When I joined SABR in mid-1981, ten years after its founding, I could not imagine the future, neither the society’s nor mine. I was a defrocked English Lit guy poking around in journalism. I had written a couple of baseball books — “on the side,” I told myself, though my central endeavor was by no means known. If I didn’t have the chops to play with Dickens and Dostoevsky, I figured, maybe I could write baseball books for real grownups, like those of Larry Ritter and Harold Seymour, already longtime idols for me.

After covering the SABR convention in Toronto for The Sporting News, and meeting so many strange and wonderful individuals, I knew I had found a spiritual home, a place where my nose for mathematics, my curiosity about history, and my love of the game’s imagery made me a fit with like minds: Pete Palmer, Bob Carroll, John Holway, and Mark Rucker, among so many others.

It struck me in the fall of 1981 that SABR’s main vehicle for publication, The Baseball Research Journal, hosted outstanding research but was editorially narrow and visually unappealing. I proposed to the Executive Board — consisting of Kit Crissey, Jerry Gregory, Vern Luse, Bob Soderman, John Pardon, Cliff Kachline, Frank Phelps, and Stan Grosshandler — that I create a new publication to broaden our scope and look to appeal to a somewhat wider, non-specialist readership. Maybe, I figured, such an “American Heritage of Baseball,” as I thought of it, might even give a boost to SABR membership. On January 9, 1982, the board gave me a green light.

That they also provided no funding — except for the cost of typeset, printing, paper, and mailing — meant that I would have to scramble a bit, but that was OK. I enlisted contributors — those mentioned above, my newfound friends, my onetime idols, and veteran authors, journalists, and researchers. Gordon Fleming, author of The Unforgettable Season, a pioneering new form of baseball book, sent me a brilliant treatment of the Merkle Boner. Dr. Seymour and David Voigt, who had long disapproved of each other, took the roles of lion and lamb for this new journal, coexisting peaceably and contributing bold, fresh articles. Baseball Research Journal regulars like Art Ahrens, Al Kermisch, and Ted DiTullio contributed fine pieces. And an unpublished researcher, a bank accounting officer named Frank J. Williams, submitted an exhaustive article, handwritten on yellow legal paper, which upon publication became a landmark in the history of baseball record keeping (See: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/all-the-record-books-are-wrong-340d12173b88.)

I designed the publication and on my kitchen table laid out the reproduction proof with paste pot and Exacto knife. I created the headlines with Letraset transfer type and a burnishing tool, as our printer Dean Coughenour of Manhattan, Kansas, could not obtain display-size versions of the type I had specified. If all this sounds like complaint, then I have failed to strike the proper tone. Trust me, it was heaven. I could not have believed more fervently than I did in the opening words of my “house column”:

The National Pastime has sprung into being to depict the panorama of baseball, from its murky beginnings on up to last night’s news, showing that the past of this great game is every bit as exciting as its present.

The debut issue was mailed in late October and immediately met with rave reviews. Its nominal cost was $5, but that was paid only by nonmembers — whose cost could be reduced to nothing if they added $10 to purchase a SABR membership. Our rolls rose from 1250 in July 1981 to 2800 at year end, 1982. In the June/July 1983 issue of American Heritage, which had been my model for TNP, the editor wrote:

Thorn, who assembled the portfolio of baseball pictures in this issue, is editor of The National Pastime, a handsomely produced publication sponsored by the Society for American Baseball Research (P.O. Box 323, Cooperstown, NY 13326). And like all of SABR’s three thousand members, he is interested in exploring and preserving the legacy of the sport.

Actually by the time that issue of AH hit the stands, SABR membership had climbed to nearly 4000. This debut issue, which even in reprint more than three decades later, still looks handsome to me, also won an honorable mention in the 1983 PRINT Magazine annual review of the nation’s top achievements in the graphic arts.

But enough button-popping about the look of the thing. It is the quality of the writing that will impress most today, as it did then.

Click the image below to download the complete article (PDF):

The matching jackets, I knew, had been purchased by the Browns’ flamboyant owner, Chris Von Der Ahe, who reportedly had spent $20,000 on accommodations for the team’s 1888 championship series against the Giants. What the greyhounds were doing in the picture I had no idea. When I returned to my table with the photo, a friend and fellow 19th-century collector remarked that he had read about the dogs in one of a series of three books by Al Spink entitled Spink Sport Stories.

In an interesting coincidence I had just purchased this series myself, so I made a mental note to browse through the books and try to find that specific item. Since the three volumes consisted of 1000 stories and ran over 1400 pages, I was not optimistic of obtaining speedy satisfaction; however, fortune was on my side as the story appeared in the first 50 pages of Volume 1. It goes like this:

In the mid-1880s Peoria, Illinois, was an enthusiastic baseball town. Charlie Flynn was the baseball team’s president and doubled as chief of police. Flynn was a friend of most ballplayers who came through town and probably knew everyone in the National League and American Association.

Spink recalled that one Thursday night in St. Louis ca. 1885, he was aroused by Flynn at an unorthodox hour. Flynn complained, “Saturday we play Davenport the deciding game for the championship.” He went on, “Fish Hall [Peoria’s pitcher] tried to turn Peoria dry and now he has the ‘jimmies.’ Nothing will save us but another pitcher.” Flynn urged Spink to get him a pitcher immediately “with speed like Old Rad when he was right and a cool head like Clarkson.” Spink got dressed and went looking for the “Egyptian,” who, he knew, had just come into town.

The “Egyptian” was John Healy and he hailed from Cairo, Illinois – hence the nickname. Spink and Flynn found Healy in his boarding house. Healy said he couldn’t possibly pitch in the championship game for Peoria, and pointed to two greyhounds he had brought with him from “Egypt.” He said his first business was to sell the dogs, and he could not leave them for a moment. Spink offered to help sell the dogs for Healy. The Egyptian said, “If you can, I’ll go with you to Peoria and win that flag for Flynn and his bunch.”

Spink and Flynn took the dogs to Faust’s tavern on Broadway, where Chris Von Der Ahe was throwing down a few. Immediately on sight of the dogs, he said he wanted them. Spink wrote, “Charlie Flynn and I put the $300 in Healy’s pocket, hurried him to the railway station, and on the next Saturday John Healy and the Peoria team swept Davenport from the face of the earth.”

What became of the dogs? Von Der Ahe named them Fly and Prince. Prince was given to John Botto, the owner of the Louisville club. Fly died in the fire that destroyed old Sportsman’s Park, despite Von Der Ahe’s efforts to save him.

And Egyptian Healy, who came into the National League, according to Spink, with “the skill of a wizard, speed to burn, and an uncanny command of the ball,” went on to a mediocre eight year big-league career topped by his selection for the World Tour squad in 1889.

(Click image to enlarge)

These seven were Bill Terry, Rogers Hornsby, Travis Jackson, Fred Lindstrom, Edd Roush, Mel Ott, and Burleigh Grimes. An eighth Giant Hall of Famer, outfielder Ross “Pep” Youngs, was on the roster before the 1927 season opened; but Youngs developed Bright’s Disease, did not appear in a regular-season game, and died shortly after the season ended. How this constellation of all-time stars came together in the Polo Grounds in 1927 is an interesting story.

First baseman Bill Terry, a big, slightly stoop shouldered Southern native elected to the Hall of Fame in 1954, had his first big major league season in 1927, hitting .326 and batting in 121 runs. A handsome, ambitious young man with jet-black hair and a pronounced Southern drawl, Memphis Bill played what Polo Grounds devotees considered to be the most graceful and effective first base this side of Hal Chase and George Sisler.

Terry was a powerful left hand hitter who specialized in drilling low line drives into the alleys rather than pulling the ball down the Polo Grounds’ short right-field line. This style enabled him to hit for high average (he was the last National League hitter to scale the .400 mark with his .401 in 1930) and to collect an impressive number of extra base hits. Typically, in 1927 Terry hit 13 triples and only 20 home runs.

Terry was a hard-headed realist and shrewd businessman. The realistic side of the Terry personality manifested itself in his first meeting with manager john McGraw. The Giants were in Memphis in April 1922, on the way to New York to start the regular season, and Memphis club owner Tom Watkins told his old friend McGraw about Terry, then a 23-year-old semi-pro left hand pitcher. Bill had performed in the Texas League in 1916-17, but quit to take a job with the Standard Oil Company office in Memphis.

At Watkins’ suggestion, Terry visited McGraw in the Giant manager’s hotel room. McGraw was impressed by the serious Terry but somewhat taken aback. Accustomed to young players who would have given anything for a shot with the Giants, McGraw said to Terry, “How would you like to come to New York with us?” Without batting an eye, Terry responded, “For how much?” McGraw’s broad Irish grin was replaced by a frown as he said sharply, “I’m not sure you understand. I’m giving you a chance to make the Giants if you can.” Terry drawled pleasantly, “Please understand, Mr. McGraw, I’m not impressed by the Giants unless you can offer me a lot more money than I’m making here working regular hours and playing local ball. I’m married, we have a child and a nice home, and I’m not leaving it unless you can make it worth my while.” The nonplussed McGraw said, “There’s no hurry. Let me think about it.” Terry got to his feet, shook hands with McGraw, and said softly, ”You can reach me in care of Standard Oil if you want to contact me.” He walked out leaving a thoughtful McGraw behind.

A few weeks later McGraw wired Terry, offering him a $5000 contract with the Giants retaining an option on Terry if he was sent to the minors. Terry accepted and reported but, impressing McGraw more with his hitting than with his pitching, was sent to Toledo to be converted into a first baseman. Terry was recalled near the end of the 1923 season and stayed with the Giants for the rest of his career, going on to replace McGraw at the helm in 1932.

Second baseman Rogers Hornsby hit .361 and batted in 125 runs for the 1927 Giants. Incredibly, this was something of a comedown for the great Rajah, who had averaged a cool .402 during the 1921-1925 period with a high of.424 in 1924. While Hornsby’s playing performance was all the Giants had hoped for when they obtained him from the St. Louis Cardinals before the 1927 season, in every other respect, the mix of Hornsby and the Giants was a disaster.

Hornsby, who made the Hall of Fame in 1942, left his native Winters, Texas, in 1914 to play in the Texas Oklahoma League. The Cardinals picked him up in 1915 and by 1920 he had gained recognition as one of the foremost right hand hitters in the game. He became the Cardinals’ playing-manager on June 1, 1925 and in 1926 he managed the Redbirds to a pennant and a World Series over the Yankees in a dramatic seven-game set.

Hornsby, like Ty Cobb and Ted Williams, sometimes was accused of “living for his next time at bat.” Still, despite his preoccupation with hitting, he was considered a good second baseman, although, almost incomprehensibly, he had difficulty handling deep pop flies. Hornsby did not drink or smoke and he stuck to a diet of steak and potatoes, reasoning that a “hitter needs his strength.” To conserve his keen eyesight for hitting baseballs, the Texan did not go to movies and he read very little except the Racing Form. His major off-the-field passion was betting on the ponies, an avocation which would cost him most of his life savings. Above all, Hornsby was outspoken and, in the words of a veteran New York writer, “the most tactless public figure I ever met.”

The Giants obtained Hornsby from the Cardinals, to the astonishment of St. Louis fans, on December 20, 1926 in exchange for second baseman Frank Frisch and pitcher Jimmy Ring. (Hornsby’s contractual demands were greater than the Cardinals would pay, and Frisch had been ticketed for a trade following a violent argument with McGraw which resulted in Frisch’s jumping the club in September 1926.) Six weeks after the trade, National League President John Heydler belatedly ordered Hornsby to sell his 1,167 shares of stock in the Cardinals before playing for the Giants. Owner Sam Breadon reminded Hornsby that when he acquired the stock in 1924, it was for $45 a share. Rogers retorted, “Hell, they’re worth $120 now because I won the pennant and Series for you!” Eventually, according to Fred Lieb, Breadon paid Hornsby $80,000, the Giants kicked in $16,000, and the National League put up an additional $16,000. Rogers’ two-year capital gain thus came to a tidy $59,485.

At about the same time as the stock matter, a Kentucky betting commissioner sued Hornsby unsuccessfully for $70,000 to collect Hornsby’s alleged unpaid gambling debts. Although Hornsby was acquitted, the baseball establishment was unhappy about the accompanying bad publicity.

Hornsby signed a two-year contract with the Giants for $40,000 a year, which made him the second-highest-paid player in the game after Babe Ruth. McGraw immediately appointed Hornsby team captain-the least he could do for a man who had managed his club to a World Series victory the previous season. A few weeks into spring training, a writer asked Hornsby, “Not for publication, Rog, what do you think of the outfield situation with Edd Roush holding out?” The newly appointed field leader answered with his usual bluntness, “First, I don’t talk ‘not for publication.’ Anything I say you can put in the paper and if anyone doesn’t like it he can lump it. Second, I think the outfield stinks. With Roush out of center field, all those clowns are running into each other.” There was considerable consternation in the Giant front office over that unvarnished commentary while the club was engaged in delicate salary negotiations with Roush.

Hornsby’s worsening position with management was matched by a deterioration in his relationships with his teammates. Several times during the 1927 season Hornsby took over as acting manager for the absent McGraw, and he succeeded in alienating the other players by insisting, “To hell with what McGraw told you, you’ll do things my way when the Old Man isn’t here.” McGraw’s reaction was not reported.

The last straw came in September when acting manager Hornsby cussed out club president Charles A. Stoneham in the clubhouse after Stoneham had had the temerity to question a point of strategy. An infuriated Stoneham told close friends later that Hornsby was finished with the Giants. With no clear indication that McGraw supported the deal, Stoneham personally announced the trade of Hornsby to the Boston Braves for two undistinguished players on January 10, 1928.

Shortstop Travis “Stonewall” Jackson, a Hall of Fame selection in 1982, had one of his best seasons for the Giants in 1927, hitting .318 and driving in 98 runs. In his sixth year with the Giants, the native of Waldo, Arkansas, was recognized as a classic ”ballplayers’ ballplayer”-widely respected and liked, a great fielding shortstop with a rifle arm, a superb bunter and hit-and-run man, and possessed of surprising power considering his slight build. In his quiet, unassuming way, Jackson was an authoritative figure. Giant right hander Freddy Fitzsimmons once said, “People think Jax is an easygoing guy but he can really lay into you on the field if he thinks you’re not bearing down.”

Jackson was brought to McGraw’s attention in Memphis in April 1922 at the same time as Bill Terry. Kid Elberfeld, who managed the Little Rock club, told McGraw about Jackson, then a virtually unknown 18-year-old shortstop with Little Rock. The Giants bought Jackson a few months later and he joined them at the end of that season. He became the Giants’ regular shortstop in 1924 and played only with New York until the end of his big-league days.

Third baseman Fred Lindstrom was signed by the Giants as a 16-year-old, also in 1922, fresh off the campus of Loyola Academy in Chicago. McGraw dispatched the rangy, speedy youth to the Giants’ farm club at Toledo for seasoning, where he played with Terry, then brought him up to the parent club before the 1924 season. Lindstrom was little used that year, backing up second baseman Frank Frisch and third baseman Heinie Groh while coming to bat only 79 times.

Yet when Groh came up with a gimpy leg just before the World Series, Lindstrom played all seven games and gained nationwide recognition. Still two months shy of being 19, Lindstrom hit .333, including a four-hit game against Walter Johnson, and fielded flawlessly. But his best-remembered role in the Series came in the bottom of the twelfth inning of the last game when the Senator’s’ Earl McNeely sent an easy ground ball to third base which struck a pebble and bounced over Lindstrom’s head to send in the Series-winning run.

Playing both third base and the outfield, Lindstrom hit .306 in 1927. During a practice game in the spring of that year, acting manager Hornsby viciously criticized a play Lindstrom had made at third. Lindstrom responded, ‘Jeez, that’s how McGraw wants the play made.” Hornsby fired back the familiar line, “When I’m running the club, you’ll do it my way.” Lindstrom walked directly in front of Hornsby and said in a voice that rang through the dugout, “Look, fella, you maybe a .400 hitter but you’re no bargain yourself when you put that bat down!” With that riposte  (to the delight of the more timid Giants in the dugout), Lindstrom ended the argument by grabbing his glove and storming angrily into the clubhouse.

Outfielder Edd Roush hit .304 in 140 games for the Giants in 1927. The 34-year-old Roush, enshrined in Cooperstown in 1962, had been a remarkably consistent hitter for the Cincinnati Reds from 1917 through the 1926 season, twice winning batting titles and staying within a narrow range of .321 to .352 during that ten-year period. A speedy line-drive hitter, Roush was usually among the leaders in triples. In addition he was a clever center fielder, noted for shifting his position as a pitch was delivered without tipping off the hitter.

Roush also is remembered as an independent, self-possessed man who drove a hard bargain for his services. He missed all but 49 Cincinnati games in 1922 because of a holdout and he stayed out for the entire 1930 season over a contract dispute. The businesslike Hoosier farmer began his major league career as a 20-year-old with the Chicago White Sox in 1913, then moved to the Federal League in 1914 and 1915.

The Giants signed Roush in 1916 but traded him in midseason to Cincinnati along with a fading Christy Mathewson and infielder Bill McKechnie for infielder Buck Herzog and outfielder Red Killefer. With the loss of Ross Youngs, McGraw reacquired Roush from the Reds in a trade for first baseman George “Highpockets” Kelly on February 9, 1927. And how did Roush react to the trade back to the dictatorial McGraw, whom he disliked intensely? Characteristically, he held out until well into the spring training season, obtained a lucrative three-year contract, and extracted an agreement from McGraw to “leave me alone and let me play my own game.”

Mel Ott, a 5-foot, 7-inch, 150-pound,18–year-old reserve outfielder, hit .282 in 82 Giant games in 1927. The fuzzy-cheeked Ott scarcely looked his age, and was not yet ready to assume a full-time role-that would come in 1928-yet he was widely recognized as a coming major league star.

Master Melvin was a stylist from the very start. He had an unusual swing, featuring a high kick with his front (right) leg as the pitcher completed his windup, a quick planting of the foot just after the pitch was released, and a smooth, flat cut with a quick wrist snap. In the spring of 1926 McGraw decided to keep the 17-year-old with the Giants while he learned his trade for fear that a minor league manager would tinker with Ott’s unique batting form. So for two years Ott remained under McGraw’s gruff but loving supervision, learning the pitchers, building his confidence (McGraw would not let him hit against a lefthander in a game unless it was unavoidable), perfecting his outfielding skills, learning to control his powerful arm, and mastering the difficult caroms of drives off the Polo Grounds’ outfield walls.

Despite Ott’s natural hitting ability, in 1927 McGraw’s prodigy had yet to master the knack of pulling the ball to benefit from the 257-foot right-field wall at the Polo Grounds. Through the end of the 1927 season, Ott surprisingly had hit only one home run in 223 at-bats and that was a low liner to center which eluded Hack Wilson and went for an inside-the-park homer. Once gained, the pull-hitting stroke produced for Mel 511 home runs.

Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1951, Ott was another of the many young players recommended to McGraw by an old friend. In this case Harry Williams, a wealthy Louisiana lumberman, sent the adolescent catcher to The Little Napoleon. McGraw decided to convert the backstop to an outfielder because of his small size and heavy legs which were likely to knot up from continual crouching behind the plate. He asked Ott whether he had ever played the outfield. The scared 17-year-old responded with the classic line, “Yes, Mr. McGraw, when I was a kid.”

Right handed spitballer Burleigh Grimes had a 19-8 record in 1927, his only year with the Polo Grounders. Before that he had won 163 games for Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. McGraw obtained “Old Stubblebeard” on January 18,1927, in a complicated three-team deal in which the Giants gave up infielder Fresco Thompson and righthander Jack Scott for the Dodgers’ Grimes and Phils’ outfielder George Harper. Not overwhelmed by Grimes’ performance in 1927 even though he won 13 straight games and finished with the best record on the Giants’ lackluster staff, McGraw traded Burleigh to Pittsburgh for veteran righthander Vic Aldridge on February 11,1928.

Grimes’ pitching style reflected his rough-hewn, no-nonsense makeup. The last major-league pitcher to throw a legal spitball, Grimes also was one of the foremost dispensers of the knockdown pitch. Burleigh reached new heights, or depths, in a game against the Giants in 1926. As Mel Ott described it years later: “Bill Terry was batting against Grimes and Bill’s roommate, Fred Lindstrom, was waiting to hit. Lindstrom shouted out to Grimes jokingly, ‘Bet you a quarter you’re afraid to knock him down, Burleigh.’ Whoosh-Bill was knocked down by the next pitch and he got up glaring, first at Lindy and then at Grimes. Then when Lindstrom came up I’ll be darned if Boiley didn’t knock him down, too, just for good measure.”

Frank Frisch, one of the most intrepid Giants, admitted that Grimes could scare him more than any other pitcher of the era. Frisch said, “Burleigh could frighten you just by his appearance. He had that mean scowl and they called him ‘Old Stubblebeard’ because he never shaved the day he pitched, so he looked even meaner out there. Then, too, his spitball was murder. But the worst thing was that duster. If you even got a loud foul or, worse still, a hot smash through the box the last time up, Grimes would set you down on the first pitch and maybe the second. But, in his rough-tough way, he was one of the best.” The Hall of Fame Veterans Committee agreed, electing Grimes to the Hall in 1964.

The question inevitably comes to mind: how did the 1927 Giants, with seven all-time greats on their roster, contrive to finish in third place?

First, the club suffered from mediocre pitching. The club’s ERA of 3.97 exceeded the league average, and only eight times in 201 major-league campaigns (not once in the period 1915-66!) has a team won a pennant despite such a situation. Grimes led the staff with 19 wins and Freddy Fitzsimmons, the knuckleballer with the distinctive turntable pitching motion, added 17, but no other starter was even average. The catching was weak as Zack Taylor, who caught most of the games, hit a mere .233 and veteran Al DeVormer was equally ineffectual at .248. The outfield was poor defensively and unremarkable offensively. Right fielder George Harper had a good season with 87 RBI’s and a .331 average but Roush was on the downhill slide, his extra-base power waning despite a .304 average. And left field was manned inadequately by Heinie Mueller and Ty Tyson; Ott was still learning his trade at McGraw’s side. To sum it up, the brilliant infield of Terry, Hornsby, Jackson, and Lindstrom could not compensate for the Giants’ inadequacies elsewhere.

To top it off, the Giants had serious morale problems. The aging McGraw, obsessed with winning one last pennant, became jittery and more dictatorial than ever; the counterproductive results were increased tension on the field and deterioration in McGraw’s health. Then, in the boss’s absence, Hornsby’s abuse of authority aggravated the players still more.

And finally, as the accompanying Table I demonstrates, the correlation between future Hall of Famers and pennant winners is ragged at best. And Table II, which enumerates the Hall of Famers on the ten teams Donald Honig identified in a recent book as the greatest of all time, further points up the adage that baseball is a team game, and the best teams are somehow greater than the sum of their parts.

FRED STEIN is the author of Under Coogan’s Bluff: A Fan’s Recollections of the Giants Under Terry and Ott.

Table 1: Major League Teams With most Hall of Famers (Through 1982)

(Click image to enlarge) 

Table 2: Hall of Famers on Highly Regarded Pennant-Winning Teams (Through 1982)

(Click image to enlarge)

Goose Goslin had begun his big-league career with the Washington Senators in 1921. He ended it with the same team 17 years later. In between he was one of baseball’s outstanding hitters, although his defensive skills in the outfield occasionally fell somewhat short of perfection. In January 1968, the Goose was unanimously elected to the Hall of Fame by the Committee on Veterans. The Cooperstown induction was scheduled for Monday morning, July 22, and the Goose joyously made plans for his big day.

“You’re sure to be there,” he said to me on the phone. “We’ll have a wonderful time.”

Both of us arrived at Cooperstown on Sunday evening, the day before the ceremonies, the Goose accompanied by some relatives and close friends from home in southern New Jersey. He his party happily established themselves in several beautiful rooms at the Otesaga Hotel, a few blocks from the Hall of Fame, and all of us enjoyed a bountiful meal, with many toasts, as we awaited the day of days. Joe Medwick, also to be inducted the next day, joined us as the evening progressed and the two former outfielders recalled, with some exaggeration, the many game-saving catches they had made and the home runs they had hit in the bottom of the ninth.

The long-awaited day dawned warm and beautiful. A large crowd was already on hand as we arrived at the Hall of Fame at 10:00 in the morning. General William D. Eckert, then the Commissioner of Baseball, introduced the Goose and presented him with a replica of the plaque that would stand, forever in his honor, in close proximity to those of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Walter Johnson. The Commissioner noted, in his introduction, that the Goose had once been hit on the head by a fly ball, but then had hit three home runs in that same game.

In response, the Goose, his eyes wet, tried to maintain his composure. “I want to thank God, who gave me the health and strength to compete with those great players,” he said. Then he started to cry and couldn’t continue, until the gentle hand of the commissioner and the applause of the crowd restored his self-control. “I will never forget this day,” he concluded. “I will take the memory of this moment to my grave.”

For the next couple of hours the Goose was besieged by reporters and assorted admirers. Finally, we made our way back to the hotel, where a buffet luncheon had been prepared for the new inductees and their guests. Although the lunch was excellent, the Goose could hardly eat because of his exhilaration, not to mention the steady stream of interruptions by congratulatory old friends and autograph seekers.

After lunch we returned to the room and began to make plans for the afternoon and evening. “I think I’ll take a nap for an hour or so,” the Goose said. ”Then let’s all walk back to the Hall and take a good look at it.”

Before anyone could answer, however, the phone rang. It was the room clerk. ”You will have to vacate your rooms within the hour, Mr. Goslin,” he said. “We have a convention arriving and people are already waiting in the lobby for your rooms.”

“But I’m not leaving until tomorrow,” the Goose said. “It’s a long drive home and I’m tired. We expected to stay overnight.”

“I’m sorry,” said the clerk. “When we wrote you several months ago we told you that we had reserved your rooms for Sunday night only, and that if you or any of your party wanted to stay longer you’d have to let us know. Since we never heard from you, we assigned your rooms to someone else for tonight.”

The Goose was stunned. He was also enraged. He called Ken Smith, the Hall of Fame’s director, Paul Kerr, its president, and everyone else he could think of. But no one, not even Commissioner Eckert, could help. There simply were no vacancies in the Otesaga, or in any other hotel or motel within 20 miles. Like it or not, the Goose had no choice. He had to leave.

And so it happened that on his great day, July 22,1968, Leon Allen Goslin was honored, acclaimed, and applauded in the morning-and unceremoniously ejected from his hotel room that same afternoon.

Sic transit gloria mundi!

Editor’s note: In the 1982 launch of The National Pastime, reissued by SABR in 2014, a previously unpublished writer named Frank J. Williams wrote a groundbreaking article. “A breakthrough,” I called it then: “the ‘Rosetta Stone’ for deciphering won-lost decisions of the dead-ball era.” In the years since, every record-keeping book, website, and organization has been guided by the principles Williams deduced from his awe-inspiring coverage of games from 1876 to 1919. Self-described as a bank accounting officer whose special interests were the Boston Braves, the Red Sox, and Joe Wood, Williams carved out an enduring place in baseball literature with this one. For more about Frank, who remains an active researcher, see this SABR Salute from 1999.

Pitchers were winning games long before 1876, but were not awarded victories because in an era of nearly universal complete games and restricted substitution, there was rarely a question about which pitcher to credit or debit. In 1885, as Frank Vaccaro wrote in in “Origin of the Modern Pitching Win”, Henry Chadwick “published National League individual totals in the 1885 Spalding Guide. The practice did not catch on. The loss came later. On July 7, 1888, The Sporting News for the first time published win-loss records, and only then after the following disclaimer: ‘It seems to place the whole game upon the shoulders of the pitcher and I don’t believe it will ever become popular even with so learned a gentleman as Mr. Chadwick to father it. Certain it is that many an execrable pitcher game is won by heavy hitting at the right moment after the pitcher has done his best to lose it.’”

I heartily recommend Vaccaro’s article, published in the SABR Baseball Research Journal in 2013. But Williams’ monumental work came thirty years earlier and should be read first. Here it is, online for the first time.

— John Thorn

Ready, baseball experts? Here’s a quick quiz, consisting of only three questions, and — bending over backwards to be fair — I will permit you the use of any baseball encyclopedia or record book of your choosing. If you answer all three correctly, your prize is the next tour of duty as manager of the Yankees.

1. Who was the won-lost percentage leader in the American League in 1905 and what was his record?

2. How many games did Ralph Comstock win for the Boston Red Sox in 1915?

3. How many victories did Cy Young and Walter Johnson amass over their careers?

Question 1: The answer, according to both major encyclopedias — Macmillan and Grosset & Dunlap (commonly referred to as Neft-Cohen) — is Andy Coakley of the Philadelphia A’s, with a mark of 20–7. The Sporting News Record Book lists Boston’s Jess Tannehill as the leader at 22–9. The correct answer is Rube Waddell, also of the A’s, at 27–10; this may be found only in Seymour Siwoff’s Book of Baseball Records. All other sources credit Waddell with a record of 26–11; Coakley’s correct log of 18–8 is nowhere to be found.

Question 2: Both Macmillan and Neft-Cohen show the obscure Comstock at 2–0 for Boston in the three games in which he pitched. However, the results of those three games were one victory, one defeat, and one tie. Only Turkin-Thompson gives Comstock his due at 1–0.

Question 3: Over the years, Cy Young’s victory total has been given variously between 507 and 511; Johnson’s wins have been listed as 413, 414, and 416. Currently, Macmillan credits Young with 511 and Johnson 416, as does Neft-Cohen; Turkin-Thompson lists Johnson at 416 but Young at 507. The correct figures are 510 for Young and 417 for Johnson, as derived from my year-by-year, game-by-game study of the official scoring sheets housed in the Baseball Hall of Fame Library. This research, as yet not complete for all pitchers, has revealed errors in Young’s record for 1907 and Johnson’s for 1912 which are of the same nature as those in last year’s celebrated flap over the 1910 race for the American League batting title between Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie. How these errors crept into the record and stayed there for 70–75 years I will detail later in this discussion.

In fact, the confusion surrounding these three “trick” questions is merely the tip of the iceberg represented by the period 1901–19, one in which scoring peculiarities (by modern standards) and transcription errors are legion, affecting Hall of Famers and nonentities alike. Moreover, the random, misguided, unreconciled tinkering of the last 15 years — well-intentioned though it may have been — has piled error upon error, creating a dizzying snarl of statistics which becomes harder to untangle with the appearance of each “revised” edition.

Although the mess spills over into batting and fielding records as well, for the time being I will confine myself largely to pitchers’ won-lost records of the 1901–19 era, how they went wrong, and how they can be righted once and for all. But first, a bit of history.

Until 1967, the official scoring sheets for both the American and National Leagues were unavailable to researchers. This meant that baseball reference books compiled prior to that time (such as Moreland, Richter, Lanigan, Turkin-Thompson, Reichler, et al.) were forced to base their versions of pitchers’ won-lost decisions in 1901–19 on the Spalding and Reach Baseball Guides of that period.

This method caused a number of problems. For example, from 1902 through 1906 the Spalding Guide showed two sets of pitchers’ won-lost records for the previous season for both the American and National Leagues. There were the records according to Henry Chadwick, who edited the Spalding Guide, and there were the official records put out by the two major leagues. In the 1906 guide, on page 77 Chadwick shows Christy Mathewson with a 32–8 record for 1905, and then on page 107 the National League official record has him at 31–9. The American League was treated the same way, with Chadwick listing Cy Young as 16–18 on page 121 and the American League official record showing him at 18–19 on page 145. This discrepancy was the product of Chadwick’s idiosyncratic practices in awarding wins and losses; it must be remembered that his records were unofficial.

The guides published by Spalding and Reach from 1907 through 1913 were based solely on the official records of both leagues. This continued with respect to the National League in the 1914 guides, but a strange development had occurred in the American League for the season of 1913. Ban Johnson, A. L. president, omitted won-lost decisions from the official records released to the public, believing that these did not reflect the true worth of a pitcher, and that earned run averages did. (Earned run average was an official statistic in the American League for the first time in 1913.)

In the 1914 Reach Guide, the editor, Francis Richter, put it this way:

It will be seen that in the above official record the pitchers are ranked according to percentage of earned runs, and the old way of ranking them according to games won and lost is omitted altogether. As that custom had been too well established to be discontinued at once, the Editor of the Reach Guide takes the liberty for the benefit of the readers of the Reach Guide to append the following unofficial, but substantially covered record of games won and lost and the pitchers’ rating thereunder.

In the 1915 Reach Guide, Richter did not give even an unofficial won-lost list, simply mentioning that the decisions were omitted from the official record. In the 1916 guide, Richter went back to showing an unofficial won-lost list; but instead of showing just the 1915 season, he also offered the 1914 season with the following explanation:

During the 1914 season the pitchers’ won and lost records were omitted, which had become so well established that they were regarded as indispensable alike by fans and critics. The omission created such a general protest that President Johnson announced that he would restore that pitching feature to future records. Never the less, we find the won and lost records again absent from the official figures. In obedience to public demands, we therefore append the unofficial records for both 1914 and 1915.

Ban Johnson’s policy continued right through the 1919 season, and each year the Reach Guide carried the unofficial won-lost records; Richter was always very careful to keep these separate from the regular official pitching records (E.R.A., strikeouts, etc.). After all, the Reach Guide was the American League publication and felt an obligation to keep its readers informed.

The Spalding Guide was a National League publication, however, and its editor felt no such obligation. The 1914 and 1915 Spalding Guides offered no explanation for the omissions from the official record and did not bother to show any won-lost decisions for the American League.

Unofficial won-lost records did appear in the 1916 Spalding Guide — but were thrown in with the official pitching records, accompanied by a footnote which read, “The won and lost columns are not included in averages compiled by the American League, but are inserted unofficially as a matter of record.”

This approach by the Spalding Guide, which continued through 1919 (no won-lost records were shown in the 1920 guide), was very confusing for two reasons. First, if the reader did not see the footnote, he thought he was looking at the official won-lost pitching records; and second, the footnote implied that the American League did not compile any official won-lost records during the seasons of 1915 through 1918. The American League did compile these records, but just didn’t release them to the public.

More confusion was added in the 1918 and 1919 Spalding Guides when the wording of the footnote was altered. It now read, “The won and lost and percent columns are not included in the official averages compiled by the American League, but are obtained from official scores.”

During this period, both guides obtained their unofficial won-lost records from the weekly list of pitchers’ decisions published in The Sporting News, Sporting Life, and the Sunday edition of such newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post. These lists were based on what the official scorer recommended to the league secretary or president. (He could never do more than recommend: it was the secretary or president who officially compiled the pitchers’ won-lost records during the season.)

Often, when two or more pitchers were involved in a game, the official scorer’s recommendation was overruled by the league president. It was widely known that Ban Johnson, after reviewing the situation, often disagreed with his official scorers. Sometimes the dispute was made public; usually it was not. This compelled statisticians like George Moreland, who compiled many of the weekly lists that appeared in newspapers, to rely solely on the scorers’ unofficial recommendations rather than the final, official decision rendered by Johnson. Of course, the Reach and Spalding Guides were also forced to use these unofficial lists at the end of the season because Johnson did not release the official won-lost decisions.

Such, then, was the data base for the 1901–19 period which was to be used in record books and encyclopedias between 1920 and 1967. It was the best and only information available.

In the fall of 1967, the official sheets of both the American and National Leagues were made available to researchers from Information Concepts Incorporated, the organization responsible for the first edition of the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. (The I.C.I. group, incidentally, disbanded shortly after the 1969 publication of “Big Mac,” but David Neft, Richard Cohen, and Jordan Deutsch of that crew went on to compile a rival encyclopedia for Grosset & Dunlap.) The researchers made a sincere and honest effort to clear up any discrepancies that existed in past major-league records. One of the major problems confronting them was the won-lost pitching records prior to 1920, particularly in the American League. The official sheets for the American League prior to 1905 had not survived and the same situation obtained in the National League prior to 1903. This meant the I.C.I. group had to reconstruct day-by-day pitching and hitting statistics for those periods.

In doing the pitching records for the American League, I.C.I. discovered that the won-lost columns on the 1914 A.L. official sheets were blank. In the National League, too, there were games in which no pitcher had been awarded a win or loss; or a pitcher was awarded a win when it should have been a loss, or vice versa; or two pitchers had been awarded the same win or loss. The I.C.I. researchers corrected most of these mistakes and were able to reconcile the individual pitchers’ won-lost records to those of the teams.

Although there were some errors of this nature, the majority of the won-lost decisions for the American League, 1905–1919, had been recorded correctly on the official sheets. Yet the researchers were perplexed by these records too: they found that in games in which two or more pitchers were used, the win or loss was awarded on a basis which did not conform to pitching rules in effect from 1920 to 1949, nor to those prevailing from 1950 to the present.

Evidently convinced that there was no consistency in these pitching practices, I..C.I. chose to apply modern standards, as is indicated on page 2328 of Macmillan I (1969):

Scoring rules governing won and lost decisions by a pitcher did not become official until 1950. It was decided that all pitching decisions during the period 1920–1949 shall stand as they are in the official records, but that for the period 1876–1919 the 1950 ruling shall be in effect. The reason for this was that since 1920 the official scorer did exist, and he had the explicit authority to award the victory based on common practice, which was very close to the rule adopted in 1950. In the pre-1920 period, however, there was no official scoring rule or common practice for wins by a pitcher and for many years no official scorer.

This wholesale ravaging of the official records was as if a team of archaeologists had come upon the monoliths of Stonehenge and, not fathoming the reason for the complex astronomical arrangement of the stones, had rearranged them into a pattern they could understand.

Of course, this switching around of wins and losses caused quite a few changes in pitchers’ won-lost records, including those of Young and Johnson. Young’s wins went from 511 down to 509 and his losses went up from 313 to 316. Johnson’s wins decreased from 416 down to 413, as did his defeats, from 279 to 277.

In 1978, I undertook a research project to verify the Boston Red Sox won-lost pitching records day by day from 1901–62, comparing my figures with the statistics compiled in the various editions of Macmillan (the current edition, published in 1982, is the fifth). I had no problem in agreeing with Macmillan’s records post-1920, but for the 1901–19 era, it was a different story. I realized that my totals for Red Sox pitchers, gleaned from a variety of sources, differed so much from Macmillan’s that I would have to go to the Hall of Fame Library and go through the official sheets for the American League.

Despite the lack of official sheets from 1901 through 1904, I did not find those four seasons that hard to check because most of the games featured only one pitcher per team and the official won-lost records were in the Reach and Spalding Guides. The 1905–19 period was not so easy, as I had to start matching written newspaper accounts against the official sheets in order to ascertain the official scorer’s thinking in awarding a decision. This prodedure worked out amazingly well: a consistent pattern emerged on all won-lost decisions for Red Sox pitchers. Many of these practices were completely foreign to anything in use today.

I began to wonder if these practices might apply to other American League teams, and if they were common in the National League, too. This started me on a course of doing other teams’ pitchers on a day-by-day basis for 1905–19 and, sure enough, I found the same common practices in effect. I also found that Irwin Howe, A.L. statistician, had released pitching won-lost records in 1914 to The Sporting News, Sporting Life, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. This solved the dilemma of the blank won-lost columns on the 1914 A. L. official pitching sheets.

All of this plus invaluable information, advice, and help from SABR members Cliff Kachline, Ed Walton, Bob Wood, Pete Palmer, John Thorn, Paul Doherty, Don Luce, Bill Gavin, and former Boston Red Sox pitcher Smoky Joe Wood, brought about a list of common scoring practices used in both the American and National Leagues between 1901 and 1919. Had these practices been known to the I.C.I. researchers 15 years ago, we would have a perfect set of won-lost records today.

*****

The first practice existed primarily from 1876 to 1904. Most pitchers went the full nine innings, but when they didn’t, the win went to the starter if he left the game with the lead and his team never relinquished it. The starter did not have to go five innings, but could get away with pitching two or three innings and still be awarded the win. A couple of examples of this are as follows (pitchers are listed only for the one team which illustrates the practice at hand):

September 27, 1902; at Baltimore — first game
Boston 4 1 3 0 0 0 1 0 0–9 Hughes, 4 inn., WON; Altrock, 5 inn.
Balt’re 0 0 3 2 0 2 0 0 1–8

April 30, 1904; at Washington
Boston 0 3 0 0 1 0 0 0 0–4 Winter, 2 inn., WON; Young, 7 inn.
Washi’n 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0–1

The 1969 edition of Macmillan originally gave the latter win to Young, showing him at 27–16 for the 1904 season and George Winter at 7–4, but the 1982 edition has correctly given the win back to Winter, showing him at 8–4 and Young at 26–16. Macmillan failed, however, to change the relief record. Young’s record should now be 1–0 with one save, but Macmillan still shows him at 2–0. When you make any single change like that, it must be traced all the way through in order to reconcile individual and team totals.

The season of 1905 brought the first real influx of relief pitchers into baseball, and along with this came a drastic change in the awarding of won-lost decisions. It became the official scorer’s job to determine who deserved the win or defeat and then recommend this decision to his superiors, Ban Johnson or John Heydler of the National League. Neither man was shy about overruling official scorers if he disagreed with them.

The second practice, an early change in awarding won-lost decisions, covered the period 1905–15 and is best depicted in a National League game played in 1912.

June 12, 1912; at New York — Marquard’s 13th straight win
Chicago 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0–2
New York 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 2 x — 3 Marquard, 8 inn., WON; Crandall, 1 inn.

The following explanation appeared in the New York Times of June 13, 1912:

Rube was taken out of the game in the last half of the eighth inning to allow Shafer to try his skill as a pinch-hitter. At that time, the Cubs were in the lead 2 to 1. Shafer walked and that started the rally which gave the Giants two runs and the victory. Crandall pitched the ninth inning. Well, if you must know, Marquard gets the credit for the victory. That is, the official scorer will send in such a recommendation to the Secretary of the National League. In most instances, when a pitcher is retired and the team is behind, the credit for the victory goes to the pitcher who succeeds him. The circumstances in games are so different that there is no rule to cover it and it is often a matter of judgment. The reason that Marquard received credit for yesterday’s game was because he did the bulk of the pitching, and he was not withdrawn from the game for poor pitching. In fact, Rube pitched pretty good ball. [Emphasis mine — F.W.]

Under today’s rules, Marquard would also get this win, but not for the same reason. The following examples are from American League games between 1905 and 1915 which conformed to this practice.

April 21, 1905; at Boston
Philad 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 0–5 Coakley, 7 inn., Waddell, 2 inn., WON
Boston 0 0 0 0 0 1 3 0 0–4

Coakley was batted for in the eighth inning and left the game trailing. He was taken out for not pitching well. Waddell faced six batters in two innings and struck out five of them. In the judgment of the official scorer, he pitched better than Coakley did and thus deserved the win.

May 30, 1905; at Washington-first game
Boston 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 3–4 Winter, 8 inn.; Young, 1 inn., WON
Wash’n 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0–3

Winter was batted for in the ninth. It wasn’t until the latest edition that Macmillan gave this win back to Young and changed his record from 17–19 to 18–19.

The third practice was the most common used in 1905–19. Under modern rules, this situation would be described as a save, but back then, it was a win. Usually, the relief pitcher finished the game and pitched more effectively in crucial situations than did any of his predecessors. The written coverage of this type of game often stated that the relief pitcher saved the game. Examples are as follows:

June 30, 1905; at New York
Philadel’a 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 2 2–7 Plank, 8 inn., Waddell, 1 inn., WON
New York 0 0 0 0 2 1 1 0 0–4

With none out in the ninth, Eddie Plank left the game leading 7–4, but Waddell pitched out of a tight situation and saved the game. According to the latest edition of Macmillan, Plank and Waddell both had 26 victories that year to lead the American League, but this is incorrect. Waddell was awarded the above game, which made him 27–10. He is also the A. L. won-lost percentage champion for 1905 — as you know from the opening quiz — rather than Coakley, who was 18–8 per the practices of that time (the official sheets showed Coakley 17–8, but omitted a complete-game victory on July 10).

July 17, 1909; at Cleveland
Boston 0 0 0 0 0 5 1 0 0–6 Arellanes, 4 inn., Steele, 1 inn.,Wood, 4 inn., WON
Cleve’d 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0–4

Elmer Steele left this game in the bottom of the sixth inning leading 5–4, but Wood pitched one of the best strikeout games ever by a relief pitcher. In four frames, he faced 17 batters and fanned 10 of them without walking anyone. There was no doubt that he saved the game and, in line with this observed practice, was awarded the win.

June 6, 1912; at Chicago
Washi’n 1 0 1 0 0 0 3 0 4–9 Musser, 5 inn., Johnson, 4 inn., WON
Chicago 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0–1

Johnson came into this game when the score was only 2–1 and stopped Chicago the rest of the way. There are countless more examples of this practice. Can you imagine what Macmillan did with all these games in its first edition? Every one of them must have been changed!

The fourth practice is an extension of Practice Number One, which was in effect from 1876 to 1904, but with some slight differences. Page 21 of the 1910 Spalding Guide says, “If a pitcher retires from the game after pitching four innings and his team has a big lead, which is maintained to the end, he surely should get the victory.” I would add to this that a pitcher who left a game because of an injury, illness, or banishment would also get the victory if he had the lead when he departed and his team never tied or trailed. I have combined all these situations into one practice because they go hand in hand. Moreover, I have found that the practice was not limited to a pitcher going four innings; the real point is that so long as he was not pulled for ineffectiveness, he could pick up the win. Examples follow.

May 22, 1909; at Cleveland
Washing’n 0 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 0–4 Johnson, 3 inn., WON; Hughes, 6 inn.
Cleveland 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0–1

Johnson was batted for in the fourth because he was not feeling well and could not continue.

May 8, 1912; at Washington
Chicago 2 0 1 1 2 1 0 0 0–7 Benz, 1–1/3 inn., WON; Walsh, 5–2/3 inn., Lange, 2 inn.
Washi’n 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 2 1–6

Joe Benz left this game because of an injury and the relief pitchers did not pitch particularly well, so in the judgment of the official scorer, he was the winner.

May 18, 1912; at Philadelphia
Detroit 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0–2
Philad’a 3 0 3 0 8 4 4 2 x — 24 Coombs, 3 inn., WON; Brown, 3 inn., Pennock, 3 inn.

The fifth practice is very similar to Practice Number Four except for one main point. It works this way. Let’s say the starter for Team A is pitching strongly, but for any number of reasons except for poor pitching, he is forced to leave the game with his club ahead. The relief pitcher allows Team B to tie or go ahead, but then Team A rallies to win. If the starter has pitched at least four innings and was not driven from the box, he gets the win. This practice came down to a fine matter of judgment on the part of the official scorer, but it certainly shows up a lot in 1907–15. Examples follow.

April 20, 1912; at New York
Brooklyn 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3–3
New York 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 2–4 Tesreau, 8 inn., WON; Marquard, 1 inn.

The scoring practice used in this game cost Marquard a 20-game winning streak. Rube relieved Jeff Tesreau in the top of the ninth inning with the Giants in front 2–1. Two baserunners scored on a Giant fielding error, and they trailed 3–2. Although the Giants rallied to win, the decision was given to Tesreau. The 1913 Spalding Record Book says on page 55, “As Marquard faced but three batters in the 9th inning the game was given to Tesreau on the ground that he had done the bulk of the work and that he was fully entitled to any honor which might arise therefrom.”

April 11, 1907; at Philadelphia — 14 innings
Boston 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 4–8 Young, 8 inn., WON; Tannehill, 6 inn.
Phila’a 0 0 1 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0–4

Young was pinch-hit for in the ninth and left the game ahead 4–3. He had pitched strongly. The writeup of the game says Tannehill did not perform well in the ninth and allowed Philadelphia to tie.

September 20, 1912; at Detroit
Boston 0 0 0 1 3 0 0 0 0–4
Detroit 0 0 3 0 2 0 0 1 x–6 Covington, 4 inn., WON; Lake, 5 inn.

Bill Covington had allowed only one hit through four innings when he was thrown out of the game by the umpire in the fifth. He left in front, 3–1. The official sheets, Reach Baseball Guide, and the New York Times all stated that Covington was awarded the victory. This game received a lot of attention because it was the end of Joe Wood’s 16-game winning streak.

August 15, 1913; at St. Louis
Boston 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0–2 Moseley, 6 inn ., WON; Hall, 3 inn.
St. Lou 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0–1

I saved this game until last to show a slight variation in the practice. Here we have Earl Moseley allowing only one hit in six innings and being forced to leave because of an injury. He left with the game tied, but in the judgment of the scorer, he pitched longer and better than Charley Hall, and was primarily responsible for the victory.

The sixth practice was discovered by Paul MacFarlane of The Sporting News, who passed the information on to Cliff Kachline in January 1980. This practice started in 1913 and was reported in Sporting Life as follows: “Ban Johnson ruled that when a pitcher leaves the box at the end of an inning he shall not receive benefit of any runs made in the following inning. He says all runs should aid the reliever, not the previous pitcher.” The game on which Johnson ruled was played in St. Louis on July 16, 1913.

Washin’n 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 2–3 Boehling, 7 inn., Gallia, 0 inn., Hughes, 1 inn.; Johnson, 1 inn., WON
St. Louis 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0–2

This was part of Walter Johnson’s 14-game winning streak in 1913.

The seventh practice involves the relief pitcher being held responsible for the runners left on base by the starting starting or previous pitcher. During this period, if the runners he inherited represented the winning runs and the reliever prevented them from scoring, he was often credited with the victory (this would tie into Practice Three).

August 26, 1912; at Washington-second game
St. Louis 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 0 0–4
Washin’n 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0–3 Hughes, 6–1/3 inn.; Johnson, 2–1/3 inn., LOST

Johnson was sent in to relieve Long Tom Hughes in the seventh inning with the score tied 2–2, one out, and two men on the bases. Johnson allowed both men to score and, as was the custom of the time, he was charged for both runs.

It now came down to who was more responsible for the defeat, Hughes or Johnson. There were those who would have given the defeat to Hughes so that Walter Johnson could continue his 16-game winning streak. Ban Johnson after a couple of days ruled that Walter Johnson was the loser because with the score tied, no matter how many men were left on base by his predecessor, Johnson would have been credited with a victory had his team won out. (Full details are on page 207 of the 1913 Reach Baseball Guide).

Although this decision could have gone the other way, there are enough examples of this type of game to make it definitely an individual practice. Cliff Kachline discovered the earliest form of this manner of awarding defeats:

May 4, 1904; at Detroit
Cleve’d 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0–2 Hickey, 4–1 /3 inn.; Joss, 4–2/3 inn., LOST
Detroit 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0–3

John Hickey started this game, but left in the fifth inning with one out and the bases filled. Addie Joss relieved and allowed a triple by Charlie Carr of Detroit. This allowed the three winning runs to score and the defeat was charged to Joss. This is proven by the fact that the official A. L. records in the 1905 Reach Baseball Guide show Hickey with an 0–1 record in 1904. Hickey pitched a complete-game loss on April 16 against Chicago. Joss is shown with a 14–10 record.

The latest edition of Macmillan shows Joss at 14–9 in 1904 and Hickey at 0–2; they did not award this defeat to Joss. A complete game-by-game breakdown of both pitchers also proves Joss should be 14–10 and Hickey 0–1. The Sporting News Hall of Fame Fact Book has the correct record for Joss.

The eighth practice is one of the most interesting ones, involving the awarding of won-lost decisions in forfeited games. Pete Palmer was the first one to come across it in research he was doing on pitching records in the dead-ball era. Thanks to an excellent article on all forfeited games in the 1978 Baseball Research Journal by Paul Doherty, I was able to find a set pattern in both the American and National Leagues for the period 1901–19.

In all forfeited games from 1901 through 1925, won-lost decisions were awarded to pitchers. There were 20 such games during this period, of which nine were less than the regulation four and a half innings (the last such contest occurring in 1914). There were no forfeited games between 1925 and 1937. All baseball record books show complete won -lost decisions without mention of forfeits because the baseball guides and official sheets of that period included them in the pitchers’ tables.

In fact, it was not until 1940 that the Spalding Baseball Guide stated, “A new clause has been added to Section Eleven in which it is provided that no victory shall be credited nor defeat charged to a pitcher in a regulation game which the umpire has forfeited.”

July 6, 1913; at Chicago — second game, stopped in fourth inning
St. Louis 3 1 0 x — 4 Sallee (St. L.), WON
Chicago 0 0 0 x — 0 Overall (Chi.), LOST

The ninth practice was based on the theory of charging the starting pitcher with the defeat if he was the one who allowed the most runs or could be held mainly responsible for the loss. It did not matter if his team tied the game or went ahead after he left — just that they lost because of him. This really came down to a matter of judgment on the part of the official scorer, but enough examples of the type exist to warrant it as a practice of that period. Examples:

September 26, 1905; at Philadelphia — 10 innings
Detroit 0 0 2 0 1 1 0 0 0 2–6
Phila’a 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0–4 Coakley, 7 inn., LOST; Dygert, 3 inn.

June 18, 1908; at Chicago
Boston 0 0 1 0 1 0 3 0 0–5 Patten, 3 inn., LOST; Burchell, 5 inn.
Chicago 0 1 4 0 0 0 0 1 x–6

July 25, 1915; at St. Louis — first game
Boston 0 1 2 1 1 0 0 3 0–8 Ruth, 2–1/3 inn., LOST; Mays, 3–2/3 inn., Gregg, 2 inn.
St. Lou 0 0 4 3 0 0 2 0 x — 9

Ruth was charged with all four runs in the third inning.

The tenth practice was not as common as the others, but I believe I will find more games of this nature as my research continues. Basically, it came down to one-run games in which the starter left the game behind, but the reliever got the loss because he pitched poorly and allowed the deciding runs to score. The following examples will serve to illustrate:

September 11, 1912; at St. Louis
New York 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 2 0–5
St. Louis 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 0–4 Powell, 7 inn.; Baumgardner, 2 inn., LOST

Jack Powell had pitched very well for St. Louis, and the report of the game in the New York Times stresses that it was George Baumgardner who pitched poorly and allowed the two runs that provided the margin of victory for New York. It was felt that Baumgardner was more responsible for the loss than Powell.

October 3, 1914; at Boston
N’York 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2–3
Boston 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2–2 Shore, 7 inn.; Cooper, 2 inn. , LOST

Guy Cooper allowed the runs which were the margin of victory for New York. The Yankee run that scored in the first was due to fielding errors and was in no way the fault of Shore.

The eleventh and last practice awarded the decision to the middle-inning reliever when he pitched the best. Usually the reliever who finished the game strongly was given the win, but there were occasions when this did not happen.

July 22, 1915; at St. Louis
Boston 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3–7 Foster, 1–2/3 inn., Mays, 6–1/3 inn., WON, Wood, 1 inn.
St. Lou 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0–3

Mays went out for a pinch runner in the ninth, but his exit was not for poor pitching.

October 6, 1915; at New York — first game
Boston 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0–2 Shore, 1 inn., Leonard, 2 inn., WON, Wood, 3 inn., Mays, 3 inn.
N’York 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0–0

Hub Leonard allowed no hits in two innings.

I have not completed the American League for the period 1901–19 and a couple of more practices may yet emerge, but it is unlikely. Although there are many more examples than those cited in this article, space limitations prevent my listing all of them. There is no doubt that both the American and National Leagues used all but the first practice starting around 1905, but no mention of them appears in print until the editor of the 1910 Spalding Guide thought to bring them up for discussion by the Baseball Writers’ Association.

*****

This discussion didn’t change any of the practices, but in later Spalding publications — How to Score a Baseball Game, J. M. Cummings (1913) and the 1917 Baseball Guide — John Heydler tried to set standard practices for his official scorers to follow. The American League published nothing on this subject during the period.

The existence and the consistent application of these practices during the 1901–19 era demonstrate that there should have been no changing of pitching won-lost records, except for out-and-out errors on the official sheets, by I.C.I. and Macmillan in 1969. Later editions of the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia came out under a new editor, Joe Reichler, and many changes made for the 1969 edition, particularly those of Hall of Famers, reverted to what they were supposed to be.

The 1982 edition states on page 2237, “It was decided that all pitching decisions during the period 1901–1949 shall stand as they are in the official records” — the same wording which has appeared in all editions but the first. The Neft-Cohen encyclopedia also tried to go back to the correct pitchers’ won-lost records for 1901–19. Yet the current editions of both books differ from each other, and neither agrees completely with the official records.

Macmillan did not switch all the pitchers’ won-lost decisions back to agree with the official sheets, and even when the switch was made, it was not always a complete job. A good example of this is Smoky Joe Wood’s pitching record. I was glad to see that Macmillan corrected his lifetime record to 116–57 from the 114–69 they had shown previously (11 of Wood’s 12 losses in the minors in 1908 had somehow found their way into his major-league totals), but the editor did not change Wood’s won-lost marks in relief or his number of saves. When I did Wood’s day-by-day record, I not only found an extra win for him, but also emended his relief totals. Macmillan should be showing Wood with a lifetime mark of 19–8 in relief with 11 saves, but instead, they are showing him at 15–9 with 17 saves.

When Wood’s 1911 record was changed back to 23–17 from the 21–17 cited in the 1969 edition, Larry Pape’s record should have been reduced by two victories, but it wasn’t. Even by doing that, however, Macmillan wouldn’t get Pape’s record straight because another win it has given to him should be transferred over to Ray Collins! Pape should be 10–8 in 1911, and Collins 11–12. If you add up all the Red Sox pitchers’ wins for 1911 in Macmillan, you will get 80; Boston won only 78 games. This is by no means an isolated instance of halfhearted, unreconciled tinkering.

The reason that Neft-Cohen doesn’t agree with the official sheets is that it is relying heavily upon American League won-lost decisions from the Spalding and Reach Guides for the period 1913–19, which are mostly unofficial records. Even some of the years prior to 1913 do not match up to the official sheets; the season of1915 provides a good example of some of these differences. Examining the Red-Sox won-lost marks, we see Rube Foster at 20–8 when he sould be 19–8; Babe Ruth at 18–6 when he was really 18–8; Wood at 14–5 rather than 15–5; Leonard at 14–7 (should be 15–7); Vean Gregg at 5–3 (correctly 3–2); Collins at 5–7 (correctly 4–7); Mays at 4–6 (correctly 6–5); and the aforementioned Ralph Comstock at 2–0 rather than 1–0. And this mess all arises from one team in one year.

*****

Although the 1982 editions of both encyclopedias disagree on some of the yearly records of Cy Young, they are in accord when it comes to his grand totals of 511 wins and 313 defeats. The Hall of Fame Fact Book and the 1982 Macmillan agree completely on Young from 1890 to 1901, and I agree with them that this is his correct record for those 12 years. They also concur on the 1902 season in showing Young with a 32–10 record, but here I agree with Neft-Cohen, which gives Young a mark of 32–11.

I did Young’s 1902 season game by game and it is impossible to come up with any other record. Cy pitched in 45 games, of which 43 were starts, 41 of these complete, and two games were in relief where he had no record. His record in complete games was 32–9 (including a forfeit game of eight innings). The other two starts were incomplete games which were losses beyond a doubt. They are as follows:

May 2, 1902; at Boston
Balti’e 6 2 0 2 0 4 0 0 0–14
Boston 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 1 1–6 Young, 1 inn., LOST; Prentiss, 8 inn.

August 7, 1902; at St. Louis
Boston 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0–4 Young, 1 inn., LOST; Sparks, 7 inn.
St. Lou 6 0 0 1 0 3 0 2 x–12

There is no doubt after looking at these two games, in each of which Young allowed six runs, that he was 32–11 in 1902. Pitching practices both then and now would charge Young with these defeats. Interestingly, I obtained this information from the Macmillan reconstructed sheets which are housed in the Hall of Fame Library (remember, there were no official American League sheets for 1902). The 32–11 record that I.C.I. originally compiled in 1967 and which was printed in the first edition of Big Mac was correct; now Macmillan lists an “improved” record.

For 1903, both the 1982 Macmillan Encyclopedia and The Hall of Fame Fact Book show Young at 28–10, but this too is wrong. The Spalding and Reach Guides containing the American League’s official won-lost records show Young at 28–9. The previous Macmillan edition listed Young correctly at 28–9, and by changing this to 28–10 Macmillan has taken away the won-lost-percentage championship which is rightfully his.

Cy Young was in 40 games in 1903, of which 35 were starts — all but one complete — and five were in relief. He was 26–8 in complete games, and 2–1 in relief with two saves. The one start which did not affect his record is as follows:

April 20, 1903; at Boston, second game
Phila’a 0 0 0 0 0 0 6 1 3–10
Boston 0 2 1 0 3 0 0 0 1–7 Young, 7 inn. (6 runs), Hughes, 2 inn., LOST

The two encyclopedias and The Hall of Fame Fact Book all agree on Cy Young’s records for the years 1904–11, as do I with one crucial exception. For 1907, all three books show Young with a 22–15 record, but my research shows that he was actually 21–15.

In reviewing the Red Sox pitching staff day by day for 1907 from the official sheets, I discovered that an extra win had been marked on Cy Young’s personal sheet without a corresponding date. The extra win is sandwiched between the dates of May 24, when Young pitched a complete-game victory over St. Louis, and May 29, when Young made his next start and lost. He did not pitch in any games between those dates.

Cy Young’s phantom win of 1907 — look closely around May 29.

See the photo of this portion of Young’s official sheet, and note the peculiar placement of the extra “W.” It could be that the official scorer started to give Young a win on May 29, then realized his mistake and added the “L.” The writing was in ink and may have been difficult to erase. Or the scorer could have been thinking of the game of May 30, which Young finished for the victorious Ralph Glaze. In any event, the bottom of Young’s sheet showed a won-lost record of either 20–15 or 21–15, which was erased and changed to 22–15 (the handwriting was of the period). The scorer must have counted the “W”s without matching the dates. It could well be that he originally had Young at 21–15, but in rechecking counted the extra “W” and changed the total to 22–15.

In 1907 Young appeared in 43 games, completing 33 of 37 starts and relieving six times. In complete games, Young had a record of 18–13; in incomplete starts, 1–2; and in relief, 2–0 with a pair of saves. He pitched two more complete games which ended in ties, and one start in which he was not involved in the decision.

I checked out Young’s two saves and his incomplete start that the Red Sox won. They are as follows:

May 30, 1907; at Philadelphia — second game
Boston 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 5–6 Dinneen, 2/3 inn., Glaze, 7–1/3 inn., WON; Young, 1 inn.
Phila’a 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0–4

Glaze was batted for in the ninth, but was not removed for poor pitching (see Practice Two and the example of Marquard-Crandall). The official sheets gave this win to Glaze.

August 9, 1907; at Boston
Chica’o 0 0 0 0 0 3 1 2 0–6
Boston 1 0 2 1 0 3 0 0 x–7 Glaze, 6 inn., WON; Young, 3 inn.

Glaze was batted for in the sixth inning, but went out with the Red Sox ahead by at least 4–3. The official sheets give the win to Glaze. Macmillan shows Young with a relief record of 1–0 with three saves, but the correct figures are 2–0 with two saves, the wins coming on August 21 and August 28.

June 14, 1907; at Boston
St. Lou 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0–3
Boston 0 3 0 0 1 0 0 0 x — 4 Young, 1 inn.; Winter, 8 inn., WON

Official sheets show Winter the victor. After proving to myself that Young was without a doubt 21–15 in 1907, I was led to wonder how the two encyclopedias ever reconciled the individual records of the Red Sox pitching staff to the team record that year of 59–90: if Young had one win too many, somebody had to have one win too few. My first hunch was that Glaze had been deprived of his win on May 30, described above, but no — both books are in accord with the official sheets in listing him at 9–13. Neft-Cohen and Macmillan each gave Winter one win too few . . . but this they balanced by giving Cy Morgan one too many!

The win which disappeared in order to balance Young’s belonged to Rube Kroh, who pitched a complete-game 2–1 victory over the Browns on August 18, 1907, yet is listed in Neft-Cohen and in Macmillan as 0–4 for the year. Whatever Macmillan and Neft-Cohen are basing their won-lost decisions on, it certainly is not the official record.

Another major difference between the official sheets and the reference books has to do with the lifetime record of Walter Johnson. The Hall of Fame Fact Book; Macmillan; Neft-Cohen-Deutsch; Turkin-Thompson — you name it, they all show The Big Train with a career record of 416–279. Yet my research proved him to have one more win and one fewer defeat.

I discovered the first error on his record while examining the 1912 season. This was the year in which Johnson became the first A. L. pitcher to win 16 straight games. Although this outstanding record was equaled later that same year by Joe Wood, and again by Lefty Grove in 1931 and Schoolboy Rowe in 1934, it remains unsurpassed in the American League 70 years later.

This great streak lasted from July 3 to August 23. It was well documented in the Spalding and Reach Guides and in all the newspapers of 1912. Ban Johnson fully accepted this winning streak and his references to it were amply quoted in the guides and the daily press. Included in the streak was a game played against Chicago on August 5.

At Chicago; 10 Innings
Washin’n 0 0 1 0 0 2 1 3 0 1–8 Groom, 2–1/3 inn., Cashion, 5–1/3 inn., Johnson, 2·1/3 inn.
Chicago 1 0 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0–7

Walter Johnson drove in the winning run in the tenth inning. The weekly listings in the Washington Post and the New York Times gave this win to him. The Reach and Spalding Guides gave this win to him. There did not exist a scoring practice in that period which would have given the win to anyone but him.

Walter Johnson’s winning streak only 15? Look at August 5.

It was an open-and-shut case — except that the A. L. official sheets showed Jay Cashion as the winner, and thus left Johnson with only a 15-game winning streak!

This problem is unresolved today. There is no doubt in my mind that the clerk making out the official sheets made a mistake. Walter Johnson allowed no hits and no runs in 2–1/3 innings, plus drove in the winning run. This was a performance far superior to that of Cashion, who allowed three hits and two runs in 5–1/3 innings.

As mentioned earlier, during this period an A. L. official scorer recommended a pitcher for a win or a loss, and then Ban Johnson either agreed or changed the decision. The fact that Walter Johnson appears as the winner in the weekly newspaper listing proves that the official scorer recommended him for the victory. The fact that Ban Johnson accepted the 16-game winning streak proves he agreed with the official scorer. Walter Johnson’s record in 1912 should be changed from 32–12 to 33–12.

In 1917, AI Munro Elias published Walter Johnson’s pitching record from 1907–17 in a Washington newspaper. He showed Johnson’s record against every team for the 1912 season and added it all up to a 33–12 record. I have researched Johnson’s 1912 season day by day and my breakdown agrees completely with that of Elias.

The additional win for Johnson will give him a 9–1 mark against Chicago, which will tie the major-league record for most wins over one club in a season. This will also mean that he had the most wins on the road of any A. L. pitcher in 1912: his record was 17–4.

If Johnson is not given the victory, it will mean that his winning streak in 1912 was only 15 games, and he would no longer be tied for the A. L. high. I believe Johnson deserves the win because all the evidence is on his side. In the Cobb-Lajoie affair, the Baseball Records Committee ultimately left the batting title in the hands of Cobb, despite the obvious existence of a duplicated entry on his sheet, primarily on the basis that Ban Johnson had investigated the matter and had so ruled. Consistency as well as simple justice would dictate following Ban Johnson in the matter of Walter Johnson’s “hidden” win in 1912.

The other two errors in Johnson’s record occurred in the season of 1916. The Hall of Fame Fact Book, Macmillan, and Neft-Cohen all show him with a 25–20 mark, but the official sheets have Johnson at 24–19.

Anyone looking at the 1916 newspaper box scores of the games in which Johnson pitched and applying modern scoring practices would give him 20 losses. Under the practices of that period, however, only 19 losses were awarded to him. The game in question:

August 7, 1916; at St. Louis; 10 Innings
Washin’n 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0–2 Gallia, 7 inn., LOST; Ayers, 1–1/3 inn., Johnson, 1–1/3 inn.
St. Louis 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1–3

Common Practice Number Nine applies perfectly to this game: the theory of charging the starting pitcher with the defeat if he was the one who allowed the most runs or could be held mainly responsible for the defeat. The official scorer must have felt this was the case and so charged Bert Gallia with the defeat, even though he did not pitch poorly. There are too many examples of this type of game between 1905 and 1916 to dismiss it as an error or a fluke.

The other problem on Johnson’s record in 1916 was whether he won 25 games, as shown in all the reference books, or only 24, as shown on the official sheets. The game in question was played at New York on June 26, 1916, and lasted 11 innings.

Washin’n 0 3 1 3 0 0 1 0 0 0 1–9 Gallia, 3–1/3 inn., Harper, 3–2/3 inn., Johnson, 4 inn.
New York 0 1 1 3 0 0 2 0 1 0 0–8

The weekly newspaper listings in the New York Times show Johnson as the winner in this game. This would mean that the official scorer recommended him for the victory; but the official sheets show Harry Harper as the winner. Johnson allowed one run and three hits in four innings while striking out five. He was far better than Harper, who allowed five hits and three runs in three and two-thirds innings. Also, Johnson finished the game very strongly and was pitching when the lead run scored.

I cannot see Ban Johnson overruling the official scorer on a decision like this. Unlike the game of August 7, 1916 cited above, for which we have an abundance of examples to show that the official scorer was right in not giving the defeat to Johnson, here we have a situation in which the common practices of the period all point to a Johnson victory. He should have a 25–19 record in 1916, and accordingly a lifetime mark of 417–278.

I am not the first person to find errors on Johnson’s won-lost record. Up to the late 1950s, Johnson was universally shown with a lifetime log of 414–281, but then a researcher found that The Big Train had been charged with two defeats in 1911 which were really complete-game victories. This elevated his record that season from 23–15 to 25–13, and his lifetime totals from 414–281 to 416–279.

As we have seen from the 1910 Cobb-Lajoie situation, errors were made on the batting records, too — and something similar to Cobb’s “phantom” 2-for-4 game can be found in the 1913 record of Boston outfielder Duffy Lewis. His official sheet lists him as playing in a game on June 29 and collecting two hits (a single and a triple) in four at bats while scoring a run. The only problem was that the Red Sox did not play that day, so his 1913 totals have to be adjusted. Oddly, the rest of that famous outfield — Tris Speaker and Harry Hooper — also had their records botched that year, as Speaker was given an extra hit and Hooper an extra at bat. Small potatoes, perhaps, but it gives you an idea of how rampant scoring errors are in the years before 1920.

Even something impossible to overlook, like a record-setting winning streak, can be overlooked. Reviewing the season of 1891 in the newspaper accounts, I came across an 18-game winning streak by the Boston Nationals. All record books show Boston’s longest winning streak as 17 in 1897, but this is wrong. The 1891 Braves, who were then known as the Beaneaters, made one of the greatest comebacks in the history of baseball: on September 15, they were six and a half games behind Chicago, but then they started on the 18-game streak which resulted in their winning the pennant by three and a half games. The streak lasted from September 16 through October 2.

I hope that the Baseball Records Committee and the publishers of the various encyclopedias and record books can straighten out the statistics for 1876–1919. Since there are no official sheets before 1903 (N.L.) and 1905 (A.L.), I would think that the I.C.I.-recompiled batting records for the period 1876–1904 should be accepted as the most nearly correct. My personal goal is to finish my day-by-day record for all American League pitchers from 1901–19 and to compile a complete won-lost list for each pitcher based on the official sheets, except where errors are found. Included will be a won-lost record in relief along with the total saves.

In conclusion, I would say that with the identification of the common scoring practices of the 1901–19 era as they relate to pitchers’ won-lost decisions, the time is ripe to support the goals of this study and, at last, to clear up the baseball records mess.

FRANK J. WILLIAMS is a bank accounting officer whose special interests are the Boston Braves, Red Sox, and Joe Wood.

“One day, when I was pitchin’ to Cool, he drilled one right through my legs and was hit in the back by his own ground ball when he slid into second.”

Or, how about this? Satchel again. “Bell was so fast that he could turn out the light and jump in bed before it got dark.” Paige amused people with this claim for nearly 40 years but, of course, nobody really believed him.

Finally, at the 1981 Negro Baseball Reunion in Ashland, Kentucky, Cool Papa assured everyone that his friend was telling the truth. “During the 1937 winter season, Satchel and I roomed together in California. One night, before he got back, I turned out the light, but it didn’t go off right away. There was a delay of about three seconds between the time I flipped the switch and the time the light went out. Must of been a short or something.

“I thought to myself, here’s a chance to turn the tables on Ol’ Satch. He was always playing tricks on everybody else, you know. Anyway, when he came back to the room, I said, ‘Hey Satch, I’m pretty fast, right?’

 ‘You’re the fastest,’ he said.

“Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, I told him. Why, I’m so fast, I can turn out the light and be in bed before the room gets dark. ‘Sure, Cool. Sure you can,’ he said.

“I told him to just sit down and watch. I turned off the light, jumped in bed, and pulled the covers all the way up to my chin. Then, the light went out.

“It was the only time I ever saw Satchel speechless. Anyway, he was telling the truth all these years.”

 The transgressions are well known, ranging from breaking NCAA rules to downright scandals. The wrongdoing starts with recruitment of semiliter­ate high-school athletes who have graduated by virtue of spurious grades or nonacademic curricula. Like hyenas squabbling over an an­telope carcass, college coaches com­pete with each other for these high school jocks, wooing them with let­ters, telephone calls, home visits, and free trips to campuses where they are dined, entertained, and given sales talks.

The chief lure in the degrading chase is, of course, that contradiction in terms, the athletic scholarship. This camouflage is the major source of violation of NCAA rules. Charges of undercover payments beyond the amount of the scholarship are not new, but recently Notre Dame’s Rich­ard “Digger” Phelps became the first college coach to claim openly that at least seven schools were using boosters’ cash to offer a high-school player the standard underground rate of $10,000 for each of his four years, in the hope that he would be the decisive factor in earning millions for its athletic department.

Abuses do not cease after the bar­rage of high-pressured salesmanship. Once corralled, the high-school lumi­nary receives further perquisites­—perhaps a car, an apartment, money for clothes and a stereo, game tickets purchased by alumni to convert into cash, a promissory note cosigned by a local businessman, and, in one case at least, even arrangements for a girlfriend’s abortion.

Lastly, the “student” athletes come under the control of coaches who are under great pressure to produce win­ning teams (but at least are rewarded by higher salaries than the institu­tion’s scholars and, not infrequently, presidents). In a win-or-perish en­vironment, coaches stoop to conquer. To preserve their gladiators’ academic eligibility, coaches steer them into such Mickey Mouse courses as “Safety with Hand Power Tools” and “Jog­ging.” One football player even re­ceived credit for wind sprints performed during practice. Worse, col­leges have given athletes credit for extension and off-campus summer courses they never took or even knew they were taking. Academic tran­scripts have been forged.

Because of the financial stake in­volved, college presidents, ad­ministrators, and trustees tacitly condone and faculties primly ignore these odious practices. They, together with the superkindergarten alumni they suborn and the college’s political and financial patrons they cultivate, are all consumed by a craving for winning teams. The rot of mal­practice that, like damp under fresh paint, seeps through the razzledazzle surrounding intercollegiate sports is only slightly less deplorable than the hypocritical pretension that the play­ers are amateurs and the contests educationally beneficial. In fact, as the New York Times put it, the ath­letic program constitutes an en­tertainment business quartered on campus.

The moral dwarfism of these ath­letic spectacles often has a pernicious impact on both the athletes and members of the general student body. Despite all the talk about edu­cation the athletes soon learn, if they did not know it beforehand, that their primary function is to perform well on the playing field or risk losing their scholarships. Indeed, realizing that many colleges in effect provide cost ­free farms for pro football and bas­ketball leagues, many athletes see college playas the way to fulfill their dream of becoming professionals; however, since only an estimated 2 percent achieve pro status and count­less others fail to finish college, ath­letes frequently end up with neither pro career nor college degree. Those who manage to get an education in spite of everything deserve respect.

Detrimental effects of the athletic system on the other undergraduates may be more insidious. These stu­dents observe the disparity between what is professed and what is prac­ticed, between the paeans accorded learning and what is really honored, between the ideals preached and the squalid tactics employed. (On second thought, perhaps in a perverse way the experience does have educational value, in that it helps prepare them for the kind of society they will enter!)

In recent years the onus of corruption in college sports has attached largely to football and basketball. Baseball escaped most of it, but not out of any intrinsic moral superiority. The record of college baseball in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when it was the leading intercollegi­ate team sport, shows an accumula­tion of similar abuses. Except for more sophisticated methods now used and the immensely larger stakes involved, the corrupt practices of the two eras are hardly distinguishable. In the nineteenth century pro­fessional baseball coaches were brought into colleges to replace stu­dent captains and charged with pro­ducing winning teams “or else.” Mon­ey and other inducements were soon offered to recruit good players from prep schools, and colleges raided each other’s players. Ringers and what were called trampathletes pass­ed for bona fide students. A story is told of a tobacco-chewing player ob­viously above college age warming up before a college baseball game. Sus­picious, the opposing captain asked him whether he was a student. An­swer: “Yeh.” “What course are you taking?” Pronouncing the name of his pretended major with the ch as in chest, he answered, “Chemistry”!

The burden of abuses gradually shifted from baseball to football and basketball for several reasons. First, the professional football and basket­ball leagues and especially the advent of television greatly increased interest in these sports. Football and basket­ball took place while the colleges were in session and regardless of weather, whereas baseball was lim­ited to short seasons, especially in the colder parts of the country. When television entered the picture—or ra­ther created it for masses of people—and dangled rich contracts before the colleges, they snapped at the bait.

Another important factor played a part in the trend. A country-wide network of professional minor league baseball teams already served to develop and feed players to the major league baseball clubs; pro football and basketball, lacking these farms, turned to the colleges for tal­ent. Realizing this, high schoolers who envisioned lucrative careers in pro football and basketball became keen to serve their apprenticeships on college teams, so buyers and sellers met, and the scramble to deal be­came ever more frantic. Smoothed over with genuflections to education, character-building, and sportsman­ship, corruption in the colleges be­came rife.

Fortunately, the college athletic scene has a brighter side. Some col­leges succeed in keeping the athletic tail from wagging the academic dog. Some have done so from the day they opened, for example my alma mater, Drew University in Madison, New Jer­sey, where I played a prominent part in the establishment of varsity baseball on a genuinely amateur basis.

The university began as a Method­ist Episcopal seminary founded in 1866 with money provided by Daniel Drew, whose bequest demonstrates (to vary an observation of Samuel Johnson’s) that philanthropy can be the last refuge of a scoundrel. One of the most disreputable figures in American finance, Drew began his career as a drover, and his trick of increasing his cattle’s weight by hav­ing the animals lick salt on the way to market and then filling them with water just before selling them in­spired the term “watered stock.” In the post-Civil War era Drew became one of the infamous robber barons who corrupted legislatures, bought judges, broke laws, and swindled the public and each other.

During the seminary era, sports at what was to become Drew University were limited to informal football games among the young theologians. They played anywhere they could find a suitable place on the 300-acre campus. With the opening of a gym­nasium in 1910 they also engaged in intramural basketball. Intercollegi­ate competition appeared only after the founding of the liberal arts college in 1928.

Varsity baseball at Drew University dates from fall 1930, when I entered as a student. That summer, when I applied for admission to the arts col­lege (then called Brothers College, in honor of the founding Baldwin broth­ers), I was interviewed by Dean Wil­liam P. Tolley. During the interview I asked if there would be a varsity baseball team. He replied—for all I know, on the spur of the moment—that there would be, and that a fac­ulty member, Dr. Sherman Plato Young, would handle it. I wondered how a guy with that middle name could run a ball team, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

That fall, as a freshman I joined others interested in baseball in a scrub game on a rough meadow just behind the gym. After the game Doc Young, as he was known, called every­one together and spoke briefly of plans for a team. When he finished he asked if there were any questions; there were none except mine. Having grown up under the influence of the professional code of going all-out to win, I entertained some fear that our games might be looked upon as an opportunity for “good fun” and “fellowship.” Besides the lingering semi­nary influence I was aware that some of the candidates for the baseball team were pre-ministerial students and that Doc Young, who taught Lat­in and Greek, was also an ordained minister. So I asked right out whether we were going to play to win. Doc looked a bit quizzical but assured me that such was his intention. I was satisfied, but as things turned out my fears were not entirely unfounded.

The following spring, 1931, what passed for practice began in the small gym and then, as soon as weather permitted, moved outside. Just before the start of the season Doc was sud­denly stricken with appendicitis and carried off to a Morristown hospital. A gym teacher from Madison High School showed up, apparently to re­place Doc as coach, but he knew as much about baseball as an organ grinder does about playing an organ. After only a couple of practices he either quit or was fired by Dean Tolley.

Next somebody suggested that the players select one of their own to take charge of the team until Doc’s return. At any rate, the players held an even­ing meeting in one of the college classrooms and, knowing something of my baseball background, un­animously chose me for the post.

I knew a good deal about the game, not only the techniques of play and “inside baseball” strategy but also how to teach them. Since boyhood I had played ball on the Brooklyn sand­lots and had read everything I could find on baseball techniques, such as Christy Mathewson’s Pitching in a Pinch. I had obtained my first uni­form by playing for a couple of years on the Fenimore Street Methodist Episcopal Church team in Brooklyn, New York; the pastor there was instrumental in my matriculation at Drew. Later, in high school, I had played two years of varsity baseball and had received hon­orable mention for New York City’s All-Scholastic PSAL team.

In addition, I was already in my fourth season of coaching and field managing a boys’ team I had or­ganized in Brooklyn in 1927; al­though nominally amateurs, we play­ed for a side bet and a National or American League ball. (Actually, outside of scholastic and college ball, the leader of the team was called the manager, as in professional ball; the term “coach” was scorned.) I was in fact to continue to manage such ama­teur and even semipro teams for six more years, the last one, the Crestons, entering the Brooklyn Amateur League in 1936 for the first time and winning the championship.

The dessert in this early baseball feast consisted of three summers I worked as batboy at Ebbets Field, two of them for the visiting National League teams and one for the Brooklyn Dodgers, then called the Robins after Uncle Robbie, their bumbling, colorful manager. Those were the days of players like Hornsby, Traynor, Alexander, Wheat, Vance, and of course McGraw. There I learned more about the game and a lot about the atmosphere of a big ­league bench and clubhouse by listening and asking questions of the players. But that is another story.

With only a tiny student body of few­er than fifty to draw from that first season of Drew baseball, we had barely enough players to field a team, let alone provide bench strength. Apart from a few decent hitters and a pas­sable outfield, the squad was woe­fully weak. We had no pitching to speak of, infielders who couldn’t stop a pig coming down a gangway, and a general lack of speed. The catcher, one of two or three older pre­-theological students in the lineup, once waved weakly at a throw to the plate, allowing a sliding runner to score. When I angrily asked what the hell was the matter with him, he replied that he could not afford to get hurt! In short, we were what big ­leaguers called a humpty-dumpty team.

To make matters worse, we played a schedule that an interested stu­dent, our “student manager,” improvised as best he could without his having any idea of the caliber of the opposition. As a result we suffered a string of defeats, some of them “laugh­ers” that provided the opposition with little more than batting practice and a workout running the bases. After each game I grimly sent a less than cheerful written report to Doc, and I also visited him in the hospital a number of times. Dean Tolley had called the birth of the college “an adventure in excellence”; the birth of the ball team was anything but that.

Later in the season Doc returned, leaning on a cane. I assumed he would take over the team and would have been glad of it, but when I im­mediately said as much he replied, “No, just continue as you are doing.” So he sat on the bench and acted as cheerleader while I continued to handle the team. In effect, therefore, I was the coach—Drew’s first base­ball coach—though officially I was called Drew’s first captain.

None of us realized it at the time, but this arrangement was a throwback to the system followed by the first college teams of the nine­teenth century, when the players chose a captain who took full charge of the team. For this position the squad usually elected the best and most knowledgeable player, who laid down training rules, selected the play­ers, ran the practice, chose the line­up, and determined strategy during games. So the captain in those days was what we would now call the coach.

Somehow we managed to win the last game of the season, a road game. I drove in what turned out to be the winning run, but the outcome re­mained in doubt until the final out; New Haven Teachers College had the potential tying and winning runs on base with two out in the ninth when as first baseman I caught a high pop fly to end the game. I can still see Doc yelling and waving his cane in exulta­tion as he limped out from the bench. He also sent a telegram to the college dean in Latin paraphrasing Caesar’s famous message: “We came. We saw. We conquered.”

During my first year at college I doubled as reporter, writing up Drew baseball and some basketball, about which I understood little, for the col­lege newspaper, the Acorn, and for the local Madison Eagle. I also re­commended one of the players whom I had taught on my Brooklyn team, Bill Lohrman, a pitcher, to the St. Louis Cardinals, who signed him af­ter watching him pitch batting practice. His only baseball experience and instruction had been with my club. When Warren Giles, then Branch Rick­ey’s righthand man, first saw Lohr­man pitch, he said to me, “Well, your boy knows how to stand on the mound”—intended as high praise, since most rookies were just throw­ers. Lohrman eventually made the major leagues. As a result of recommending him I became an un­official scout (“bird-dog”) for the Cardinals; later I did the same for the Boston Red Sox.

In my second year of college I spent Easter vacation at the spring training camp of the Rochester Red Wings, a Cardinal farm team, in Greensboro, North Carolina. There I had the opportunity of discussing the fine points of baseball with the team’s playing manager, George “Specs” Toporcer, a former Cardinal who had been the first big-league infielder to wear glasses and who was a fount of technical baseball knowledge.

In our second year of Drew base­ball we began winning because of the added experience of the holdovers on the squad, the departure of some of the poorer players of the first sea­son, and the addition of some new recruits, especially batterymen, from the incoming freshman class. Our fielding improved, too, as a result of a new second-base combination and third baseman and also because of Doc’s daily fungo hitting to the out­fielders during batting practice and to the infield after it—something I could not do the previous season, of course, and still play my position. Finally, Doc’s careful scheduling of teams more in our class made us genuinely competitive, and during my last three years at Drew we en­joyed winning seasons. Each year Doc quietly appointed me field captain, but at the end of each season he also named as “honorary captain” one of the three players who had formed the nucleus of that first Drew ball team and who continued to be varsity regulars.

A statement in a recent book by an alumnus begins by pointing out that no sport at Drew surpassed the excellence of baseball, and goes on to say that “This stemmed from Sher­man Plato Young … who coached baseball with a combination of vim, meticulous attention to detail, and spirited locker room rhetoric.” All this was correct except for the “me­ticulous attention to detail.”

To be sure, Doc was a baseball enthusiast, had played some high­ school ball and had seen big leaguers play, but his knowledge of the game was superficial. In the four seasons I played at Drew he never held “skull practice” to teach team play and tac­tics or instructed individuals in bat­ting or in how to play their positions. Nor did he go over the mistakes of individual players after each game, as I did with my own teams.

During my career at Drew, Doc Young in effect acknowledged that I knew more baseball than he did. At indoor spring practice Doc would take me aside and ask such questions as, “How would you show them how to throw the curve?” “How would you show them sliding?” Or he would have me illustrate how to bunt. At crucial stages in the game Doc would consult me on tactics: “Would you let him hit or have him bunt?” etc., and he invariably followed my advice. I also gave him a sign from the field when I thought our pitcher was los­ing his stuff; it was then up to Doc to decide whether to yank him.

As already mentioned, Doc’s work during practice consisted of hitting fungoes to infielders and outfielders, the kind of drill our players badly needed. In games, we played “straight baseball,” employing very little strategy. We had only two signs, bunt and steal, which Doc rarely gave, partly because he conducted a conservative game and partly because we had only a few players who had the speed or bat control to “execute.” On the eve of our second season Doc sounded me out as to whether he should coach at third base instead of from the bench. Apparently he want­ed to, but hesitated because, I sus­pected, he was afraid that being so conspicuous might appear unseemly in the eyes of some of his colleagues. When I encouraged him to go ahead, he did so, and thereafter always took up his position at third.

Nor did Doc know the rules as tho­roughly as a coach should. On a num­ber of occasions the Drew team lost out when the umpire, ignorant of the rules, called a play against us and Doc, not knowing them either, not only failed to dispute him but kept me from doing so.

Once an umpire’s ignorance help­ed us. On an attempted suicide­ squeeze play with me at bat, the only time we ever tried it, I missed the pitch, so I tried to protect the runner coming in from third by “acciden­tally” getting in the way of the catcher; then, trying to get out of his way, I “accidentally” got tangled up with him, allowing our runner to slide in ahead of the tag. The plate umpire was not fooled and called me out for interference—but allowed the run to score! As the man remarked when he threw a stone at a dog and hit his mother-in-law instead, “Al­though the intention miscarried, the effort was not entirely wasted.” The tactics used remind me of Roy Cam­panella’s fumble of his closing homily on a radio program on which I was his guest: “And now, boys, remember—it’s not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose”!

After my years at Drew, baseball there continued to grow in strength and competence. As enrollments in­creased, more ballplayers appeared, especially from the junior college in nearby Morristown. Two young men who learned baseball on my Brooklyn teams entered Drew and played key parts in later Drew diamond success. One of them, Joe Mele, a southpaw and good hitter, pitched Drew to a signal victory over Yale. In the course of Doc’s tenure as coach, Drew baseball teams won more than 70 percent of their games.

My close relationship with Doc Young did not fade away when my years at Drew were over. After I grad­uated he gave me a gold baseball for my watch chain, inscribed “Drew’s First Captain.” In 1940 Drew named me as first baseman on the All-Star Team for Drew’s first baseball dec­ade, a squad apparently selected by Doc. My record included batting over .300 in each of the four seasons-in two of them over.SOO, for a combined average of .425.

Doc and I continued to keep in touch, mostly by mail. Many years passed before he apparently felt se­cure enough to admit, even in private, my contribution to Drew’s baseball beginnings. On the occasion of his retirement he wrote to thank me for my telegram:

You were the principal factor in giving direction and quality to Drew sports. You were always so decent to me. You knew much more baseball than I did but you always kept perspective and never embarrassed me. In time I learned a lot­—much of it from you—and Drew de­veloped a true tradition of sports.[fn]Young to Seymour, May 30, 1954.[/fn]

Later he put it even more frankly:

When you first knew me at Drew I knew nothing about baseball. By long, serious study I mastered tactics and I could get men to hustle. After 30 years I realize how little I know about the game.[fn]Young to Seymour, August 6, 1959.[/fn]

Doc Young was far more than a baseball coach. In the afterlight it is clear that his real importance lay in his contribution as a teacher. He used baseball as a vehicle through which he exerted a significant influence on young men-ballplayers and non­players alike, as students and after graduation as well. My own case ex­emplified the others. His interest in my future began in my freshman year when he invited me to lunch at the Ridgedale Inn, a fine old establish­ment in Madison where I lived in my senior year and that alas is no more. There we discussed not baseball but Oxford University, where he had spent a term and which he envisioned my attending one day. How proud he was when Oxford University Press became my publisher! Doc was in­strumental in my going on to gradu­ate work at Cornell, and in later years I often sought his counsel and advice. His encouragement and guidance never failed.

Doc’s primary position as full-fledged member of the arts faculty and his interest in lifting the intellec­tual sights of all his students, not just the ballplayers, harmonized with the college’s policy of subordinating ath­letics to the pursuit of learning. From the very outset, classroom and library took precedence at Drew University over gymnasium and playing field, although the latter two were by no means neglected. Put another way, intercollegiate sports stood on a par with such other extra classroom ac­tivities as dramatics, debate, and clubs, and like them existed only for whatever educational and rec­reational value they might afford.

To ensure fulfillment of its policy toward athletics, the college adopted a cluster of specific measures: No athletic scholarships or recruitment of athletes, no lengthy playing sched­ules or extended road trips, no admis­sion charges to games or inordinate publicity for athletics, no special priv­ileges or perquisites for athletes, no snap courses or academic leniency for them. Indeed, if anything we athletes suspected some professors (no doubt wrongly) of grading us a bit more severely than they did the others. Lastly, coaches were tenured mem­bers of the faculty, free from pressure to produce winners, and the college eschewed varsity football completely.

These strictures were designed to help advance the overriding purpose of the college. Rather than turning out narrow, vocationally trained people, it sought to produce liberally educated men—and, beginning with World War Two, women—familiar with, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” and possessed of what John Henry Newman called en­largement ofmind.[fn]For an elaboration of this view, see Harold Seymour, “Education for Free Men,” Jour­nal of Higher Education (December 1952), pp. 489-494.[/fn] In brief, the pri­mary task of the college was to prov­ide an education as distinguished from training, which was the func­tion of business and professional schools.

The policy toward athletics and extra class activities in general was complemented by high academic standards; yet no eligibility rules for participation were established. Stu­dents were free to take part or not. If they failed to meet the required stan­dards they simply left or were drop­ped from the college. Because they gained admission as students in the first place, athletes on the whole worked as hard and did as well scholastically as the other students. A fair portion of them made the dean’s list, and at the end of our freshman year it was a ballplayer who won a $300 scholarship for achieving the highest average in the class.

The condition of the campus field on which the baseball team practiced the first year seemed to symbolize the Drew policy. It was in such poor shape that we played nearly all home games on Dodge Field in downtown Madison. Only after a couple of sea­sons did all home games take place on campus, on what is now Young Field, named in Doc’s honor at the request of alumni upon his retire­ment. Even then the campus field was little more than a rough mead­ow, without a cut-out infield; it fea­tured a steep hill in center field, a crude backstop close behind home plate, and a couple of benches set up along the foul lines for the players. Spectators stood behind the backstop and on an embankment along the first-base side of the field. The only groundskeeping, apart from an oc­casional cutting of the grass, was done by the players, who raked some of the infield for fear of losing their teeth trying to field ground balls. Not until years later was the field im­proved, dugouts built for the players, and some wooden seats for fans add­ed on the first-base side. The college also constructed a splendid new gym with swimming pool, but wisely never built a stadium.

Indeed, in those pioneer years of Drew baseball Doc Young and most of the players sensed a coolness and even some hostility toward inter­collegiate competition on the part of some students and faculty. The 1929 Carnegie Report supplied them with ample ammunition. Warnings of “professionalism” and “overempha­sis on sports” together with praise of intramural competition and of the casual attitude toward sports that supposedly prevailed at Oxford and Cambridge circulated about the cam­pus. I recall a meeting of the student “extra classroom activity committee” where, in freshman naivete, I pro­posed a training table for varsity play­ers! To this suggestion the faculty chairman reacted as though I had just proposed blowing up his science lab­oratory. He sternly (and, I came to realize, rightly) squelched the idea. Another professor, the epitome of the stereotype—Harvard Ph.D., goatee, tweeds, knickers, cane, and a second pair of glasses worn over the first when he read a passage in class —volunteered during a classroom lec­ture that faculty members were un­der no obligation to attend athletic contests; he never attended any, either.

On the other hand, a number of faculty members proved sympathetic to baseball. Dean Tolley occasionally caught batting practice—lefthanded and garbed in tennis whites. Others attended games with some fre­quency, and one sometimes asked me afterward to explain a play. Professor Frank Lankard, who succeeded Tol­ley as dean, also showed great inter­est in baseball.

To help dispel any doubts about the legitimacy of our baseball en­terprise and to lift the morale of the players, I took it upon myself before the opening of our second season to obtain some gesture of support from the university’s president, Arlo Brown. Without Doc Young’s or any­one’s prior knowledge I went to Presi­dent Brown’s office and asked him to come over to the field the day before the first game and say a few words to the team. He seemed quite pleased with the idea and readily complied, and much to the satisfaction of Doc and the players he in effect put his imprimatur on our venture.

Despite great growth and vast changes over a half-century, the col­lege has held to the essentials of its intercollegiate athletic policy and ap­pears likely to continue, at least dur­ing the administration of the in­cumbent president, who, prior to coming to Drew, as president of South­ern Methodist University called the attention of the NCAA to violations by members of his own institution. More important, Drew has stuck to its orig­inal educational objectives, in part because it keeps athletics under con­trol. If anything, admission require­ments and academic standards are stiffer, the more noteworthy in these times when colleges commonly offer bonehead English and remedial mathematics.

My experience at Drew was, to use an overworked word, rewarding. Al­though my Drew baseball experience added little to my knowledge of the game, I thoroughly enjoyed playing, and in fact probably devoted too much time to it. More important, some of my teammates and I grad­ually began to understand what the college was trying to get across to us, and what education was all about. With the passing years I learned to view baseball in broader perspective. Much of what we absorbed took place outside the classroom because of close association with a few profes­sors, not on a palsy-walsy, first-name basis but on one of respect and friend­liness between master and appren­tice. Such valuable relationships were common at Drew, where it was not unusual to have dinner at professors’ homes, to attend the theatre, opera, or lectures with them in New York City, as well as Broadway musicals and ballgames with Doc at the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field. Besides Doc, I still have fond memories of close association with other profes­sors, especially Herrman Meier, Grange Wooley, and Jack Benton, Doctors of the Universities of Mar­burg, Paris, and Edinburgh res­pectively, from whom I probably learned as much or more outside the classroom than in it, through no fault of theirs.

Drew University and other colleges have demonstrated that intercollegi­ate athletics can and should play a part in an institution of higher learn­ing, if, as is often piously said, they are properly conducted. That is a very big if. Far too few conduct athletics properly. Their varsity programs, as Professor Francis J. Lodato of Man­hattan College recently wrote function apart from the lifeline of the colleges and universities and contribute noth­ing to the academic environment.[fn]New York Times, April 11, 1982.[/fn] Like pre-1870 Prussia, which was an army with a state, many institutions of higher education are athletic es­tablishments with a college or uni­versity. Long ago Thorstein Veblen put the matter more graphically. Speaking of college-sponsored sports extravaganzas, he said they had about as much relevance to education as bullfighting does to agriculture.

The solution is plain. Let colleges and universities presently engaged in operating sports businesses get out of them and instead embrace and en­force programs like that of Drew Uni­versity. Unfortunately, judging from past experience, the possibility of such major surgery being performed is about as great as of nations con­verting all nuclear arms into sources of energy. Intermittent efforts to tame intercollegiate athletics since early in the century have made little headway. Even if colleges possessed the will and the courage to reform, and it is not clear that they do, the task is more formidable than ever. Too many financial and emotional interests are involved for fundamen­tal change to take place easily. More likely, there will be deploring and hand wringing, promises to elimin­ate abuses, bandaid remedies, and wrist-slapping penalties. Eventually, the hullabaloo will subside and the system will carry on much as before.

Robert M. Hutchins had the cour­age to ban football at the University of Chicago, because, as he said in an­swer to critics, “I’m running a uni­versity, not a circus.” He once wrote:

You may be sure, that the American edu­cational system will be engaged in the cultivation of whatever is honored in the United States. Its weaknesses will be the weaknesses of American ideals.[fn]Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom (Louisiana University Press, 1945), p. 49.[/fn]

Recently, however, Professor Thomas Bender of New York University went beyond Hutchins’ observation, de­claring that:

Unless liberal institutions and universities in particular have courage to stand for something substantive, how can they be defended? A university worth affirming must have an ethos, a sense of its own integrity.[fn]New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1982, p. 20.[/fn] 

Intercollegiate athletics is but one of many serious problems that beset higher educational institutions in these parlous times. Will they rise to the occasion, as good ballplayers do? Grover Cleveland once said, “A good way to begin is to begin.” A good place for colleges and universities to begin is with intercollegiate athletics.

Dr. Harold Seymour is the author of Baseball: The Early Years (1960) and Baseball: The Golden Age (1971).

Most statistical analyses of baseball have been concerned with evaluating offensive performance, with pitching and fielding coming in for less attention. An important area that has been little studied is the relationship of runs scored and allowed to wins and losses: how many games a team ought to have won, how many it did win, and which teams’ actual won-lost records varied far from their probable won-lost records.

The initial published attempt on this subject was Earnshaw Cook’s Percentage Baseball, in 1964. Examining major-league results from 1950 through 1960 he found winning percentage equal to .484 times runs scored divided by runs allowed. (Example: in 1965 the American League champion Minnesota Twins scored 774 runs and allowed 600; 774 times .484 divided by 600 yields an expected winning percentage of .630. The Twins in fact finished at 102-60, a winning percentage of.624. Had they lost one of the games they won, their percentage would have been .623.) Arnold Soolman, in an unpublished paper which received some media attention, looked at results from 1901 through 1970 and came up with winning percentage equal to .102 times runs scored per game minus .103 times runs allowed per game plus .505. (Using the ’65 Twins, Soolman’s method produces an expected won-lost percentage of.611.) Bill James, in his Baseball Abstract, developed winning percentage equal to runs scored raised to the power x, divided by the sum of runs scored and runs allowed each raised to the power x. Originally, x was equal to two but then better results were obtained when a value of 1.83 was used. James’ original method shows the ’65 Twins at .625, his improved method at .614.)

My work showed that as a rough rule of thumb, each additional ten runs scored (or ten less runs allowed) produced one extra win, essentially the same as the Soolman study. However, breaking the teams into groups showed that high-scoring teams needed more runs to produce a win. This runs-per-win factor I determined to be equal to ten times the square root of the average number of runs scored per inning by both teams. Thus in normal play, when 4.5 runs per game are scored by each club, the factor comes out equal to ten on the button. (When 4.5 runs are scored by each team scores .5 runs per inning –totally one run, the square root of which is one, times ten.) In any given year, the value is usually in the nine to eleven range. James handled this situation by adjusting his exponent x to be equal to two minus one over the quantity of runs scored plus runs allowed per game minus three. Thus with 4.5 runs per game, x equals two minus one over the quantity nine minus three: two minus one-sixth equals 1.83.

Based on results from 1900 through 1981, my method or Bill’s (the refined model taking into account runs per game) work equally well, giving an average error of 2.75 wins per team. Using Soolman’s method, or a constant ten runs per win, results in an error about 4 percent higher, while Cook’s method is about 20 percent worse.

Probability theory defines standard deviation as the square root of the sum of the squares of the deviations divided by the number of samples. Average error is usually two-thirds of the standard deviation. If the distribution is normal, then two-thirds of all the deviations will be less than one standard deviation, one in twenty will be more than two away, and one in four hundred will be more than three away. If these conditions are met, then the variation is considered due to chance alone.

From 1900 through 1981 there were 1448 team seasons. Using the square root of runs per inning method, one standard deviation (or sigma) was 26 percentage points. Seventy teams were more than 52 points (two sigmas) away and only two were more than 78 points (three sigmas) off. The expected numbers here were 72 two-sigma team seasons and 4 three-sigma team seasons, so there is no reason to doubt that the distribution is normal and that differences are basically due to chance.

Still, it is interesting to look at the individual teams that had the largest differences in actual and expected won-lost percentage and try to figure out why they did not achieve normal results. By far the most unusual situation occurred in the American League in 1905. Here two teams had virtually identical figures for runs scored and allowed, yet one finished 25 games ahead of the other! It turns out that with one exception, these two teams had the largest differences in each direction in the entire period. Detroit that season scored 512 runs and allowed 602. The Tigers’ expected winning percentage was .435, but they actually had a 79-74 mark, worth a percentage of .517. St. Louis, on the other hand, had run data of 511-608 and an expected percentage of .430, yet went 54-99, a .353 percentage.

Looking at game scores, the difference can be traced to the performance in close contests. Detroit was 32-17 in one-run games and 13-10 in those decided by two runs. St. Louis had marks of17-34 and 10-25 in these categories. Detroit still finished 15 games out in third place, while St. Louis was dead last. Ty Cobb made his debut with the Tigers that year, but did little to help the team, batting .240 in 41 games.

The only team to have a larger difference between expected and actual percentage in either direction than these two teams was in the strike-shortened season last year, when Cincinnati finished a record 88 points higher than expected. Their 23-10 record in one-run games was the major factor. The 1955 Kansas City Athletics, who played 76 points better than expected, had an incredible 30-15 mark in one-run games, while going 33-76 otherwise.

(Click image to enlarge)

Listed above are all the teams with differences of 70 or more points.

The 1924 National League season affords an interesting contrast which is evident in the chart. St. Louis failed of its expected won-lost percentage by 72 points while Brooklyn exceeded its predicted won-lost mark by 70.

The two poor showings by the Pittsburgh club in 1911 and 1917 were part of an eight-year string ending in 1918 in which the Pirates played an average of 37 points below expectations, a difference of about six wins per year. This was the worst record over a long stretch in modern major-league history. Cincinnati was 40 points under in a shorter span, covering 1902 through 1907. No American League team ever played worse than 25 points below expectation over a period of six or more years.

On the plus side, the best mark is held by the current Baltimore Orioles under Earl Weaver. From 1976 through 1981 they have averaged 41 points better than expected. The best National League mark was achieved by the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers in 1954-63, 27 points higher than expectations over a ten-year period, or about four wins per year.

The three-sigma limit for ten-year performance is 25 points. The number of clubs which exceeded this limit over such a period is not more than would be expected by chance. So it would seem that the teams were just lucky or unlucky, and that there are no other reasons for their departure from expected performance.

Here are the actual results and differences for the four teams covered.

(Click image to enlarge)