In 1939, the ESSO Gas Company issued a fifty-page booklet to commemorate the supposed centennial of baseball and handed it out at gas stations. Among the nuggets in the booklet was a list of every major leaguer who had hit at least 100 career home runs. Fatefully, one of the youngsters who picked up a copy was a 14-year-old named Bob McConnell, and his new acquisition proved to be a windfall for baseball research.

Robert C. McConnell was born on January 18, 1925, in Seattle, the son of a sea captain and a former World War I nurse. The family moved frequently while he was young, and portions of Bob’s childhood were spent in Oregon, New Mexico, California, Massachusetts, and New York City before the family finally settled in Newark, New Jersey, in 1935. One of the constants in each new location was a love of baseball, which proved a good way of making new friends. When Bob arrived in Newark, he found that many of his new schoolmates were also baseball nuts, and that helped him feel right at home. He soon became an avid fan of the local Newark Bears, one of the legendary minor league franchises.

So when ESSO issued its commemorative booklet, Bob eagerly picked one up at the gas station, and it became his prized possession. His was especially intrigued by the listing of batters with 100 lifetime home runs, which included only fifty-one names. He started meticulously updating it about once a week. The pages of the booklet soon became well-worn, and a lifelong passion had begun.

A world war, however, soon intervened and men of his generation had to postpone these sorts of dreams. Bob joined the Navy for a minority hitch in 1942. (A minority hitch committed 17-year-olds to serve in the regular Navy until their twenty-first birthdays.) He spent the next three years on two ships: the U.S.S. Whitman, a destroyer, and the U.S.S. Mifflin, an attack transport.

In July of 1945, just before the end of the war, Bob was selected for officer training and was sent to Vanderbilt University. He was discharged from the Navy in January of 1946, but continued at Vanderbilt under the G. I. Bill. He graduated in the spring of 1949 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering. Later that year, he married Mildred “Millie” Cooper. Like Bob’s mother, Millie was a native of Nova Scotia, and he met his future wife during one of his family’s annual vacations in that beautiful coastal province.

Bob was hired straight out of college to work as a start-up service engineer for Combustion Engineering. The job involved the construction of new power plants, so as soon as one job was done, he was on to a new location. Over the next four years, he was traveling all the time, never spending more than a few months in one spot. Millie gave birth to the couple’s first son in 1952 while they were living in a house trailer.

It was time to seek a more stable lifestyle, and Bob and Millie talked over where they’d like to raise their family. Both agreed that of all the places Bob had worked, the stint they had most enjoyed was one in Wilmington, Delaware. So Bob put in an application with the Delmarva Power & Light Company in Wilmington, and was hired as a power plant engineer on April 1, 1953. It proved the perfect fit, and Bob remained in the position until his retirement in 1983 on the 30th anniversary of his hiring.

Bob and Millie completed their family with the birth of their second son, and work and parenthood kept them busy in the years to come. But gradually they began to find time for other interests. Millie became an expert bridge player and is now a Life Master. Bob, meanwhile, began to reignite his old passion for baseball.

In particular, with the minor leagues now struggling, he became fascinated with commemorating the heroics of the stars of the glory days of the minor leagues. The statistical records of many of these players were shockingly incomplete, and Bob began the painstaking work of filling in the gaps. He started making trips to the Library of Congress and using interlibrary loan to track down old box scores. He got additional help from the fortuitous discovery of two articles in The Sporting News.

One of them was a piece written by a Washington, D.C., resident named Bob Davids who displayed a similar interest in tracking home run feats. Intrigued, McConnell looked up Davids’s address in the Washington phone book and sent him a letter. Davids responded and informed McConnell of several other kindred spirits, including Cliff Kachline and Ray Nemec. Before long, Bob McConnell had several new correspondents with similar interests.

The other article put him in touch with a researcher named John Tattersall, who was the owner of the kind of collection that every SABR member dreams of discovering. Years earlier, a Boston newspaper merger had led to the disposal of much of the morgues of one of those papers. Among its contents was an extraordinary collection of box scores and game accounts dating back to the 1876 formation of the National League. Tattersall happened to be living in Boston at the time and purchased the collection for a song. He then began meticulously going through this gold mine and using it to fill in the massive gaps that still existed in major league baseball’s statistical records. Imagine Bob’s excitement when he learned of the existence of this precious resource — and that its owner now lived in nearby Philadelphia.

Needless to say, the two men became close collaborators in the ensuing years. On any spare weekend McConnell could be found at the Wilmington library, poring over the goodies that had arrived as a result of his interlibrary loan requests. Once a month he would travel to Philadelphia. But box scores from Saturday games all too often remained elusive, so he made two trips a year to the Library of Congress, which had many late editions.

In the years that followed, Bob McConnell continued to slowly but surely expand his network of baseball research colleagues. He made his first trip to Cooperstown in the mid-1950s, where he met Hall of Fame historian Ernie Lanigan. Lanigan was succeeded in 1959 by Lee Allen, who became another valuable ally in Bob’s many projects. Another longtime correspondent was S.C. Thompson, who collaborated with Hy Turkin on an ambitious baseball encyclopedia that gave researchers a survey of the field but also revealed how much information had disappeared in the mists of time.

Even with all these new resources, doing baseball research remained a slow and tedious endeavor, especially for a man with a demanding job and a growing family. Reliable published resources were still scarce, so a voluminous correspondence was often needed just to try to fill in the many gaps in the early encyclopedias. So Bob became an indefatigable letter-writer, and he had two file drawers full of baseball correspondence.

By the 1950s, he was regularly writing to ballplayers to sort out the many anomalies that were emerging. Sometimes these produced exciting discoveries, such as when Bob received a letter from George Winkelman — a player from 1884 — in which Winkelman verified that he pitched with his left hand.

Yet letters such as that were the exception rather than the rule. For every letter that elicited an exciting reply, Bob mailed countless others asking post offices, town clerks, and other officials about the whereabouts of a long-ago player, only to receive a short, unhelpful response or none at all. It was not a pursuit for those who are easily discouraged!

Even collaborations with fellow researchers were generally carried on by means of the post office. That finally began to change in 1971 when Bob Davids — who was just as tireless a letter-writer as McConnell — floated the novel proposal of an organization for all of the people doing baseball research. When he got enough positive replies, he arranged for a meeting in Cooperstown on August 10, 1971.

Sixteen researchers ended up attending the meeting and forming the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Davids was selected as the president of SABR, while McConnell became its first secretary and treasurer. Like the founders of any new organization, they had grandiose dreams of great growth. McConnell said with a chuckle, “we talked with excitement about how one day we might have as many as fifty members!” It is safe to say that SABR has exceeded their wildest dreams, as it now boasts well over 6,000 members.

That initial meeting was also a spur to a great deal of research by enabling the leading baseball researchers to meet face-to-face for the first time. McConnell met such kindred spirits as Joe Simenic, Ray Nemec, and Bob Davids for the first time at the Cooperstown meeting — and the resulting friendships ensured that such get-togethers would continue. McConnell and Davids formed an especially close friendship and began making annual trips to the Hall of Fame to do research.

The two Bobs also renewed their acquaintance each year at the annual SABR convention, rooming together until shortly before Davids’s death in 2002. These conventions started as small reunions for the founders, but soon went through the same growth spurt as the organization itself. Today they routinely attract 500 or more attendees — ten times the fifty members that SABR’s founders had seen as an optimistic goal.

Through all of this growth, one constant was Bob McConnell, who attended all but one of the 41 annual conventions held during his lifetime. Asked about the one he missed, McConnell grimaces before replying, “That was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. I had some business come up and I don’t know why but I let it get in the way.”

In 1983, the prospect of such dilemmas was eliminated when Bob retired. Not surprisingly, he devoted much of the extra time to baseball research. Eventually, he and Davids began making two journeys a year to Cooperstown — and carefully planning these trips to ensure maximum research time. According to Bill Deane, then Senior Research Associate at the Hall of Fame, the two Bobs would make one trip “in May and the other in October (just before the tourists came and just after they left). Davids would drive to McConnell’s house in Delaware, and the two of them would drive up to central New York. They’d stay for a few days, maximizing their research time, and drive back. Davids would always find time to break for lunch at Newberry’s next door, but McConnell would often skip it, immersed in his contract cards.”

By this time, the continued growth of SABR was providing new luxuries to members. In the early days, with such a limited number of active researchers, everybody pitched in to help out on a new project or an administrative matter. McConnell served as a board member for 11 years during this formative period, and was an active participant in pretty much everything SABR undertook during those years. But the rapid expansion of the membership enabled researchers to specialize in the areas that interested them most. McConnell took advantage and, not surprisingly, he turned his attention to two interests that dated back to his youthful days of rooting for the great sluggers of the 1930s and for his hometown Newark Bears.

The first of these was home runs. One of John Tattersall’s most ambitious projects was the creation of a log that would detail every major-league home run ever hit. McConnell was a key ally on this initiative, filling in many of the gaps in the records. When Tattersall died in 1981, SABR purchased his collection, and McConnell was put in charge of the home run register, which was rechristened the “Tattersall-McConnell Home Run Log.” McConnell insisted that it was Tattersall who “should be credited with the bulk of the work.” The results were published by Macmillan in the 1996 book SABR Presents The Home Run Encyclopedia. The SABR Home Run Log, now maintained by David Vincent, is available for everyone to view at Baseball-Reference.com. (Go to any player’s page and click the tab that says “HR Log” to access the data.)

McConnell’s second research passion also came out of the many afternoons he spent watching the greats of the International League. Along with Ray Nemec, Vern Luse, and Bob Davids, he became one of the principals in another ambitious effort that aimed to create complete statistical records for the greatest minor league players. The project proved so successful that SABR eventually published three volumes of the Minor League Stars series, along the way directing new attention to “Buzz” Arlett and the other luminaries of the golden age of the minors.

In 2008, Bob marked the 25th anniversary of his official retirement. Yet he remained as active as ever in his passionate devotion to baseball research. He even made some use of the Internet although, not surprisingly, his favorite sources were the microfilmed newspapers that he obtained through interlibrary loan. His main research interests continued to involve minor league history and slugging, especially in filling in the gaps in the extra-base-hit categories of the statistics issued by many minor leagues.

Today’s researchers take for granted the completeness of the statistical record that is now available at the click of a mouse. But we need to recognize that we have that vantage point because we stand on the shoulders of giants like Bob McConnell who put in countless hours of work to make that possible.

Life has a funny way of bringing things full circle. Bob and Millie McConnell had three grandchildren and one of them worked for Exxon — that’s right, the company that released the fateful commemorative home run booklet back when it was known as ESSO. Oh and in case you were wondering about that home run booklet, it disappeared along with his baseball cards while he was serving in the Navy. But it hasn’t been forgotten either. Some years ago, Bob purchased an original booklet from a dealer and had it bound. It occupied a prominent place in his home.

Bob McConnell died on March 18, 2012, at the age of 87.

Sources

Conversations and correspondence with Bob McConnell, Bill Deane, and members of SABR.

Born on January 30, 1938, on Long Island, John F. Pardon was the only child of Francis C. Pardon Jr. and Dorothy (Parmele) Pardon. When he was five years old, his parents moved to Ossining, New York, not too far from Sing Sing, a maximum security state prison.

A Dodger fan as a child, John enjoyed going to games at Ebbets Field, where on July 31, 1954, he saw Joe Adcock hit four home runs and a double against the Dodgers. However, his favorite on the Dodgers was not a player but announcer Vin Scully. When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, he switched his allegiance to the Yankees, who had former Dodgers announcer Red Barber.

At Croton Harmon High School he was the official scorer for the baseball team. After high school graduation he spent the next two years at Canton ATI (Agricultural and Technical Institute) majoring in food service. He roomed with three other students in a funeral home and sometimes helped the owners by performing errands. Over the years he often returned to pay the owners a visit until they both passed away.

After graduating from Canton ATI, he spent the next four years at Rider University, where he majored in journalism. After graduating from Rider, Pardon served a stint in the army. When his army service was completed, he wrote to all the major league teams seeking employment. He received a response from the New York Yankees and was given an interview by Public Relations Director Bob Fishel. Although the Yankees didn’t have any openings at the time, he was always impressed that Fishel took the time to interview him.

Pardon then applied at the now defunct Ossining Citizen-Register, where he was hired and served as sports editor for three years.

In 1966 he took a vacation trip visiting minor league parks in Virginia and North Carolina. He fell in love with North Carolina and decided to move there.

Moving to Asheville, he authored a sports column called “Pardon Me” for the Citizen Times. Once, a critical article was written about a player. The angry player confronted John, who later said he could see his life flashing before him. Luckily for John, he hadn’t written the article.

In Asheville he developed a deep love for minor league baseball and minor league parks. The 1969 Asheville Tourists souvenir program contains a photo of him and credits him with helping compile the year-by-year league statistical data. He would comb through libraries and historical societies researching minor league statistics and cities. Over the years he accumulated many binders full of minor league information—all written in longhand. He had information on every minor league team for every year.

John loved talking about old minor league parks he had visited. Sulphur Dell, in Nashville, Tennessee, was his favorite because the park outfield had a steep incline and the fences were close, making for all kinds of possibilities. When he was in a town, he would check to see if there was a minor league team nearby. One hundred miles was close enough.

When Macmillan was putting together the first large Baseball Encyclopedia, he was contacted and asked if he would be interested in being part of the project. Much research would be required. The offer was good, but he turned it down because he was not sure what would happen to him once the encyclopedia was completed. Accordingly, he decided to stay with the Citizen Times.

By then John had become well known as a baseball researcher and was one of the people Bob Davids contacted when he decided to form the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Sixteen people met in Cooperstown and formed SABR on August 10, 1971. Pardon was named vice-president. Over the years he also served as secretary and was on the Board of Directors. He always enjoyed being involved.

To say John was involved is to understate. In addition to serving SABR as an officer and director, he was chair of the Minor Leagues Committee and worked on the Ballparks, Biographical Research, Business of Baseball, Latin American, and Nineteenth Century committees. Beyond committee work John attended over 30 national conventions and 50 regional meetings, largely in the New York City area and Cooperstown, but also Toronto, Albany, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, Reading, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, Delaware, and North Carolina. If he was in Cooperstown during Induction Weekend at the Hall of Fame, he would operate a recruiting booth for SABR. In 1998 he received SABR’s highest honor, the Bob Davids Award.

Yet John was characteristically modest about his role in the founding of SABR, noting, “The Joy of my life was that I was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time . . . Sixteen baseball research enthusiasts met in Cooperstown, N. Y., in 1971, and little did we know what we began.”

In November 1978, Along with Ed Leonard and Tom Zocco, John put together the first SABR regional convention in New England. The setting was Greenfield, Massachusetts, and he made the long drive several times to help prepare for the session. The Eastern League had a team in Holyoke, Massachusetts (Holyoke Millers), and the three members would meet at the ballpark, take in the game, and make plans for the regional. After the game, there was always a visit to the team office. The Holyoke owner was Tom Keyser, who is now president of the Texas League. Keyser was very cordial. After the game, John would make the three-hour trip back home.

The regional included guest speakers Charlie Eschback, Eastern League president, former Cubs shortstop Lenny Merullo, and Henry Berry, author of several books on the Red Sox. Several SABR members made the long trip: Bob Davids (Washington, DC), Frank Phelps (King of Prussia, Pennsylvania), and Cliff Kachline (Cooperstown). The regional was a rousing success. After everything was over, Charlie Eschback remarked that the convention was much better than he expected. He was amazed by the knowledge of SABR members.

Wherever the national SABR convention was held, John always managed to locate a friend from college, church, or a club he had once belonged to, even though he hadn’t seen some of these people in over thirty years. He would arrive early and plan a visit with them. He would visit any museums in the area. Some museums were small and had very few visitors. John would spend hours talking to the people in these small museums. He would always keep a count of how many of the original sixteen founders of SABR were at each convention.

John loved boats, so after a convention was over, he sought out boat tours in such cities as San Diego, Cleveland, and Louisville. A boat ride was a must.

Although John enjoyed working for the Citizen Times, working nights interfered with his social life, so he decided to move back to New York, where he was hired by the Veterans Administration and worked in the claims department until retiring after twenty years of service in 1993.

He joined the Reformed Church and became very active as a speaker. Taking members of the church, many of whom had never seen a ballgame, he would often travel several hours to a minor league game. He would call friends to get together to see a minor league game. It was always a long drive for him although most of the friends lived close by. After the game was over, John would talk to his friends in the parking lot. The lot would finally be empty, and everyone would head home. It was always a long drive for John, who would arrive home in the early hours of the morning.

Keeping physically active, he joined a square-dance club and made many friends there. He became very involved in the activities and looked forward to square dancing. An avid reader, for many years John did not like or own a television set. It was fatal when he finally bought one, as he became addicted to late night talk shows and would stay up watching them.

John also enjoyed talking with former minor league players. He loved hearing their tales and about players they played with. He would become excited when he ran into a relative of a former minor league player. The relative would be amazed at the information John was able to provide about the player.

Another interest was minor league attendance. It always bothered him that minor league yearbooks, press guides, and the like didn’t contain information about attendance. One rainy day at a Waterbury Reds (Eastern League) game, John was part of a small crowd. He went around and counted everyone in the stands—thirty-six people. After the game was over, he went into the office and asked what the attendance was. He was told 112. They went by the amount of tickets sold. Fortunately, it was wristband promotion day. He wondered what the attendance would have been without the promotion.

It’s a cliché, but John was one of those rare individuals who never met a stranger and made friends wherever he went. He enjoyed speaking with other SABR members and usually ran up a large monthly phone bill. It didn’t bother him. Every month when he received his phone bill he would just pay it. If his friend wasn’t home, he’d leave a message on the answering machine saying to call him back; the time didn’t matter.

He loved having his picture taken with other SABR members. Often he would stop a stranger walking down the street and ask if they could take a photo of everyone together. He was never refused.

In 1982 at the SABR convention in Baltimore, Sparky Anderson saw John and recognized him immediately from his minor league managing days. They began chatting like long lost friends. They exchanged Christmas cards every year after that. In 1993 the convention was held in San Diego. A player called the hotel early one morning when he heard John Pardon was in town. The player was Kurt Bevacqua. Kurt knew John from his minor league days and wanted to take him to breakfast. In 1995 at a SABR regional in Philadelphia, held during the baseball strike, a replacement umpire and John recognized each other. As usual, John talked to him like an old friend.

Every summer a group of SABR members would meet in Cooperstown for a weekend of research at the Hall of Fame Library. On the final night everyone would gather at the home of Evelyn and Cliff Kachline for a cookout. The next day, everyone would start the long drive home. Everyone except John, that is. He would head in the opposite direction to take in a game at Binghamton or Jamestown.

When SABR members passed away, John would keep in touch with their wives to see how they were doing. He was always concerned about their well-being.

John was always sad to think about all the baseball knowledge SABR members were taking with them when they died. He thought it would be sad to have all their research thrown away and fought for SABR to establish some sort of archive system. He rescued a large minor league database from the wife of a deceased member. She had had no idea what she was going to do with it and probably would have thrown it in the trash. The Hall of Fame was more than happy to accept the boxes of minor league player information.

John’s other favorite sport was hockey. He loved watching a hockey game no matter what level. As he would at a baseball game, he would start chatting away with whoever was sitting next to him even if he had never met them before. If he couldn’t find anyone in the mood for a hockey game, he’d go alone.

His love of baseball and hockey aside, John took care of the inner man. He loved good food and was an incredibly slow eater, savoring every bite.

John took everything in stride when he found out he had prostate and colon cancer. Having had part of his colon removed, he referred to himself as John Semi-Colon. John knew the end was near when his doctor told him to eat whatever he wanted. He wrote his own obituary and said he was having fun doing it. He died on October 19, 2008.

Ironically, around that same time, Facebook emerged in full force. Good and gentle man that John was, he would have loved joining the discussions and being friends with everyone online.

Sources

“John F. Pardon.” Asheville Citizen-Times.com (http://obituaries.citizen-times.com). October 26, 2008. (Written by John Pardon).

Pardon, John F. “A Bizarre Game of Baseball.” SABR Baseball Research Journal, 1981.

Pardon, John F. “The Perfect Pitching Season.” SABR Baseball Research Journal, 1977.

SABR Salute: John Pardon. https://sabr.org/sabr-salute/john-pardon/

SABR’s Founding Members: The Cooperstown 16. https://sabr.org/about/founders.

If you spend much time at the Hall of Fame perusing the files of obscure players, it will not be long before you find a note written by Joe Simenic. In particular, if you think you’ve found a promising new lead on one of the approximately 250 mystery major leaguers whose death information is unknown, it will not be long before you discover that Joe Simenic has been there before you. For more than four decades, Joe was at the forefront of biographical research for major league ballplayers.

Born in Kostanjevac, Croatia, on August 4, 1923, Joseph E. Simenic and his mother set sail on the S. S. Berengaria from Cherbourg on May 31, 1924, to join Joe’s father in the United States. Upon arrival the family settled in Cleveland, where (with the exception of his military service) Joe Simenic lived ever since.

During his childhood, as Joe tells it, he “loved playing baseball but was too small to ever consider it as a career.” It took a couple of fortuitous events to lead him down the path to becoming a stalwart baseball researcher.    

In 1935 the Simenic family was living at 1029 East 78th Street when a young man named John Mihalic who lived directly across the street at 1030 East 78th reached the major leagues with the Washington Senators. Mihalic was also the son of immigrants from Yugoslavia, and his feat naturally became the talk of the neighborhood. Joe Simenic was especially impressed when Mihalic’s brother Joe gave his young neighbor a copy of an Official Spalding’s Baseball Guide that included his brother’s name.

When he became a teenager, Joe Simenic took an after-school job as a page at one of Cleveland’s branch libraries. He soon discovered more editions of the Reach and Spalding guides and spent every spare minute immersed in them. It was the start of a lifelong passion.

Duty interrupted on January 14, 1943, when Simenic was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps. He served as a Staff Sergeant in England, France, and Germany for the next three years.

Upon his discharge in 1946, Simenic returned to Cleveland and soon “came across a copy of the Baseball Register published by The Sporting News, found a lot of mistakes in the book and sent them to publisher J.G. Taylor Spink. “He sent me a check for $50 and asked if I would consider working in St. Louis but I decided to stay in Cleveland.”

As is suggested by this anecdote, even as a young man Joe Simenic possessed an ardor for the written word and for setting the baseball record book straight. He also had a determination to get anything he set his heart on, no matter the obstacles. Those traits came together over the next few years as he launched a career and got married.

Joe explains: “On January 29, 1948, I began working at the Cleveland News as secretary to general manager Charlie McCahill. I was 24 years old, single and not dating anyone steadily. I was, however, corresponding quite often with an attractive blue-eyed blonde named Katie Novosel who lived in Kane, Pa. (about 90 miles southeast of Erie). I had met her at my sister’s wedding in Cleveland on May 10, 1947 (her father had been best man at my father’s wedding).

“At any rate our correspondence reached the point where I wanted to see her often, even if it was only every other weekend (as I had to work Saturdays half a day). I was able to arrange my schedule so that I could work the weekends the Tribe was at home and visit Katie in Kane the weekends the Indians were out of town.

“But I had no car at the time so all summer long I dated Katie with the help of a Greyhound bus which would leave Cleveland on Friday evening at eleven o’clock and get into Kane at six the following morning. And on returning I would leave Kane on Sunday evening at eleven and get to the Greyhound bus terminal on Chester Avenue at six Monday morning. Instead of going home I’d walk five blocks to my office at the News, wash up and get ready for work.

“I kept this schedule all summer long until World Series time. I was able to get tickets for the fourth game and immediately invited Katie to come to Cleveland, not only for the game but also to look for a job (as the company she worked for in Kane had gone out of business).

“To make a long story short Katie came to see the game, stayed in Cleveland and got a job, we became engaged the summer of ’49 and married on September 9, 1950.”

Joe worked as secretary to the general manager of the Cleveland News for the next decade while he and Katie welcomed two sons, Steve and Tom. But even during these busy years, Joe’s love of baseball found an outlet. His office at the News was two doors away from that of Ed Bang, who had been sports editor since 1907 and had accumulated a gold mine of baseball books. Bang began calling on Simenic to research stories for him, and Simenic began availing himself of Bang’s immense library. Shortly before Bang died in 1968, he passed his entire collection of baseball guides on to Simenic.

In 1960, the Cleveland News folded. Fortunately for Joe Simenic, the News and the Plain Dealer had long been under the ownership of the Forest City Publishing Company, and he was offered a position as secretary to Plain Dealer publisher and editor Thomas Vail. Simenic remained at the Plain Dealer until his retirement on January 1, 1992.

At his new position, Joe Simenic got to know Plain Dealer sports editor Hal Lebovitz, who wrote a column entitled “Ask Hal, the Referee.” Soon Lebovitz was asking for Simenic’s help on arcane inquiries, and in 1961 he passed along an inquiry from Baseball Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen about a man named Johnson Fry who pitched in a single game for Cleveland in 1923. Joe Simenic solved the longstanding mystery of Fry’s identity and started another enduring partnership.     

Allen began feeding him a steady diet of leads and was astonished at how resourceful Simenic was in tracking down missing players. “I wish I had a man in every state like Joe,” he exclaimed in 1969. Allen’s Sporting News columns during the 1960s included regular references to the value of Simenic’s assistance, and in one on December 30, 1967, Allen marveled that Simenic must have “risked conjunctivitis or astigmatism or whatever it is you risk when you glower at too many phone books.”

Simenic, however, had a different take. When Allen asked for his help on obtaining a questionnaire from every major leaguer (or, if deceased, a descendant), he was delighted. “This was the kind of research I loved best,” Joe would recall, “digging into the past to complete the demographics of all major leaguers.” He did admit that, “It’s a labor of love. My wife thinks I’m crazy.”

The project was a huge one and, lacking the resources today’s researchers take for granted, progress was slow. In 1969 Allen was interviewed for a Plain Dealer Magazine article about Simenic and he reported that some 4,000 of the 10,400 men who had played major league baseball were still unidentified. “This could be called a branch of sociology,” commented Allen. “We hope to compile data on what states the major leaguers come from, their height and weight, how they’ve grown over the years, how nutrition has affected them, etc. We have found already, for instance, that the divorce rate among baseball players is lower than the general population’s. We plan to make graphs on their educational backgrounds over the decades.”

Sadly, Allen never got to see any of those plans come true. Five days before the article was published, he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four.  

But Joe Simenic forged on and gained new allies in the quest to collect accurate biographical information on every major leaguer. Lee Allen’s successor, Cliff Kachline, continued work on the project and the progress continued. On August 10, 1971, Simenic and fifteen other baseball researchers traveled to Cooperstown, New York, to form the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Biographical research was the hallmark of many SABR founders, with Simenic, Kachline, Bill Haber, Tom Shea, Bob McConnell, Tom Hufford, Bill Gustafson, Bob Davids, and Ray Nemec all making this a main focus of their efforts. As a result, the once staggering number of unidentified players drops each year, and today there are fewer than 300 “missing” players.

The founding of SABR created a powerful network of baseball researchers and, from the first, Joe Simenic contributed to its development in an extraordinary number of ways. He served as vice president of the fledgling organization in 1973-74 and as chairman of its Biographical Committee for several years during the 1980s. Like his fellow SABR founders, Simenic was amazed to witness its explosive growth. As McConnell put it, during the early days “we talked with excitement about how one day we might have as many as fifty members!”

Joe Simenic also found a number of ways to combine his passion for baseball research with his devotion to the Indians, especially after his retirement from the Plain Dealer in 1992. He compiled an exhaustive list of every major leaguer who had ever appeared in a Cleveland uniform that was included in the club’s press guide. In 1993 he worked with Mel Harder to help a New York artist who was doing a painting of Cleveland’s League Park and wanted to get all of the details right. In the course of the project, Joe found that Harder had no record of his career, so he created and presented Harder with a detailed record of each of his 582 pitching appearances for the Indians.

In the mid-1990s Russ Schneider recruited Simenic to be coauthor of The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia. After two years of research, the book was published by Temple University Press in 1996 – by good fortune, its release followed the Indians’ first pennant in more than four decades. In a review, Steve Gietschier of The Sporting News wrote that the book was “above all … well organized” and singled out its records and statistics section. Those judgments came as no surprise to anyone familiar with Joe Simenic’s work.

Perhaps Joe Simenic’s greatest contribution to the baseball research community was his willingness to share his knowledge. Over the years he continued to add to the collection given to him by Ed Bang, and his basement library included more than 500 baseball books, over 150 reels of microfilm of Sporting Life and The Sporting News, a microfilm viewer, and assorted other memorabilia. Characteristically, he also organized his research on the dwindling number of “missing players” so as to be able to respond to fellow researchers with detailed notes. Longtime SABR Biographical Committee chairman Bill Carle noted that whenever he called Joe with a question on a player, Joe was able to consult his microfilm reader and his notes and call back within hours with the answer.

For nearly two decades, it was the privilege of the current writer to receive letters from Joe Simenic whenever a new clue about a player’s identity emerged. Those letters also revealed a great deal about their author, as they invariably were succinct and to the point yet rich in detail and invaluable for research purposes. On more than a few occasions, they also gave glimpses of Joe’s delightful outlook on life. An obscure two-game 1884 player named Al Strueve, for example, proved especially frustrating because every newspaper account provided a different spelling of his unusual surname. But as usual Joe Simenic came through with a letter that provided the clues needed to identify him, and he also contributed this little verse:

“To prove or not to prove
Whether it’s Steuve or Struve
Or Streuve or Strueve
That is the question.” 

In 1985 SABR established the Bob Davids Award to honor members “whose contributions to SABR and baseball reflect the ingenuity, integrity, and self-sacrifice of the founder and past president of SABR, L. Robert ‘Bob’ Davids.” Fittingly, Joe Simenic was the second recipient of the award in 1986.

Of course, biographical research never ends and pursuit of the remaining unidentified major leaguers continues, with Joe Simenic’s notes providing the impetus for many of those quests. As with any good sleuth, he also has a few tantalizing tales to tell about near-misses. One of those stories concerns a player named Moxie Divis who played three games for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1916 and then vanished into obscurity. When Divis’s identity was finally determined, Joe was stunned to find that they had worked together at the Cleveland News. But by then Divis was already dead, so Joe wasn’t able to ask his onetime colleague about the hand with which he batted and threw.

Those details remain missing from the baseball encyclopedias and record books. But the fact that such gaps are now so few is a testament to the ceaseless labors of researchers like Joe Simenic. Although he was too small for a career as a baseball player, Joe is one of the true giants of baseball research.

Joe Simenic’s wife, Katie, passed away in 1988. He died on February 7, 2015, at the age of 91 in Columbus, Ohio. His immediate family included his two sons and three grandchildren.

Sources

Dan Coughlin, “The Super Baseball Detective,” Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine, May 25, 1969, 40, 42, 52; Lee Allen, Cooperstown Corner: Columns from The Sporting News (Cleveland: SABR, 1990); personal correspondence and conversations with Joe Simenic.