Thorn: Remembering John C. Tattersall
From SABR member John Thorn, a Henry Chadwick Award recipient, at Our Game on February 5, 2014:
This morning SABR announced the 2014 recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award, established “to honor the game’s great researchers—historians, statisticians, annalists, and archivists—for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America’s present with its past.” The five new Chaddie winners are Mark Armour, Marc Okkonen, Cory Schwartz, Ernie Lanigan, and John C. Tattersall, whose brief bio I wrote for the forthcoming Baseball Research Journal. As perhaps the least well known of the five (at least to those under the age of sixty), Tattersall deserves, in my opinion, something of a sneak preview. For snapshot profiles of all five honorees, see: http://sabr.org/latest/sabr-announces-2014-chadwick-award-recipients
John Tattersall (1910–1981) was a great authority on home runs and early baseball records. His scrapbooks of multiple box scores for nearly every game from 1876 to 1890 proved vital for three generations of baseball encyclopedia: Turkin-Thompson in 1951, ICI/Macmillan in 1969 (for which he was listed as “Consulting Editor”), and Total Baseball in 1989. Tattersall’s day-by-day records have been lost, but what has survived is a batting and fielding summary and a pitching summary for each club in each year.
Tattersall first gained national attention for his baseball research in 1953 when The Sporting News ran his story on the correction of Nap Lajoie’s 1901 batting average from .405 to .422. (In that same year he self-published The Home Run Parade, “a complete exposition of the home run production of all active major league baseball players.”) Lajoie had originally been credited with a .422 average, with 220 hits in 543 at bats. After a number of years, someone noticed that if you take these at bats and hits, the average comes out only to .405, so his average was changed. Turkin-Thompson gave Nap a mark of .409 in its first edition, in 1951. Later in the 1950s, Tattersall had his doubts and decided to go through his newspaper collection of box scores. He found 229 hits for Lajoie, not 220—the error had been in the figure for hits, not in the figure for batting average. Thus his average was restored to .422, which happened to be the highest in American League history. ICI/Macmillan research in this area came up with a .426 mark (232 for 544, based on newspaper accounts), which was his average as published in the 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2014/02/05/tattersall/
Related link: Learn more about John Tattersall and all the 2014 Henry Chadwick Award recipients
Originally published: February 5, 2014. Last Updated: February 5, 2014.