baseball—indeed, the very mortar of the sport—since the dawn of the game, even if in the beginning their number was so few they could be entered on a postcard with more than enough room left for an oversized one-cent stamp and a generous message. And those few reduced to paper could be called statistics only in the same way raisins could be called fruit—technically and only in a manner of speaking.

Take, for example, one of the very first recorded: that of the number of miles traveled by the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, as they criss-crossed the country in 1869, their first year in existence. One of the early recordkeepers estimated that the Red Stockings had covered some 11,877 miles, playing in 57 games—of which they won 56 and tied one. However, one historian, ever Thomas the Doubter, doubling back on the historic breadcrumbs laid down by the Red Stockings, discovered that Harry Wright’s team had played at least 80 games in their inaugural season and figured they had many a mile more to go than that originally estimated.

Many of those early records set down by recordkeepers were something of a hit-or-miss proposition—mostly miss. One of those came on the afternoon of Thursday, September 6, 1883, when Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings set a record by scoring 18 runs in the seventh inning against the Detroit Wolverines. However, when the report of the game was wired to the Detroit Free Press, as well as other papers around the country, most of the details of the game were MIA. The sporting editor of the Free Press, taking note of the omissions, apologized to his readers, writing that the paper “would be pleased to submit the full score of this remarkable game to its readers, but the Western Union Telegraph Company, which has no excuse for its poor service, has furnished it bobtailed and in ludicrous deformity … the Company was requested to supply the missing links, but the head operator declined to do so.”

There were several other instances of reporters or Western Union operatives exhibiting a polite fiction of the non-existence of such relevant statistics, several times omitting the names of batterymates. However, here it must be noted that many’s the time in those early days of organized-and-disorganized-baseball, even the pitcher and the catcher didn’t know the names of their batterymates. Such was the case in 1897 when the pitcher and the catcher of the Louisville team were as unfamiliar to one another as two shipwrecked survivors coming ashore on a wave-swept beach, neither knowing the name of the other. None of their teammates knew their names either, both having just joined the team—the pitcher the day before; the catcher being signed on a trial basis just before the game. When the pitcher was asked by writers who his catcher was, he answered, “Couldn’t tell you, first time I ever saw him.” The catcher’s answer to the identity of the pitcher was ditto. Still at a loss as to the names of the two, the writers now approached manager Fred Clarke and asked the same question. As lost as Robinson Crusoe without a boat, all Clarke could do was point to the name “Weddel” on the scorecard and say, “This man will pitch.” Then, pointing to the tall man putting on his catcher’s gear, said, “And that tall fellow over there will catch.” Calling over to his catcher, Clarke had him spell out his name for the writers, which he did: “S-c-h-r-e-c-k-e-n-g-o-s-t.” Then, asked by the writers if the “Weddel” on the scorecard was the correct spelling, Clarke shrugged his shoulders and responded, “Don’t know, you’ll have to ask him.” They did, discovering it was spelled “Waddell.” (Ironically, after their dual Major League debut, Ossee Schreckengost and Rube Waddell’s faces would become as recognizable to one another as those seen in the mirror every morning as they became batterymates for six seasons with the Philadelphia A’s.)

The shoddy record keeping of the time also resulted in several other records being overlooked, there being no mention of the-then-record 11 RBIs in one game by Baltimore Oriole Wilbert Robinson nor the 27 home runs by Chicago White Stocking Ned Williamson in 1884, both records forgotten by the time they were broken—Robinson’s by Jim Bottomley and Williamson’s by Babe Ruth.

Ernest Lanigan, baseball’s first great historian, noted that the omission of Williamson’s season record of 27 home runs was occasioned by the fact that whenever Henry Chadwick—known as “The Father of Baseball,” but whom Lanigan called “that human eliminator”—wrote on the subject of home runs, “which variety of hits he detested … (he) eliminated them from the guides.”

Early records were thus cut and restitched to fit any pattern the recordkeeper wanted, many of their entries unable to stand up to the slightest investigation. In one classic case Wee Willie Keeler was credited by the Baltimore scorekeeper with four hits in a 1897 game versus St. Louis. However, St. Louis sportswriter Frank Houseman, pulling up the game to study its roots, wrote the following rundown of Keeler’s run-up of hits: “Down in Baltimore, Keeler sent two flies to (Bud) Larry, who muffed both of them. Then he hit to (Fred) Hartman, who fumbled the ball and threw wild. Then Keeler made a good single. The next morning, four hits appeared to Keeler’s credit in the Baltimore papers.” Houseman couldn’t resist adding, “Talk about stuffing records.”

And, as if it wasn’t enough that telegraphers or writers “stuffed” a player’s performance, sometimes they even “stuffed” the line-up itself. In one of those moments that inspires a reference to A. Lincoln’s sonnet about “fooling all the people … ,” a St. Louis Western Union operative up in the press box named Lou Proctor, in a “Forgive us our Press Passes” moment, inserted his own name in a 1912 St. Louis Browns boxscore, fooling even the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia editors who included it in their first edition, giving him equal standing with “Moonlight” Graham before discovering the error and dropping Proctor from its later editions.

As sportswriters and fans voyaged, Columbus-like, into the new world of baseball statistics, commissions and omissions weren’t the only problems they faced. One of those problems was the determinate criteria for stolen bases, there being no baseline (good word, that!) of agreed-upon standards. At given times over the years, runners were given credit for a stolen base when they scored from third on a fly out, when they took two bases on an infield out, when they were the successful half of a double-steal when the other half was thrown out, or even when they overslid a base and were tagged out.

Other statistics, like strikeouts, runs scored and batted in, and sacrifices, hitherto unaccountable in whole or in part, came late to the table and were incorporated into baseball’s growing world of stats—soon to be joined by others.

Still, with annuals like the early day Reach and Spalding Guides and Balldom as well as The Sporting Life Base Ball Guide and Handbook and the while-you-get-your-haircut weeklies serving up heaping platefuls of statistics to satisfy the appetite of ever-increasingly hungry fans for such fare, statistics took on a life of their own, framing the game and providing a basis of comparison of the past and the present.

As baseball archaeologists like the aforementioned Lanigan began spackling the cracks by correcting some of the early statistics that had been recorded with all the innocence of Adam naming the animals on his first day in the Garden by early recordkeepers even they created problems of their own. One such error occurred when the Reach Guide of 1903, in a typographical error, credited Nap Lajoie with 43 triples in 1897 when the actual number of triples should have read 23. And so, when Pirate outfielder Owen Wilson, better known as “Chief,” began belting the ball all over the lot, hitting seven triples against Chicago and Cincinnati pitching, five against St. Louis and New York, and three each versus Philadelphia and Brooklyn, sportswriters took little note of his feat, figuring his total of 36 still seven shy of Lajoie’s “43.” It would take some of baseball’s best archaeologists to dig back through Lajoie’s game-by-game record to exhume his real total and properly acknowledge Wilson’s record.

By the 1920s, recordkeeping had approached the foothills of accuracy as statistical cryptographers resurrected and decoded the facts and figures of earlier historians, thus providing a correction to baseball’s past. No longer random and haphazard, baseball statistics now had a relativism to earlier-day records and accomplishments, ensuring that no feat would vanish down the hole of history—for baseball records, like everything else, except maybe Eve telling Adam about all the men she could have married, are relative.

It was that thesis of baseball relativity that enabled Lanigan to compare Tip O’Neill’s otherworldly .492 batting average in 1887 (later amended to .485) to Babe Ruth’s .378 in his great offensive year of 1921 when he hit 59 home runs and drove in 171 runs. Pointing out that in 1887 batters received credit for base hits when they walked, producing helium-like averages, he calculated that Ruth would have an equally lofty .509 in ’21 had his then-record of 145 bases on balls counted as hits.

In fact, it was the explosion of the long ball (as personified by The Babe, who held the original copyright) that changed the game. And along with it, its statistics. Suddenly, the trickle of records became a Niagara as statisticians wore a carload of pencils down to their stubs recording them as records lasting about as long as Hollywood bridegrooms.

As the game continued to evolve, so too did the statistics, growing with the game. And nothing proved that the body of statistics was growing at an exponential rate more than a quiz show back in the ‘50s called The $64,000 Question, where one contestant, a Georgian housewife named Myrtle Powers, was asked to name the seven players who “had a lifetime total of 3,000 or more hits.” Ms. Powers correctly answered: “Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Eddie Collins, Tris Speaker, Cap Anson, and Paul Waner,” the number who had climbed that statistical mountain over the past 80- plus years. Now, a half-century later, a total of 29 players, over a fourfold number, have reached that magic mark.

But, even as baseball’s “official” recordkeepers continue to collect each and every statistic from the obvious to the most minute, amateur historians who OD on baseball stats continue to find omissions and commissions—such as an extra run batted in by Hack Wilson in his record-setting 190 RBI season of 1930, an extra triple in the lifetime total of Lou Gehrig, and a double-counting of a two-for-three day by Ty Cobb in 1910, which would have cost him the batting title to Nap Lajoie by one point. (Such a finding of an error even occurred in that Holiest of Holy places, the Baseball Hall of Fame, when an eagle-eyed fan standing in front of the Babe Ruth plaque noted that the inscription for his playing days read “1915–1935” and pointed out to the powers-that-be that Ruth had first played for the Red Sox in 1914, not 1915.)

Now I had always considered myself as part of that amateur array of baseballogists, one of a large group of enthusiasts who accumulate lists of stats, especially those with more variations on the theme than even Mussorgsky had imagined.

But it wasn’t until I met a fellow traveler in stats named Jack McClain that I realized that my variations were as nothing compared to those Jack had conceived—his lists defying normal categorization, like “Most Pitching Wins by Zodiac Sign,” “Most Home Runs by State of Birth,” et cetera, etc., etc., etc.—the et ceteras going on for about five pages or more. We decided on the spot to collaborate on a book of what we called “fun stats,” a novel approach of combining our efforts into one volume that would be different from anything before.

Unfortunately, Jack passed away before we had finished our book, leaving me to carry on alone. But over the years, I have continued to develop list after list—so many, in fact, they are available at a discount. And now, with the able assistance of many others, including Bill Francis of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cornell Richardson, the Office of the Baseball Commissioner, Mark Weinstein, Parker Bena, Frances J. Buonarota, Jason Katzman, and a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, it is my pleasure to give you a different perspective (call it a “different view from the same pew,” if you will) on America’s second most popular pastime: baseball statistics.

—Bert Randolph Sugar