Some boys dream of a life in the circus; others, like Lee Allen, dream of a life in baseball. Born in 1915, he was the son of a Cincinnati attorney who served three terms in Congress. Having seen his first Reds game while still in knee pants, Allen was a regular at Redland Field (later Crosley Field) by the time he entered Hughes High School. Whether he cajoled the principal into letting him escape from class early, as some romantic accounts have it, or whether the school day ended before the late afternoon games began, Allen got to the ballpark every day in time for the first pitch. Paying his way into the grandstand, he positioned himself in the upper deck near the press box where he one day hoped to work.

Readers of the Cincinnati Enquirer soon noticed that Jack Ryder’s “Notes of the Game” column often included an exact tally of how many balls and strikes each pitcher had thrown. Ryder was a good reporter, but these data were supplied by Allen, who charted every pitch while munching on a steady supply of food from the concession stand. Later he earned seventy-five cents a game for telephoning out-of-town scores from the Western Union ticker in the press box to the scoreboard. “I lost money on that deal,” Allen remembered, “I used to spend about a $1.50 a day for ice cream, soda, and peanuts.”

After graduation, Allen matriculated in psychology at Kenyon College in the same class as Bill Veeck. He covered baseball for the campus daily but in truth didn’t know what occupation to pursue. In 1935 he somehow managed to tour the Soviet Union with newsman H.V. Kaltenborn and was far out of touch with baseball until reaching Moscow where Ambassador William Bullitt let him read back copies of the New York Times.

After Kenyon, Allen enrolled in the Columbia University School of Journalism. But after little more than one semester, he was invited to join the Reds as a paid assistant to Gabe Paul, then the team’s publicity director and road secretary. Allen stayed with the Reds as they won consecutive National League pennants in 1939 and 1940. When the United States entered World War II, Allen was rejected for military service because of high blood pressure. In 1942, he took a civilian post with the navy and was shipped out of Seattle to work as a laborer on Kodiak Island, Alaska. After a year or so, he returned to Cincinnati to replace Paul, who had been called to the service.

All the while, Allen was accumulating the foundation of an outstanding collection of baseball books, manuscripts, and notes. As he recalled later, “a book — The Baseball Cyclopedia by Ernest J. Lanigan — got me started. I always loved baseball, but I wasn’t very good at playing the game. I wasn’t fast enough. But I still wanted to be a part of it and this was a way I could do it.” He began to build a variegated career as a baseball researcher, putting in stints for two Cincinnati newspapers, appearing on radio and later television and even working a year for The Sporting News. “It was my observation of Taylor Spink,” he said “that taught me the only real happiness is in one’s work.”

Still, as many baseball researchers have learned, breaking into print for profit requires not only talent but also luck. “You just can’t get out of college and say, ‘I’m a writer; hire me,'” Allen once reminisced. While working with the Reds he saw that G.P. Putnam’s Sons had begun publishing its series of club histories. He wrote to them cold, “and a fellow wrote back saying they didn’t know anything about me as a writer and that they hadn’t decided who they would assign the Reds book to.” Putnam told him to take a stab at it. “I wrote the book, they accepted it, and it got me started.”

That first book, The Cincinnati Reds (1948), led in turn to 100 Years of Baseball (1950) and The Hot Stove League (1955), an absolutely marvelous collection of unusual research and anecdotes, many of which eventually made their way into anthologies. These books established Allen as a recognized expert who could make a living from his passion. On Cincinnati’s radio station WSAI, for example, he once challenged listeners to write in — this was before talk shows — giving the names of former players for him to identify. On May 23, 1952, while working in Philadelphia, Allen and Phillies manager Eddie Sawyer engaged in a “Baseball Talkathon” from 11:15 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. on KYW. The pair answered questions telephoned to several operators and forwarded to moderator Jean Shepherd.

In early 1959, the National Baseball Hall of Fame announced that Allen would replace retiring Ernest J. Lanigan as historian. It was a propitious appointment for both the Hall and Allen who brought with him to Cooperstown not only his knowledge and research skills, but also a vast baseball library. The mover who trucked the books from Cincinnati said they filled fifty-five cartons and weighed 5000 pounds. Allen, who began his new job with no advance instructions, had a firm idea of how he would proceed. “I hope to make the office of Historian of the Hall a place where anyone may write for information about almost any phase of baseball history and receive accurate replies.”

The Allen family — Lee had married Adele Felix the previous August — settled into Cooperstown just a few months before the birth of twins Randall and Roxann in October 1959. The new father nevertheless dove into his work with a great deal of gusto. Ensconced in the old library on the second floor of the museum, Allen established a daily routine that included meeting a steady stream of visitors, answering mail as soon as it arrived, and chipping away at the long-range research projects he set for himself. His workdays soon stretched to twelve hours and his weeks to seven days.

One of these assignments involved uncovering the date and place of death for nineteenth century National Leaguers. Another had him breaking down the number of games outfielders had played in left, center, and right fields. “No one has ever separated outfields before,” Allen told Sports Illustrated shortly after he began. “When Zack Wheat is inducted into the Hall of Fame this summer, I’ll be able to tell him how many games he played in each field.”

Allen’s major effort was to collect biographical data on the 11,000 men he estimated had played in the major leagues to that point. In this mammoth task that would grow into the first edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia, he labored with other pioneers in baseball research, including John Tattersall, S. C. Thompson, Frank Marcellus, Karl Wingler, Harry Simmons, Allen Lewis, Joseph Overfield, Clifford Kachline, and Paul Rickart.

After a while, the Allens decided to spend the summers in Cooperstown and the winters in Boca Raton, Florida. Allen used the trips back and forth as opportunities for extended research odysseys. He would visit one remote hamlet after another, prowl through graveyards and courthouse records, and gently pump as many townspeople as necessary for the information he was seeking.

Allen did not sit on his research. He turned it into a long list of articles, innumerable speeches to dozens of groups, and a series of books renowned for their original insights. In The National League: The Official History (1961), for example, he used his unprecedented access to league documents and correspondence to throw new light on pivotal events such as Fred Merkle’s “boner” and Hal Chase’s involvement in fixing games.

In the companion volume, The American League Story (1962), Allen related how president Ban Johnson moved the Milwaukee franchise to St. Louis, home of The Sporting News, and how in 1903, type for the peace agreement between the leagues was set in that newspaper’s composing room.

Basking in the success of these books, Allen accepted an additional commission, a column in The Sporting News. “Cooperstown Corner” ran from April 4, 1962, to May 31, 1969, a total of 133 times. It began as a biweekly feature whose regular appearance was sometimes delayed for lack of space. After August 24, 1963, it was printed much more sporadically: twice during the rest of that year, nine times in 1964, six in 1965, and not at all in 1966. In June 1967, the column resumed a biweekly schedule. It proved to be so popular that it became a weekly feature in February 1968, and remained so until Allen’s death. The last two columns appeared posthumously.

Simultaneously with the column, Allen wrote other books: a joint history of the Giants and the Dodgers, a collection of biographical sketches written with Tom Meany, lives of Babe Ruth and Dizzy Dean, and a history of the World Series published in 1969 as professional baseball observed its hundredth anniversary.

Surely, Allen must have looked forward to this centennial. For one thing, he now went to work in the new National Baseball Library, opened in 1968 as a separate building from the Hall of Fame. For another, the celebration commemorated events in his native city. He contributed a special essay on the Red Stockings of 1969 to The Sporting News and journeyed back to his hometown in May for a ceremony honoring Cincinnati players. After presenting a silver plate to Edd Roush as the greatest Red of all time and participating in the attendant festivities, Allen climbed into his car for the long drive back to Cooperstown.

When he reached Syracuse on the morning of May 20, he stopped and called a cab, complaining of chest pains. Two hours later, at St. Joseph’s Hospital, he was dead of a massive heart attack. If the truth be told, Allen had not been a well man. Undoubtedly, he worked far too long and too hard, ate, drank, and smoked too much, and had probably suffered an earlier heart attack several years before. Still, his death was a shock to the baseball world that had come to treasure him.

Sources

A version of this article was originally published as the Introduction to Cooperstown Corner (SABR, 1990), a collection of Allen’s columns that had run in The Sporting News in the 1960s.

In compiling this piece, the author mainly used Allen’s clipping files in the archives of The Sporting News in St. Louis (where the author works). He also spoke with Lowell Reidenbaugh, who was Allen’s contact with The Sporting News and remained on staff with the paper for many years afterwards.

Bob Davids, a career Federal government employee, never played professional baseball. However, he had a deep and lasting impact on the game by founding the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in 1971. This organization has had a large effect on how baseball is quantified and discussed, and its existence is a logical extension of Bob’s love for the game of baseball as well as his chosen professional career path.

Leonard Robert Davids was born on March 19, 1926, the eighth of nine children on a farm four miles southwest of Kanawha, Iowa. He was the child of James and Katie (Bakker) Davids. James emigrated from the Netherlands and changed his name from the Dutch original Jacobus Vroegindeweij. Katie was a third-generation American of German heritage. All nine of their children were born at home, many without a doctor present at the birth.

Although his given name was Leonard, he acquired the nickname “Bob” early in life. The background of this name is unclear, as different members of the family tell different stories. One version of the story is that the young Leonard went around the house imitating the sound of the family’s new washing machine saying: “bob, bob, bob …” His older brothers then started calling him Bob as a result of this act. In later years, he used the name “L. Robert Davids” in all correspondence.

Bob played sports growing up and was a star pitcher on his high school baseball team. In one game during his senior year against Garner High School, the county seat, he struck out 10 batters in a 7-inning 3-hitter. He enjoyed pitching and later in life displayed his talent in unusual ways. On one trip home to Iowa with his grandson, the two stopped in Dyersville to visit the Field of Dreams movie set playing field. Bob usually carried bats, gloves and balls in the trunk of his car. While in Dyersville, he pitched batting practice for his grandson and then for anyone else who wanted to hit that day on that field.

Another example of his pitching occurred when the Washington chapter of SABR met at a minor-league ballpark. Bob threw out a ceremonial pitch before the game to the delight of the chapter members. It was always a strike, sometimes to the surprise of the player chosen to catch the pitch.

Davids began studying baseball in 1939 about the time he started high school. He acquired the book Major League Baseball, published by Whitman Publishing Company. This book contained annual averages for players, and the young Davids read them with great interest. Bob’s interest in these statistics caused him to read about the performance of players in earlier years.

Bob attended the Norway Township #3 grade school and graduated from Kanawha High School in 1943. He left after graduation for San Diego, where his brother Bert lived. In California, Bob attended prep school and worked for Consolidated-Vultree Aircraft Corp. He enlisted in the Army Air Force in February 1944 and flew as a nose gunner in the same aircraft, B-24s, which he had helped build in San Diego. His two years of service included duty on Okinawa and in the Philippines.

Davids took two baseball publications with him overseas. The first was the 1945 Baseball Register, and the second was about pitching records. The latter book related team won/lost records to individual performance. Bob read both books frequently while overseas to the extent that they were both in tatters by the time he returned to the U.S. In fact, the first few pages of the book on pitchers were all torn off, leaving no title page to identify in later years.

After leaving the military in 1946, Bob enrolled at the University of Missouri. He received a Bachelor of Journalism in three years and a Master of Arts in History in 1951, both from Missouri. These two academic disciplines served him well professionally as well as in the baseball community. Davids received a Ph.D. in International Relations from Georgetown University in 1961.

Dr. Davids began his 30-year Federal civilian career in Washington with the Department of Defense in 1951. From 1952 to 1958 he was Assistant Editor and later Editor of the Navy Civil Engineer Corps Bulletin. He served in April 1953 as the Navy information officer for Operation Hardtop, a Navy Seabee experiment to build an airfield runway on the icecap of northern Greenland. The technique of packing snow into a runway was used later in Operation Deepfreeze in the Antarctic.

While in the Arctic, he traveled with the Danish Governor of North Greenland and the Commander of the Thule Air Base to an Eskimo village a few miles north of the base. They met with Ootah, an Eskimo guide, to present a gift on behalf of the Navy Civil Engineer Corps. Ootah had accompanied Admiral Robert E. Peary, who was a Civil Engineer, Matthew Henson, and three other Eskimos on the 1909 expedition to reach the North Pole. An interview was conducted with the 78-year-old Eskimo, and photos taken to record the meeting. At the time of his death two years later, Ootah was the last survivor of the expedition.

Dr. Davids transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1958. There he served as a technical reports officer and later as a long-range planning officer. In 1964 he helped compile presidential documents on nuclear energy for the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library.

In late 1968 Davids received a Congressional Fellowship and spent the next year working in the offices of Senator Mark Hatfield and Representative Robert Taft Jr. Davids wrote speeches and helped prepare legislation during his Fellowship. He traveled with Taft and Representative Wilmer Mizell (a retired major-league pitcher who had toiled for the Cardinals, Pirates, and briefly for the Mets) to Cincinnati in July 1969, where they participated in ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first professional baseball team, the 1869 Red Stockings.

Returning to AEC after his Fellowship ended in late 1969, Davids prepared the “Weekly Report to the White House.” He also served as a speechwriter for two AEC chairmen, Glenn T. Seaborg and Dixie Lee Ray.

When the agency was dissolved in 1975, Dr. Davids moved to one of its successors, the Energy Research and Development Administration, as Chief of the Special Projects Branch. In April and May 1977, he served as the head of the U.S. Secretariat at the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Conference in Salzburg, Austria.

Later that year he moved to the newly formed Department of Energy as the Special Events Coordinator. His work for this organization included coordinating government dedications of various energy facilities, as well as demonstrations of energy conservation measures. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, policy changes dictated adjustments at the agency. The 55-year-old Dr. Davids retired from Federal Service at this time.

Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper that began publishing in 1955, published many articles on Congressional history under Davids’ byline between 1960 and 1975. He wrote about unusual topics that had not been published before, such as brothers, fathers and sons who served at the same time in Congress; the first women in Congress; and the story of the only time a U.S. Vice President took the oath of office in a foreign country.

Davids wrote many freelance baseball articles for The Sporting News (TSN) between 1951 and 1965. The first appeared in December 1951. Among the pieces to appear under Davids’ name were a number of full-page features. Perhaps his most personally satisfying article was about his favorite player, Lou Gehrig. The article, written to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the end of Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak in 1939, was published on May 16, 1964.

Another full-page article for TSN centered on two-sport athletes. The article, which appeared in the November 16, 1963, issue, discussed the careers of persons who played both professional baseball and football. This piece combined two of Davids’ interests, as he was also a member of the Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA).

In the mid-1960s, TSN reduced its coverage of baseball in order to expand its coverage of other sports. This meant Davids lost his outlet for historical baseball articles and needed to find another for the research he continued to do.

A few years later, Davids decided to create his own publication, a monthly newsletter called Baseball Briefs. The first edition of this newsletter appeared in April 1971 and contained short articles on interesting baseball topics. Its masthead showed the graphically produced title “baseball” and noted that it was “volume 1, number 1.” The graphic used bats as the two L’s and a combination of a bat and ball for the two B’s in the word “baseball.”

The first article in Baseball Briefs was about the American League. It read, in part: “The American League opened as a major circuit 70 years ago this month and the only player who still survives that inaugural is little Freddy Parent, shortstop of the Boston Red Sox. Now 95, he is living in a nursing home in Sanford, Maine. Parent did not miss a game from the April 26, 1901 opener to September 26, 1903, making him the first iron man of the AL with 413 consecutive games.”

Other briefs in that first issue showed the extent of Davids’ knowledge and sense of humor, with eye-catching opening lines: “Batter strikeouts continue to go up like the Consumer Price Index”; “Frank Howard of the Nats is the only active player who can hit his weight and still have a respectable batting average (.280)”; “Base stealing, like crime in general, is increasing and is also getting more difficult to curb”; and “Jim Bunning now has the unenviable record of being taken out of more games than any other pitcher in major league history.”

Davids published Baseball Briefs monthly during the baseball season from 1971 through 1974. In 1975, SABR decided to include the Briefs in a member newsletter not under Davids’ control, but that effort failed after a few months. At this point the Briefs disappeared for a few years. Most of Davids’ writing at that time was devoted to editing the various SABR publications, so Baseball Briefs was not issued again until 1981, now as a season-end summary. In its last manifestation, the Briefs were included in the SABR Bulletin annually from 1989 through 2000.

On Davids’ 45th birthday, March 19, 1971, he mailed approximately 35 invitations to a meeting in Cooperstown, New York. The addressees included persons interested in baseball history and statistical research, for whom Davids used the term “statistorians.” He compiled his mailing list from names he saw in The Sporting News “appended to an interesting historical or statistical article,” as he said in the letter, and from names given him by a number of other baseball historians.

This was an effort to organize the unknown quantity of baseball statistorians into a formal group. The initial letter read in part:

“What would be accomplished at the Cooperstown meeting? From general to specific, your attendance would provide an opportunity (1) to see Cooperstown and the always changing Hall of Fame Museum; (2) to meet and exchange first hand views with other statistorians; (3) to review specific areas of baseball interest to avoid duplication of effort; (4) to establish an informal group primarily for exchange of information; or (5) to establish a formal organization with officers, dues, a charter, annual meetings, etc.; (6) to consider the establishment of a publication in which our research efforts could be presented; and (7) to take up additional matters which you may suggest in response to this letter.”

The letter continued with an example of Davids’ humor.

“What do you do now? You should send me a note saying something along the lines of (1) ‘Your idea of a get-together of the baseball statistorians sounds great, I would like to attend; (2) I am interested in your efforts to organize the group, would like to be included but cannot get away for a meeting at Cooperstown this summer; or (3) your plans for an organization are completely impossible; take me off your mailing list, quick.'”

Cliff Kachline, the Baseball Hall of Fame Historian, offered the Hall’s library for the meeting. The induction ceremonies that year were held on August 9 and featured many players elected by the Veterans’ and Negro Leagues Committees but none elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America. It is interesting that only players from older eras were inducted in the year that baseball historians gathered in Cooperstown.

On August 10, 1971, sixteen people from eleven states attended the meeting on a warm Tuesday in New York and established the SABR. Those 16 were representative of about 40 statistorians who had responded favorably to the concept of the organization. The group elected three officers, whose first task was to draft the first SABR constitution.

In the SABR Bulletin No. 1, issued in August of that year, Bob wrote about the initial meeting:

“Discussion of a name for the group centered around geographic coverage, a possible acronym, and a means of covering both the historical and statistical aspects of the group without a long title. It was generally agreed that the word research accomplished the latter. In regard to geographic scope, it was stated that American was broader than national. Society was preferred over association. Efforts to come up with a name resulting in a baseball acronym like RBI or something similar proved fruitless. Consequently, we became the Society for American Baseball Research.”

There was also a note in the first Bulletin about membership in the Society. Bob wrote: “In regard to membership application, some justification of the $10 fee may be in order. This figure may seem high to some and the question may be raised in individual minds ‘what do I get for my $10?'” After a careful description of the benefits, Bob ended that item: “Membership (to paraphrase a current song) means never having to say you’re sorry … for not having joined.”

Davids was elected the first president of the organization and he is the only person to serve in that position multiple times, having held the office on three separate occasions (1971, 1975, and 1982-83.) In addition, Davids served as a member of SABR’s Board of Directors for five years in two separate terms during the 1970s.

Bob’s expectation for SABR was that it would be “a cozy research group with its own publications.” He ran the organization from his Northwest Washington, DC home for ten years, serving as Editor-in-Chief during that time. Publications included the bi-monthly newsletter, The SABR Bulletin, and the annual Baseball Research Journal, as well as a membership directory. In those early years, once a publication was ready for distribution mailings were prepared by groups of SABR members in Bob’s dining room. The group would talk about baseball, politics and other topics and eat cookies. Crumbs would often find their way into envelopes, sometimes accidentally and sometimes not.

Davids welcomed articles for SABR’s publications and meeting presentations covering a wide range of topics, including the Negro Leagues. This was well before commercial publishing houses accepted works about the Negro Leagues.

In the 1980s, SABR grew beyond what the charter members imagined as interest in baseball increased. Publishers were buying many more works on the history of baseball, and this helped generate the rapid growth of the organization that took it beyond the “cozy research group” envisioned by the founders.

On November 4, 1974, twelve members and two guests from the Washington, DC, area met at the home of Ron Gabriel in Chevy Chase, Maryland. This was the first time that a regional group within SABR met formally. The Washington-Baltimore chapter has continued to meet at least once a year since that first event. It was renamed the “Bob Davids Chapter” in 1992 by a vote of the chapter members over the strong objection of its namesake.

For many years, Dr. Davids spent hours at the Library of Congress doing research on his favorite topics in baseball and other areas. Bob would spend many Saturdays and even lunch hours during the week at the Library, where he had a favorite microfilm machine that he used. Local researchers knew that they could go to the Library on most Saturdays and find Bob there. Interesting discussions often ensued about baseball and other items of interest. As he did everywhere he went, Davids developed friendships with people whom he met at the Library, including one woman who had escaped the Nazis during World War II.

Davids also took semi-annual trips to Cooperstown to do research at the Hall of Fame Library. His usual companion on these journeys was another founding member of SABR, Bob McConnell. The two Bobs, sometimes referred to by other members as “Bob Squared,” also roomed together at SABR conventions. They are officially listed in SABR history as members #1 and #2.

Davids’ research and clippings were not limited to baseball history. Among other lists he kept were a roster of the first 500 SABR members with member number, date joined and hometown; the first women to join the organization; and the first members by state and foreign country. For many years, Bob wrote SABR Salutes, which were tributes to members published in the membership directory. They gave a brief synopsis of that person’s contributions to SABR and baseball history.

Davids contributed information for sports fact boxes in multiple newspapers through the years. He was a regular contributor to the Washington Post‘s “Stat of the Day” and the Chicago Sun-Times‘ “Sports Fact.” These contributions were similar to the pieces he wrote for Baseball Briefs. He wrote an extended article on the history of the designated hitter for the April 7, 1993, edition of USA Today Baseball Weekly on the 20th anniversary of the first use of the DH.

At SABR meetings, Davids was famous for his “warm-up quizzes,” which took unusual and humorous looks at the game. Among other question types, he enjoyed creating a clue to the surname of a player to elicit an answer from the assembled group. For a regional meeting at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium in 1990, Davids listed Orioles from the 1954-84 era with clues such as the following:

Clue: Player
Brooklyn bird: Boyd (Bob)
Graceful in manner: Gentile (Jim)
Bombproof shelter: Bunker (Wally)
A donut submerged: Duncan (Dave)
Precisely 2000 pounds: Singleton (Ken)
Heavyweight KO artist: Dempsey (Rick)
Read Him His Rights: Miranda (Willie)

In 1985, the SABR Board of Directors established the Bob Davids Award, which is awarded annually to a SABR member “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.” It is awarded each year at the annual convention and is considered the Society’s highest honor.

At the time of his death, Davids was the only person to have attended all 31 annual SABR conventions. In addition to SABR 31, he attended two other official SABR events in 2001. When the organization celebrated its 30th birthday with a gathering in Cooperstown in August, Bob was at the center of the celebration and cut the birthday cake for all to enjoy. Appropriately, his last SABR event was a meeting of the Bob Davids Chapter in November 2001. He had attended all chapter meetings up to that time.

In addition to his keen interest in baseball history, Davids was also interested in other sports. He was a member of the Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA). According to Bob Carroll, Executive Director of PFRA, although Davids “wasn’t present at the PFRA organizational meeting in 1979, he was supportive from the beginning. He joined as soon as the organization was announced. Because his reputation for legitimate sports research was so strong, his membership encouraged others to join PFRA. Over the years, he would send advice, suggestions, and tidbits of information.”

Carroll continued: “Obviously his main interest was baseball, but he had a good knowledge of football history, and my impression was that he was conversant with other sports. I’ve never heard anyone say anything negative about Bob.”

Davids published one byline article in PFRA’s official newsletter/magazine, The Coffin Corner. It appeared in volume 9 number 7 (1987) and was titled “23 Guys with Hobbies.” This was the year that Bo Jackson decided to follow his baseball season playing for the Royals with football for the Raiders. Davids wrote about the 23 persons who had attempted the dual sports roles in the same year and the article’s title is another example of Bob’s dry humor.

Dr. Davids was also a member of the International Boxing Research Organization (IBRO). This interest in boxing started as a young man. The Davids brothers were interested in boxing and, in fact, one of his brothers acquired the nickname “Sharkey” after his favorite pugilist. As an adult, Bob maintained a correspondence with heavyweight champ Max Schmeling for years.

Davids married Yvonne Revier, a Pentagon administrative assistant, on June 13, 1953. They had one daughter, Roberta Davids Hagen and two grandsons, Edward and John.

Dr. Davids also was a good neighbor and a kind pet owner. He loved walking through the neighborhood with his dogs. His favorite was a 125-pound gray Bouvier nicknamed Bob-Dog. On his strolls, he would take errant newspapers and toss them on the owners’ porch and perform other acts of kindness.

He was actively involved in numerous community activities. After arriving in Washington in 1953, he was an active member of the Washington Christian Reformed Church until 1969 when he helped to organize its daughter church in Silver Spring. Once the new church was established, he served as head usher from 1969 to 2002 and as a deacon for a short time.

From 1967 to 1987, he was the commissioner of the Washington-area Church Fellowship Softball League. He was a frequent blood donor, having donated 9 1/2 gallons to the American Red Cross prior to undergoing triple heart bypass surgery in 1982. He prepared and served meals at Shepherd’s Table in Silver Spring from 1988 to 2002.

In 1992, Davids was diagnosed with bladder cancer and underwent many years of chemotherapy for that disease. On the evening of February 3, 2002, he took some newspapers out the back door to the recycle bin but fell as he walked down the stairs. At the insistence of his family, he went to Sibley Hospital the next day to be examined. The doctor thought he discovered a kidney stone and decided surgery was in order. However, the surgical team discovered that there were no stones but that the cancer had taken over much of Bob’s body.

Davids died in the hospital on February 10, 2002. He was buried on February 20, 2002, at Arlington National Cemetery with military honors in section 33, grave 8910. The numerology of the burial date is one that Bob would have loved as a possible topic for one of his warm-up quizzes: 02202002.

A term that has gone out of vogue is “Renaissance Man,” meaning someone who is an expert in many fields. Bob Davids certainly represented that concept well. He was interested in baseball, boxing, football, politics, Congress, the Presidency, longevity (reaching the age of 80 or above), and coin and stamp collecting, among other topics. He knew a lot about each of these subjects and often tied them together while writing interesting articles.

In addition, Bob was a kind person — someone who made everyone feel important. He was generous with his time and knowledge and helped many researchers when they did not have the facilities available to do their own fact checking. Much of his time at the library was spent helping others with their research.

Bob Savitt, the president of SABR’s Bob Davids Chapter at the time of Davids’ death, said: “Bob was one of those ‘larger than life’ persons whose wit, wisdom and love blanketed all who came in contact with him.”

SABR has enriched the lives of many people through the friendships made, the events attended, and the lessons learned. Thus, Bob Davids’ legacy lives on in the organization he founded and the many people whose lives he enhanced.

Sources

Carroll, Bob. E-mail letter to the author. October 23, 2003.

Chicago Sun-Times. Chicago, IL. Multiple issues.

Davids, L. Robert. “23 Guys With Hobbies.” The Coffin Corner. Volume 9, number 7. 1987

Davids, L. Robert. Baseball Briefs. Volume 1 Number 1. Washington, DC. April 1971.

Davids, L. Robert. Invitation letters for first meeting of SABR. March — June, 1971.

Davids, L. Robert. SABR Bulletin No. 1. Washington, DC. August 1971.

Davids, L. Robert. Interviews with the author.

Davids, L. Robert. Various family publications.

Davids, L. Robert. “DH has effect on two decades.” USA Today Baseball Weekly. April 7, 1993.

Davids, Yvonne R. Interviews with the author.

Garner Herald. Garner, IA. April 28, 1943.

Pardon, John F. Ten-Year History of SABR. Society for American Baseball Research. 1981.

Roll Call. Washington, DC. Multiple issues.

Savitt, Bob. E-mail letter. February 2002.

The Sporting News. St. Louis, MO. Multiple issues.

Washington Post. Washington, DC. Multiple issues.

Born on a wheat farm on the western edge of Minnesota on October 25, 1885 (a year before Ty Cobb and nearly ten years before Babe Ruth, both of whom he outlived by decades), Lane “drifted” (his word) eastward with his parents and three older siblings in the wake of his father’s successive bankruptcies, first to Minneapolis, then Canton, Ohio, and Lowell, Massachusetts, finally arriving at Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod, when he was seven. Six years later the family moved to Marion, on the other side of Buzzards Bay from Cape Cod, where Lane attended high school at Tabor Academy. He then worked his way through Boston University, receiving his B.A. in 1907, and continued on to graduate study at B.U. (including courses in the law school) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology across the river in Cambridge. It was during his university years that he first indulged his lifelong wanderlust and curiosity about the world with a voyage—in steerage—to Naples. Could even Lane himself have imagined this background as preparation for a career in baseball journalism?

Baseball Magazine, which began publication in the spring of 1908, was founded by Jacob C. Morse, a Boston baseball writer and author of Sphere and Ash (1888), the first history of baseball. Morse’s new magazine filled a niche. For decades there had been, in addition to baseball coverage in the daily press, baseball annuals and weekly sporting papers, but Baseball Magazine was the game’s first monthly magazine. Lane was hired in 1910 or 1911. After a period as associate editor and a month as joint editor with Morse, he assumed full editorship with the January 1912 issue as the magazine transferred its office from Boston to New York. 

Leverett T. Smith, Jr.—whose biography of Lane for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 241 (2001) contains the fullest and most astute assessment to date of Lane’s baseball writing—points out that Baseball Magazine, as a monthly publication, “could take a longer view of events than the daily or weekly papers.” The magazine, to which Lane himself contributed hundreds of articles and editorials—more than a million words in all—featured interviews, reports on the state of the game, biographies, discussion of off-field issues, and innovative efforts to find better ways to measure player effectiveness. Distrusting accepted statistics like batting average, Lane sought (in Smith’s words) “to establish an objective, scientific basis for evaluating player performance.” His suggestions never caught on with baseball officialdom or the baseball public, but his efforts may have helped inspire the precursors of the current sabermetric revolution.

More important for those interested in the history of the game, Lane (as Smith points out) “became an excellent interviewer and profiler.” Researchers have in recent years begun to rediscover the riches in Lane’s interviews and biographical essays. The late Jack Kavanagh, for example, found Lane’s writings so useful in researching the lives of Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander that he wrote a piece for The National Pastime (1996), an annual SABR publication, to alert SABR’s researchers to this long-neglected writer. Lane would travel throughout the country in the offseason to visit players in their homes. Often he “would be invited to spend several days and would come away with family anecdotes and history,” Kavanagh discovered. “As a result, we have far richer knowledge… than what we learn from memoirs and reminiscences written after their starring careers had ended.”  One important byproduct of Lane’s interviews is his book Batting. Quotations garnered from more than 250 baseball figures during Lane’s first fifteen years at Baseball Magazine form the essence of this book.

Batting, Lane’s only book about baseball, was published—on cheap paper, with plain brown paper covers and a price of one dollar—by Baseball Magazine in 1925. Legendary SABR bibliophile Frank V. Phelps remembers Batting as “one of the very first baseball books I owned as a youngster,” and recalls that it was offered as a premium for subscribing to the magazine. As Phelps observes, Batting “stands up well against the many books on hitting which have followed through the years,” but its chief interest for readers today may be the insight it gives us on how those who were active in the first quarter of the twentieth century viewed the science and art of hitting.

And how Lane himself viewed baseball offense. Lane claimed to be objective—simply a collector of expert opinion—but Leverett Smith points out that Lane’s views show through in his selection and arrangement of the quotations he has gathered on the subject, and in his commentary that binds the quotes together. Batting, Smith writes, “is a kind of medley of players’ voices, orchestrated by Lane himself.’

Lane was ambivalent about the slugging game that Babe Ruth had recently brought to the fore. While he recognized the contribution of heavy hitting to run production, he preferred the “scientific” game of place hitting, bunting, and base stealing. Babe Ruth, Lane wrote in an August 1922 Baseball Magazine article, “assaulted not only the home run record but the long established system of major league batting.” In an article a month earlier he had expressed his regret that the recent rise in slugging had been accompanied by a decline in base stealing, “because the stolen base is one of the flashy, brainy plays in baseball and one of the chief elements of a well directed offense.” Like writer Henry Chadwick of an earlier era (Chadwick’s career ended about three years before Lane’s began), Lane preferred the aesthetic excitement of the inside game over the explosive excitement of slugging—brain over brawn. Lane recognized Ruth’s greatness, but always regarded Ty Cobb as the game’s greatest player. Leverett Smith’s novel index to SABR’s 2001 reprint of Batting—which distinguishes the authors of quoted passages from references to persons—records Lane’s bias, showing that Lane quotes Cobb five times as often as he does Ruth, while otherwise Cobb and Ruth are mentioned about equally.

When Lane left Baseball Magazine after the December 1937 issue, he pretty much left baseball behind him. He edited the annual Little Red Book of Major League Baseball from 1937 through 1948, but his primary attention lay elsewhere. “While I loved the thrill of the game and prized the many interesting characters I was able to meet,” he wrote in his entry for Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement (1955), “sports writing was always a vocation, never an avocation.” He wrote that he departed New York “to give the balance of my life to more congenial tasks.”

Although Lane felt in 1955 that he was “losing the argument with Father Time,” when he left New York in the late 1930s he and his wife Emma—whom he had married in her Brooklyn home in 1914—had nearly a half century of life together yet ahead of them. From their home on Cape Cod— in Wellfleet, adjacent to Truro where Ferdinand had spent his elementary school years—the Lanes traveled the country and the world. For two years—1941-1943—Ferdinand headed the history department at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, where he also taught journalism and geopolitics. In 1941 the college awarded him an honorary doctorate in humanities.

After his brief stint as an academic, Lane turned to writing about what had always most enthralled him: the world of nature. In the six years from 1947 through 1952, Doubleday published five books that Lane wrote for the general reader about the sea and the world’s lakes, rivers, mountains and trees. Lane then wrote three volumes over the next four years—on the sea, insects and flowers—for the Random House “all about” series for young readers. After this flurry of science writing, which included a number of encyclopedia articles, Lane self-published his final book—On Old Cape Cod, a collection of his poems—then settled into what turned out to be twenty-six years of quiet retirement, a period equal to his tenure as editor of Baseball Magazine. He died on April 20, 1984, at age 98, just two months short of his seventieth wedding anniversary. Emma died ten months later.

F. C. Lane may be the most unjustly overlooked of our baseball writers. Lacking the literary repute of a Ring Lardner, the staying power and self-promotional drive of a Henry Chadwick, the memorable phrasemaking of a Grantland Rice, or the brisk conciseness of a Red Smith, the value of Lane’s baseball writing was taken for granted in his day, then forgotten. Unlike Chadwick, who remained active as a baseball writer until the week he died, Lane left the game at midlife. And unlike Red Smith, he never published a collection of his writings.

As Jack Kavanagh wrote in 1996, “A graceful writer, an erudite man, F. C. Lane was more than a contributor to the written word of baseball’s past. He was an adornment.”  Lane’s legacy as a baseball writer seems never to have interested him, so it is up to us who treasure his work to return it to public accessibility.

Sources

This article originally appeared as the foreword to SABR’s 2000 reprint of F.C. Lane’s Batting. The sources consulted by the author are mentioned throughout the article.

Baseball already has had some interesting centennials. In 1939, they celebrated the first 100 years of baseball as an American sport and institution. It was the year the game’s shrine in Cooperstown, New York was officially dedicated. In 1969, they celebrated the golden anniversary of baseball’s first all-pro team, the unbeaten Cincinnati Reds in 1869, with appropriate functions and ceremonies in Washington, Cincinnati, New York and other cities.

In 1971, the game did honor to the National Association, the first professional League to play a regular schedule, with the Athletics of Philadelphia winning the 1871 championship. In 1876, the early National Association was reorganized into the National League, the great and honored major league of today.

In 1973, baseball comes up with another centennial, the 100th birthday of Ernest John (Ernie) Lanigan, early historian of the Hall of Fame, who was king of baseball figures, statistics, records, names and birth-places of players, events and incidents, both ordinary and extraordinary. He was born in Chicago on January 4, 1873, and died in Philadelphia on February 6, 1962.

SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, may well consider the beloved Ernie Lanigan as its patron saint or guardian angel. No man, living or dead, did as much for baseball research as the diligent, untiring, ever-searching Ol’ Ernie.

Damon Runyon, a brilliant baseball writer in the New York press box at the Polo Grounds, New York, in the early part of this century, once referred to Ernie as the “Figger Filbert.” I am sure Ernie never cared for this cognomen. As author of the book The Baseball Cyclopedia, he referred to himself as the “Fearless Writer.”   But, I feel Damon meant Ernie no harm. Lanigan actually was a nut on baseball statistics, and chased down any odd item on baseball with the zeal of a scientist coming up with a new plant, bug, million-year old human bone, or any early caveman’s artifact.

My early New York baseball writing career was closely associated with that of Ernie Lanigan, as I succeeded him as baseball editor of the New York Press in 1911. The Press gave more attention and space to baseball than any of its competitors. It was Lanigan of the Press who was kind enough to teach me how to score, and make out a box score, and some of the tricks of successful metropolitan writing.

However, one must confess that Lanigan was an odd character as a top echelon baseball man. After he spent some two weeks with me in the Giants’ and old New York Highlanders’ press boxes, helping me with my chores and scores, I never again saw him in a major league ball park. I believe he did attend one or two games, and when he worked for the International League as statistician and publicist, he attended a few of their games.

“I really don’t care much about baseball, or looking at ball games, major or minor,” be once confided to me. “All my interest in baseball is in its statistics. I want to know something about every major league ball player, not only what he is hitting, but his full name with all middle names and initials, where they were born, and where they now live.”

He came by his interest in baseball and its statistics, and his writing ability, quite naturally, as his mother, Bertha Spink Lanigan, was a sister of the famous Spink brothers, all born on an island off the shore of Quebec, Canada. First to come to the States was William (Willie) Spink, early St. Louis baseball writer and personal telegraph operator to President U.S. Grant. He was followed by Albert H. Spink, who started The Sporting News in St. Louis in 1886, and eventually by Charles C. Spink, early South Dakota homesteader, who soon became one of the key men in The Sporting News picture. Ernie was a first cousin to J.G. Taylor Spink, for many years the dynamic publisher of The Sporting News, and a second cousin of C.C. Johnson Spink, the present publisher and editor.

George T. Lanigan, Ernest’s father, was a skillful newspaper reporter-editor and poet; and Ernie’s mother, Mrs. Berthan Spink Lanigan, was an early editor of the Ladies Home Journal. A younger brother of Ernie, Harold (Hal) was a successful baseball writer and sports editor in both St. Louis and New York.

Ernest was never was a robust man, and most of his life he battled with some form of illness, especially pulmonary. Several times he had to go to health sanitariums or live in high altitudes. Despite his health problems, and frequent indulgence in bourbon and rye whiskey, he lived to be 89, and had his fine mental faculties and splendid memory, especially of things concerning baseball, right to the end.

He changed jobs frequently, partly because of health and partly because of his independence and rugged individuality. He left the New York Press in 1911 to take a position of assistant to Edward G. Barrow, then the strong new president of the International League. No matter what high positions Barrow later attained, he always demanded almost servile service from his subordinates. Ernie couldn’t live, breath or function at his best under such a boss. During the latter part of the 1911 season, Ernie wasn’t fired from his International League job, nor did he officially quit. He just went out to lunch one day, and never returned.

In his frequent moves, Lanigan served stints as baseball editor of the Cleveland Leader, press representative and auditor of the Syracuse Stars, and business manager of the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm clubs in Dayton, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Eventually, he gravitated back to the International League office when Frank Shaughnessy served as President.

Big names in the world of politics, sports, or the theater meant little to Lanigan; he was strong in his likes, also in his dislikes. On one of Commissioner K.M. Landis‘ periodic trips to New York, he stopped at the International League offices, then in Gotham. He peered for a moment or two at an elderly man seated behind an outside desk, and asked “Didn’t I meet you in Florida?”

The elderly gentleman in the outer office was Ernie Lanigan. “No, you didn’t see me in Florida, or anywhere else,” he said through pursed lips. “Because I have carefully avoided meeting you.”  Judge Landis’ face turned livid. In his long career as a Federal judge, and then as the No. 1 man of baseball, no one ever had spoken to him like that. He started to say something, though better of it and went into the office of the International League President. In the 1920s, when there was a running feud between Landis and Byron Ban Johnson, first American League President, Ernie’s sympathies were entirely with the fighting Ban.

Lanigan worked for his uncles, Al and Charley Spink, of the St. Louis Sporting News, when he was only a teenager. His contributions to baseball were many. He was one of the originals boosters for a national organization of the major league baseball writers, and even had his then young friend, Sid Mercer, do missionary work for such an association when Sid took the road, writing about the New York Giants. He saw his dreams become reality when the Baseball Writers Association of America was successfully launched in New York in December 1908.

His big gift to the field of baseball statistics is the important Runs Batted In (RBI) column of today. He and his New York Press sports editor, Jim Price, used to enter “Runs Batted In”, and “base-runners thrown out by catcher” in the lower part of the Press box-scores of New York teams. They appeared in no other big city newspapers. Eventually, Lanigan induced John Heydler, then secretary of the National League, to include these figures in his official averages. Later, they were taken up by the Associated Press in their nation-wide coverage of big league games.

In 1946, Shaughnessy loaned Lanigan to the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y. Although he took a strong distaste to his title as “Curator of the Museum”, Lanigan grew roots in the pretty town on Otsego Lake, and stayed there for the remainder of his working days. After a few years, he was able to turn over active direction of the museum, and he concentrated his efforts as historian of the Hall of Fame. He continued in this post until old age caused him to retire. Lee Allen succeeded him as Hall of Fame historian in 1959.

While baseball statistics were Ernie Lanigan’s first love, he did have a keen interest in orchestral music. Among his many jobs, he was treasurer and press representative for the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra in 1902-04. But, even when Ernie was getting his pay and groceries from this great orchestra, he still had time to dabble with baseball “facts and figgers.”  If the tuba player had a cousin in Oshkosh who played third base for the Cardinals, Ernie would not rest until he had the payer’s middle name, something on his antecedents, and whether he had been a pitcher before he switched to the hot corner.

As Judge Landis once said of Ernie’s cousin, Taylor Spink, “There never could be another like him. After God made him, he threw away the mold.”  So the same is true of Ernest John Lanigan, and for the same reason.

Sources

This article originally appeared in Baseball Research Journal, Volume 2 — February 1973, Society for American Baseball Research, Washington, D.C. The primary source for this recollection was Fred Lieb’s extraordinary memory and mind. Lieb wrote a two-page obituary for Lanigan in the February 14, 1962 edition of The Sporting News, and much of the material in this piece can be found there.

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.

Henry Chadwick, baseball’s first historian, tried to capture a game in a chart for his newspaper readers. It was called a box score, and as it evolved over the years, it offered the raw material for the statistically minded to analyze, understand, and appreciate the game. There were dozens who followed, from Ernie Lanigan, longtime baseball writer and editor, to fans sitting at their dining room tables with pencils and, maybe, a mechanical calculator.

Allan Roth pushed the analysis of baseball statistics to a new level. He promoted himself into a place those other analysts only aspired to. Roth was the first to be employed full time by a major-league team, “the only zealot lucky enough to work for a major league team and to get to test his theories first hand.”1

Abraham Roth was born in Montreal on May 10, 1917, the son of Nathan and Rose (Silverheart). Nathan, a tailor, had emigrated from Galicia (which straddles the current Poland/Ukraine border) in 1899 at the age of 15. Rose probably came from Bucavina, an area then part of Romania, but now in Ukraine. She arrived about 1910.2 Abraham had an older brother, Max, who became a leading Canadian architect, and a younger sister Sylvia.

Nathan worked as a tailor and the family moved around Ontario province before returning to Montreal during Abraham’s high school years, when he attended Strathcona Academy, playing all the major sports. He also spent many free hours from ages 13 to 16, compiling statistics for the International League and his home town Montreal Royals. He passed the entrance examination for McGill University, where Max was already studying. Family circumstances, however, prevented paying for a second college student, so Abraham took a job. He worked as a salesman, first of magazines and later of men’s ties, suspenders, belts and mufflers.3

In July 1940, Abraham married Esther Machlovitch and the following winter, changed his name to Allan. Later that year, he began his pursuit of “the type of work that I wanted to do.”4 From an early age, he had been mathematically oriented, entertaining himself and his family at age three by counting backwards from 100 by twos.5 In his spare time, he had done both hockey and baseball statistics, developing the breakdowns which would characterize his later work.

In December 1940, Roth wrote to Leland “Larry” MacPhail, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, seeking an appointment to discuss work as a statistician. He tried again in June and August of the next year. He met MacPhail in the Mount Royal Hotel in Montreal and explained his ideas. MacPhail was, at best, non-committal.6 But, Roth decided to take the plunge, quit his job in men’s clothing and began to compile statistics on professional hockey. In October 1941, Roth showed his work to Frank Calder, president of the National Hockey League, who hired him to be the league’s official statistician and to write for the league’s publicity sheet. His progress was interrupted three months later, when he was drafted into the Canadian Army.7

The Army at least recognized his talents and he was put in charge of all the records and statistics of the unit charged with organizing reinforcement contingents for Canadian Forces in Europe. In January 1944, Roth was discharged due to epilepsy, which was of the petit mal variety, and not likely to affect his work.8 He began to write sports features for the Montreal Standard and to compile statistics for the Montreal Canadiens. But, he kept his focus on the Dodgers because he considered Branch Rickey, MacPhail’s successor as Dodger president, the most innovative man in sports.

In April 1944, three months after his military discharge, he wangled a meeting with Rickey at the Dodgers spring training site in Bear Mountain, just north of New York City. It was a disaster, Roth said. The dinner included Mrs. Rickey and was in the main dining room of the Bear Mountain Inn, the premier hotel in the region. Rickey was constantly being interrupted by well-wishers. Roth despaired of making a coherent presentation. Finally, Roth told Rickey he didn’t think he was getting a fair shake. Asked what he wanted, Roth responded, “Ten minutes of your undivided attention.”9

Rickey asked that Roth send Ed Staples, his assistant, a detailed outline of Roth’s ideas. The four-page letter contained proposals to track a wide range of statistics. Some of these were standard, but others, such as where the ball was hit and the count it was hit on, hadn’t been compiled regularly. Roth also proposed to break the statistics down into various categories that would reveal tendencies which the front office and the manager could use to win ballgames. Breakdowns such as performance against left-handers and right-handers, in day games versus night games, in the various ballparks, in situations with runners in scoring position, are all mundane to us now. But in Roth’s time, they were rarely compiled or used, and never part of the public discussion. The letter was intriguing enough to get a meeting with a still-skeptical Rickey. The conversation turned positive, Roth said, when Rickey asked him about runs batted in. Roth said he didn’t think much of runs batted in unless they were correlated with the chances to drive them in, and differentiated again by which base they’d been drive in from. This meshed with Rickey’s own beliefs and the conversation flowered. Roth was offered the job.10

But, with World War II, and then the U.S. government’s fears that returning servicemen would have a hard time finding jobs as military production was cut back, Roth couldn’t get a visa until 1947. Even then, Rickey had some difficulty persuading his partners, Walter O’Malley and John Smith, to approve a $5,000 salary.11

The Roth era began on Opening Day, April 15, 1947, with the Dodgers hosting the Boston Braves at Ebbets Field. Braves shortstop’s Dick Culler’s ground out to third base was the first plate appearance to go into Roth’s specially designed 17×14 inch sheets. Beginning that day, Roth would record virtually every pitch in a Dodger game for the next 18 seasons. The game itself was only part of his day. He estimated he spent another five hours daily, at a minimum, updating the breakdowns on the Dodgers and their opponents. In the offseason, he would refine the numbers further, seeking longer term trends and finding the outliers. Everyone knew right-handed hitters generally performed more poorly against right-handed pitchers and vice versa. Roth would look for, and find, the left-handed hitter who broke the mold and could provide a manager with an unexpected platoon advantage. He tracked bases advanced, a metric that encompassed baserunning statistics as well as the ability to move runners along with outs. He recorded what happened at each point in the count, what happened in bunting situations and differences between night and day games, home and away games, and in individual stadiums. No other team had access to such analysis at that time.

Unlike contemporary statistical analysts, Roth generally ignored higher mathematics. “The figures concerned in baseball statistical work don’t call for integral calculus or even advanced algebra,” he said.12 And he also recognized their limits. “I know perfectly well that baseball cannot be played one hundred percent according to figures, and that the human element is even more important. I realize that certain sets of figures on players and teams will change from time to time, but nevertheless, by a deep and systematic research into the detailed statistics which I have in mind, there is bound to come to light numerous facts which were previously unknown, and which would prove of great value.”13 His records would become voluminous. When the team moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles a decade later, newspapers reported Roth’s data took up more space than the rest of the Dodgers’ archives.14

In fact, outside of baseball, Roth wasn’t much of a numbers guy at all. He didn’t do his own taxes.15 He couldn’t remember his phone number.16 What he would do is record the numbers in myriad detail and then use his true talent, recognizing what the numbers meant, to provide value to his employers. He summed up his philosophy: “Baseball is a game of percentages — I try to find the actual percentage, which is constantly shifting, and apply it to the situation where it will do the most good.”17

In his first season, for example, Roth used another of his innovations — spray charts showing the location of all of a player’s batted balls — to show that Dixie Walker’s hits were going to the opposite field more and more frequently. Rickey, following his own dictum that it was better to trade a player a year too early, sent Walker to the Pirates. “The People’s Cherce” hit .316 in 1948, but was down to .282 the next year, and became a player-manager in the minors.18 A year after his Walker revelation, Roth’s numbers showed that in 1948, Jackie Robinson drove in a higher percentage of baserunners than any other hitter in the lineup. Manager Burt Shotton moved Robinson, who had barely broken into double digits with 12 homers, into the cleanup spot. He hit only four more home runs in 1949, but drove in 124 and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award.19

Roth’s major league debut was missed in the tumult surrounding Jackie Robinson’s that same day, but reporters soon began to notice the latest addition to the Dodgers’ traveling party. By June 1947, The Sporting News contained a note that Allen (sic) Roth, a “slide-rule expert,” was providing Rickey with numbers to analyze the team.20 In those days, Roth’s numbers were considered proprietary and not made public, adding to the mystery. But he would generate awed publicity — the “flesh-and-blood electronic brain” or “Mechanical Brain Can’t Match Roth’s” and some fear on the part of players, who saw him as Rickey’s hatchet man, especially after the Walker trade.21

In looking for meaning in the numbers, Roth’s methodology was much like that of Bill James and later members of the Society for American Baseball Research — take a piece of accepted baseball wisdom and analyze whether it was true. “Some fellows have mentioned that batting average increases of ten or 12 points would result from the sacrifice fly rule,” Roth said during a 1953 discussion of scoring rules, “The figures on the Dodgers for the last two years don’t come anywhere near such figures.”22

Rickey’s departure from the Dodgers after the 1950 season meant changes for Roth. The new owner, Walter O’Malley, was dedicated to the business side of the organization. The new manager, Charlie Dressen, managed by the seat of his pants and, after receiving Roth’s work politely, would quickly deposit it in the trash can.23 The new head baseball man, Buzzie Bavasi, cottoned to Roth slowly.

Roth’s working position was moved from a seat behind home plate to the press box. To Roth, the move felt like a demotion, and he felt unappreciated.24 He quit classifying the pitches because he didn’t feel he could do it accurately from his new perspective. O’Malley moved him to the press and public relations operation, a department the new president understood. Roth’s tidbits began to appear regularly in the newspaper columns and he was put in charge of a publication called Press Box Pickups. Distributed to reporters each game day during the season, the magazine was filled with Roth’s statistics as well as promotional material. He provided extensive statistical sections for the team’s yearbooks and media guides.

In 1954, he was moved into the radio booth to feed timely material to the Dodger announcers and quickly struck up a strong friendship with Vin Scully, who was becoming the team’s lead announcer. “If you had some question that came to you in the middle of a game, he would reach down into the bag, and next thing you knew you’d have your answer. It was marvelous,” said Scully.25 This partnership had an additional benefit to the team’s bottom line — the broadcast sponsors began to pay half Roth’s salary.26 A few years later, Roth’s spot in the booth included a link to the press box P.A. system, where his choicer items could be relayed live to reporters. He was always available to reporters looking for statistics to back up an angle or ideas for something to write on a slow day. The Dodger switchboard directed all queries of a statistical nature to Roth’s desk, and he settled a great number of bar bets. He even tried to answer queries from long before his time or his statistics, such as why Dodger pitcher Henry Schmidt, who went 22-13 for the 1903 Dodgers at age 30, never pitched in the majors again. Schmidt, a Texas native, had decided he didn’t like living in the East and returned his 1904 contract unsigned.27

Roth kept up his interest in the more analytical side of his statistical work. As the only full-time team statistician, he became a magnet for others working in the field and an inspiration to many young men who would write him for advice about how they could get into his line of work. He corresponded with Nathan McFadgen, Charles Mercurio, Paul Simpson, Tony Johncola, and others, all researchers with a statistical bent who were self-publishing their findings.

In 1954, Roth’s work hit the big time — with a heavy coating of Branch Rickey. Life Magazine, one of the largest-circulation magazines in the country, ran an article titled “Goodby [sic] to Some Old Baseball Ideas.” The article said it had been written by Branch Rickey, whose picture graced the first page. Roth’s back is visible in the background of that photo, and he is pictured on the article’s third page, along with a multipart equation. That equation was clearly Roth’s work; Rickey called the equation, “the most disconcerting and at the same time the most constructive thing to come into baseball in my memory.” Thirty years later, John Thorn and Pete Palmer, in their seminal book, The Hidden Game of Baseball, wrote “Rickey and Roth’s fundamental contribution to the advancement of baseball statistics comes from their conceptual revisionism, their willingness to strip the game down to its basic unit, the run, and reconstruct its statistics accordingly.”28

In many ways, “The Equation” was years ahead of its time. Its first two terms were what we today call on-base percentage and isolated power. It would take the book Moneyball half a century later to cement the importance of on-base percentage. The equation, which contained eight different terms, including pieces devoted to run-scoring efficiency, pitching, and fielding, was vastly complicated for contemporary baseball organizations. In his history of baseball analytics, Alan Schwarz summarizes the impact of Roth’s equation: “No evidence exists that anyone took it seriously.”

While Roth may have felt unappreciated within the Dodger organization, it could not have been completely unexpected. Roth’s 1944 letter to Ed Staples outlining the benefits of employing him had suggested exactly the kind of press and public relations work Roth was now performing. More significantly, it is clear the Dodgers didn’t see him merely as a producer of press releases and statistical tidbits.

As the 1951 season tottered to a close, the Dodgers felt they had an insurmountable lead — 12 1/2 games on the morning of August 13. So, they detached Roth with scout Andy High for a two-week tour to follow the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians, the two leading contenders for the American League flag. High would make the traditional scouting report, while Roth would add his statistical insights. These two weeks encompassed the only Dodger games Roth missed from 1947 to 1964. The Dodgers’ pennant hopes succumbed to an unbelievable charge by the New York Giants. O’Malley sent Roth a note of thanks.29

It wasn’t just game statistics where Roth’s opinion was sought. That same year, O’Malley sent Roth a pamphlet titled “American Baseball Needs Four Major Leagues” and asked for his opinion of the arguments. The book dealt with questions of population shifts, markets and the structure of major and minor leagues. Roth responded with some mostly statistical comments on the work.30

O’Malley turned to Roth again after the 1954 season, and it’s clear that he was concerned about Walter Alston, who had just finished his rookie season as the Dodgers’ manager. Each year, Roth produced a book which summarized the team’s just-ended season. There were only four copies made — for O’Malley, Bavasi, Alston, and Roth. In mid-December 1954, O’Malley queried Roth on when he’d be able to see the report.31 Roth delivered the report two weeks later, discussing reasons for the Dodgers poorer 1954 performance. He noted some pitching and hitting declines but also suggested Alston wasn’t conducting as aggressive a running game as had Dressen.32 In reply, O’Malley posed additional questions about the number of “hit and run” and “run and hit” plays called, as well as stolen base attempts. “There was a change of managers,” O’Malley wrote, “Is there any significance (to that)? Was club direction less enterprising?”33

Roth began assuming again more of the role he had played under Rickey. But now his analysis was not going just to Rickey, but to the manager and directly to individual players. On Friday, September 18, 1959, the Dodgers arrived in San Francisco for a key series against the Giants. The team was two games behind the Giants and tied with the Milwaukee Braves. With only eight games left in the season, they need a sweep to have any realistic hope of making the World Series. Friday night’s game was rained out and Alston announced that Don Drysdale, who’d been scheduled to start Friday, would pitch the first game Saturday afternoon. Roger Craig would start the Saturday evening game. When Roth saw that Saturday morning, he went to Alston and pointed out that Drysdale’s night-game record was substantially better than his daytime performance while Craig showed little difference. Alston switched the pitchers, Los Angeles won both games, and Sunday as well. The Dodgers finished the season in a tie with the Braves, won the tie-breaker playoff and the World Series for an improbable championship.34

After the move to Los Angeles, Roth started to attend spring training in Vero Beach, something he hadn’t done early in the Brooklyn years.35 Now he met with each player, along with one of the coaches, and went over their performance the previous year, emphasizing positives as well as negatives and suggesting changes that could improve the player’s statistics. Sandy Koufax would credit such sessions in the early 1960s with helping him learn to emphasize first-pitch strikes and taking something off the ball.36 In the dugout, coach Pete Reiser had a set of Roth’s 5×8-inch cards with summaries of player performance keyed to the opposing pitching staff.37

Roth also began a campaign that would ultimately result in the creation of the statistic for a reliever’s “Saves.” In 1951, Roth began to keep track of such situations and began sharing the number with reports several years later.38 By 1964, pushed by sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, major league publicity directors approved the version of the save that we’re familiar with today, although the formula is a bit different from the one devised by Roth.39

A few months after the coronation of his invention, Roth was fired by the Dodgers. It was done very quietly. The team made no announcement and it wasn’t until reporters asked about Roth’s absence from a late-season road trip that the team announced he had resigned because he was tired of all the travel.40 He may have been tired of the travel, but that wasn’t why he was fired. Walter O’Malley hated negative publicity and also had a fear, born in the early years of baseball’s integration, that any news of inter-racial sexual relations could cause an outcry. 41 Bavasi said Roth had developed a relationship with an African-American woman who traveled with him, and then gotten into a screaming match with her in a Philadelphia hotel corridor.42

Roth’s marriage would end in divorce a little over a year later. But he still needed to provide a living for his wife, children, and himself. He began to expand his already extensive freelancing.

Roth’s first article in The Sporting News had been published in 1946, while he was waiting for his visa to join the Dodgers.43 There was a long hiatus until the next one, when he got his first byline in 1959.44 Within weeks of his firing, he was contributing regularly.45 He revived a monthly column he’d written for Sport magazine from 1952 until 1960.46 He continued to edit the annual Who’s Who in Baseball, which he’d done since the 1954 issue. He contributed statistical data for Koufax, by Sandy Koufax and Ed Linn, and the publisher felt it important enough to be included in advertising for the book.47 He collaborated with Harold Rosenthal on the spring training magazines from MACO publishing.48

In 1966, NBC came calling with its new contract for the Game of the Week, the All-Star Game, and the World Series. The Sporting News column disappeared and for the next decade, Roth would sit between Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek, feeding them the kind of statistical nuggets he’d supplied to Scully for years. A few years later, he moved to ABC to provide the same service. As always, Roth traveled heavy. On his weekly flight from Los Angeles to wherever the broadcast was originating, he was accompanied by several suitcases stuffed with his notebooks, charts and graphs.49 As he did all his life, his calculations were made with pencil, paper, and often internal calculation.

In the offseason, Roth attended meetings of the Los Angeles chapter of SABR, which was named after him. He’d usually speak, presenting some of his recent findings and answering questions, which often ranged far from his current work.

While spending his time providing statistical nuggets for the broadcasters, Roth continued his exploration of ways teams could use statistics to improve performance. He consulted for 20 major league teams and identified Joe Morgan as the league’s most valuable player long before voters did.50 Harking back to his early talks with Branch Rickey, Roth focused on Morgan’s on-base percentage, power, and stolen base success. In a discussion with the San Francisco Giants, he made a case that the tactic of guarding the lines late in games wasn’t as effective as believed. The Giants changed their practices.51

Ill health forced Roth to retire in the late 1980s and he died of a heart attack in Brotman Hospital in Culver City on March 3, 1992.

Roth was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2010. “He was the guy who began it all,” said Bill James. “He took statisticians into a brave new world.”

A version of this article originally appeared in the Spring 2014 edition of the Baseball Research Journal.

Notes

1 Alan Schwarz. The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 55.

2 Immigration and family information courtesy of Alan Greenberg of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal. Much of the material about his youth is contained in biographical handouts produced when Roth was with the Dodgers and included in his papers, which are housed at Case Western Reserve University. C. David Stephan and volunteers such as Chuck Carey and Sam James, who preserved the papers after Roth’s death. Thanks to Alain Usereau for pointing me to the Genealogical Society.

3 Roth to Edward Staples, Brooklyn Baseball Club, April 4, 1944, Allan Roth papers.

4 Roth to Edward Staples, Brooklyn Baseball Club, April 4, 1944, Allan Roth papers.

5 Schwarz, The Numbers Game, 56.

6 L.S. MacPhail to Roth, December 19, 1940 and June 6, 1941. Roth to L.S. MacPhail, Aug. 4, 1941, Roth papers.

7 Roth to Staples.

8 Roth to Staples.

9 Harold C. Burr, “Dull Statistics Alive Under Magic Roth Touch,” Brooklyn Eagle, January 11, 1953.

10 Burr, and Harold Rosenthal, ed., “The Statistician,” in Baseball is Their Business (New York: Random House, 1952), 140.

11 Branch Rickey, Memo, April 23, 1947, Branch Rickey papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Also, Murray Polner, Branch Rickey (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 210. Interestingly, in his letter to Staples, Roth had proposed a salary of $30 a week, or $1,560 annually.

12 Rosenthal, ed., Baseball is Their Business, 139.

13 Roth to MacPhail, August 4, 1941, Roth papers.

14 Los Angeles Mirror News, July 21, 1959; Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1963.

15 New York Times, February 19, 1961.

16 Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1958.

17 Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1960.

18 Schwarz, Numbers Game, 54-5.

19 Rosenthal, ed., Baseball is Their Business, 140.

20 The Sporting News, June 4, 1947.

21 People Today, July 2, 1952: 28 and New York Herald-Tribune, clipping in Allan Roth papers, probably from late 1952. Schwarz, Numbers Game, 57.

22 The Sporting News, November 25, 1953.

23 Schwarz, Numbers Game, 57.

24 Interview, Michael Roth (Allan’s son), March 4, 1997.

25 Schwarz, Numbers Game, 58.

26 Los Angeles Mirror News, July 21, 1959.

27 Richard Goldstein, Superstars and Screwballs (New York: Dutton, 1991), 79.

28 John Thorn and Pete Palmer, The Hidden Game of Baseball (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 42.

29 O’Malley to Roth, October 30, 1951, Roth papers.

30 Roth to O’Malley, November 1, 1951, Roth papers.

31 O’Malley to Roth, December 14, 1954, Roth papers.

32 Roth to O’Malley, December 28, 1954, Roth papers.

33 O’Malley to Roth, January 7, 1955, multiple handwritten notes, Roth papers.

34 This anecdote is contained in a three-page document in the Roth papers that is clearly a draft of an updated biosheet for Roth after the 1959 season. It is undated, and has the number 1. Centered at the top of the page followed by Roth’s name, birthdate, birthplace, and the rest of the material.

35 Rosenthal, ed., Baseball is Their Business, 137.

36 Sandy Koufax with Ed Linn, Koufax (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), 148 and Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 106.

37 Walter Bingham, “Dodgers in Mufti,” Sports Illustrated, August 15, 1960: 69.

38 The Sporting News, January 30, 1957: 8.

39 The Sporting News, December 21, 1963: 10; April 18, 1964: 34; and May 2, 1964: 6.

40 Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, September 2 and September 3, 1964. Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1964.

41 Frank Graham, Jr., A Farewell to Heroes (New York: The Viking Press, 1981), 253.

42 Interview, Buzzie Bavasi, August 30, 1994.

43 The Sporting News, January 31, 1946: 15.

44 The Sporting News, January 7, 1959: 11.

45 The first appeared October 10, 1964:16 and others appeared sporadically through February 1966.

46 Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1965.

47 The Sporting News, August 27, 1966: 10.

48 Rosenthal to Roth, September 7, 1964 and December 11, 1964 in Roth papers. From the letters, it’s clear even as close a friend as Rosenthal didn’t know the real cause of Roth’s firing.

49 The Sporting News, April 18, 1970: 28.

50 The Sporting News, October 25, 1975: 3.

51 The Sporting News, January 22, 1971: 42.