Probability theorists usually think about this in terms of a tossing a biased coin (that is, one whose probability of turning up heads is not equal to .5) in succession, with each toss having the same probability of being a head. A perennial question is the probability of having a run of k heads in a row in n tosses. In the parlance of baseball, the question is the likelihood of getting a streak of k games in which he gets at least one hit. 

Our focus here is on a different question—namely, whether a long streak is consistent with a random coin-tossing model or if it is an exceptional event that defies the usual odds. This is a controversial topic, especially in the case of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. It was an unusual occurrence, but was it only a manifestation of pure chance?1

We want to add our voice to this discussion by being more specific about what it means for the outcome of a game to be due to chance. 

A player’s average performance over many games is obtained from his batting average and his average number of hits per game. From these, one extracts an estimate of his probability of getting at least one hit per game—every time he is at bat, he either gets a hit or not—and the probability of this is some constant value determined by his averages. Moreover, each atbat is independent in outcome from all previous at-bats. This independence assumption is somewhat questionable during periods of exceptional performance (something we discuss further below), but it appears that, in the long run, over many games and many seasons, this hypothesis is not unreasonable and, as we will see, some of our results tend to support it. 

We now have the components for what is known as a Poisson process (after the French mathematician S. Poisson). For a Poisson process there is a specific formula p(k) for the probability of obtaining exactly k hits: ?k e-k/k! The details of how this comes about are discussed in most texts on probability and statistics. The only point of immediate concern to us is the parameter ?, the average number of hits per game. In a season of n games in which a player gets a total of m hits, one estimates ? by m/n. In the case of DiMaggio in 1941, he played in n=139 games and got a total of m=193 hits, and so ?=1.39. 

To begin the study of the phenomenon of “streak hitting,” we obtained game-by-game statistics pertaining to the two major streaks in modern baseball— DiMaggio’s 56-game streak in 1941 and Pete Rose’s 44-game streak in 1978. In DiMaggio’s case, the data had to be painstakingly culled from newspaper box scores.2 It is possible to count how many games in the season there were either no hits, or one hit, or two hits, up to four hits (the maximum for any game, as it turned out). Whether these data are consistent with the Poisson formula is easily found by computing p(k) for k=0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and then comparing the result to the actual number of hits. For the Pete Rose streak year, the same type of data was obtained from the Retrosheet, an invaluable source for this study and any future studies requiring daily and seasonal baseball data that are in-depth.

In order to test whether these streaks were exceptional occurrences, we made the comparison between theoretical and actual data for three sets of data in each of the streaks—the full seasons of 1941 and 1978, the streak-only data for those years, and the no-streak data. We also compared a variety of common stats such as batting average, average hits per game (this is the lambda, the one parameter of the Poisson distribution), on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. (The latter two metrics added together form OBPS.) We then were able to compare the action of the model on each of those periods and also compare the hitting statistics of the players during each of the periods, and finally we could examine two streaks for interesting similarities or difference with respect to the model fit and the players’ statistics. 

To test the hypothesis that the model predicted data that could be considered a reasonable representation of the actual data, we used the well known Chi Square goodness-of-fit test. If this hypothesis is rejected on the basis of the Chi Square test, then we must say that the model is not doing a good job of representing the data. Looking at the first two scenarios, we see that the Poisson assumption overestimates the number of games in which DiMaggio went hitless and underestimates the single-hit games, whereas, when the streak is removed, in the third scenario, there is actually a very good fit to the actual data (rounding to the closest integer gives a nearly perfect fit).

Table 1. DiMaggio’s 56-Game Streak, 1941

Ruth and Cobb are both in the Hall of Fame, but each hitter excelled in his own way. Indeed, every batter has unique psychological approaches, swing mechanics, habits, and characteristics. Even so, one thing about hitting is true for every hitter: Every time he walks up to the plate, he has only one tool to work with. Skillful use of this tool, the baseball bat, has captured the attention of fans, tried the patience of athletes, and turned men into legends.

AMBITION BEGETS EXPERIMENTATION

Baseball as played today emerged from a cauldron of other games. In the late nineteenth century, the rules changed often, contributing to a seesaw dynamic within the game. For a few years, batters would have the edge and pitchers would be disadvantaged; subsequent rule changes would turn the tables. Exploited rules (and inherent advantages) disappeared quickly, leaving rules that maintained a good balance of offense and defense. Around 1900, rules about the bat had evolved that were simultaneously simple and thorough. In the decades since, bat-specific rules have remained relatively unchanged. The bats themselves, however, are a different story.

One important rule change in the early turbulent years came about in 1887: Batters could no longer request a high or low pitch. If the pitcher’s throw passed over the plate and between the shoulders and knees, it was called a strike. Thus the adversarial approach to pitching — planted by Jim Creighton in 1859 — fully bloomed. Instead of trying to help the hitter, pitchers had a new objective. The goal of all pitchers became what Casey Stengel once said of Satchel Paige: “He threw the ball as far from the bat and as close to the plate as possible.” Pitchers began experimenting with various deliveries and grips. The spitball became a part of nearly every pitcher’s arsenal.

As pitchers experimented with the ball, hitters responded by experimenting with the bat. Indeed, as the sport evolved, the bat changed significantly — in shape, size, and material — as batters sought a competitive advantage. Examining the history and underlying science will allow us to gauge the success of these experiments.

Large barrel of Heinie Groh’s “bottle bat” gave him a bigger striking surface. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

EARLY EXPERIMENTS

During baseball’s fledging years, there were no bat manufacturers. Each player made his own, often starting with an axe handle or wagon tongue and shaping it to his liking using hand tools. Through trial and error, hickory wood was found to be successful. It was hard and resilient, so players rarely needed to replace bats. But as the game became more sophisticated, so did bat making. In 1884, a boy watched the slumping local star Pete “Gladiator” Browning break his bat. After the game, the boy offered to make Browning a new one using his father’s woodworking lathe; the two worked through the night on a piece of northern white ash. The next day, Browning’s three hits provoked inquiries about his new bat. As the years went on, ash wood became very popular with players. So did that boy and his father. That is how Hillerich and Bradsby, the manufacturer of the popular Louisville Slugger line of baseball bats, got their start. A trend had begun. Instead of making their bats, more and more players in the 1880s began purchasing bats that were professionally lathed.

Experiments were not restricted to trying out different types of material. Briefly popular, flat bats fell into obscurity as longer bats with slight tapers and knobs at the handle became prevalent. Players continued to tweak the weight distribution and barrel and handle diameters, but, for the most part, bats used after 1900 look remarkably similar to each other. However, creativity was not totally suppressed — experiments that deviated from the norm found their way into the batter’s box and the patent office.

THE “SCIENTIFIC GAME,” MOMENT OF INERTIA, AND EXPERIMENTS ON SHAPE

To understand the experiments on bats, we must understand the goal of the batter. If Stengel’s words best sum up the efforts of the pitcher, the objective of the hitter was best summarized by Wee Willie Keeler’s “Hit ’em where they ain’t.” In Keeler’s playing days (1892–1910), hitters followed his guiding wisdom by playing what has been called the “scientific game.” The scientific game involved a heavily strategic approach to baseball. Runs were scored via bunts, hit and runs, and stolen bases. Batters choked up and slapped at the ball, placing hits between infielders or just over their heads. Slugging — swinging mightily — was a frowned-on approach.

The appeal of the tactics employed by adherents of the scientific game is understandable when you consider the game’s origins. Making contact was important because, in the sport’s infancy, the development of the bat far outpaced the development of gloves. Since gloves were deemed unmanly, they were often not used, and errors were common. Even if a batter did hit the ball in the proximity of a fielder, he still might reach base on an error. Also contributing to the allure of the scientific game was an English game that heavily influenced baseball: cricket. In cricket, batsmen may get only one turn to bat per match, so the ability to place hits (and avoid being put out) is important. The first baseball players took this idea of guiding their hits and brought it to the diamond. And so experimentation with bats in the early days of baseball was steered by this “small ball” approach — the goal of experiments was to help players place their hits.

Many players, most notably Ty Cobb, adopted a split-hands grip, hoping to increase their bat control. But bat manufacturers sought to improve the tool itself by making a bat that was easier to swing. Manufacturers tried unconventional shapes; many bats that hit the market looked familiar to us from the knob up but had baseball-sized chunks of wood connected below the knob. In advertisements from this era it was explained that the chunks were intended to give the bat a more even weight distribution. In other words, manufacturers were hoping to alter the moment of inertia of the bat.

Moment of inertia (MOI) is an object’s resistance to rotation. It relates both to how the weight is distributed throughout the object and where the point of rotation is located. MOI is a value, just like weight is. And just as a heavier object will be harder to lift, an object with a higher MOI will be harder to swing. Two bats can have the same static weight, but if their shapes are different they may have different MOI and different swing weights. Even though bats are described in terms of length and weight, fans and players alike know that these values alone do not tell the whole story; a bat feels “heavier” when swung while holding the handle versus when held around the barrel. In reality, however, the bat’s weight is remaining the same — it is the moment of inertia that is changing.

The lemon-, ball-, and mushroom-knobbed bats used in the Deadball Era were all successful in lowering the MOI when compared with similarly weighted bats shaped like those used today. So these bats felt lighter when swung and gave a player more bat control than if he used a similarly weighted bat of twenty-first-century shape. However, a decrease in MOI means a less efficient collision between the bat and ball. And so these bats, perfectly suited for the scientific game, have fallen out of favor for the same reason Ty Cobb’s split-hands grip has: More bat control means less power.

While these bats succeeded in increasing bat control, other peculiar shapes were introduced to help batters play the scientific game. Perhaps the most famous of the oddly shaped, antique baseball bats was one wielded by Heinie Groh in the 1910s and ’20s. His “bottle bat” had a thick barrel that extended past the label before tapering quickly to a thin handle. Groh’s manager, the crafty John McGraw, suggested such a bat, but he was not intentionally trying to lower the MOI and thus make an easier-to-swing bat for the fivefoot-eight, 160-pound batter. The goal of the larger barrel was to give Groh a bigger striking surface; the thinner handle would make it easier for his small hands to grasp the bat. Groh had a fine career, but whether his bat helped is difficult to determine. Interestingly, because of the peculiar shape, if his bat were the same length as one used today, the MOI would be higher. However, if it were the same weight as one used today, the MOI would be lower. The unique geometry of Groh’s bat may have given him slightly more bat control than if he had used the heavy bats that were common during the Deadball Era.2

Another variation on the bat’s geometry was that of Napoleon Lajoie’s bat, which had two knobs, the higher one being called the shoulder. The shoulder was a few inches up the handle and was for the batter’s bottom hand, if he was choking up, or for his top hand, if he was swinging normally. This bat, named for Lajoie, drew a lot of attention. Many players tried it, hoping to emulate Lajoie, one of the outstanding hitters of his day (and of baseball history, for that matter).

A third oddly shaped bat was patented in 1906 by inventor Emile Kinst. His patent drawings more closely resemble a jai alai stick than a baseball bat. In his patent (US0838257), Kinst claimed his bat had two unique features. The first was the shape of the barrel: When viewed from the side, it traced not a line but an arc. He hoped that the curved barrel would allow the hitter to spray the ball to all parts of the field and that it would impart spin to the ball, making it harder to field. A player who mastered the use of this bat would be very hard to defend. The second curious trait was the series of longitudinal grooves in the front of the curved barrel. Their purpose was to aid the hitter in hitting sharp line drives, avoiding foul tips and fly balls. Both of these traits, the bat’s tendency to give spin to batted balls and to induce them to take the form of line drives, fit directly with the objective of the scientific game.

A NEW OBJECTIVE

Despite how crazy (not to mention illegal) his bat may seem, Kinst incorporated one design feature into his bat that was well ahead of its time. In 1971 the idea of bending the bat resurfaced with the patent of a bent-handled baseball bat. As stated in the patent application, the dog-leg handle was supposed to “improve the batter’s hitting power and effectiveness.”3

Notice the goal of the dog-leg bat was to increase the power, not the placement of the hit. Bats invented before 1920 all tried to help the hitter play the scientific game. Whether by a change in the weight distribution, the addition of a knob, or an alteration of the shape, all were designed to give the batter more control over where he hit the baseball. This dog-leg handled bat is just one example of the many modifications that in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s were made to help the player hit the ball hard.

And so, while Emile Kinst’s idea of a curved bat would be imitated more than half a century later, the reasons behind his design were entirely different. Clearly, between the early 1910s and the 1970s there was a change in the goal of design improvements. If the experiments in the later twentieth century were focused on a player’s ability to hit the ball far and hard instead of placing it carefully between the shortstop and third baseman, something must have changed. A new objective of experiments in bats suggests a change, in the approach to hitting, from what had been around for over half a century — since the beginning of baseball no less. What could bring about so monumental a shift? It would take only 54 swings by one man to forever change the game.

Remember, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb disagreed sharply on this very issue: Is hitting scientifically better than slugging? As it turned out, Cobb was the last of one era, Ruth the first of another. For decades, hitters had been playing the scientific game, but this low-scoring approach went out the window when the Babe was up. Setting incredibly lofty single-season home run records, he swung for the fences every time. Players, seasoned fans, and team owners familiar with the entrenched style thought Ruth’s approach was an indecent way to play the game. However, in the years immediately following the First World War, the public’s appetite for entertainment was renewed, which Ruth provided, appealing to a new type of fan and a broader audience. A bright spot after the disillusionment bred by the Black Sox Scandal, he became one of the first national celebrities; as his popularity rose, so did attendance figures.

Rogers Hornsby, a contemporary of Ruth, remarked, “The home run became glorified with Babe Ruth. Starting with him, batters have been thinking in terms of how far they could hit the ball, not how often.”

Old-school players were frustrated. As a proponent of the scientific game, Cobb had always looked down on Ruth’s approach, but his style of chopping at the baseball was falling out of fashion. Ruth succeeded in changing what had been the norm for eighty years. Though still trying to “hit it where they ain’t,” he and his successors attempted to do this in a different way. On the whole, hitting the ball sharply gives defenders less chance to field it and, moreover, increases the odds it will fly over the fence. Hitting the ball hard became the new objective.

CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM

If players wanted to focus their experiments on one particular variable, perhaps the best metric of a hitter’s ability to hit the ball hard is batted-ball speed (BBS). The question for athletes and inventors then becomes what variables can be tweaked to help a player hit the ball hard — to increase BBS?

We can analyze which properties of the bat affect BBS. In physics terms, the momentum of the bat-ball system is conserved during the swing, so the sum of the initial momenta must be equal to the sum of the final momenta. Though simplifying the collision, examining the linear case will yield meaningful insights. The equation for the conservation of linear momentum of the bat-ball collision looks like (1)

where mB is the mass of the bat, vB the velocity of the bat, mb the mass of the ball, and vb the velocity of the ball. Since the goal of the batter is to hit the ball hard, not to guide it anywhere in particular, vb final needs to be as large as possible. Assuming that the mass of the bat and ball stay the same throughout the collision, the equation can be rearranged using simple algebra to yield (2)

To increase BBS, vb initial could be increased. Baseball players have long supported this conclusion: If the pitcher is throwing harder, the batter will hit it harder. However, this insight is not always helpful to the hitter — the only values under his control belong to the bat: vB initial and mB. When we focus on these values, further analysis shows that since vB initial > vB final >0 (the bat slows down after contact, but does not change direction) the ratio of mB / mb will be multiplied by a m/m positive constant. So this ratio needs to be as large as possible, and so the numerator needs to increase. Therefore, we see that a heavier bat will hit the ball harder.

While equation 2 helps our understanding, incorrect conclusions can be drawn if we just stopped there. For instance, if vb initial were increased by any amount, it appears that vb final would be increased by an identical amount. That would be incorrect, because a harder-thrown pitch will result in a slower bat after contact. We still have vB final in our equation, and, in order to get a complete picture, we need to get rid of it. Besides, when was the last time you heard someone talk about the bat’s speed after collision? We need a way to eliminate that variable. The answer is the coefficient of restitution (COR).

The COR deals with how elastic the collision is between two objects — in our case, the bat and ball. A higher COR means the ball bounces off the bat harder. (In the case of a baseball colliding with a bat, the COR is about 0.55, meaning the ball bounces off with just over half of its original velocity.) The correct equation (using C to designate the COR) that isolates all of the variables is this: (3)

If we look closely at this equation, we see that, if we increase vB initial then we will have a larger numerator, as both the second term and the third term will increase. And so a faster bat will result in a higher BBS. What is curious about the heavier-versus-faster predicament is that these traits are mutually exclusive. If we assume the bats are similarly shaped, a heavier bat is necessarily swung slower, not faster. So which is more important, weight or speed?

Rogers Hornsby, a contemporary of Ruth, remarked that “starting with him, batters have been thinking in terms of how far they could hit the ball, not how often.” (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE “UNSCIENTIFIC” GAME — WHAT MATTERS MORE, WEIGHT OR SPEED?

Ideally, a player would swing the heaviest stick with the greatest speed, but the ideal is impossible, so players face a difficult tradeoff. The correlation between the bat’s characteristics (weight and speed) and the player’s performance (BBS) intrigues scientists and batters alike. Bat speed matters more than bat mass, according to Daniel Russell of Kettering University.4 In one of the studies he cites, experimenters, using BBS as the guiding metric, recorded the ball velocity resulting from different swings of different bats. Bats of increasing weight were swung at a constant speed. Other factors (like ball velocity and ball mass) were kept constant. Obviously, the largest bat resulted in the highest BBS. (It had the largest initial momentum.) Then bats of the same weight were swung at increasing speeds. Again, other factors were kept constant. Again, the results proved intuitive: The faster bat resulted in the highest BBS. The interesting thing was that a change in bat speed resulted in a higher BBS than a proportionally equal change in bat weight. So an incremental change in bat speed would give a player a higher BBS than would an incremental change in mass. In practice, though increasing the mass of the bat is not the scientifically optimal choice, it’s the easier alternative. It’s easy enough to grab a heavier bat but not so easy to just swing harder — players often swing as hard as they can anyway.

That bat speed matters more than bat weight was certainly not intuitive to players in Ruth’s era. Players in the late 1920s and ’30s actually pounded nails or needles into the barrel of their bats to make them heavier. They intuited (correctly) that a heavier bat would hit the ball farther, and they concluded (incorrectly) that the heavier, the better. And so we hear tales of 45-ounce clubs being wielded in the batter’s box. Today’s players seem to understand the importance of bat speed. So what — or, rather, who — was the reason for the shift from emphasis on weight to emphasis on speed? Supposedly baseball players are great experimentalists, so how did such a fact stay undiscovered for decades?

The origins of recognizing bat speed as more important than bat mass are difficult to pin down; the shift to lighter bats was gradual and not marked by any one specific event or person. However, Ted Williams reports in his book, The Science of Hitting, that he began using a light bat during the 1938 season. He used a 35-ounce bat in the minor leagues for a while before borrowing a teammate’s lighter bat and, to his surprise, hit a home run with just a flick of his wrists. From then on Williams used a 33-ounce bat. In his book he remembered that players using smaller bats created a stir in the 1950s, but he claimed to have been using one for years.

In Keep Your Eye on the Ball, Robert Watts and Terry Bahill help explain both why Ruth and others were using such heavy bats (though with success) and why a lighter bat might have been better.5 In the 1990s Watts and Bahill devised a test in which they tried to find the best bat weight for a player to use. They had a player swing bats of different weights. They measured the swing speed and calculated what the ball’s exit speed, or BBS, would be. As expected, the faster swings were with lighter bats, slower swings with heavier bats. Also as expected, there was a bat weight at which an extra ounce meant the ball’s exit speed would decrease.

Watts and Bahill realized that there might be a difference between an optimum bat weight and an ideal bat weight. While an optimum bat weight would enable a hitter to create the highest BBS, a bat lighter than that would allow the hitter more time to see the pitch, would give him more bat control, and would enable him to make good contact more frequently. They suggest that the ideal weight would be one in which the player has good bat control and can wait longer before swinging. They suggest a weight that is 1 percent below the maximum BBS value. The swing speed would be much higher and therefore the frequency of well-struck balls would outweigh the slight dip in power.

Their results suggest that the difference between optimum weight and ideal weight is approximately equal to the difference in the weights of the bats used by Ruth and by Williams respectively. Focusing on the idea that more weight would help him hit the ball farther, Ruth kept traveling along the curve until he reached a fall-off point. It is likely, then, that Ruth would not necessarily be able to hit the ball any harder (or farther) by using a bat that was slightly lighter or slightly heavier. However, pitch velocities have risen since 1930, so that the importance of bat speed has increased. Over time, players have favored increased bat speeds and lighter bats even at the cost — albeit diminutive — of BBS.

Before Barry Bonds’ 73-home-run season in 2001, few players had ever used a maple bat, let alone on a regular basis. Seven years later, about half the bats in the major leagues were maple. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

RECENT EXPERIMENTS ON THE SHAPE OF THE BAT

As bat speed has become more important, many alterations to the shape used by Ruth and Williams have been suggested, from dimpled barrels to bent and V-shaped handles. Patenting his idea in 1994 (US5284332), MIT professor Jeff DiTullio believed that adding dimples to the barrel would increase a player’s bat speed by reducing drag.6 A dimpled barrel experiences less drag because the dimples stir up the air around the bat, causing it to flow through more turbulent air, reducing the drag coefficient. DiTullio tested his dimpled bat and found that he could increase the swing speed by about 3 to 5 percent — enough to turn a fly ball caught on the warning track into a home run.7 However, bats used in MLB games must be “smooth” (Rule 1.10a), so it’s unlikely that DiTullio’s idea will be applied in professional ball.

Another bat redesign intended to increase a batter’s power has already been mentioned: the dogleg-handled bat. By the 1980s, the idea of a dog-leg handle had migrated into aluminum softball bats. In 1982, Esther Moe completed her master’s thesis in which she compared the ball-exit velocity off the two differently handled softball bats — one “normal”-handled bat and the other with a handle angle of 19 degrees.8 She found that, despite the psychological appeal of a newer technology, the different handle shape did not help the performances of the players.

While these two bats are some of the many that are disallowed by MLB rules, there have been experiments on bat shapes whose permissibility is only questionable. Some players shave down the handles of their bats. Most are simply trying to change the diameter so that it feels right in their hands when they swing. In the 1980s and ’90s, Don Mattingly went so far as to change the shape of his handle so that it was no longer cylindrical. He believed his bat speed would improve if he held the bat in his fingers, not his palms. He found that a rounded, triangular-type handle would help the bat sit well in his hands and keep his fingers aligned throughout his swing. Mattingly’s name now appears on a line of V-handled bats promising to help players hit the ball farther.

MATERIAL EXPERIMENTS

Alongside experiments on the shape of the bat have been experiments on its material. For the last quarter century, amateur players have been able to use metal bats in games. The idea was around as early as 1924,9 but metal bats did not come into common use until the 1970s. Originally, metal bats were used because they were more durable. However, performance quickly became the main reason for their use.

Indeed, metal bats are quite an upgrade from wooden ones. Like Daniel Russell, Alan Nathan maintains a website where he looks at, among other things, the science of baseball. Both Russell and Nathan explain many of the advantages metal has over wood.10 They explain the efficiency of the bat-ball collision based on hoop and linear oscillatory modes, describe a few different ways to define the “sweet spot” of a bat, and show why certain safety measures need to be taken. They were involved in helping the NCAA regulate their bats, looking at both the ball-exit speed ratio (BESR) requirement and the MOI monitoring. However, while the history and science of metal bats is interesting, I will leave it for another to fully explore and explain. I will limit my examination of differences in materials to a look at different types of wood.

Even though different woods have different characteristics, the type of material used by players had remained remarkably consistent for more than a century. Ever since Pete Browning swung his in 1884, Louisville Slugger has made bats out of ash, specifically northern white ash. As recently as 2000 it was generally accepted that professional ballplayers used ash bats. Today, though, many players are using sugar (rock) maple. After ash dominated the market for so long, why the sudden change? Interestingly, it was another single-season home-run king who was responsible for altering a convention that had prevailed among hitters for a century.

BODYBUILDERS PLAYING BASEBALL

In 1998, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were locked in a home-run race to see who could break Roger Maris’s 37-year-old single-season home-run record. Looking more like bodybuilders than typical baseball players, they slugged it out, drawing fans and media adulation. That year McGwire did succeed in setting a new record, but his reign on top was brief; baseball waited only three years before another single-season home-run record was established. Besides uncannily quick hands, a nearly inhuman plate discipline, and the plausible assistance of undocumented and possibly unsafe levels of chemicals coursing through his body, to what could Barry Bonds attribute his record 73 home runs in 2001? The bat of the new home-run king was a maple, and Bonds credited it with giving him “a lot of confidence.”11

Reports vary as to when maple bats were first used in an MLB regular-season game, but they all agree that, before 1996, no player had ever used one. Before Bonds’s monster season, few players had ever used a maple, let alone on a regular basis. Yet only seven years after the record-setting season, about half the bats in the major leagues were maple.

Manufacturers claim maple has two advantages over ash. The first is that maple bats help a player increase his BBS. The second is that maple bats last longer. One obvious place to look for evidence that these bats help players hit balls farther would be offensive statistics. With 50 percent of players using maple, offensive statistics should have increased. Benjamin G. Rader and Kenneth J. Winkle studied the 1990s hitting barrage.12 They discovered that hitting peaked in 2000 and that seasons that spanned 2001 to 2007 saw a “new equilibrium” of offensive statistics. They found that when maple bats started becoming more popular, the offensive numbers actually decreased.

However, they caution that maple was not an isolated variable. In fact, offensive numbers have declined over the past decade primarily because of the changing strike zone, the banning of certain substances, and the institution of drug-testing programs. It’s possible that maple bats help hitters but that the positive effect has been outweighed by expansion of the strike zone and restrictions on drug use. Rader and Winkle acknowledge the effect of such institutional changes and think their findings are indicative of them, not of wood type.

Although it’s difficult to determine from offensive statistics, ash and maple indeed have unique performance characteristics. Uniqueness does not imply superiority, however — one does not necessarily have an advantage over the other. After all, McGwire used an ash bat when he hit 70. If statistics will not suffice, perhaps a scientific examination of each material will aid in the understanding of the distinct characteristics of each type of wood and how each is suited for use in major-league games.

“The pitcher has got only a ball,” Henry Aaron once said. “I’ve got a bat. So the percentage of weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.” (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

CHARACTERISTICS OF WOOD

The table below shows measures of stiffness and other important features of different types of wood.13 I include values of hickory for historical purposes and values of yellow birch to show that other suitable woods exist that have yet to catch on.14

Specific gravity relates to the density of the wood. Even though hickory was used in the 1930s and earlier, it has fallen out of favor as bat speed has become important. It’s possible that new drying techniques can make hickory a viable wood in the future, but its heavy weight continues to discourage its use. Also, since maple is denser than ash, the barrel and/or handle diameters of maple bats are necessarily thinner so that a maple bat will have the same length-to-weight ratio of an ash bat.15

Static bending relates to the stiffness of the bat and is commonly referred to as Young’s modulus. Having a lower value, an ash bat will bend more on impact with a ball than a maple one will. Players notice the inherent give to an ash bat and that the connection with a maple bat feels more solid. Some hitters have commented that they like maple because they don’t have to compensate for this give; others prefer the flex of an ash bat. The stiffness of the bat also determines how the bat vibrates when struck by a ball. These vibrations are what contribute to a stinging sensation when the ball is hit poorly and a solid feeling when contact is made on the bat’s sweet spot, giving further credence to players’ subjective evaluation of the different merits of ash and maple.

It’s interesting to compare Young’s modulus with the “height of drop causing failure” test. This test is exactly what it sounds like: A hammer is dropped on a wood sample from increasing heights until the wood breaks. From Young’s modulus, we know that ash is more flexible; from the “height of drop causing failure” test, which is a measure of impact bending, we see that ash will also withstand a greater force from a hammer. So, compared to ash, a maple bat, which is stiffer, will, with its thinner handle and lower impact bending value, be more likely to snap at the handle. However, an ash bat is more likely to split down the barrel, as it has lower shear strength parallel to the grain. There is an important difference in the ways these two bats tend to break: A splitting bat poses significantly less danger to spectators than does a snapped bat. A split bat usually stays in one piece, whereas one that snaps leaves the batter holding only the bottom six inches while the barrel goes flying away. In the summer of 2008, a player, a fan, and an umpire were all injured by a flying barrel. As the use of maple has risen, so have safety concerns.

MLB RESPONSE TO SAFETY CONCERNS

Prompted by the rise in broken bats, Commissioner Bud Selig assembled a team of experts to study the issue. Over a two-month period in 2008, the committee collected and examined more than 2,200 broken bats. Chief among their discoveries was that manufacturers were making bats with a poor slope of grain.

Slope of grain is essentially a measure of how parallel the bat would be to the tree it came from. If a bat breaks at the handle and there is a smooth ellipse-shaped break — almost as if someone had cut through the bat with a knife — that is an example of a break due to poor slope of grain. The steeper the angle of that oval, the less strength the bat had. Bats used during the 2008 season had as much as a 14-degree angle, which means they were at only 25 percent of the possible strength. MLB now enforces regulations on this issue, but some manufacturers have simply opted to stop selling maple bats entirely.

In addition to considering rules for minimum handle thickness and proposing regulations regarding the slope of the grain, the MLB committee defied conventional wisdom and asked manufacturers to reposition the label on maple bats. From childhood, players are taught to swing with the label directly up (or down) in order to hit with the edge grain of the bat. With the label on the edge grain of a maple bat, the players still hit with the label in the same orientation, but they make contact with the face grain instead. The committee recommended this change because the face grain has a higher impact bending strength, which means it can withstand a higher hammer drop. So the bat is stronger with the face grain hitting the ball. The recommendation of the committee gives the player a tougher side of the bat to use, and so the bat will be less likely to snap when struck by a baseball.

As it turns out, maple and ash bats alike have a higher impact bending strength when struck on the face grain. Yet the label for an ash bat remains in its traditional location. So why would the label not change for ash bats as well? The answer hinges on the difference in the pore structures. Ash is a ring-porous wood, so rings of pores correspond to the growth rings. Conversely, maple is diffuse-porous — the pores are spread out evenly throughout the wood. These pores compress when ball hits bat. Maple compresses evenly, but ash bats will deteriorate very quickly when struck on the face grain. Manufacturers put the label on the face grain of ash bats to warn players which side would deteriorate fastest with use. This is why players are taught to hit with the label either directly up or down — to hit, that is, parallel with the grain — even though that means the face they hit with is the weaker one.

Diffuse-porous bats made of wood like maple don’t undergo such deterioration. In fact, grain spreading in ash leads many players to discard used ash bats, but maple bats tend to be used until they break. Bats made of maple will typically last longer, and their lack of degradation allows players to take into the game the same one they used in batting practice that afternoon. Each player wants to succeed at the plate, and comfort with his particular tool of the trade can go a long way toward helping him achieve that aim. However, players who prefer ash may soon need to consider other bats, as the supply may be in jeopardy.

FUTURE OF WOOD BATS

For decades, Pennsylvania forests have provided ash wood for baseball bats. In 2002, the emerald ash borer, a species of beetle dangerous to ash trees and once foreign to America, was discovered in Michigan. By 2007 it had reached Pennsylvania. If it reaches certain parts of the state, the supply of ash bats could be severely diminished. While the manufacturers of bats are aware of the beetle and are taking what precautions they can, it still threatens. While birch and bamboo bats are currently being manufactured, maple may need to become the primary wood for MLB. Provided ash does need to bow out of the spotlight it has enjoyed for the past hundred years, maple would be a viable alternative. Many players already enjoy the bat. And since safety concerns already keep some players from switching over, should the MLB committee’s recommendations prove to alleviate these concerns, maple may achieve the dominance enjoyed by ash until just a decade ago. It seems the future of maple bats hinges on the safety of their use.

Or we can just wait for someone to hit 80 home runs with a birch bat, which would then become all the rage.

Hitters take their bats seriously. Some believe that each bat has one hit in it and will constantly change bats. Others may keep their bat in a special case when not in use, bringing the same bat up to the plate for months on end. The experiments over the years — by players, inventors, physicists, engineers — have resulted in a refined tool for the major-league hitter to carry with him to the plate. Although the job of hitting is quite possibly one of the hardest in sports, the right tool makes it slightly less so. “The pitcher has got only a ball,” Hank Aaron once commented. “I’ve got a bat. So the percentage of weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.”

BEN WALKER, a recent college graduate, is moving with his new wife and electrical-engineering degree from Seattle to Chicago, where he will look for work, a home, and Cubs tickets.

Sources

Adair, Robert K. The Physics of Baseball. 3d ed., rev. New York: Perennial, 2002.

Anderson, Sandy, Donald Fehr, Dan Halem, David. Kretschmann, and Ron Manfred. “MLB Winter Meetings.”

ASAP Sports (www.asapsports.com), 9 December 2008; Baseball History: 19th Century Baseball. 1 June 2009. (www.19cbaseball.com).

Ira Flatow, Brian Boltz, Lloyd Smith, Sven-Erik Spichiger. “Batter Up!” Science Friday. NRP, 4 July 2008.

Curran, William. Big Sticks: The Batting Revolution of the Twenties. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

DiTullio, Jeff C. “Reduced aerodynamic drag baseball bat.” U.S. Patent 5284332, 8 February 1994.

Hernandez, Roland. WoodBat.org. January 2009.

Hibbeler, Russell C. Engineering Mechanics — Statics and Dynamics. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2006.

Hill, Bob. Crack of the Bat: The Louisville Slugger Story. Champaign, Ill.: Sports Publishing, 2000.

Kinst, Emile. “Base Ball Bat.” U.S. Patent 0 838 257. 11 December 1906.

“Objectives of the Game.” Official Baseball Rules. www.MLB.com / Official Information/Official Rules.

Sawicki, G. S., M. Hubbard, and W. J. Stronge. “How to Hit Home Runs: Optimum Baseball Bat Swing Parameters for Maximum Range Trajectories.” American Journal of Physics 71, no. 11 (November 2003): 1152–62.

Thompson, Andrea. “The Science Behind Breaking Baseball Bats.” Live Science (livescience.com), 15 July 2008.

“V-Grip Technology.” Mattinglybaseball.com/About.

Williams, Ted. The Science of Hitting. New York: Fireside, 1986.

Wong, Stephen, and Susan Einstein. Smithsonian Baseball: Inside the World’s Finest Private Collections. New York: Collins, 2005.

Notes

There are a number of different ways to reach first base safely, one of which is by hitting a baseball. Applying the expression “thinking outside the box” to the art of hitting, one will eventually conclude that there is a better baseball bat out there just waiting to be discovered. And there is. So, we’re going to “steal first base” by using a new bat that will significantly increase the player’s batting average. Adios to the white ash and maple bats of today. 

Surprisingly, there have been no innovations with respect to the bat used in Major League Baseball over the past hundred years. While we admire Heinie Groh’s bottle style bat of the teens and 1920s, we do not consider it to be an innovation because this clever design never really caught on. Major-league ballplayers have gone to thinner, lighter bats over the past thirty years while still clinging to the traditional wood—white ash—to increase their bat speed. Why hasn’t anyone considered another type of wood? 

THE ANIGRE BAT 

Arvin Moehler of Hogan Hardwoods says that, while white ash and maple are the staple of their sales to bat companies, he thinks there may be better types out there. One he’d like to see tried out is walnut. He adds that, for any type of lumber to be a success in baseball, it must be durable and impact-resistant, rate high on the hardness scale, and, most of all, it must be of light weight. So I suggested anigre (pronounced anna-grey), a hardwood, found in Tanzania, that has all the characteristics of white ash but with a density that is almost half, meaning that a bat made of this material would weigh only 60 percent of a similarly shaped ash bat. This lighter weight should correlate to better bat control and higher bat speed, which should then produce more hits, although arguably this effect might be offset by the lower mass resulting in the batter hitting the ball with less force. 

Moehler was familiar with this type of wood, anigre, and thought it might work well. I went on to suggest alder, a wood found in Oregon and Washington, with an even lower density, but Moehler said it would fracture and therefore not hold up when coming into contact with a baseball. 

MARUCCI BAT COMPANY 

After I wore out Arvin Moehler with questions and ideas, he sent me to one of his favorite customers, Kurt Ainsworth, who helps run the Marucci Bat Company in Baton Rouge. They supply bats to more than 120 major-league players, including Carlos Beltran, Ryan Howard, and Andruw Jones. Kurt was a wealth of information, explaining that hickory, beech wood, and even bamboo had been tested but did not perform as well as white ash. He was very interested in our anigre bat, adding that, before it could be approved, several dozen of them would have to be tested by the people working for Roy Krasik at MLB. 

I went on to suggest a different geometry of bat, one I call the Comb bat. Into the barrel of a bat being turned on a lathe, narrow grooves, 1?16 -inch wide, are cut close together like a comb, to lighten the barrel but not cut down on the diameter. In essence, it would look like the combination of a comb and a hair brush. 

Ainsworth, while warming to the idea, did not want me to get my hopes up. He explained that MLB is extremely concerned with safety, especially when it comes to cracking down on bat pieces cracking off and flying—onto the playing field or the stands. He didn’t think MLB would go for any design that involved grooves or cutting down on the integrity of the bat. I later went down swinging with my attempts to interview Roy Krasik at MLB on this topic. 

So the major-league hitter using our anigre bat would in essence be stealing first base by hitting for a much higher average than his competition would. Think of the success his team would enjoy if they kept the type of wood a secret. 

With this in mind, I began dreaming of the accolades I would receive from my hometown club when I posed the anigre bat to Houston Astros president Tal Smith. Instead of offering me a permanent seat in his club box, he gently set me back down to earth by explaining that if our bat was approved by MLB every other team would be given this information. In other words, it wouldn’t be a secret any more. Back to the bleacher seats. Tal did like the idea, though, and wanted to be updated on any progress. 

I’m not giving up on those choice seats just yet. It could happen that a team got approval to use the bat only late in the season and would be the only franchise capable of taking immediate advantage of it. The other teams would have to find a supplier, and there is only one in the United States (good luck finding him). 

STEAL THIS GAME 

You don’t have to be a businessman to know that innovation is one of the keys to success. Yet, strangely enough, in baseball innovation seems to be considered taboo. For example, baseball fans are familiar with the terminology “by the book.” If a baseball manager does not manage “by the book,” he can be found beaten over the head with it by his critics. In Murray Polner’s excellent biography of Branch Rickey, Rickey’s grandson repeated what he heard his grandfather say several times: “Baseball people, as a rule, are generally allergic to new ideas.”1 Who is going to be the next Mahatma, willing to take a chance on a few new ideas? Mr. Rickey and I are proposing a few suggestions to help that person steal a game or two.

THE RICKEY SHIFT 

The shift is a baseball tactic that involves bringing your center fielder in to play the infield when the likelihood of the batter hitting the ball out of the infield is low. Years ago when coaching my son’s Little League team, I caught a lot of flak for using the shift, because it wasn’t “by the book,” or even “in the book.” So did team president Branch Rickey when he suggested his Brooklyn Dodger managers use the shift when the opposing team was going to bunt. 

Mr. Rickey’s variation of the shift involved bringing in the right fielder to cover first base while the corner infielders charged the plate as the batter squared around to bunt. His intention, though, was not just to put out the player bunting. At his direction, in spring training games in the late 1940s, his teams routinely turned double plays when employing “the Rickey shift” in bunt situations, and yet his managers were reluctant to try it during the regular season. Why? My guess is, because it wasn’t in the book. 

I suggested the Rickey shift to the sharpest person to manage a Major League Baseball team in the past fifty years, Larry Dierker, and he replied that, while he liked the idea, he was a bit wary of the repercussions if things didn’t work out. Granted, the season was already underway and his team was winning, so he didn’t need this potential advantage, but later on he did incorporate his own Shift, moving his second baseman, Craig Biggio, out to left center field whenever Mark McGwire came to bat. 

THE TWO-WAY PLAYER—IN BASEBALL 

Typically your top high-school or college pitcher is the best athlete on his team, and when he reaches the minor leagues he has to make a choice—either he’s a pitcher or he’s a hitter. One would think, given that he’s working on the game eight hours a day, he could devote a few hours to hitting, assuming his primary function is as a pitcher. Not only would this improve the pitcher’s performance, because it would give him a daily break from focusing only on his pitching, but it would also provide the manager with one more hitter in the lineup when the pitcher is pitching. And, it might even give him a pinch-hitter without adding a body to the roster. 

It would be innovative only in today’s game, not in baseball in the old days. There were many good-hitting pitchers back then. Babe Ruth, of course, was outstanding. Bucky Walters, Red Ruffing, Wes Ferrell, Bob Lemon, Don Newcombe, and Bob Gibson were not bad either. (All but Walters are in the Hall of Fame.) Of those taking the mound today, the top hitters are Mike Hampton, Dontrelle Willis and Carlos Zambrano. 

In The Hardball Times a few years ago, David Gassko penned a poignant piece, detailing the decline, over the history of baseball, in pitchers’ batting performance compared to the league average.2 The pitchers’ annual wOBA (weighted on-base average) divided by the hitters’ wOBA went from 0.95 in the 1870s, to 0.70 in 1930, to the present-day 0.50. 

What this implies is that pitchers have become more specialized over the years, in pitching, and have become less competent at hitting. With my proposal I would attempt to reverse this trend by allowing pitchers to devote more time to work on their hitting. Would Rick Ankiel have still been pitching so far into his career if this had been applied to him years earlier? 

THE PSEUDO-PITCHOUT 

One more tactical innovation, adapted from a skill perfected by Houston Astros’ first baseman Jeff Bagwell, involves the first baseman cutting off the pitcher’s delivery to home plate, with a runner on first and the batter about to attempt a bunt. For this to work, the first baseman must charge toward home plate just before the pitcher delivers—Bagwell was adept at this—but, instead of stopping two-thirds of the way to home, the fielder traverses slightly toward the third base bag and faces the pitcher. He then intercepts the pitched ball and catches the baserunner leaning off first (we assume the second baseman is now covering first) for a quick putout. I call it the “pseudo-pitchout.” 

Baseball-rules expert Rich Marazzi studied this proposal, and his interpretation unfortunately was that the first baseman is guilty of interference and that the batter should be awarded first base. On the plus side, he went on to suggest that this be used to intentionally walk a batter with only one pitch. 

THE HOUDINI TAG—HE NEVER SAW IT COMING 

If you are having trouble accepting my ideas so far, you are really going to struggle with this one. It’s such a reach that not even Larry Dierker may like it. I will say that I’ve had a 100 percent success rate when applying this idea (it worked the only time we tried it) while coaching my son’s Babe Ruth League team of 13-year-olds. With a runner on second base, the pitcher gives the sign for the shortstop and second baseman to move away from second and onto the fringe of the infield grass to lull the baserunner into a false sense of security, while the center fielder begins his dash toward second. Four seconds after giving the sign, the pitcher wheels around and throws right at the second base bag, where the center fielder has just arrived to accept the throw and tag the unsuspecting runner out. I call it the Houdini tag, because the baserunner in this instance was the fastest player in our league and never saw it coming. Don’t feel bad, Justin. Your first- and third-base coaches didn’t see it either. 

Hopefully you’re catching on to our model for stealing not only first base but an entire game—propose several new ideas in hopes either that one will catch on or that it will spur other ideas. (Swing the bat enough times and you’ll eventually get a hit.) For this to work, you can’t shoot down another’s brainstorm for fear of halting the flow of innovation. (Don’t criticize the empty swings.) My coworkers have witnessed many of my strikeouts. Now, who wants to be known as Baseball’s Number-One Thief, or the next Branch Rickey? 

JIM KREUZ was introduced to SABR by former major-league pitcher Tim McNamara, whose high-school catcher was a kid named Gabby Hartnett, whose shortstop at Fordham was Frankie Frisch, and whose best friend on the Boston Braves was an outfielder named Casey Stengel.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Lee Lowenfish, Murray Polner, and Stu Chan for contributions.

Notes

1 Murray Polner, Branch Rickey: A Biography, rev. ed. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007), 2.

2 David Gassko, “Hitting Pitchers,” Hardball Times, 8 February 2007, http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/hitting-pitchers (accessed 21 May 2010).

Doug Glanville in his new baseball memoir notes that many players, “rewarded with huge contracts because of their offensive prowess, . . . have developed a kind of attention deficit disorder when it comes to defense. . . . If you put up tremendous offensive numbers year after year, the game will cut you a little slack when it comes to the glove.”1 But is that still true? Or, rather, is the converse still true—that the compensation to players whose glove is better than their bat is not commensurate with their true value? 

In the past year many baseball writers have remarked that “defense is the new on-base percentage,” meaning that it’s an undervalued asset—as the ability merely to get on base was about a decade ago, when driving in runs was thought to be the ticket, or so said Michael Lewis in Moneyball. You would think that, if here and there online and now in the pages of the Baseball Research Journal you’re reading that defense is undervalued in the market, surely it no longer is. Wouldn’t the market have already corrected itself? “We were concerned several years ago that the advantage of the things that we knew could play itself out when you reach the point that everybody knew those things,” Bill James told a gathering of the Boston chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America earlier this year.2 Haven’t all the front offices caught on by now, so that there are no more bargains for them to sift through in the glovework department? 

But knowing where to shop is not the same as knowing what to look for once you get there. If some position players whose good glove more than offsets their weak bat still have a market value below their actual value, how would you know how to identify them? “The reason there are still more inefficiencies on the defensive side is that defense remains hard to quantify,” Jeff Kingston, assistant general manager of the Seattle Mariners, told Sports Illustrated earlier this year. “The metrics have come a long way in the last few years, and clubs go to great lengths to quantify defense, but they simply don’t have the same confidence level as they do in quantifying offense.”3 

James agrees with Kingston that a major limitation of the effectiveness of defensive metrics is that our “confidence” in them is shaky. Referring to the quantification of defense, he comments that “we haven’t been doing it all our lives. We’ve had pretty good methods now for five or six years. I’ve been doing the [offensive] stuff all my life. I know what’s a normal gap between two seasons [offensively] and what isn’t. I don’t know the same [defensively].’’ Even so, he thinks that defense “can be evaluated with the same degree of precision and the same degree of agreement among different methods as [can] offense.”4

It’s true that the business of quantifying offense has undergone profound development in the past thirty years, after decades of relative stasis. To the familiar categories of batting average, RBIs, runs scored, and so forth, baseball analysts have proposed countless new metrics, some of which—OPS+, wOBA, linear weights—have stuck. Although Major League Baseball doesn’t recognize them as official statistical categories, they’re computed from the actual statistics in the official record and have proven to be reasonably reliable instruments for evaluating and predicting a player’s offensive performance. 

Most of the effort to quantify run prevention, or defense, has been focused on pitching, at least since the late nineteenth century. Sabermetric scrutiny in general has been so abundant, however, that, whether or not fielding has been scrutinized less than pitching, it’s still been scrutinized a lot—more than a lot of people who take a professional interest in the subject can easily keep up with. 

The earliest baseball writers used the terms offense and defense in a precise manner that doesn’t match up entirely with twenty-first-century usage. Defense for them was the entire project of preventing runs, and that includes pitching as well as fielding. In this article we use the term defense mostly in the twenty-first-century sense, to mean fielding as distinct from pitching. 

Below we’ll look at some of the new, and not so new, defensive metrics that Jeff Kingston alludes to and then at some of the major-league clubs that are mining them for information that might give them insight and an advantage over their competition. First, though, let’s look back at the handful of defensive statistical categories that are familiar and traditional. A brief inquiry into their history might give us a new perspective on defense and on the report that defense is the new OBA.

EARLY FIELDING STATISTICS: REWARD RANGE OR PENALIZE ERROR? 

Recent buzz about defense may strike you as a fad that will soon pass, but in some respect it reflects a return to the earliest days of organized baseball. “It’s almost impossible,” writes Alan Schwarz in The Numbers Game, “for the modern baseball fan, conditioned to focus on the battle between pitcher and batter, to appreciate how important fielding was in the early game. … As baseball historian John Thorn notes, ‘Fielding skill was still the most highly sought after attribute of a ball player.’”5 

Already by 1876, putouts, assists, and errors were added together to determine chances, and fielding percentage was calculated as it is now. In 1887, the practice of counting wild pitches and passed balls as errors, or “battery errors,” was discontinued. Double plays by individual fielders were added as an official stat in 1922. This was among statistical categories that weren’t included in official records in the early days but that nonetheless were recorded in box scores, from which later researchers have reconstructed season totals. Stolen bases against individual pitchers and catchers began to be recorded more reliably, and catchers began to be credited for “caught stealing.” Otherwise the system of measuring defense remained fairly static until Bill James began to publish his groundbreaking work in the late 1970s. 

As for fielding percentage, Henry Chadwick was not alone in thinking that range was more important than sure-handedness. In his Beadle guide following the 1872 season, fielding statistics did not include errors.6 In 1875, Al Wright, following a similar philosophy, took the sum of putouts and assists and divided that by games—a metric that rewarded players for how often they got to a batted ball. Errors didn’t figure into it at all. This method of quantifying fielding didn’t catch on—not, that is, until about a hundred years later, when James introduced Range Factor. Wright had called it “fielding average.”7 

What is the primary criterion by which the performance of a fielder ought to be evaluated? Chadwick represented the school of thought, which perhaps was more traditional, that fielders should be rewarded for range, but the opposing school of thought, that the emphasis should be on penalizing them for errors, was winning the day. The debate was captured, and the case for the reward-range doctrine nicely made, in a poem in a New York newspaper in 1917.8 

Chances 

When the fielder loves his record
More than victory for his team
Doubtful chances miss his glances
For his caution is extreme.
Going after every grounder
Means a slip-up here and there,
And in terror of an error
He will choose the chances fair.
Spotless records are enticing
In a ball game as in life,
And the cunning pick their running
To avoid the stony strife.
Many a mortal swaggers slowly
Down the years in proud parade,
Boasting to the meek and lowly
Of the slips he never made.
Well it is that wise commanders,
When they call for sterling men,
Place the workers o’er the shirkers
Though they err and err again.
Men who try and fall when trying
Try again and win at last,
Never brooding, never sighing
O’er the errors of the past.
— William F. Kirk 

Kirk went on to say that managers prefer that their players go after everything even if it means they make more errors, as long as they’re not mental errors.

We often hear that 90 percent of baseball is pitching. Addie Joss first said that, in 1906, according to Bill James, who adds that, when Joss was criticized for it, he tried to explain that he meant that pitching was 90 percent of defense. John McGraw divided it up this way—batting is half of baseball, pitching is one-third, and fielding is one-sixth.9

Hugh Fullerton, a baseball writer, came up with a different formula in 1921. He gave more weight to offense and fielding than McGraw did and less to pitching. First he divided the game into offense and defense (fielding plus pitching) and gave roughly twice as much weight to the former—his exact ratio was 64 to 36. Then he subdivided defense into each of the nine positions. Of that 36 percent of the total, it was 36 percent for the pitcher, 14 percent for the catcher, 6.5 percent for the second baseman, 6 percent for the first baseman, and less than 6 percent for each of the remaining positions.10 All this, of course, was pure conjecture—as is the assumption that fielding counts for less now than it did back then. That assumption, however speculative, is hardly groundless, though: There are more strikeouts and home runs now and consequently fewer balls put into play. 

In 1954, Allan Roth and Branch Rickey, at that time general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, developed an “efficiency formula” for quantifying run-creation and run-prevention performance. Unable to figure out how to measure fielding, they set their metric for it at 0—that is, they threw up their hands and just assumed that its overall effect on the game’s outcome was neither positive nor negative. Rickey was resigned to the idea that “there is nothing on earth anyone can do with fielding.”11 

GOLD GLOVE AWARD 

In 1957, Rawlings, the baseball-glove manufacturer, established the Gold Glove Award for the player who would be voted the best fielder at his position. The inaugural All-Star Fielding Team, as it was called, was voted on by a committee of sportswriters and was drawn from players in both leagues. Since 1958, the Gold Glove has been given to nine players in each league. From 1958 through 1964, they were voted on by players. In 1965 the vote came instead from managers and coaches (they could not vote for players on their own team), and this practice has continued to the present day.12

Everyone understands that the basis for selection is ultimately subjective. It depends on the judgment of voters, whose impressions will be influenced by a given player’s reputation and will vary according to how much of his performance, and which moments of it, they’ve witnessed, either live or on TV. The dearth of familiar statistical categories that can serve as a common criterion that all voters can take into account makes the Gold Glove Award even more susceptible to being discounted by skeptics than are, for example, the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards. 

Moreover, no minimum number of games or innings at each position is stipulated, making it possible for Rafael Palmeiro in 1999 to become the “first DH to win the Gold Glove,” which he was awarded for his work at first base, where he’d played a grand total of 28 games.13 It’s true that a given Gold Glove winner is likely to have already been more high-profile than the average player—to play for a winning team, to have been selected to the All-Star Game, to have won the Gold Glove previously—and this raises the question whether voting is biased against the player who arguably was the better fielder but lacks marquee status.14

As a data point, then, that we can use when plotting the fielding quotient of a player who has won it, the Gold Glove Award is of limited value, but neither should it be ignored or outright dismissed. Judgment calls based on seeing, on empirical evidence, do count for something, as any scout will tell you, and when joined to statistical analysis the two modes of evaluation taken together may produce a higher confidence level than either of them taken only by themselves. Still, the usefulness of the Gold Glove Award in evaluating defensive talent across MLB would be greater if the details of the vote were made public—only the winner is announced, so we don’t know by how much he won or who else was in the running. 

SABERMETRIC STATISTICS 

The statistical measurement of defensive performance has undergone profound development in the past forty years. Most innovations in defensive metrics during this period fall into one of two flavors—metrics that can be derived from the established statistical categories (putouts, assists, errors, total chances) and metrics that require batted ball information, including hit locations. One metric, Total Zone, incorporates the best of both approaches. 

Statistics Based on Box-Score Statistics 

The first proposals to reassess fielding statistics involved adjustments to the defensive statistical categories that have existed since 1876. The newer metrics—Range Factor, Relative Range Factor, Adjusted Range Factor, Defense Efficiency Record, Fielding Runs, and Fielding Wins—are generated from calculations based on these simple box-score statistics. A big advantage of these metrics is that they can be calculated for any year from 1876 to the present. 

Range Factor (RF) and Relative Range Factor (RRF). In 1976, Baseball Digest ran “Fielding Statistics Do Make Sense!” an article wherein the author, one Bill James, introduced Range Factor, a reincarnation of Al Wright’s fielding average (putouts added to assists and divided by games). Later James acknowledged that Range Factor could not adequately capture the fielding performance of pitchers, catchers, and first basemen. Moreover, he explained, it was liable to be skewed by the following:

The number of a player’s defensive innings is not necessarily the number of games he played in multiplied by the number (in most cases, nine) of innings in that game. (James would later propose that defensive innings be recorded. They would have to be estimated for games before 1952.) 

A player is likely to get more opportunities if he plays on a team whose pitchers have a low strikeout rate. 

A pitching staff with a high ratio of groundballs to fly balls is likely to increase the number of chances for infielders and to decrease the number of chances for outfielders. 

A pitching staff that is more left- or right-handed than average will affect the number of fielding opportunities for the various position players, with a left-handed pitcher, for example, likely to increase the number of opportunities for the left fielder, third baseman, and shortstop and to decrease the number of opportunities for the right fielder and first and second basemen. 

It does not adjust for team defense. “Every team makes 27 outs,” James explained in The Fielding Bible (2006), “whether they field like a team of Adam Everetts or a team of Jason Giambis. The overall range factor of a bad team is the same as the overall range factor of a good team.”15

James adjusted for these wrinkles in Relative Range Factor (RRF), which he introduced in a chapter in The Fielding Bible, twenty years after his original article on plain Range Factor.16 Using Defense Efficiency Record (see below), he also adjusted for team defense to compensate for the fewer opportunities that a given fielder is likely to have if he plays on a team with good defense. 

An important advantage of RRF is that can it be used for seasons as far back as 1876. A practical advantage that plain Range Factor has over Relative Range Factor is that it can be generated entirely from the data in box scores (you don’t consider, for example, whether the pitchers the fielders are playing behind are groundball or fly-ball pitchers), although the reliability of plain Range Factor is inferior to that of RRF.

Adjusted Range Factor. In the 1980s, Tom Tippett developed Adjusted Range Factor.17 A variation on Range Factor, it’s based on the number of balls in play (other than home runs) while each fielder is at his position. It’s adjusted for the strikeout and groundball rates of the pitching staff and for the handedness of batters. It tracks only meaningful putouts and assists—for example, when a second baseman fields a groundball and throws to first to retire the runner, the assist is considered meaningful, whereas the putout executed by a first baseman catching the thrown ball is not. However, like Range Factor, Adjusted Range Factor yields an estimate, not an exact measure of the opportunities presented to a fielder. For historical data, this provides a better estimate than does plain Range Factor, although it’s still an estimate. 

Defense Efficiency Record (DER). James went on to develop DER (defense efficiency record), a defensive metric applicable to teams. DER is a measure of the percentage of batted balls that become outs. For example, a team that records outs on 72 of 100 balls put into play has a DER of .720. DER can be applied to historical data. Roughly, it’s an inverse of batting average (roughly in that neither strikeouts nor home runs affect DER). It varies from era to era, so that it fails to measure a team’s defense relative to the league average at the time, and it does not do a great job of distinguishing pitching effectiveness from fielding.18 Still, DER is highly correlated with winning. From 2008 to 2009, for example, the Tampa Bay Rays went from worst to first in DER and from worst to first in the American League East standings.19

Fielding Runs and Fielding Wins. Pete Palmer in Total Baseball introduced Fielding Runs, a formula for estimating how many runs a fielder saves.20 A player’s Fielding Runs number is either positive or negative, unless it’s zero; an average fielder at any position would save zero runs. For double plays, additional credit is given beyond the putouts and assists the fielders are credited with. For first basemen, assists are counted but not putouts, which are considered to be not meaningful in most cases, resulting in the anomaly that the first baseman fielding the ball and throwing it to the pitcher covering first is rated more highly than the first baseman who fields the ball and runs to the bag himself. 

James in Win Shares concurs that fielding statistics don’t easily lend themselves to the evaluation of first basemen.21 In his initial attempt to arrive at a single number for the defensive value of a player to his team, James used a complex formula. The match between James’s Win Shares defensive values and Pete Palmer’s Fielding Runs was only about 50 to 60 percent, whereas their different methods for arriving at runs created “gets essentially the same answers,” according to James, about 99 percent of the time.22 

Like Range Factor, Fielding Runs does not take into account the handedness of batters or how a pitching staff’s strikeout and groundball rates affects how many opportunities a fielder gets. 

A player’s Fielding Runs number is used to estimate his Fielding Wins, an estimate of the number of games a team won above or below what it would have won with an average fielder (with zero Fielding Runs) at the player’s position. 

Statistics That Require the Tracking of Batted Balls Metrics 

In contrast to the set of newer defensive metrics discussed up to this point are defensive metrics that involve zone charts and require the tracking of batted balls to the precise points where they land on the field. These metrics are beyond the ability of the typical fan or researcher to calculate on his own; he must simply trust the work of private data-gathering services—for the most part, STATS, LLC (formerly STATS, Inc.) and Baseball Info Solutions (BIS)—and rely on the numbers they report. Another limitation of zone-based defensive metrics is that they can’t be used for seasons before 1989. For the seasons for which they can be used, however, these metrics have proven to be more reliable indicators of a player’s fielding ability than are the box-score-based metrics. How do we know the numbers are more reliable? The numbers correlate better year to year. Many of these metrics measure very specific observations (ability to field balls to his right, ability to handle bunts, etc.). These metrics give results that conform well to our impression. They also give us insight into abilities of players who through conventional scouting methods may have been overlooked. 

Tracking by Eyeballing. In the late 1970s, James proposed that the location of every batted ball be tracked for the purpose of evaluating defensive performance. From the beginning, this project involved dividing up the field into zones. Below is an example of a STATS zone chart.

Zone Rating (ZR). In 1989, STATS, Inc., developed Zone Rating (ZR). How is ZR calculated? They divide the field into zones. Each fielder is responsible for one or more of them. Some zones, representing “gaps,” are not assigned to any defensive position. STATS “reporters” sit in the press box and, “eyeballing” the course of batted balls, record which zone every ball put into play falls into. If it falls into a zone for which the shortstop, for example, is responsible, he’s credited with an opportunity. If he makes a play on the ball, he’s credited with the opportunity plus the play. His zone rating is simply plays divided by opportunities; in this way, zone-rating numbers are numerically similar to fielding percentage. 

If a fielder makes a play on a ball in a zone he’s not responsible for, he’s credited, but the form of credit varies according to the system of Zone Rating, that of STATS or that of BIS. In the original Zone Rating from STATS, players get extra credit for fielding a ball out of their zone. In Revised Zone Rating (described below), no extra credit is given for them, they’re merely tallied separately.23 

Defensive Average (DA). In the 1990s, Pete DeCoursey and Sherri Nichols used play-by-play data from Project Scoresheet and The Baseball Workshop, a research company that produced baseball databases, in their development of Defensive Average. The concept is the same as that of Zone Rating. The field is divided into zones that are assigned to positions. The number of plays a given fielder makes is compared to the number of balls into the zones he’s responsible for. Some baseball analysts have found DA to be useful, but it has not been adopted across the industry to the degree that the various flavors of ZR have. 

Significant differences between DA and ZR mean that a given fielder may look better in ZR than in DA or vice versa. In DA, every zone is assigned to at least one fielder—no gaps in the outfield, for example, are recognized, as they are in ZR, and every ball put into play is deemed to be at least possibly fieldable. In ZR, a ball that drops in for a hit in a zone that no fielder is considered responsible for is not counted as an opportunity for anyone, whereas in DA, if the ball is hit into the gap between short and second, for example, each infielder is charged with half an opportunity. This tends to penalize a fielder who plays next to a fielder with poor range.24

Tracking by Pixel. “But none of these [defensive metrics],” Alan Schwarz wrote back in 2004, “have gained any real currency, because they all basically derive from the same specious input: putouts, assists, and errors. To really assess the skill of a fielder, many more factors must be considered: How hard was the ball hit? Where was the fielder stationed at the moment of contact? How quickly was he able to close the gap between his glove and the ball? Would a stronger throw have beaten the runner, and how fast was the runner moving?”25 

The first item, at least, in Schwarz’s list of questions is addressed with the help of Baseball Info Solutions and the availability of new kinds of data, which are used for Revised Zone Rating, Plus/Minus, Ultimate Zone Rating, and Probabilistic Model of Range (all described later). BIS tracks the direction, speed, type, and distance of every batted ball. Speeds of batted balls are classified as soft, medium, or hard. Types are classified as groundball, liner, fly ball, “fliner” (balls considered halfway between a fly ball and line drive), or bunt.26 High infield pop-ups are grouped with fly balls. After this breakdown, there are two specific splits: distance (in feet) and direction (indicated by a vector). 

For direction and distance, the manner in which the batted balls are tracked by BIS video scouts is entirely different from how balls are tracked by STATS for Zone Rating. BIS video scouts do not determine which zone a batted ball falls into. Rather, they plot a hit location on a field diagram for the given ballpark. BIS software enables the video scouts to simply click on the computer image of the field to plot the hit location. This displays a one-pixel-by-one-pixel hit location where a ball lands or is fielded. In contrast to the tracking method of ZR, this method does not involve the assignation of zones to specific fielders. Video scouts’ opinions of the degree of difficulty are never considered; the video scouts simply watch game film and plot the data points. Each hit location is plotted by at least two video scouts to ensure accuracy.

Revised Zone Rating (RZR). In The Fielding Bible, John Dewan expands on the original Zone Rating system he developed at STATS, his former company. Revised Zone Rating (RZR) involves two major improvements over plain Zone Rating. 

First, in RZR, the hit locations by pixel, described above, are used to plot batted balls; balls hit in specific directions and at specific distances are predetermined to fall in a player’s zone or “out of zone.” BIS video scouts plot hit locations, and then an automated code determines whether the ball landed (or was caught) in a particular RZR zone. 

Second, Baseball Info Solutions, in using RZR, tallies separately the number of plays made outside a player’s zone. These are designated Plays Out of Zone, or OOZ. Revised Zone Rating is simply a percentage of the balls fielded successfully in a player’s zone; it lists Out of Zone plays separately. This is slightly different from the original Zone Rating, where balls fielded out of a player’s zone as well as in it counted toward a player’s Zone Rating. 

In RZR for outfielders, different zones are used depending on batted-ball type. For example, the zone for line drives is much smaller than that for fliners or fly balls. This is an improvement on Zone Rating in that a 6-second fly ball, for example, is treated differently from a 3-second line drive or a 4.5 second fliner. 

When viewed simultaneously, Plays Out of Zone (OOZ) and percentage of plays in zone (RZR) prove to be a significant measure of a player’s fielding performance, as they indicate whether a player is a standout fielder at routine plays, difficult plays, both, or neither.27

Plus/Minus. Plus/Minus, another metric that John Dewan developed using BIS data, is designed to answer the question “How many plays did this player make above or below what an average player at his position would make?”28 Adam Everett, for example, had a Plus/Minus of +33 at shortstop in 2005. That is, he made 33 more plays than the average shortstop. Conversely, in 2005, Derek Jeter had a Plus/Minus of –34, despite his Gold Gloves and his reputation for making web-gem plays.29

Plus/Minus offers more nuance than other defensive-rating systems—the harder the play that is made, the greater the credit to the fielder. Conversely, the fielder is penalized more harshly for missing a routine play than for missing a hard one. But this begs the question: What exactly is a hard play, what is an easy play, and what are the various shades of difficulty between the two ends of the spectrum? This is determined from BIS data on the direction, speed, type, and distance of every batted ball. All plotted hit locations that match these four criteria are compared to each other. 

For example, each hard fliner hit 350 feet at vector 180 (the vector representing straightaway center field) is compared only to other hard fliners hit 350 feet at vector 180. So if only two out of 25 fielders caught hard fliners hit 350 feet at vector 180, those two would be rewarded significantly; the players who missed the play would be penalized, but not much. Conversely, if 23 out of 25 fielders caught hard fliners hit 350 feet at vector 180, the 23 fielders would receive a small credit to their Plus/Minus score, and the two fielders who missed the play would be penalized harshly. 

Plus/Minus values are calculated purely on the fielders’ success at all exactly unique plotted hit locations. This effectively minimizes subjectivity. Credits and debits are assigned to the fielders according to the difficulty of a play made or not made. 

Infielders are rated on their ability to handle balls hit straight at them and, to determine if they’re weaker or stronger on one side, they’re rated on their ability to handle balls hit to their right and then to their left. In The Fielding Bible, team defense for the thirty MLB clubs is rated in 19 different locations on the field where balls enter play.30 

Defensive Runs Saved. In The Fielding Bible, Volume II, John Dewan takes the defensive metrics in the first volume and translates them into runs—into runs saved, that is, or Defensive Runs Saved.31 They’re the mirror image of Runs Created, the metric Bill James developed to estimate how many runs that are scored a hitter can be credited for. 

The most important ingredient in Defensive Runs Saved is the Plus/Minus system. A fielder’s Plus/Minus number reflects how often a play is made for a batted ball with a given trajectory and hit location. For the outfielders and corner infielders, it is adjusted to reflect the number of bases saved (on plays that could be or were extra base hits)—the result is an Enhanced Plus/Minus number. A constant multiplier is applied for all players at a given position, but it varies by position. At the high end are the infielders and the pitcher. Each one saves .73 to .76 runs per Plus/Minus point. At the low end are the three outfielders, whose numbers are .56 to .58. For second basemen, shortstops, and pitchers, their positional value is multiplied by their Plus/Minus, and the result is their Plus/Minus Runs Saved. For outfielders and corner infielders, their Plus/Minus Runs Saved number is calculated by taking their positional value and multiplying that by their Enhanced Plus/Minus. Plus/Minus Runs Saved is the largest component of Defensive Runs Saved for all positions except catcher.

DEFENSIVE MISPLAYS AND GOOD FIELDING PLAYS

The category Defensive Misplays was introduced in The Fielding Bible, Volume II.32 The official scorer’s decision to charge a fielder with an error is broadly based on his judgment that the play could have been made with ordinary effort, whereas the decision to charge a fielder with a Defensive Misplay is based on a long list of criteria—54 of them—that are spelled out with some specificity. Here are some examples:

• Outfielder fails to anticipate the wall when making a catch.
• Infielder makes a poor throw.
• Infielder lets the ball roll under his glove.
• Players attempt to catch a fly ball or popup and it drops between them.
• Outfielder takes a bad route to a ball.
• Outfielder misses the cutoff man, allowing the runner to advance.

Conversely, fielders are credited for plays they’re not expected to make. These are appropriately named Good Fielding Plays. There are 27 criteria. Some examples:

• Outfielder steals a home run from a batter.
• Catcher picks off a runner.
• Fielder holds a runner to a single on a ball that was a likely double or a triple.
• First baseman handles a difficult throw.
• Middle infielder turns a double play despite an aggressive slide by the baserunner.

Both the Defensive Misplays and Good Fielding Plays can be tracked per Touch. A Touch is counted if a fielder touches the ball with his hand or his glove at any point during a play or if he is the first fielder to handle a ball that falls in for a hit. He can’t get more than one Touch per play.33

First Base and Third Base 

The main ingredients in the Defensive Runs for first and third baseman are Plus/Minus Runs Saved and runs saved on bunts.34 The Plus/Minus numbers for the infielders at the corners are adjusted to create an Enhanced Plus/Minus, which reflects the value of bases saved on balls hit down the line. (Some of those balls would have turned into doubles.)35 From 2003 through 2008, Albert Pujols and Mark Teixeira had the best Enhanced Plus/ Minus at first; Mike Jacobs and Richie Sexson had the worst. Adrian Beltre and Scott Rolen led among third basemen.36 

Second Base and Shortstop

For middle infielders, the main ingredients are Plus/Minus Runs Saved and runs saved on double plays.37 Double plays and double-play opportunities are tracked, as are pivots and pivot opportunities, where, for example, the second baseman would get credit for a pivot in a 6-4-3 or 5-4-3 double play.38 At shortstop, Adam Everett is the leader in Runs Saved from 2006 through 2008 by a wide margin, 48 to Jimmy Rollins’s 33; Derek Jeter has the lowest Runs Saved, –50. Chase Utley and Mark Ellis lead among second basemen for this period, and Jeff Kent ranks last.39 

Outfielders 

For outfielders, Defensive Runs involve three main metrics—Plus/Minus Runs Saved, runs saved by the outfielder’s arm, and runs saved by robbing hitters of home runs. For Plus/ Minus Runs Saved, the Enhanced Plus/Minus version is used, because outfielders can take a hit that would have been a double and keep it to a single. Rather than just account for the number of plays made, the Enhanced Plus/ Minus number indicates the number of bases saved.40 In The Fielding Bible, Volume II, separate Plus/Minus values are given for the three categories of distance (shallow, medium, deep).41

Also factored into the formula for Defensive Runs for outfielders is opposition baserunning. The number of bases that runners advance when an outfielder gets the ball is tracked, as it’s a good measurement of how intimidated (if at all) runners are by an outfielder’s arm.

Outfielders are rated on how often runners advance, stay put, or are thrown out in extra-base advancement situations. Baserunner kills are a more direct measurement of an outfielder’s arm than are assists, which include relay throws to an infielder whose own throw may have had more to do with the eventual putout than did the outfielder’s relay.42

Pitchers 

Defensive Runs for pitchers is a measurement, of course, of the runs they save with their glove, not with their arm, except when they throw to a base after a ball is hit into play. Because of the location of the mound, the calculation of Plus/Minus for pitchers is similar to that of Plus/Minus for the middle infielders. 

The running game does not show up in Plus/Minus Runs Saved, which is combined with Stolen Bases Runs Saved to yield his Defensive Runs. The caught-stealing percentage is tracked for pitchers as it is for catchers. The pitcher’s ability to curb the running game has been shown to impact the running game more than the catcher’s ability to do the same. Attempted steals, caught stealing, and pickoffs factor into a pitcher’s Stolen Bases Runs Saved. Kenny Rogers led major-league pitchers in Defensive Runs in the period 2006–8, when he had 27.43

Catchers 

Catchers do not have any Plus/Minus value; their Defensive Runs Saved consists of Stolen Bases Runs Saved and Adjusted Earned Runs Saved. We start with Stolen Bases Saved. How many does a catcher have? From his caught-stealing total, pitcher pickoffs are subtracted. Let’s say the official record is that in 100 attempts the catcher has been credited with throwing out 40 runners but that in ten cases the runner was caught by the pitcher initiating the throw to one of the bases to pick the runner off. That leaves the catcher throwing out 30 runners in 90 attempts.

Each Stolen Base Saved is worth .62 Defensive Runs for Stolen Bases Runs Saved. In The Fielding Bible, Volume II, Dewan also calculates Adjusted Earned Runs Saved. Based on Catcher ERA, Dewan takes the ERA of each catcher with each pitcher and compares that to the ERA of other catchers who caught the same pitchers that year. After adjusting for home ballparks, Dewan applies a “credibility factor,” which, in essence, regresses the total to account for the volume of noise remaining in the data.44

Total Runs 

Total Runs is a comprehensive metric based on a variety of other metrics and used to compare position players for their overall contribution in all aspects of the game. (Total Runs does not apply to pitchers.) 

Total Runs consists of four components: 

• Runs Created 
• Baserunning Runs 
• Defensive Runs Saved 
• A positional adjustment that allows for comparison among different positions (more weight is given to playing the more difficult defensive positions) 

Runs Created is an estimation of how many runs a player generates on offense with his bat and basestealing ability. Baserunning Runs, an estimation of how many runs a player generates through extra-base advancements on batted balls (it does not include basestealing). 

What is the positional adjustment? It is well known that some positions are widely considered offensive positions or defensive positions. In The Fielding Bible, Volume II, Bill James assumes that 72 percent of Runs Saved are by pitchers and 28 percent by fielders (other than pitchers). He uses the average Runs Created (RC) values for 2005–7 at each of the eight positions (DHs and pitchers are excluded). First base has the highest average RC value, 99, and catcher has the lowest, 70. James also assumes that all positions contribute equally to a baseball game—that the players who contribute more offensively contribute less defensively, and vice versa. So James sets the Runs Saved value of each position equal to a value such that the sum of Runs Created and Runs Saved is equal for each position. After making some minor adjustments for the value of different outs, catchers have the highest Runs Saved component (42), with shortstops (36) and second basemen (32) not far behind. First basemen have the lowest (13), and left field (19) and right field (20) are not much higher. 

To determine the weight given to each position, the Runs Saved number is then multiplied by the percentage of possible innings played at that position. For an example, consider John Dewan’s discussion of Chase Utley in The Fielding Bible, Volume II. Dewan explains: “Chase Utley played 96.7 percent of a full season of innings at second base and 0.97 percent at first. Applying the Positional Averages, we get .967*32 + .0097*13 = 30.9 + 0.1 = 31.” 

In 2008, Chase Utley of the Philadelphia Phillies led MLB with 192 Total Runs, reflecting not only his good hitting but also his 34 Defensive Runs Saved and his high percentage of innings played at second base. Apparently most of the baseball writers voting on the NL MVP that year didn’t recognize the strength of Utley’s season—he finished only fourteenth in the voting. Utley’s teammate Ryan Howard finished second to Albert Pujols (a worthy choice, as his 171 Total Runs were the highest in MLB after Utley’s 192). But Howard ranked only fiftieth in the major leagues in Total Runs; in fact, three teammates, Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Shane Victorino, all had more Total Runs than Howard did.45 

Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). While at STATS, Dewan began plans to improve on Zone Rating, introducing what he called Ultimate Zone Rating in STATS 2001 Baseball Scoreboard.46 Soon thereafter, Dewan left STATS and eventually developed Revised Zone Rating, Plus/Minus, and Defensive Runs Saved. 

Meanwhile, Mitchel Lichtman independently began efforts of his own to improve on the basic Zone Rating metric. Lichtman’s creation, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), was introduced in 2003 in a series of primers on the Baseball Think Factory website. 

Mitchel Lichtman took Zone Rating one step further, using a different approach from that in The Fielding Bible. UZR is a measure of the actual number of runs a player saves because of his defense. Like Defensive Runs Saved, UZR is relative to the league average for a player at a given position. And, as with Defensive Runs Saved, the data for UZR is based on video replays available from Baseball Info Solutions (BIS). And UZR is like Defensive Runs Saved in that it’s based on locations of batted balls and not on an observer’s judgment whether a fielder should be able to reach a ball in a given zone.

UZR enables clubs to compare, for any given player, his runs created and his runs prevented. The data collection is imperfect, as Lichtman explains: 

First and third base get less than half the opportunities of second base and shortstop. But after a year, most positions get regressed somewhere around 50 percent, so we treat a +10 for a season worth of data as a +5, for example. There is no magic number for the amount of data on a player to be reliable, but after, say, three years, I consider a player’s UZR to be pretty darn reliable. Of course, there are still going to be a small percentage of players that UZR gets “wrong” after three years or even after ten years for that matter. It is just that, the larger the sample, the less the percentage of plays that UZR get wrong.47

For example, in 2009, Franklin Gutierrez generated about four more runs (wRAA from Fangraphs.com) than did the average hitter. He ranked eighteenth among center fielders. Franklin had a UZR value of 29, indicating that, in theory, he saved 29 runs.48 It was by far the league’s best for center fielders and probably can’t be sustained on an annual basis. When his offensive and defensive numbers are combined, he actually becomes the most valuable center fielder in the game last season. 

Probabilistic Model of Range. David Pinto of Baseballmusings.com further expanded on Lichtman’s UZR with the BIS data and developed the Probabilistic Model of Range (PMR).49 On his website, he provides breakouts and individual graphs showing specifically where a player fields balls relative to the average player at his position. For example, the graph for second basemen would show how good a second baseman is at fielding balls relative to the second-base bag and also relative to the average major-league second baseman. 

PMR adjusts for the direction of the hit, the type of hit, the speed of the batted ball, pitcher handedness, batter handedness, and park factors. All these items are taken into account to arrive at the probability that a batted ball will become an out. From that probability, a value for expected outs is obtained. What makes PMR different from the other metrics is that it builds on team DER, as an expected team DER is calculated and compared to a team’s actual DER. This provides insight into to how much a team’s defense is helping its pitching staff turn batted balls into outs.50 

Total Zone 

The biggest problem with both the box-score category of metrics and the zone/tracking category of metrics is that they’re not useful for comparing contemporary and more-recent players to players before 1989. The box-score metrics are available back to 1876, but they’re a less precise measure of defensive performance than the zone-based metrics are. The zone-based metrics are more precise, but they don’t exist for seasons before 1989. Between this rock and a hard place there is, however, a defensive metric that can be used to compared the defensive performance of players across the centuries. Welcome to Total Zone. 

Total Zone Total Fielding Runs. Sean Smith of BaseballProjection.com developed Total Zone Total Fielding Runs, which is “the number of runs above or below average the player was worth based on the number of plays made.”51 At Baseball-Reference.com, Total Zone Total Fielding Runs is regarded as the best all-inclusive defensive statistic for historical data and more recent data alike. Smith uses different methods to analyze defense depending on the data available. 

Limited Play-by-Play Data Available. Data are generally available for determining who made an out in the field. For seasons before 2003, however, data on where balls landed does not exist, and the information is roughly estimated, resulting in a fraction of each hit being assigned to each position player. Smith explains: “Without information on the hits, I have to make an estimate. I look at each batter’s career rates of outs by position. For example, if 30% of a batter’s outs are hit to shortstop, then every time that batter gets a hit the shortstop is charged 0.3 hits. Repeat for every position.”52 

Adjustments are made for pitcher handedness. Fractional hits, plays made, and errors are added together to get a Total Zone rating. If there are no play-by-play data (before 1956), the values are similar to an Adjusted Range Factor or a Relative Range Factor. 

Extensive Play-by-Play Data Available. In 2003, Retrosheet began recording more-specific play-by-play data. As with Baseball Info Solutions data, hits are classified by batted-ball type (groundballs, flies, line drives, popups), and the fielder who made the out or attempted to make it specified. The data also reflect pitcher handedness and when a runner on first must be held. 

A raw Total Zone value is park-adjusted and converted to a value, positive or negative. As with Plus/Minus, the player evaluated by Total Zone is compared to the average player at his position in his league. Since the Total Zone rating is simply a measure of fielding range, additional components must be added, depending on the position. Outfielders get a separate score for their throwing arms. Infielders are scored for their ability to turn double plays, and catchers for their success at controlling the running game and prevent passed balls and wild pitches. The sum of these values produces the Total Zone Total Fielding Runs Above Average, which is similar to Runs Saved in The Fielding Bible. 

Some players who have won Gold Gloves and have a reputation for good defense do have high ratings in Total Zone for their career: 1B Keith Hernandez, 2B Frank White and Bill Mazeroski, SS Mark Belanger and Ozzie Smith, 3B Brooks Robinson, LF Carl Yastrzemski, CF Willie Mays, and RF Roberto Clemente. And some players with a reputation for bad defense have some of the worst Total Zone ratings at their defensive positions: 1B Mo Vaughn, 2B Juan Samuel, SS Derek Jeter, 3B Dean Palmer, LF Pat Burrell and Adam Dunn, and RF Danny Tartabull.53

Of all the advanced defensive metrics, only Total Zone has been consistently recorded for minor leaguers, since 2005. Sean Forman at Baseball-Reference.com has begun to update Total Zone for major leaguers daily during the season.54

LIMITATIONS 

The data available for new players to the major leagues are limited. They come to the major leagues with a track record, in high school, college, and the minors, full of offensive data, on-base percentage and the like, but for the most part the sabermetric statistical information that a club will have on how many runs they save defensively is limited to Total Zone numbers from the minors since 2005. 

Defensive Runs Saved, UZR, and Total Zone have begun to be updated regularly during the season. Their significance over a small number of games is still uncertain and may not be great. A player who gets ten hits in 25 at-bats is having a better week than the one who goes 5-for-25. But is a player who scores +5 in Plus/Minus in the course of a single week really having a better defensive week than the player who scores –5? At this point, it’s hard to say. We do know that, like most statistics, Defensive Runs Saved, UZR, and Total Zone give a more accurate picture of player performance over the course of an entire season or, better, multiple consecutive seasons.55

Another major limitation of advanced defensive metrics is their inaccessibility to the general public, or average fan, and in some cases even to decision makers in front offices. Sitting and watching or scoring a game, any casual fan can deduce that a batter who gets 1 hit in 4 at-bats in a game is batting .250 for the game. However, the average fan attending a game can’t do the equivalent with advanced fielding statistics. If the ball goes between the first baseman and second baseman for a hit, does this count as a missed opportunity for the first baseman, the second baseman, both, or neither? If it’s considered a miss, how significant is the miss? A casual fan (or even the fan who understands sabermetrics, for that matter) would not be able to figure this out simply from watching a live game. After the average fan leaves the ballpark at the end of the game, he wouldn’t be able to say for certain whether a player’s UZR increased or decreased as he would know, for example, if the batting average of a player who got one hit in four at-bats rose or fell. 

Clubs rely on their scouting and data-collection agencies to help fill voids that statistics cannot measure and to verify that the statistics are truly showing us the best fielders. One fan-generated scouting source on defensive performance is the Fan Scouting Report collected by Tom Tango. Fans who have seen players in person vote on those players’ abilities.56 It’s a reasonable way to double-check a player’s defensive ability as indicated by the metrics. Steve Sommers has actually gone as far as combining both UZR numbers and the Fan Scout Report to come up with a combined value.57 

Even the statisticians and analysts who develop and work with the advanced defensive metrics are constantly referring back to the empirical evidence, what they see a fielder do, as well as to his reputation (how many Gold Gloves has he won?), to check the reliability of their statistical analysis. (See “Fielding Bible Awards: An Alternative to the Gold Glove” below.) 

FRONT OFFICES USE DEFENSIVE METRICS—OR DON’T USE THEM 

Clubs that are using these or similar defensive metrics have good reason not to divulge the details of their search for undervalued fielding talent, but, at least around the edges of this discussion, a few are fairly forthcoming. Jack Zduriencik, the Mariners’ general manager, is one of them. He was studying the defensive numbers available at FanGraphs and Hardball Times when the line for Franklin Gutierrez jumped out at him.58 Gutierrez’s exceptional range couldn’t be fully leveraged at Progressive Field, which has one of the smallest outfields in MLB. Safeco Field has one of the biggest. Zduriencik traded for Gutierrez after the 2008 season, as part of his larger plan to tighten Seattle’s defense. The Mariners, ranked twentieth in MLB in UZR (–1) in 2008, led all of MLB in that category (+85) in 2009. Their record in 2008 was dismal—they won all of 61 games. In 2009 they won 87, scoring 31 fewer runs than the year before, but the runs they allowed were 119 fewer. 

The Red Sox are another club not shy about admitting their attention to statistical analysis. That they’ve been paying special attention to defensive stats is suggested by their offseason acquisition of outfielder Mike Cameron and infielders Adrian Beltre and Marco Scutaro and by the departure of Jason Bay, a defensive liability in the outfield. 

“What I’m most curious about in 2010 is how much better we’re going to be defensively,’’ Bill James, who works as special advisor on baseball operations for the Red Sox, said earlier this year, during the offseason. “I don’t think anyone questions that we’re going to have a better defensive team. But are we going to be as much better defensively as we want to believe we are, and is that going to have as much impact on [the pitching staff] as we hope it does?’’(For more on how good defense helps pitching, see “The Hidden Value of Glovework” by Vince Gennaro in this issue.)59 

Mitchel Lichtman, who worked for the Cardinals for a few years, 2004 through 2006, says they used UZR back then. He guesses that, in some form or other, it’s still a part of their statistical-analysis toolkit.60 The Tigers, Rays, and Yankees have all been rumored to use defensive stats. 

Other clubs let out that they value defense but not necessarily the state-of-the-art statistical instruments for measuring it. On several occasions Royals general manager Dayton Moore has indicated that, when it comes to evaluating defense, he trusts his scouts more than he trusts the numbers. “The defensive statistics,” he said, “I still really don’t understand how some of those statistics are evaluated, I really don’t. When you watch baseball games every single day, it’s very apparent who can play defensively and who can’t.”61 

Cubs general manager Jim Hendry agrees. David Laurila of Baseball Prospectus asked him whether “ defensive metrics [are] an important part of your evaluation process or do you rely primarily on scouting?” Hendry replied: “It’s scouting for me. People scout players and they rate their defense, and that’s what I go by—and the personnel that we have in our own dugout.”62

Just as a front office’s attentiveness to the statistical analysis of defense doesn’t guarantee success (the Mariners, for example, have gotten off to a woeful start this year), neither does willful neglect of it necessarily mean a team is doomed to flail around near the bottom of the standings. The Phillies have won the National League pennant the past two years and, despite having great defensive statistics on a team and individual level, apparently have not crunched those numbers much. “I think defensive statistics are the most unpredictable stats out there,” said Charley Kerfeld, special assistant to Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. “Since I’ve been here, we don’t have an in-house stats guy and I kind of feel we never will.”63

Will any of the high-end defensive metrics ever be embraced by the average fan, for whom quantification of defense means mostly that he looks at errors and occasionally casts a skeptical glance at fielding percentage? The metrics that are available now and that we outlined above may prove useful for evaluating players in a career context or, depending on the metric, over a shorter span, one to three seasons. For the metrics to be routinely tracked and updated on a daily basis for the benefit of the general public, however, the conventions of scorekeeping would have to undergo radical revision. A hit would have to be recorded not only as a hit for the batter and against the pitcher but also as a missed opportunity for the fielder(s).

So it’s unlikely that UZR and its kin will start appearing on scoreboards alongside batting average, home runs, and RBIs any time soon. As for the resistance from some front offices, are they allergic to innovation, or is it that they have a healthy aversion to busyness? About that you can be the judge. Some of us are wired such that we find maps helpful, and some of us not so much. In any case, the maps that the sabermetric effort to quantify defense gives us may never be as subtly delineated as the four-dimensional terrain they represent. The trick is to know not only how to read the maps for what they are, a set of honest if not infallible data points, but how to read them with one eye while keeping the other one on the ball in flight as Franklin Gutierrez takes off to run it down. 

DAN BASCO is a graduate student and teaching assistant in the statistics department at the University of Akron.

JEFF ZIMMERMAN writes for FanGraphs, Royals Review, and Beyond the Boxscore.

FIELDING BIBLE AWARDS: AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE GOLD GLOVE

Since 2006, a committee of baseball experts and close observers have been voting for the best player at each position for that season. This is The Fielding Bible Award. Voters have included Bill James, Peter Gammons, Rob Neyer, Hal Richman (of Strat-O-Matic), and fans who vote in a poll conducted by Tom Tango. Many voters have a strong statistical background; others do not. All voting is based on a combination of defensive statistics and visual observation. The ballot is similar to that of the MVP selection: Ten players receive votes; the player who gets the first-place vote gets 10 points, second place is good for 9, and so on. In contrast to the rules governing voting for the Gold Glove Award, the list of eligible players is restricted to players who played a minimum number of innings at a given position. One player at each position receives the award. There is not a separate award to the best in the AL and the best in the NL—it’s only for the best in all of MLB. The three outfield positions are assessed separately. Also in contrast to the Gold Glove Awards, The Fielding Bible Awards are accompanied by publication of the results of the voting—they appear annually in The Bill James Handbook—and so we can see who came close (or not so close) to winning.64 Here is a list of the winners.65

Notes

1 Doug Glanville, The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View (New York: Times Books, 2010), 24.

2 Peter Abraham, “Calling James’s Number: Stat Guru Senses New Defensive Focus,” Boston Globe, 15 January 2010.

3 Albert Chen, “Feel the Glove,” Sports Illustrated, 1 March 2010.

4 Peter Abraham, “Calling James’s Number: Stat Guru Senses New Defensive Focus,” Boston Globe, 15 January 2010.

5 Alan Schwarz, The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), 9.

6 Schwarz, 10.

7 Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, ed. John Thorn, Pete Palmer, and Michael Gershman, with Matthew Silverman, Sean Lahman, and Greg Spira, 7th ed. (Kingston: Total Sports, 2001), 519.

8 William F. Kirk, “Strolls Through Sportsville,” New York Evening Journal. March 9, 1917.

9 Bill James, interview with C. Trent Rosecrans, “Talking with Bill James: Part 1,” March 19, 2010, Cincinnati Sports Journalism, cnati.com.

10 Hugh Fullerton, “Defensive Strength Complicated,” New York Evening Mail, October 23, 1921.

11 John Thorn, Pete Palmer, and Michael Gershman, eds., Total Baseball, 7th ed. (Kingston, N.Y.: Total Sports, 2001), 536.

12 Stephen Day, “Deconstructing the Midas Touch: Gold Glove Award Voting, 1965–2004,” January 1, 2005, Allbusiness.com.

13 John Dewan, The Fielding Bible (Skokie: ACTA Sports, 2006), 149.

14 Day, “Deconstructing the Midas Touch.”

15 Dewan, 199.

16 Dewan, 199–209.

17 Tom Tippett, “Evaluating Defense,” 5 December 2002, DiamondMind.com.

18 Scott Gray, The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 36.

19 Albert Chen, “Feel the Glove,” Sports Illustrated, 1 March 2010

20 Total Baseball, 7th ed., 2494.

21 Bill James and Jim Henzler, Win Shares (Morton Grove: STATS Publishing, 2002). 80–85.

22 Dewan, 199.

23 Tom Tippett, “Evaluating Defense”; Chris Dial, “What Is Zone Rating?” November 5, 2005, Baseball Think Factory; Colin Wyers, “Introducing WAR for Hitters,” May 10, 2008, Goatriders of the Apocalypse (www.goatriders.org).

24 Tom Tippett, “Evaluating Defense.”

25  Schwarz, 240.

26 Dewan, 1.

27 Dewan, 227–28.

28 Dewan, 1.

29 Dewan, 168.

30 Dewan, 39.

31 John Dewan, The Fielding Bible, Volume II (Skokie, Ill.: ACTA Sports, 2009), 11–4.

32  Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 27–29.

33  Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 33.

34 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 11-13.

35 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 11.

36 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 86.

37 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 11-13.

38 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 217.

39 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 86.

40 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 11-13.

41 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 161-65.

42 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 375-76.

43 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 63-67.

44 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 75-82.

45 Dewan, The Fielding Bible II, 385-94.

46 Don Zminda, Tony Nistler, and STATS, Inc, STATS 2001 Baseball Scoreboard., 10th ed. (Morton Grove, Ill.: STATS Publishing, March 2001).

47 Mitchel Lichtman, interview with Jeff Zimmerman, March 25, 2010.

48 Major League Leaderboards, 2009, All Positions, Fielding Statistics | FanGraphs Baseball (Fangraphs.com).

49 Probabilistic Model of Range Archives (last updated December 9, 2009), Baseballmusings.com.

50 Doug Miller, “Four New Defensive Stats Explained,” January 11, 2010, MLB.mlb.com.

51 Sean Smith, “Total Zone Defense on Baseball Reference,” May 5, 2008, HardballTimes.com.

52 “Total Zone Data,” Baseball-Reference.com / About / Total Zone.

53 Sean Smith, “Measuring Defense for Players Back to 1956,” March 25, 2008, HardballTimes.com.

54 Sean Smith, “Total Zone Defense on Baseball Reference.”

55 “John Dewan (and Research Assistant) Speak!” July 20, 2009, The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball (www.insidethebook.com).

56 www.tangotiger.net/scout

57 Steve Somer, “Defensive Projections, Take 2,” Play a Hard Nine, November 21, 2009, http://playahardnine.wordpress.com.

58 Albert Chen, “Feel the Glove,” Sports Illustrated, March 1, 2010.

59 Peter Abraham, “Calling James’s Number: Stat Guru Senses New Defensive Focus,” Boston Globe, January 15, 2010.

60 Mitchel Lichtman, interview with Jeff Zimmerman, March 25, 2010.

61 Dayton Moore, July 13, 2009 interview on AM 810 WHB, Kansas City, www.royalsreview.com/2009/7/13/947719/the-defensive-statistics-i-still.

62 Jim Hendry, interview with David Laurila, Prospectus Q&A, July 12, 2009 BaseballProspectus.com.

63 Doug Miller, “New Defensive Stats Starting to Catch On,” January 11, 2010, MLB.mlb.com.

64 Baseball Info Solutions and Bill James, The Bill James Handbook 2010. (Skokie: ACTA Sports, 2006), 15–16

65 Fielding Bible, www.fieldingbible.com.

Tris Speaker is remembered more for his performance on the playing field than for his results as a manager. But in 1920–21 his personnel moves, tactics, and leadership generated outstanding results for the Cleveland Indians. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

Tris Speaker, considered one of the greatest hitters and center fielders of all time, is rarely considered a great manager, though his rallying the Cleveland Indians to the 1920 world championship after the death of Ray Chapman is readily acknowledged. His remarkable achievement of managing the Indians in 1921—keeping them in the pennant race against all odds (until a ninth-inning rally against the Yankees on September 26 fell just short)—has been overlooked. The elements of that success were the same as those of 1920. How those teams were assembled and how Speaker ran them reveal a special managerial and leadership skill set.

Speaker, who took over as manager of the Indians on July 19, 1919, guided them to a remarkable 40–21 mark for the rest of that season. He had a superb eye for talent and a special ability to draw out the best in his men. Grantland Rice called him “an alert, hustling, magnetic leader, who can get 100 per cent out of his material.”1 That he could do. Equally important, he secured that “material” by seeing potential where others did not. In a Cleveland Plain Dealer article headlined “Spoke Converts Discards into Valuable Assets,” Henry P. Edwards noted that Speaker should be known as the “Miracle Man.”2

Speaker acquired pitchers who had failed and been rejected elsewhere, men in whom he “saw something.” First there was Ray Caldwell. Traded away by the Yankees after the 1918 season, the alcoholic pitcher was waived by the struggling Red Sox the following August and appeared to be finished. Speaker signed him later that month, shortly after taking over as Indians manager. As Franklin Lewis related in his history of the Indians, Speaker used reverse psychology in Caldwell’s contract: “After each game he pitches, Ray Caldwell must get drunk. He is not to report to the clubhouse the next day. The second day he is to report to Manager Speaker and run around the ball park as many times as Manager Speaker stipulates. The third day he is to pitch batting practice, and the fourth day he is to pitch in a championship game.”3 

Caldwell went 5–1 with a 1.71 earned run average for the Tribe in 1919. One of those wins was a no-hitter against his old team, the Yankees. Another was a game in which he was struck by lightning in the ninth inning; he recovered and finished the game.4 In 1920 he continued his spectacular comeback when he fashioned a 20–10 record. Under Speaker’s tutelage, Caldwell was able to keep his drinking under control. 

A year after picking up Caldwell, Speaker acquired minor league pitcher Duster Mails from Sacramento of the Pacific Coast League. After pitching for the Brooklyn Robins in 1915 and 1916, Mails had spent three seasons in the minors. “I didn’t deliberately try to dust them off,” he explained. “I couldn’t make the ball go where I wanted it to go.”5 (He had an 0–2 record with 14 walks and 16 strikeouts in 22 1/3 innings with Brooklyn.) 

Speaker had been following Mails’s progress in the Coast League, where he won 37 games in 1919–20.

“I have been trying to get Mails for a year past. … I have had Mails in mind for some time and he came to us when he did only after long bargaining and planning.”6 Mails joined the Indians for the late-season stretch, and he won seven games—including two shutouts—against no losses with a 1.85 earned run average. In the 1920 World Series he pitched 15 2/3 scoreless innings and won one game. 

Speaker picked up pitcher Allan Sothoron in the middle of the 1921 season, after he had been released by the Browns and the Red Sox, where he gave up 25 earned runs in 33 2/3 innings. Speaker had noticed a flaw in Sothoron’s delivery and thought he was tipping his pitches. Sothoron regained his effectiveness and proved to be a critical addition for Cleveland in 1921.7 He had a 12–4 record with a 3.24 earned run average. 

Speaker also was able to work youngsters into the lineup in the midst of fierce pennant races, where they performed very well from the start. After the death of shortstop Ray Chapman in August 1920, 21-year-old Joe Sewell was purchased from New Orleans. A recent team captain at the University of Alabama, Sewell took batting practice each morning against lefty Mails. Speaker wanted the left-handed-hitting rookie to build up his confidence.8 Sewell hit .329 in those final weeks of the season and, in his first full season, 1921, .318 with 36 doubles. 

When Indians’ second baseman Bill Wambsganss was injured in spring training in 1921, Speaker signed Riggs Stephenson—who had been Sewell’s double-play partner in college—directly from the University of Alabama. He responded with a .330 batting average that year. 

The Indians brought up another youngster in 1921, Joe Sewell’s brother Luke. He appeared in only three games that first season—the first, however, of a twenty-year career in the major leagues. 

Speaker reclaimed the careers of position players as well, not only pitchers. Detroit sportswriter H. G. Salsinger recognized Speaker’s personnel skills. “He [Speaker] has proved himself one of the greatest base ball leaders of all time. . . . [and is noted for his] dextrous [sic] handling of players.”9

Note: The following discussion notes the offensive improvements in a number of Speaker’s players in 1920 and 1921. While this was the start of the so-called Lively Ball Era, the improvement in his players is still significant. While playing under Speaker, many of his men had tremendous turnarounds that could not be explained entirely by the introduction of the lively ball.10 

A key transaction that paved the way for the Indians’ success was their trade, on March 1, 1919, of the difficult and temperamental Braggo Roth to the Philadelphia Athletics for Larry Gardner, Charlie Jamieson, and Elmer Myers. While Speaker was not the Tribe’s manager quite yet, he pushed for the deal.11 Franklin Lewis goes further and describes Speaker’s presence in the trade talks.12 

In his history of the Indians, Lewis describes Speaker’s role with the Indians before he took over as the team’s manager, replacing Lee Fohl. ”The Fohl– Speaker combination was formed almost immediately upon the arrival of the Texan in Cleveland. Spoke was the natural field leader, and Fohl recognized his strength and adaptability promptly.”13 

Third baseman Larry Gardner had been a teammate of Tris Speaker on the Red Sox for several seasons, and a fixture in the Boston infield for a decade, before coming to the Athletics early in 1918. After joining the Indians in the spring of 1919, Gardner revitalized his career and, in his mid-thirties, averaged over .300 the next four seasons, 1919 to 1922. 

Outfielder Charlie Jamieson had done little with the Nationals (1915–17) or the Athletics (1917–18). Over those four seasons he hit an aggregate .235 and never had an on-base percentage above .341. At the last minute, Speaker asked Connie Mack to include him in the Gardner trade, and Mack agreed.14 Speaker replaced the aging Jack Graney with Jamieson during the 1920 season, and Charlie went on to have several sensational years at the plate with Cleveland, including two in which he hit above .340 and had an on-base percentage above .400. 

In his eighteen-year career in the majors, Jamieson hit .303 with 1,990 hits and an on-base percentage of .378. He later called Speaker “my best friend. He was the one who helped me get traded to Cleveland.”15

First baseman Tioga George Burns was another key Speaker acquisition. Hughie Jennings and the Detroit Tigers had given up on him after he hit .226 in 1917. Speaker bought him from Connie Mack’s Athletics on May 29, 1920.16 Historian Norman Macht noted that Mack was willing to give him up because Philadelphia fans were riding Burns mercilessly after he dropped some fly balls.17 Speaker instilled confidence in Burns, who responded with seven straight seasons of batting above .300, starting in 1921, including four seasons above .325. In 1926 he won the award as the most valuable player in the American League, hitting .358 with 64 doubles.

Steve O’Neill was a fine defensive catcher but, before Speaker took over the helm of the Indians, a weak hitter. O’Neill had hit above .253 only once, and his on-base percentage had never reached .350, when he hit .289 in 1919. He hit between .311 and .322 the next three seasons, when his on-base percentage was above .400. Speaker gave O’Neill three specific tips to help him at bat.18

1. Go to the plate thinking you’ll get a hit. 
2. Outthink the pitcher. 
3. Don’t swing at bad balls. 

Speaker converted third baseman Joe Evans to an outfielder. He had never played in the outfield until 1920. A .214 hitter before 1920, he hit .342 the next two seasons.

On February 24, 1917, Smoky Joe Wood joined his former Red Sox roommate and pal, who was now with the Indians. “Undoubtedly,” Franklin Lewis wrote, “Wood came to the Indians on Tris’s recommendation.”19 Charles Alexander notes that the $15,000 James Dunn paid Boston to acquire Wood was far above his “market value” at the time.20 With his arm “gone” and his career as a pitcher over, Wood made a terrific comeback as an everyday player. Actually, he had been a decent hitter as a pitcher. In the four years 1910 through 1913, he hit .273 (92 hits in 337 at bats), including four home runs, four triples, and 24 doubles.

First baseman Wheeler “Doc” Johnston never hit above .280 before 1919. He hit under .250 from 1909 to 1918 and then almost .300 from 1919 to 1921. The Burns and Johnston deals cost the Indians less than $10,000.21 The Indians reacquired outfielder Elmer Smith on June 13, 1917. (They had traded him away the previous August.) In 1920 and 1921 Smith had career years, hitting .303 with 28 home runs.

Tris Speaker was also far ahead of his time in how he used his players. He was an early advocate of platooning long before the word even existed in the baseball lexicon.22 The concept of playing left-handed hitters to face right-handed pitchers and vice versa had awkward names at the time, including “double-batting shift,” “interchangeable players,” “switch-around players,” and “reversible outfield.”23 Speaker himself called it his “triple shift” because he employed the tactic at three positions: first base and two outfielders.24 

Bill James has written that Speaker instituted the “first extensive platooning” in 1920.25 James also noted that there was little discussion about the practice at the time. Yet one person did comment on it—with harsh criticism. In 1921, John B. Sheridan, the respected columnist of The Sporting News, wrote: 

“The specialist in baseball is no good and won’t go very far. . . . The whole effect of the system will be to make the players affected half men. . . . It is farewell, a long farewell to all that player’s chance of greatness. . . . It destroys young ball players by destroying their most precious quality— confidence in their ability to hit any pitcher, left or right, alive, dead, or waiting to be born.”26 

Three years later he was still passionate on the subject, that such substituting was “spoon-feeding baseball players. Giving them setups. Making things soft for them. Coddling them. Softening them morally. . . . Hell’s Bells, the only way to make a young man worth a cent is to put him out there when things are hard for them.”27 

What little other commentary there was about Speaker’s system was somewhat supportive. In December 1920, in an article about Elmer Smith, Baseball Magazine noted that Speaker’s system of alternating players was based on “the theory sound in principle that left-handers don’t hit left-handers. Whatever may be said for the theory, Speaker has certainly obtained results which seem to justify his good judgment.”28 

Where did Speaker get the idea of platooning? Why did he use it? He was playing for the Red Sox when George Stallings, the manager of the Miracle 1914 Boston Braves, platooned his outfield. Baseball Magazine noted that Speaker’s “unusual wealth of outfield material” let him alternate his outfielders “after the approved George Stallings plan, sending in right-handed batters against port-side pitchers and vice-versa.”29

In 1915, Bill Carrigan, the manager of Speaker’s Red Sox used the shift at both catcher, with Hick Cady (BR) and Pinch Thomas (BL), and at first base, with Del Gainer (BR) and Dick Hoblitzel (BL). Ed Bang, sports editor of the Cleveland News for more than fifty years, wrote that Speaker learned the concept from Carrigan.30 Charles Alexander, author of a biography of Tris Speaker, suggests that Speaker instituted the practice first and foremost to accommodate his friend Joe Wood.31

Here is a look at the dramatic results Speaker achieved at the three positions in 1920 and 1921. (The statistics listed are games played, batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging average.)32

Speaker himself performed at a very high level on the playing field, despite the burden of managing the club. He maintained his offensive prowess while still excelling in the field. He had 24 assists in 1920 and had the league’s top range for an outfielder in 1921.33

In 1921 Speaker’s world-champion Indians almost repeated as American League champions. They finished 4 1/2 games behind the Yankees but were just one game back when they dropped their final game against New York, on September 26, by the razor-thin margin of 8–7. Cleveland reporter Stuart M. Bell saluted Speaker’s 1921 achievement: “The Indians most of the season had a wreck of a championship ball club. He piloted an almost pitcherless and for two months an almost catcherless ball club. . . . Nobody but Tris Speaker could have done it.”34

The Indians held onto first place most of the season despite numerous obstacles. 

• Bill Wambsganss broke his throwing arm in preseason. He missed 47 games in 1921, after missing just one in 1920. 
• Steve O’Neill was hit in the hand by pitcher Howard Ehmke and broke a finger on May 30. He did not return to the lineup until July 15. He missed 48 games in 1921, after missing just five in 1920. 
• Speaker himself was injured at different times during the season, the most serious being a September 11 knee injury. He missed 22 games in 1921. In the late September showdown series against the Yankees, the hobbling Speaker managed only one hit in thirteen at-bats.
• Jim Bagby won only 14 games after winning 31 in 1920. His earned run average rose almost two runs. 
• Ray Caldwell won only six games in 1921 after winning 20 in 1920. 

Taking all this into account, Bang offered that “Speaker really showed more managerial ability in losing the pennant last season [1921] than he displayed when the Indians won the year before.”35 Even New York reporters recognized the team he had shaped. “The Indians are as game a ball club as has come by along the pike in all the history of the national obsession,” wrote the New York Evening Telegram late in the 1921 season.36 

Speaker was able to get results because of his management style and leadership skills. First there was the reassurance he provided to his men. St. Louis Browns’ manager Fielder Jones observed this as soon as Speaker joined the Indians in 1916, long before he became the team’s manager. “His coming has given a number of other members of the team the one thing they lacked: confidence. Speaker is as necessary to the Cleveland club as a spark plug to an automobile.”37

Then there was the example Speaker set. “He is always in the forefront in every game,” wrote New York sportswriter George Daley, “working the hardest, covering the most ground, the first in attack and the last to give up.”38 Speaker did not pretend to have all the answers. “When he was on the bench,” Coveleski said, “and something came up that he didn’t know about, he asked for help.”39 Speaker also had a special knack for connecting with his men. The Washington Times noted that “he is a manager and coacher of temperament as much as instructor of physical skill and how to apply it.”40 

“He was,” wrote veteran sportswriter Gordon Cobbledick, “proving himself a warm and understanding handler of the varied temperaments, dispositions and talents under his command. . . . There was never any doubt among the players that instructions from him were orders to be obeyed, but he didn’t place himself on a pedestal. While the ball game was in progress, he was the boss. When it was over, he was one of the gang.”41 At the close of the 1921 season, Heywood Broun wrote in Vanity Fair: “He is a leader who never gives up and never allows his team to give up in spite of the circumstances of a game. It seems to me that he is by far the finest manager in professional baseball.”42 

Postscript

Tris Speaker would manage the Indians for five more seasons, before he was forced to resign in the fallout from the Cobb–Leonard–Wood affair.43 Though the Indians won more games than they lost over that span, they would not be a serious challenger for the American League pennant, with the exception of a spectacular late-season rush in 1926.44 Speaker’s seemingly uncanny evaluation of players deserted him after 1921, when his personnel moves had only mixed results.45 He also backed off on platooning after that season.46 And so his success of 1920–21 must be seen in the context of his whole managerial career, including the less impressive record he compiled toward the end of it.

STEVE STEINBERG, a frequent contributor to SABR publications, is author of “Baseball in St. Louis, 1900–1925” (Arcadia, 2004) and coauthor, with Lyle Spatz, of “1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York” (Nebraska, 2010).

Notes

1 Grantland Rice, New York Tribune, April 6, 1921.

2 Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 31, 1921.

3 Franklin Lewis, The Cleveland Indians (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 104–5.

4 Lewis, 105.

5 Duster Mails, “The Pitcher who Clinched Cleveland’s First Pennant,” Baseball Magazine, December 1920, 353.

6 Tris Speaker, “Tris Speaker, the Star of the 1920 Baseball Season,” Baseball Magazine. December 1920, 318. Mails cost the Indians $10,000 in players and cash to Sacramento. Lewis, 113.

7 Sothoron was 20-game winner for the Browns in 1919 and finished fifth in the league with a 2.20 earned run average. In 1918 he finished third with a 1.94 mark.

8 Charles C. Alexander, Spoke: A Biography of Tris Speaker (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2007), 162.

9 H. G. Salsinger, Detroit News, 27 August 1921.

10 From 1918 through 1921, the rise in offensive performance in the AL was significant. In 1918, bating average, on-base percentage, and slugging average were, respectively .254 / .323 / .322. In 1921, they were .292 / .356 / .408.

11 Alexander, Spoke, 137, and Timothy M. Gay, Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend (Guilford, Conn: Lyons Press), 182.

12 Lewis, 98.

13 Lewis, 90.

14 Lewis, 98.

15 Charlie Jamieson file, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N,Y, quoted by Alexander in Spoke, 137.

16 Alexander, 155.

17 E-mail from Norman L. Macht to the author, 29 May 2008.

18 Adam Ulrey, “Steve O’Neill,” in Deadball Stars of the American League, ed. David Jones (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books), 683.

19 Lewis, 91.

20 Alexander, 115.

21 Lewis, 107.

22 Paul Dickson does not have a baseball use of “platoon” until many years later. Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 2009), 649–650.

23 Peter Morris, A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball: The Game on the Field (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 324 –27. Morris also cites a number of nineteenth-century examples of platooning.

24 New York World, April 3, 1921. (The one outfielder Speaker did not platoon was himself.)

25 Bill James, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Villard Books, 1986), 112 –23. John McGraw began platooning Casey Stengel (BL) and Bill Cunningham (BR) in 1922.

26 John B. Sheridan, The Sporting News, May 5, 1921.

27 John B. Sheridan, The Sporting News, August 7, 1924, quoted by Morris, A Game of Inches: The Game on the Field, 327.

28 John J. Ward, “The Man who Made Record Homer,” Baseball Magazine, December 1920, 335.

29 S. Crosby, “Charlie Jamieson of the World Champions,” Baseball Magazine, June 1921, 294.

30 Ed Bang, Collyer’s Eye, February 3, 1923.

31 E-mail from Charles C. Alexander to the author, September 30, 2006.

32 After Wood hit .366 in only 194 at-bats in 1921, Speaker let him play regularly in 1922, his final season. He hit a solid .297 in 505 at-bats. Speaker had traded Elmer Smith, Wood’s platoon “partner,” away after the 1921 season. Speaker sent Smith and Burns (and the rights to Joe Harris) to the Red Sox for Stuffy McInnis. He did reacquire Burns two years later, in a blockbuster seven-player deal. (O’Neill and Wambsganss went to the Red Sox.). Burns then had four terrific years with the Indians (1924–27), including his MVP season of 1926, when he led the league in hits and doubles.

33 Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer, The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, 5th ed. (New York: Sterling, 2008), 932.

34 Stuart M. Bell, Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 4, 1921.

35 Ed Bang, Collyer’s Eye, November 26, 1921.

36 New York Evening Telegram, September 9, 1921.

37 Quoted in Gay, Tris Speaker, 160.

38 George Daley, New York World, April 3, 1921. Daley wrote many of his columns, including this one, under the pseudonym “Monitor.”

39 Eugene C. Murdock, Baseball Players and Their Times: Oral Histories of the Game, 1920–1940 (Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1991), 17.

40 Washington Times, September 5, 1921.

41 Gordon Cobbledick, “Tris Speaker: The Grey Eagle,” in The Baseball Chronicles: An Oral History of Baseball Through the Decades, ed. Mike Blake (Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 1994), 84.

42 Heywood Broun, “Sweetness and Light in Baseball,” Vanity Fair, October 1921, 64–65.

43 In late 1926, former Tigers pitcher Dutch Leonard accused Ty Cobb, Joe Wood, and Speaker of fixing a game between Detroit and Cleveland in September 1919. Commissioner Landis later exonerated the three men. But neither Cobb nor Speaker ever managed in the major leagues again.

44 After the Yankees went on a 16-game winning streak early in the 1926 season, the Indians fell to fifth place in late June, 13 games back of first. Then, after beating the Yankees four straight late in the season, the Indians climbed to within 2 1/2 games of first on September 18. They finished in second place, three games behind the Yankees.

45 For example, Speaker traded away George Burns and Elmer Smith after the 1921 season, although he reacquired the former two years later, and Burns had four more strong seasons with the Tribe. In 1925, Speaker gave up on Riggs Stephenson, who went on to star for the Chicago Cubs for many years. He sent Stan Coveleski to Washington, for two obscure players, one of whom never appeared in another major-league game, and the other won only five games in his career, while Coveleski won 34 games for the 1924–25 Senators.

46 In 1922, Joe Wood’s last season, Speaker played his friend regularly, and Wood responded with a .297 batting average in 505 at-bats. Charlie Jamieson was emerging as one of the league’s top hitters from both sides of the plate, and in 1923 he led the league with 644 at-bats and 222 hits.

Zduriencik had to find a way to efficiently compete with clubs with more resources, including the division rival Los Angeles Angels, as well as the perennial American League powerhouses, the Yankees and Red Sox. The key to competing efficiently is to get the biggest bang for your payroll bucks by finding “value.” One approach is to determine which player-performance attributes or skills are “discounted” in baseball’s labor market. If a player attribute that translates into runs scored or runs prevented is not priced accurately—much as on-base-percentage was undervalued pre-Moneyball—it might lead to a cost-effective roster strategy. Another approach is to develop a roster strategy that uniquely fits a team or, more specifically, a ballpark. The Red Sox are masters of this approach, tailoring their roster to the Green Monster at Fenway Park. This means that right-handed fly-ball hitters are “worth” more to the Red Sox than to most teams, as their would-be outs at other ballparks are often doubles or home runs at Fenway. The Green Monster also allows Boston to have a near-DH patrol left field with minimal consequences. When the Red Sox gameplan their 95 to 100 targeted regular-season wins each year, their roster strategy implies that their expectation is to win 55-plus games at home and play .500 ball on the road.

To capitalize on both of these definitions of “value,” Zduriencik and his top assistant Tony Blengino focused on building a first-rate defensive ballclub. Arguably, defense has become the new on-base-percentage, the latest attribute or skill that seems to be undervalued in the market for players. I’ve conducted an in-depth analysis of the free-agent market—MLB’s most fluid labor market—and concluded that a run prevented through stellar defensive play can be purchased at about one-third of the cost of a run generated through offensive performance. Beyond the way MLB teams value defense, the distinctiveness of Safeco Field, with its expansive outfield, lends itself to a ballpark-based roster strategy. By building a top defensive club, with a particular focus on outfield defense, the Mariners could have a distinct competitive advantage for 90 of their 162 games, including games played at spacious McAfee Coliseum in Oakland.

In recent years, the development of defensive metrics such as Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) by Mitchel Lichtman and the Plus/Minus Ratings developed by John Dewan have become widely discussed and frequently used among MLB teams. The primary intent of these statistics is to shine a light on the defensive side of individual players, providing teams and fans with a comparative scale on which to measure defensive performance. The data are focused on the primary, or direct, effect of defense—which is the impact of good or bad defensive plays on baserunners allowed and on baserunners advanced and, ultimately, the translation of those defensive plays into a team’s runs allowed. For example, UZR data say that the starting outfield of the 2008 Mariners performed slightly above average, saving about 10 runs above average, contributing the equivalent of approximately one additional win of the Mariners 2008 total of 61 wins. By contrast, the 2009 version of the Mariners’ outfield, anchored by defensive standout Franklin Gutierrez, saved about 50 runs above average, making their outfield defense responsible for approximately 5 of the 85 Seattle wins. 

Figure 1

While the defensive metrics allow us to quantify a player’s impact on his team’s runs allowed and, ultimately, wins, the measures stop short of quantifying the secondary, or indirect, effect of defense on pitching and pitching usage. Most baseball insiders and analysts would agree that the impact of defense is not limited to the baserunners allowed and the likelihood the baserunners will score. For example, another consequence of a defensive misplay—a play that should have turned a batted ball into an out—is the additional number of pitches required to secure the out. For poor defensive teams the additional pitches can add up and alter how a team deploys its pitchers, often placing an inferior pitcher on the mound in a crucial situation. For stellar defensive teams the opposite may be true— their best pitchers may garner a higher share of innings pitched, raising the overall effectiveness of the team’s pitching staff. One example of a major-league manager’s belief in this “secondary effect” is embedded in a statement made by Mets’ manager Jerry Manuel at a pregame press conference on May 6, 2009. “An error by Luis Castillo last night caused J. J. Putz to throw more pitches, making him unavailable for tonight’s game,” Manuel observed, drawing a connection between defensive misplays and a pitcher’s workload.1

To test this hypothesis, I attempted to measure the secondary effects of defense on pitching usage. (See figure 1.) Looking at the issue from the negative side— poor defense—illustrates the point. The logic chain says that poor defense leads to missed opportunities to convert batted balls into outs, which leads to shorter outings by starting pitchers, which by definition leads to additional bullpen innings. More specifically, I tested to find whom these additional bullpen innings were allocated to, my suspicion being that they fell into the hands of the lowest-quality relievers. If this were true, the net result would be additional runs allowed by a poor defensive team because of an inefficient allocation of pitching—a secondary, indirect effect of poor defense. We would also expect the reverse to be true of top defensive teams. 

I analyzed five years, 2004 through 2008, of team-level defense and pitching data to test for the secondary effect of defense on pitching. (For more details on the methodology of the analysis, see “Secondary Effects of Defense on Pitching” on page 102.) There are several key conclusions of the study that have implications for the Mariners’ strategy of building a strong defensive team. First, analyzing the top-quartile and bottom-quartile defensive teams shows clear support for the connection between the quality of a team’s defense and its pitching usage. Top defensive teams average approximately one-half inning per game more out of their starting pitcher. While that may not sound like a lot, taking away or adding one-half inning to a bullpen that averages three innings per game is a 17 percent change in the bullpen’s workload. For the typical team, that translates into about an 80-inning swing, over the regular season, between starting pitchers or the bullpen, just on the basis of the quality of the defense. (See figure 2.)

Figure 2. Distribution of IP for Top and Bottom Quartile

It’s not just that innings get moved from starters to the bullpen. It’s also important to understand which relievers tend to pitch the innings resulting from shorter starts. Needless to say, if the starter gets pulled in the fifth or sixth inning, teams are typically not calling the closer or setup man—arguably a team’s best relief pitchers—to work those innings. These innings are often logged by the very end of the bullpen bench, even though it may be a critical, high-leverage situation, with runners on base in a close game. If we divide a pitching staff into three groups—starting pitchers, the top four relievers, and all other relievers— we can illustrate the point. While the worst defensive teams tend to move about 80 innings from starting pitchers to the bullpen, the innings are redistributed within the bullpen, with the weakest relievers getting more work. (See figure 3.) 

Figure 3. Distribution of IP for Best and Worst Defense

Notes

1 SNY.tv, 6 May 2009.

Arguably the greatest catch in the history of baseball was the basket catch Willie Mays made of a long fly ball in center field in the Polo Grounds in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, on September 29, 1954. The score was tied 2–2 in the top of the eighth. With runners on first and second, Vic Wertz hit a fly ball, 450 to 480 feet, deep into the unusually deep center field of the Polo Grounds. Mays caught up with the ball and caught it, his back to home plate, with his glove hand held palm-up. He fired a bullet back to the infield, holding the Indians’ Al Rosen to first, although Larry Doby (remember that name) was able to advance to third. Had the ball not been caught, the Indians would have broken the game open and it would not have gone into extra innings. The Giants won that game and went on to sweep the mighty 1954 Indians. Mays’s catch is often considered to have set the tone for the Series. 

Lost to the memory of all but a few, and perhaps overshadowed by Mays’s feat in the World Series only two months later, is a catch the Indians’ own center fielder, Larry Doby, made at Municipal Stadium in a game against the Washington Senators. It was a day game on July 30, 1954, the first of a four-game series. The Indians, in the heat of a pennant race with the Yankees, were leading 5–3 in the top of the third. Art Hottleman was on the mound for the Indians. With one out and a runner on first, Tom Umphlett hit a long fly ball to center-left. That, it appeared, would tie the game. 

Doby, playing fairly deep, as was his practice, took off for the ball and, as he approached the fence, looked like he was going to crash into it. Instead, he leaped over the top of it, snatched the ball backhanded, and seemed to remain suspended in air for a moment. Finally, obeying the law of gravity, he came down onto the awning above the bullpen. He bounced off that and came down hard on the playing field, the ball still in his glove. Joe Flaherty, the second-base umpire, ruled it caught, and the crowd erupted. 

Left fielder Al Smith, who had sprinted to where Doby lay, retrieved the ball and threw it to the infield to keep the runner from advancing.1 Doby was motionless. Cleveland players ran from the dugout. As they gathered around him, all eyes were on the huddle. After a few moments, Doby’s partially bald head emerged. The crowd gave him a standing ovation when Doby, still surrounded by his teammates, began making his way toward the Indians dugout. 

About halfway there, he stopped and exchanged words with Indians manager Al Lopez. Doby stopped, put on his hat and glove, shook his head OK, and began walking back to his position in center field. The crowd erupted again. The whole episode took several minutes. 

“I just went for the ball,” Doby said after the game, “same as I did for Jackie Jensen’s home run a couple of days ago, the one I missed. The fellows in our bullpen told me my right hand went through the awning before I bounced off. If it did I didn’t notice. I didn’t get hurt much. Knocked the wind out of me and my left shoulder gave me a jolt, where I hurt it before. Maybe it hurt a nerve.”2

“If this wasn’t the greatest catch of the century,” Frank Gibbons, sportswriter for the Cleveland Press, wrote the next day, “it must be at least a match for any other.”3 “I’ve seen them all,” Dizzy Dean said. “Moore, DiMaggio, and this here fellow named Mays. But I never saw a catch as good as this one and the pitcher ought to pay that Doby a month’s salary.”4

KEN SAULTER, a retired economist, writes from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Author’s Note

The author, 13 years old at the time and selling scorecards at Municipal Stadium, saw the catch. This account, based on his recollection, is corroborated by newspaper accounts and by Joseph Thomas Moore in Pride Against Prejudice: The Biography of Larry Doby (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 102–3.

Notes

1 Joseph Thomas Moore, Pride Against Prejudice: The Biography of Larry Doby (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 102–3.

2 Cleveland Press, sports sect., 31 July 1954.

3 Frank Gibbons, Cleveland Press, sports sect., 31 July 1954.

4 Cleveland Press, sports sect., 31 July 1954.

We used no mattress on our hands,
No cage upon our face;
We stood right up and caught the ball,
With courage and with grace.
— Harry Ellard, “The Reds of Sixty-Nine” (1880s)

The field position denoted on your scorecard as 2 has never been an easy job. Errant balls, foul tips, and flying bats are all a source of pain for catchers. Collisions at the plate occur with regularity, some more painful than others. The backstops from baseball’s first fifty years endured daily physical punishment, all without the luxury of today’s protective equipment. Virtues such as strength, stamina, and courage in collisions were in high demand. 

No protection short of a bunker could have spared twenty-three-year-old Ray Fosse the career-impacting injury he sustained in the 1970 All-Star Game. Catcher-turned-announcer Tim McCarver says he still suffers from nerve damage in his neck caused by back-to-back plate collisions a quarter of a century ago. Today, catchers often put their bodies literally on the line, most often the one on the third-base side. 

Catchers are expected to take their lumps without grumbling. But the early efforts of catchers to protect themselves met with a lot of flak. A typical reaction came from the crowd at the Polo Grounds when the New York Giants opened the 1907 season against the Philadelphia Phillies. As the Giants took the field, star catcher and Hall of Famer Roger Bresnahan looked more like a goaltender than a backstop when he squatted behind the plate in a pair of thickly upholstered shin guards. 

It was the first time a catcher had dared to don the protective gear in open view, and the crowd’s reaction came as quickly as a foul tip and just as nasty. “Spectators howled with delight when a foul tip in the fifth inning rapped the protectors sharply,” reported the New York Times. Bresnahan, more concerned about his livelihood than remarks about his manliness, ignored the insults from fans and foes. 

Bresnahan’s shin guards were the final pieces of the catcher’s major armor, following the glove, mask, and chest protector. 

This armor kit was lovingly dubbed “the tools of ignorance” by Herold “Muddy” Ruel, a backstop and a lawyer who caught for greats like Walter Johnson with the Washington Nationals in the 1920s. Ruel probably would have stayed a lawyer if he’d caught in the late 1860s when catchers had no equipment. 

New York Mutuals catcher Nat Hicks was the first backstop to start creeping closer to batters, in the 1870s. Before Hicks, catchers stood far behind the hitters, fielding pitches on the bounce. Hicks paid for his fearlessness with repeated and sometimes severe damage to his face and a near-loss of his right eye in 1873. 

Most backstops began crowding the plate in the early 1880s, especially when a rules change dictated that the final strike, including foul tips, had to be caught on a fly for a putout. Pitchers had begun throwing overhand by 1884, when, after a rule change in the National League, all restrictions on the pitcher’s delivery were removed and he could throw underhand, sidearm, or completely overhand, as he wished. Also, the consensus is that the mound was created in 1893 or shortly thereafter. Up until that year the pitcher’s position was known as the pitcher’s box. In 1893 the pitcher’s rear foot was moved farther from home plate to its current distance of 60 feet, 6 inches. Moving closer to the batter enabled catchers to better frame the pitches, field bunts, and throw out base-stealers. 

In 1901 the National League instituted a regulation that a “catcher must stand within the lines of his position whenever the pitcher delivers the ball and within ten feet of the home base.” The American League adopted this rule the following year. Current rules state that the “catcher shall station himself directly back of the plate . . . with both feet within the lines of the catcher’s box until the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand” (Rule 4.03[a]). The catcher’s box measures 43 inches across and 8 feet long from the plate backward. 

MASKED MEN 

The first piece of protection for catchers, a rubber mouth protector, dates to the 1870s, purloined perhaps from the sport of bareknuckle boxing. George Wright, brother of Red Stockings founder Harry Wright, preceded the mask with this “mouth protector.” His invention was a fifty-cent rubber mouth guard, similar to the mouthpiece a boxer wears. This innovation, according to newspapers of the time, surely cut down on the talkativeness of catchers. 

Masks were more obviously a protective device. Probably the first one was invented by an Ivy League man, Fred Thayer, who in 1876 adapted a fencing mask for Alexander Tyng, then with the Harvard Nine. At first, Thayer’s better mouse trap was derisively called a rat trap. But the catcher’s mask caught on quickly among pros and amateurs alike and was in wide use by the 1880s. Besides affording protection, it helped fielding from the very first game. Harvard’s Tyng made only two errors in that April 12, 1877, match, exceptionally low even for a pro catcher in those days. 

Thayer’s patented mask (patent 200,358) went into the Spalding catalog for the 1878 season, and adaptations followed quickly. Its simple forehead and chin rests were embellished with padding—made from “imported dog skin,” according to one Spalding catalog— to insulate the steel-mesh frame from the catcher’s face. 

Better visibility was always a goal in catcher’s masks. Inventor George Barnard patented his “open view” mask in 1888 (patent 376,278) that afforded both protection and vision. These wire-basket cages worn by the 1890s backstops like Roger Bresnahan and Marty Bergen gave way to the greatly improved peripheral vision of the so-called Open Vision and Wide Sight masks by the 1911 season. A. J. Reach created this mask (patent 1,012,223) for the purpose of removing the vertical bar for better visibility without sacrificing structural strength. 

The “platform mask,” a one-piece aluminum casting with horizontal crossbars instead of soldered mesh, was patented by umpire James E. Johnstone in 1921 (patent 1,449,183). Mesh still evolved, though, getting springy, shock-absorbing action and ball-deflecting shapes in the 1920s. One such mask designed by H. Goldsmith in 1923 (patent 1,475,991) had a padded “oval surround” with two cross bars. Other mask materials have come along, but carbon-steel wire mesh remains the material of choice to this day. Catchers prefer the welded-wire guard because it has better air movement and fewer massive bars that could obstruct visibility. Carbon-steel wire is used because it’s flexible but strong. The goal is to get some deformation in the mesh to reduce some of the shock but still retain structural integrity. 

Sometimes one change in a piece of equipment necessitated changes in other catchers’ equipment. For example, with two-handed catching, using the pillowstyle mitt, the catcher’s hands followed the ball into his body. In the process, the catcher was tucking in his chin so his throat wasn’t exposed. Catchers today, with the hinged-mitt, one-hand the ball farther away from their bodies, and they’re frequently looking up, so the throat’s more exposed. This is the reason why today’s catchers wear masks with throat protectors, popularized by Dodger catcher Steve Yeager. In 1976 Yeager was kneeling in the on-deck circle when a bat shattered and a sharp piece slammed into his throat. To protect him from further injury, the Dodgers came up with the billygoat device hanging from his mask. However, throat protectors go back as early as 1888, as demonstrated by a Spalding advertisement for the Spalding’s Trade Marked Catcher’s Mask No. 30 with a patented neck protection. In 1903 the Victor Sporting Goods Company offered throat protection in its model 314N with a neck extension piece. The latest-version mask has the throat protector integrated with the wire face cage. 

The end of the twentieth century has seen the mask evolve into something resembling what Darth Vader wears. Its genesis sprung from hockey’s goalie mask, and it was introduced by catcher Charlie O’Brien. It is made of new high-tech polycarbon, and O’Brien’s mask was designed by Jerry Van Valden of Toronto-based Catch You Later Headgear. The helmet protects the top, sides, and back of the head, yet the cage-like opening in the front is bigger than that of a normal mask. It increases a catcher’s peripheral vision and deflects the ball rather than hitting the catcher flush as does the previous mask. At 50 ounces, the helmet is about 10 ounces heavier than a normal mask/helmet combination. Several major-league catchers have begun wearing it, and soon it may be a standard piece of equipment. 

MITTENS FOR THE HANDS 

Mitts were a taken-for-granted part of catching. An early documented use of a glove by a player occurred on June 28, 1870, and that was by a catcher. A sportswriter for the Cincinnati Commercial cabled his office, “[Doug] Allison caught today in a pair of buckskin mittens, to protect his hands.” It was printed in the next day’s newspaper in a recap of the game between the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Washington Nationals. Also, a report appeared in the Detroit Free Press on August 14, 1867, of a catcher named Ben Delaverage playing for the Victory Club of Troy using a catcher’s glove. In the late 1870s gloves came into common use. At first players had to skulk onto the field. But star pitcher– turned–first baseman Albert Spalding made it a manly thing in 1877, boldly donning a black glove that was fingerless but padded. Ever the entrepreneur, Spalding envisioned big sales for his mail-order sporting-goods business. Catchers were among his best customers. Inventor A. C. Butts patented a fingerless glove in 1883 (patent 290,664), and G. H. Rawlings added padding in 1885 (patent 325,968). 

Historians quibble over whether Harry Decker, Joe Gunson, Ted Kennedy, or Jack McCloskey first used the padded catcher’s mitt in the late 1880s. By one account, the Kansas City Cowboys’ Gunson dreamed up the mitt, but he was too busy catching in Al Spalding’s world baseball tour to take advantage of the idea. So, ex-catcher Decker filed a patent on his mitt design in 1889 (patent 408,650). The “Decker Safety Catcher’s Mitt” was a contraption that was basically a glove stitched to the back of a round pad that covered the palm of the hand. These gloves were literally flat pillows that got their pockets broken in on the job at the expense of the catcher’s palm. Decker modified his mitt in 1891 to a more comfortable design (patent 447,233) with the addition of leather lacing on the back of the hand to hold the mitt in place. 

It was not until 1895 that stipulations concerning the use of gloves were included in the rules: Those limited the size of gloves to ten ounces and fourteen inches circumference for all players except catchers and first basemen, who were permitted to use any size glove. The early gloves, lacking webbing and lacing, merely provided protection for the hands. Nineteenthcentury players often wore gloves on both hands. For the throwing hand, they would simply snip the glove at the fingers for dexterity. 

In 1899, J. F. Draper came up with the round, pillowstyle mitt (patent 627,687) that, with several minor modifications, remained the same tool that catchers wore up until the 1920s. R. H. Young in 1920 modified this standard pillow-mitt to disperse a billow of air to form a cushion when the ball was caught (patent 1,362,280). 

Mitts were pretty small, flat, and shapeless throughout the dead ball era until a Rawlings employee, Harry “Bud” Latina, who designed dozens of mitts/gloves, created a better mitt. This hand/fingers design made the mitt loose enough to permit it to be dropped quickly or thrown off but not accidentally by using finger loops (patent 1,562,176). This became the standard for more than forty years. Additionally, it had a real change in the depth of the mitt so the ball would really stick, even though the catcher still had to use two hands. The catching technique with the pillow mitt was to stop the ball with the relatively stiff mitt, then secure it with one’s bare hand. This was accomplished by holding the bare hand behind the mitt and quickly moving it to the caught ball. But if the catcher had to move his mitt to catch a ball and failed to move both hands in unison, the bare hand could easily be exposed and subject to harm. Jammed and broken fingers were very common injuries during the pillow-mitt era. 

Modern mitts have evolved to match today’s style of baseball. Catchers now have to one-hand or backhand the ball, which means that they have to work much lower because now the pitching is lower (at or below the batter’s knees). However, when a catcher is that low, he can’t hold two hands out in front or even one with the fingers pointing up and parallel to the body. 

In the 1950s, catcher Gus Niarhos cut an opening in the back of his mitt so he could squeeze the two sides together a little bit, like a fielder’s glove. This led to catcher’s mitts with breaks in them and long oval pockets. Previously, mitts had a pocket but no breaks, and the backstop caught two-handed so the ball wouldn’t pop out. One-handed catching became possible with the hinged mitt, popularized by Johnny Bench and Randy Hundley in the late 1960s. With these, a spring-action hinge snaps the mitt closed on contact with the ball. 

The ancestry of the flex-hinge catcher’s mitt goes back to the first baseman’s mitts of the 1950s. Logically, one might suppose that former first basemen (like J. C. Martin), converted to catchers in large numbers in the early 1960s, would have been the ones to introduce the mitt. But in fact, the flex-hinge catcher’s mitt was introduced by Hundley in 1966 and Bench in 1968; neither of them had ever played first base. 

New and sometimes quirky innovations in mitts have arisen since the 1960s. For example, in 1975, Al Campanis, former general manager of the Dodgers, introduced an orange fluorescent stripe around the perimeter of the mitt to help pitchers concentrate on their targets (patent 3,898,696). This caught on, but not every development met with acceptance. Most catchers didn’t think much of another innovation in mitts, the oversized “Big Bertha” designed by Baltimore Orioles manager Paul Richards in the late 1950s. Supposedly it was to help his receivers handle the maddening knuckleball of Hoyt Wilhelm. Such baskets grew to a 45-inch circumference before being regulated to 38 inches in 1965. The surface area might help one knock down the ball, but it hindered one’s view and cut down on hand mobility. One other drawback of the “Big Bertha” was that even if one caught the ball in that glove, it was hard to find it in time to catch base-stealers. 

Some current catchers are keenly interested in the latest wrinkle in mitts, a “digital leather” glove made by Franklin. The innovation is already found in Franklin’s current line of fielders’ gloves and will make its debut in catchers’ mitts soon. The facing leather is etched with a pattern of grooves and diamonds whose purpose is twofold. First, the pattern absorbs the shock of impact. Then, its contours grab the ball and stop its spinning action. Both attributes might turn some hardhands into soft ones. Webbing, air or gel cushions, and other elements of glove design have dealt with the velocity of batted and pitched balls, but only lately have manufacturers turned their attention to the spin factor. The rotation on a baseball can be quite high, 1800 rpm or more on a curveball, for example. Franklin likens its digital leather to the road-gripping pattern of a tire. That leaves the near-spinless knuckleball to contend with, a problem sure to be compounded as more hurlers follow knuckler Tim Wakefield and other “goofy” tossers.

BODY ARMOR FOR THOSE WAYWARD 95-MPH FASTBALLS 

Women got into the act of making catching a safer profession. Legend has it that the wife of Detroit Wolverines catcher Charles Bennett devised a chest pad to protect her husband during games. He wore the creation outside his jersey in 1883. While some accounts say that catchers experimented with chest protectors earlier in the decade, these image-conscious receivers tried hiding the devices beneath their uniforms to avoid razzing. Left-handed throwing catcher Jack Clements in 1884 was quoted as saying that he wore a “sheepskin,” as chest protectors were first called, beneath his uniform to avoid being called a sissy. 

James “Deacon” White, a nine-year catcher in the 1870s who switched to third base for nine more years, supposedly created the first chest protector in the early 1880s. His design included a canvas-covered rubber bladder pumped full of air. Padding eventually replaced the air tubes. 

Today’s chest protectors, although ribbed with light but shock-absorbing polyfoam, have come full circle from the original fur-stuffed sheepskin “breast protectors” worn under the uniform until 1884. Along the way, catchers and umpires got inflatable vests. “Gray’s Patent Body Protector” (patent 295,543) with its rubber-bladder ribs sold for $10 in 1891, twice the price of stuffed canvas or leather. Gray’s Protector didn’t cover the shoulders, a prime target for foul tips. John Gamble in his 1903 design added inflatable pads that covered the shoulders (patent 745,007). 

Although umpires stuck to inflatable protectors until modern times, catchers quickly went for the maneuverability that lightweight stuffing like kapok afforded. Kapok is a lightweight material used in life jackets. Today, chest protectors are filled with foam. Stuffed protectors enabled backstops to crouch and to run to back up bases. F. W. Glahe in 1963 came up with a very flexible chest protector (patent 3,076,197) that greatly improved mobility. 

One of the last modifications to the chest protector was the addition of removable shoulder flaps. M. Neuhalfen in 1991 patented his design (patent 5,020,156) that guarded against those nasty foul tips flying into the upper arms. With the advent of ballistic materials, velcro, breathable cloth, and polyfoam padding, catchers today are wearing the most protection possible with the minimum weight. The 2008 version of the chest protector weighs less than half the chest protector that was available in the 1920s through the 1940s. 

ANTI-SPIKE PROTECTORS: THE SHIN GUARDS 

Among the tools of ignorance, the designs of masks and mitts have evolved the most, in response to the way baseball is played. By contrast, chest protectors and shin guards haven’t changed as much. As early as 1890, catchers began wrapping their bare lower legs with newspapers or leather, which was then hidden beneath their uniforms. This evolved into more elaborate pads, all under their pants, but it took tough-as-nails Roger Bresnahan to have the nerve to admit publicly that his legs hurt from all of the wild pitches, foul balls, thrown bats, and piercing spikes. The curiosities that Bresnahan wore more than a century ago actually were a modified version of the leg guards worn by cricket players. Rods of light cane encased in padded fabric covered the shins, and padding protected the knees. 

Over time, padded leather covered the kneecaps, insteps, and ankles. Hard, heavy fiberboard guards appeared in Rawlings ads in 1916. In the 1920s and 1930s, fiberboard supplanted cane. Various inventors played around with the fiberboard design, including D. Levinson in his 1918 idea (patent 1,253,260). William Barrett in 1927 patented the prototypical catcher’s leg guards (patent 1,624,129) that uses essentially the design seen today. 

The hinged shin guard was developed by the Dodgers in the late 1950s, one of three notable catcher inventions they created. (The billygoat throat protector and the hinged mitt were the other two.) By the 1960s, light but tough molded plastics replaced fiber. How tough? Announcer and former catcher Tim McCarver survived two collisions in which the spikes of ex-Met Tommy Agee became embedded in the guards. 

In 1995, W. F. Hunt Jr. patented leg guards with adjustable lower thigh pieces to facilitate lower crouches and increased protection (patent 5,452,475). G. J. Collins followed up with his multiple-piece thigh and knee guards in 2004 (patent 6,687,912). The next generation might well include complete, flexible, and lightweight leggings made from Kevlar and worn throughout the game and not just when the catcher is behind the plate. 

Catching has never appeared to be an easy or cushy job. Even with protective accessories, the position seems to lead the league in injuries yearly. That’s why safety and productivity have been the goals of a variety of catching inventions throughout the history of the game.

Baseball, though it sometimes seems the most tradition-bound of sports, has always shown that all-American penchant for tinkering and innovation. This quest for the better mouse trap has been amply applied to catchers’ gear. The evolution of the equipment corresponds to actual changes in the tactics and rules of the game. The tinkering continues. Already a new “digital” catcher’s mitt, designed to soften the ball’s impact and reduce errors, has made its debut. 

Today the well-protected warrior behind home plate has taken advantage of modern technology, especially that developed for law enforcement. Body armor, for the catcher in the twenty-first century, might well be identical to the lightweight Kevlar vests worn under police officers’ shirts today. After all, if a thin, almost shirt-like vest can stop a bullet, it certainly can stop a wayward 95 mph fastball. So perhaps chest and leg protection will come full circle and the catchers of tomorrow will be wearing their armor beneath their uniforms just as the players in the 1880s did.

CHUCK ROSCIAM, a retired navy captain with 43 years of active service and an amateur catcher for more than forty years, is the creator of www.baseballcatchers.com. His baseball writing has appeared in “The Baseball Research Journal” and “The National Pastime”.

References

Bjarkman, Peter C. The Baseball Scrapebook (New York: Dorset Press, 1991). 

Burns, Ken, and Geoffrey C. Ward. Baseball: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1994). 

Gutman, Dan. Banana Bats and Ding-Dong Balls: A Century of Unique Baseball Inventions (New York: Macmillan, 1995). 

Honig, Donald. The Greatest Catchers of All Time (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown, 1991). 

Hughes, Thomas. American Genesis: A Century of Invention & Technology (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989). 

Nemec, David, and Saul Wisnia. 100 Years of Major League Baseball (Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 1999).

Obojski, Robert. Baseball Memorabilia (New York: Sterling, 1991). 

Owens, Tom. Great Catchers (New York: Friedman/Fairfax, 1997). 

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 

Spalding, Albert. Baseball: America’s National Game (orig. pub. 1911; San Francisco: Halo Books, 1991). ———. Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guides, 1876–1913. 

Trucks, Rob. The Catcher (Cincinnati: Emmis Books, 2005). 

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, http://uspto.gov. 

PERIODICALS: Antiques and Collecting, Sporting Life, The Sporting News.

The third in a series of rules passed by Major League Baseball’s owners in an attempt to save themselves from paying large bonuses to amateur prospects, the First-Year Player Draft was in place from 1959 to 1964. Although it was often referred to as a bonus rule, it actually covered all first-year players, regardless of whether they had received a signing bonus. At first it had little effect, but, when the rules were strengthened, it took on some of the flaws of its predecessors and was soon replaced by the amateur draft. 

Following the Second World War, MLB clubs found that the price of premium amateur talent was rapidly rising. Some were giving untried players signing bonuses that were in excess of the average major-leaguer’s salary. The other clubs, many of whom couldn’t afford to compete for these prospects, viewed this as a problem and demanded a solution. In response, from 1947 to 1950, and again from 1953 to 1957, Organized Baseball instituted bonus rules. These stipulated that players who had received bonuses above a certain amount had to be kept on MLB rosters after one year in the minors (in the earlier rule) or immediately (in the second rule). This hurt player development but didn’t keep teams from paying large bonuses. 

At the 1958 winter meetings, the owners instituted the First-Year Player Draft. The draft was held at the winter meetings beginning in 1959 in conjunction with the Major League and Minor League (Rule 5) drafts. Initially, the rule allowed teams to draft a player who was on the roster of a team at a lower level and had just completed his first season in Organized Baseball. Major-league teams could draft players from Class AAA and lower. Class AAA teams could select players from Class AA and lower, and so on. For an MLB club, the price in the First-Year Player Draft was $15,000, to be paid to the club that the player it was drafting belonged to; minor-league clubs could draft at a lower price, which depended on their level. This was significantly lower than the Rule 5 draft price of $25,000. 

Under the bonus rules of 1947 through 1957, teams were motivated to pay players under the table to avoid the restrictions of those rules. But that incentive was gone with the First-Year Player Draft, since it applied to all players, even if they didn’t receive a bonus. Clubs became reluctant to invest bonus money in a player whom another club could draft at a fixed price. Moreover, the First-Year Player Draft required that teams losing a player in the draft continue to pay him any deferred bonus. The goals of this draft were to keep bonuses down and to allow less-wealthy teams to compete for talent with the freer-spending clubs. 

Thirty-nine first-year players were protected on MLB rosters that winter. Only one player was chosen by an MLB team in this initial draft, pitcher Mike Lee being taken by the Cleveland Indians, along with thirteen taken by minor-league clubs. The First-Year Player Draft followed the same rules as the major-league draft other than price, which meant the Indians had to keep Lee on their roster the full season or offer him back to the Giants. And so Lee stayed with Cleveland all of 1960, pitching only nine innings. Few teams were willing to use a roster spot on such an inexperienced player, so the draft had little effect in 1959. 

The number of veteran minor-leaguers (those with at least four years of OB experience) being taken in the Rule 5 draft might have been expected to rise with the coming of the First-Year Player Draft, with fewer rosters spots available after the first-year players were protected, but it doesn’t seem to have happened. Between 1958 and 1959 the number of picks increased only from twelve to thirteen. 

The following year, the requirement for MLB teams to keep first-year draftees on their roster was dropped, and the price for selecting a player in the First-Year Player Draft was changed to a flat $12,000 for all levels. As a result, the number of players drafted by MLB teams increased to six in 1960 and fifteen in 1961. There were also sixteen players taken by minor-league teams in 1960 and eight in 1961. Of these 45 players, only one, Jim Merritt, became a star. The low price allowed teams to take long chances on players such as William Maddox, who was 0–11 with an 8.50 ERA in his first professional season, yet was picked by the Yankees in the 1961 draft. Likewise, Steve Cosgrove was taken by the Orioles from the Braves despite an 0–9, 7.35 record in Class D. Those investments rarely paid off. 

The first-year player rule was still not strong enough to fully moderate bonuses, so some teeth were added to it in 1962. The draft price was lowered to $8,000 for all teams. More important, a new restriction was applied. With one exception per team, first-year players added to the 40-man roster to protect them from the draft could not be optioned to the minors. Furthermore, the one option teams were allowed (the designated assignment) had the effect of reducing the size of their active roster from 25 to 24 for the bulk of the season. If teams wanted to send additional first-year players to the minors, they had to obtain waivers from the other MLB clubs, who could claim each player at the same $8,000 price applicable to the draft. To further encourage drafting, teams with a full 40-man roster were allowed to select one first-year player, although they were not permitted to take anyone in the Rule 5 draft. These changes had the desired effect, at least in the most visible way. The number of first-year draftees selected by MLB teams jumped to 45 in 1962 with an additional 33 picked by minorleague clubs. Among them were such future stars as Glenn Beckert, Paul Blair, Dave May, Lou Piniella, and Jim Wynn. 

In addition, MLB teams were carrying an average of five first-year players on their winter rosters, up from 2.5 per team in 1959–60. Among those who didn’t make their team’s 25-man roster and were lost to other clubs via waiver claim was Denny McLain. The 1963 Yankees, defending their championship, started the season with a first-year player, Curt Blefary, in the minors on a designated assignment. They decided in mid-season that they couldn’t afford to use a roster spot on him and placed him on waivers. He was claimed by the Baltimore Orioles, and a couple of years later was AL Rookie of the Year, and then helped them to the 1966 world championship, along with first-year draftee Paul Blair. Meanwhile the Yankees sank to last place. 

The biggest complaint about the rule was that it penalized clubs that did a good job of signing and developing new players. Fresco Thompson, farm director of the Dodgers, claimed that 200 fewer amateurs were signed to contracts by Organized Baseball in 1962 than the year before because of the risk of losing those recruits after one year. That was enough to stock ten minor-league teams. 

The number of players taken in the 1963 draft was 52 by MLB clubs and 16 by minor-league squads. Some of the top names were Reggie Smith, Bobby Tolan, Rudy May, Dick Bosman, and Luke Walker. The most recent expansion teams, the Senators, Angels, Mets, and Astros, were hampered in their efforts to build with youth, since they were having to keep inexperienced players on their benches rather than let them develop in the minor leagues. In recognition of this, the other teams voted in December 1963 to allow them, in addition to the one designated assignment, to option four first-year players without waivers or counting against the 25-man roster. 

As for whether the rule was achieving the goal of reducing bonuses, there is evidence to suggest it succeeded. Gabe Paul, general manager of Cleveland, claimed in 1964 that annual bonuses had gone down from $7 million before the draft was instituted to about $4.5 million in 1963. Other insiders such as Ed Short and Hal Keller agreed that the rule was effective in reducing bonuses. However, the conditions that led to escalating bonuses still existed—namely, competition both from within Organized Baseball and from other sports. So, some clubs would still pay ever increasing bonuses to recruits such as Rick Reichardt and Bob Bailey. Rather than let a promising youth go to their competitors, they were willing to gamble that he would play at the major-league level in his second professional season. The rule may have led to the escalation of bonuses for the top prospects, while the run-of-the-mill amateur got less. 

In 1964, the number of draft picks reached a high of 59 by MLB teams, with another twenty going to minor-league clubs. The best-known players taken were Felix Millan, Sparky Lyle, Ed Herrmann, and Ellie Rodriguez. In addition, the A’s lost Joe Rudi on waivers when they tried to send him to the minors. Later in the year they reacquired him by trade. 

The requirement to protect first-year players from the draft negatively impacted some teams. The defending world-champion Los Angeles Dodgers in 1964 could carry only 24 players, including first-year bench warmers Jeff Torborg and Wes Parker, which left them shorthanded as they struggled to a 24–31 record in one-run games. This was one factor in their fall to sixth place. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Phillies, who led the National League much of the season before a late-season collapse, carried little-used Johnny Briggs and Rick Wise all year. Sometimes a team could be helped by the rule inadvertently. Those same Dodgers in 1964 could not keep reliever Larry Sherry because of the roster limits and so traded him to Detroit for minor-league veteran Lou Johnson, who became their regular left fielder and a World Series star the following year.

Thanks to the tougher restrictions in place from 1962 through 1964, there was increasing dissatisfaction with the rule. Following the 1964 draft, the owners decided to do away with the first-year draft. The requirement for all but one first-year player to pass through waivers before being sent to the minors was kept in 1965, although that designated assignment would no longer reduce the 25-man roster. The draft was replaced by an amateur draft (which has lately been called the First-Year Player Draft, oddly enough). They also made all minor leaguers not on an MLB team’s 40-man roster eligible for the Rule 5 draft. However, since some teams felt this would penalize those who had chosen well in the amateur draft, players who had been selected in the June draft or who signed after that would not be eligible for the Rule 5 draft until after their second season in professional ball. Interestingly, these individuals were still officially designated as “first-year players” in the rules and were still available for the special $8,000 price. After 1968 the drafting of players with one or two years’ service in Organized Baseball was phased out. 

Many players saw their careers affected by the First-Year Player Draft. Most obvious were those who were taken in the draft. However, other players were affected less obviously. Some got a chance to see major-league action two or three years earlier than they might have otherwise, because they were being protected from the draft. A lot of these saw limited action, such as Mike Kekich and John Sevcik. Outfielder Ross Moschitto, kept on the 1965 Yankees at the age of 20, appeared in 96 games without a single start. However, others got a fuller chance and took advantage of it, most notably 19-year-olds Tony Conigliaro and Wally Bunker in 1964. Lou Brock and Rollie Sheldon also fell into this category. Still others— Ron Hunt and Ken Hubbs, for example—were added to 40-man rosters early and so may have reached the majors sooner than they would have without the FirstYear Player Draft. Of course, while youngsters were helped, there were fewer roster spots available for veterans. For example, Dale Long performed well in spring training with the Cubs in 1964, but they decided not to keep him, since they were protecting two firstyear players on their 25-man roster, bringing his career to an end. 

It is well known that MLB’s amateur draft is a crap shoot, with many high draft picks never meeting expectations or even advancing to the majors. The difficulty of projecting young ballplayers is illustrated by the lack of success of many of the players taken in the First-Year Player Draft. Overall, there were 178 players chosen by MLB teams and 106 selected by minor-league clubs. Of those, only 67 and seven, respectively, ever played in MLB, and only 50 achieved either 300 plate appearances or 50 innings pitched. 

Naturally, some clubs gained an advantage from the First-Year Player Draft, while others were hurt. Perhaps no team was helped more than the 1967 Boston Red Sox. Regulars Reggie Smith and Joe Foy were both obtained via the draft, along with early-season starting pitcher Bill Rohr and reliever Sparky Lyle. In addition, a couple of the team’s biggest stars, Tony Conigliaro and Jim Lonborg, benefited from the early look they got as a result of Boston’s desire to protect them from the draft. 

The First-Year Player Draft was another unsuccessful attempt by Major League Baseball to reduce signing bonuses to amateur prospects. It was replaced by the amateur draft, which is still in place more than forty years later. While it was in effect, though, it had a big effect on the teams and players of Major League Baseball. 

CLIFFORD BLAU, a retired CPA living in White Plains, New York, is a frequent contributor to SABR publications.

Sources

Chicago Tribune 

Los Angeles Times 

New York Times 

The Sporting News 

Washington Post 

Retrosheet 

Nowlin, Bill, and Dan Desrochers, eds. The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox. Burlington, Mass.: Rounder Books, 2007.

Major League Rules and Major–Minor League Rules.

EVOLUTION OF THE BONUS RULE 

A few players had received sizable signing bonuses during the 1930s. For example, the Yankees paid Charlie Devens $20,000 in 1932 and Tommy Henrich $25,000 in 1936.1 Henrich, however, was not an untried player, having spent three productive years in the minor leagues. Despite such early bonuses, most baseball historians identify Dick Wakefield as the first member of the group that would be forever known as the “Bonus Babies.” In 1941, the Detroit Tigers signed Wakefield out of the University of Michigan for $52,000 and a new car. 

As the sportswriter (and later novelist) Paul Hemphill observed: “Once bonus fever set in, there was no stopping it.”2 Perhaps not, but the owners certainly tried. Steve Treder suggests in The Hardball Times that the motivation behind the bonus rule was twofold. Club owners were interested in competitive balance and sought a way to keep the richer clubs from cornering the market on top prospects. These moguls also wanted to hold down their labor costs, both for new signees and for the increasingly disgruntled established stars, who resented making less than untried “phenoms.”3 

The size of signing bonuses continued to creep upward as the Yankees (again!) paid Bobby Brown $60,000 in 1946. Earlier that year, baseball’s major-league owners proposed restrictions that, according to John Drebinger of the New York Times, “virtually outlaw bonus payments” because the “heavy and complicated restrictions . . . make it unlikely that any Major League club will care to take the risks involved except in very rare cases.”4 The proposed restrictions on bonus payments received approval from the minor leagues (the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues) and took effect in 1947. 

This original bonus rule stipulated that any player signed by a major-league team for a salary/bonus package exceeding $6,000 had to be placed on the major-league roster before the end of the season or be declared a free agent, claimable by any other major-league (or higher-classification minor-league) team. Similar restrictions applied to minor-league clubs, with a sliding scale for the amount at which the bonus rule kicked in. This scale ranged from $4,000 for triple-A teams down to $500 for Class E teams. The rule also specified that a bonus player retained this designation throughout his career. 

The new rule may have slowed the bonus bandwagon, but it certainly did not bring it to a halt. A significant new bidder did, however, hop aboard. In 1947, the Philadelphia Phillies, under new ownership, shelled out bonuses to two high-school pitchers— $15,000 to Charlie Bicknell and $65,000 to Curt Simmons. The latter bonus was by far the better of the two investments; both were sizable when compared to the average ballplayer’s annual salary of approximately $11,000.5 (The median annual family income at that time was $3,031.)6

The following year, the Phillies again were major investors in the bonus market. The Boston Braves paid the highest premium for a single player—$65,000 to Johnny Antonelli—but Philadelphia signed three young pitchers for a combined bonus total of $85,000. Bob Miller, out of the University of Detroit Mercy, received $20,000; Robin Roberts, from Michigan State University, pocketed $25,000; and Georgia schoolboy Hugh Radcliffe accepted the Phils’ offer of $40,000. 

Few believed that the bonus rule was the solution to the spending problem, and many openly criticized its intent, its effectiveness, and its impact on the young players who fell under its restrictions. It is not surprising, considering his team’s heavy investment in young talent, that Philadelphia Phillies owner Bob Carpenter called the rule “the most unfair piece of legislation in baseball.” Carpenter, who had opposed the adoption of the rule and led several unsuccessful efforts to have it repealed, elaborated on his objections, saying: “It is not only unfair to the clubs who are willing and eager to improve their positions, but doubly unfair to the players themselves. There is no doubt that the necessity of keeping youngsters on the Major League roster has retarded their progress.” He went so far as to label the rule more than unfair, calling it “unAmerican” and asking: “Have you ever heard of any business other than baseball which penalizes a club for making improvements?”7

Carpenter was not alone in his criticism of the bonus rule. Connie Mack, owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, observed that “the bonus rule hurts the player, the club, and all baseball.”8 Baseball Commissioner “Happy” Chandler called the rule a “restrictive yoke,”9 and American League President Will Harridge labeled it “a long-range boomerang to promising youngsters.”10 Leaders of independent minor league teams, such as the Atlanta Crackers’ Earl Mann, recognized that the rule would undermine their ability to compete for new young talent and actively campaigned against it. 

The criticism was not unanimous, however. Warren Giles, Cincinnati’s president and general manager, maintained that “if a player is worth a substantial bonus, he should have sufficient ability to play in the majors at the time he signs and not have to spend several years developing.”11 The varying opinions and the intensity of those feelings made the bonus rule a topic of discussion at every owners’ meeting and resulted in frequent tinkering with its finer points. 

In 1949, for example, the rule was modified to allow certain bonus players signed after March 31 that year to be optioned once during their first year. The “bonus” level for triple-A and double-A teams was increased to the major-league level of $6,000. This latter change was a partial response to a proposal from George M. Trautman, president of the NAPBL, that all leagues have the same limit to prevent clubs from signing players at a higher level to avoid the bonus designation and thus requiring them to face stiffer competition than they were ready for. 

By late 1949, however, the handwriting was on the wall—or at least in the New York Times. In a column entitled “End of a Noble Experiment,” Arthur Daley compared the bonus rule to Prohibition, noting that it was “as lofty in its idealistic motivations . . . and as impractical in its application.” Daley added that the rule “didn’t work and produced more ills than it was supposed to cure.”12 Daley and others reported that just as bootleggers had circumvented Prohibition’s restrictions, owners were adept at finding ways around the bonus rule. Some of these ruses included signing prospects’ fathers to scouting contracts, paying off mortgages on prospects’ family homes, and treating prospects and their families to lavish entertainment. 

Daley also noted that “bonus players, per se, breed discontent”13 and cited the situation in Boston in 1948 as the most egregious example. Johnny Antonelli, the 18-year-old who received the largest signing bonus that year, had joined the Braves in midseason, but manager Billy Southworth was unwilling to use an unproven rookie in the heat of a close pennant race. Consequently, the youngster faced only 17 batters in four innings, and his resentful teammates refused to vote him a share of the team’s World Series earnings. Following the season, Johnny Sain, whose 24–15 record earned him The Sporting News’ Pitcher of the Year honors, demanded and got a raise. Clubhouse dissention, due at least in part to resentment of the Bonus Baby, continued to plague the Braves in 1949, eventually causing Southworth to step down for the final third of the season. 

When the end for the controversial bonus rule finally came in December 1950, its demise was overshadowed by a more newsworthy event: Major-league owners approved its elimination at the same meeting where they voted not to retain “Happy” Chandler as commissioner. The minor leagues ratified elimination of the bonus rule in early December, and Arthur Daley penned its obituary, concluding that “the bonus rule never did achieve its purpose. It didn’t halt extravagant spending. It retarded the development of kids it was supposed to help and in some instances ruined them. It destroyed team morale. It led to sharp practice and chicanery. It was a bad rule.”14

Writing 22 years later, Paul Hemphill, in an article appropriately titled “Whatever Happened to What’s-His-Name?” focused on the adverse impact the rule had on the young players. He said: “Forced to sit in big league dugouts—gaining no experience, ostracized by jealous teammates, eventually the source of humor for fans and press—they waited while their potential, assuming they ever had any, stagnated and often disappeared.”15

Apparently, the club owners did not fully share these assessments of the failure of their initial attempt to limit bonus payments. Only two years after killing the first bonus rule, they approved an even more stringent variation on the theme. In 1952, led by Branch Rickey, the owners passed a new bonus rule (Rule 3k), which lowered the bonus threshold from $6,000 to $4,000 and required that players signed for more than this amount be immediately placed on the signing team’s major-league roster for two years. This new rule, labeled “baseball’s biggest blunder” by Brent Kelly in his 1996 book of the same name, remained in effect for five seasons (1953–1957) and suffered from (and perhaps exacerbated) the shortcomings of the rule it replaced. 

While this rule was in effect, every major-league team signed and carried on its roster at least one Bonus Baby. In all, 57 untried youngsters garnered this designation16 and the financial rewards that accompanied it. Few of them gained the stardom that their signers envisioned, although the list does include three Hall of Famers—Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew, and Sandy Koufax. 

What happened after the rule was eliminated suggests that it did have some dampening effect on the amounts spent on bonuses. In 1958, the first year following rejection of the second bonus rule, major-league teams paid some $6 million dollars in bonuses, compared to approximately $5 million during the preceding decade.17 The owners reacted by implementing an unrestricted draft of first-year players. This concept, which had been discussed for several years but always rejected, allowed teams to draft any first-year player not protected on a major-league roster for a standard draft amount. The drafting team was then required to place the drafted player on its roster for a full year. 

The first year–player draft did help to reduce the number of signing bonuses, but the amounts of these bonuses continued to creep upward. The owners tweaked the details of the first-year draft and continued to discuss (and reject) an unrestricted free-agent draft—a concept which finally earned approval in 1965 and remains in place today. 

The history of baseball owners’ efforts to control the amounts paid to untried but highly touted young players suggests that there may be no ceiling on such payments and no viable way to create one. The two young Georgians who were courted in 1948 were among the first players who had to consider how bonus rules would affect them—both their immediate financial status and their long-term future. As we will see, they chose different paths and achieved different results. 

WILLARD LEE NIXON: COLLEGE MOUND ACE 

Willard Nixon was the older and more experienced of the two Peach State phenoms. He was born in Taylorsville, Georgia (near Rome), in 1928 and lived in that area all of his life. By the time he graduated from high school, where he excelled in football and basketball, he was a veteran of four seasons of textile ball, first as part of an informal effort to “keep baseball alive despite wartime conditions”18 and later in the Northwest Georgia Textile League (NWGTL). 

Nixon’s textile-league experience was with the team representing Pepperell Mills. He played his first game in 1943 when he was only 14 and was used sparingly during that season. He pitched a two-hit, nine-inning shutout in an exhibition game early in 1944, but he fared less well against Pepperell’s regular opposition and again saw limited action during the remainder of the season. In 1945, Willard became the acknowledged “ace” of the Pepperell pitching staff. He compiled a 6–1 record and earned two complete game victories when Pepperell swept a best-of-three postseason tournament. The final victory came just two days after he had intercepted a pass and returned it for a touchdown to spark McHenry High to a 19–9 win over Trion High. 

He opened the 1946 NWGTL season with three shutouts and 33 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings and compiled a regular-season record of 12–3. When Pepperell became league champions by winning two postseason series, Nixon was the workhorse—and the show horse—of both. He pitched in six of the ten games and played left field when he was not on the mound. He won the deciding game of each series and batted .519 (19 for 37) for the postseason, including a game-tying solo home run in the final game. 

In 1947, the Detroit Tigers offered Willard a contract following his graduation from McHenry High, but he chose instead to accept a grant-in-aid from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University). In his Auburn debut, Willard faced only 19 batters in five innings against Mercer University to earn his initial collegiate victory. He compiled an 8–2 season record and led Auburn to a second-place finish in the powerful Southeastern Conference. 

College baseball in 1947 was a far cry from the attraction it has now become; it was then a minor sport that attracted few fans. As Nixon himself said in a 1974 interview, it “was just something students came out to watch if they didn’t have anything else to do.”19 Willard had played before larger crowds—and perhaps faced better players—back home in the textile league. It was, however, a bigger stage, and his performance placed him in a brighter spotlight than ever before. Johnny Bradberry, sports editor of the Atlanta Constitution, reported that “folks are calling Nixon the best pitching prospect in the Southeastern Conference since Spud Chandler.”20

When the collegiate season ended in May, Willard rejoined his Pepperell team, which had started its NWGTL season in April. He soon benefited from a record-setting performance by Pepperell third baseman “Shorty” Hall, who hit four home runs in four consecutive innings off four different pitchers. Pepperell (and Nixon) won that game 25–4, and Hall became the subject of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon. Willard’s 1947 NWGTL record was 8–1, and he again was the undisputed star of the postseason. He pitched in five of the six games, winning three, “saving” one, and losing one. He batted “only” .364, but three of his four hits were for extra bases, yielding a 1.000 slugging percentage. 

Willard returned to Auburn and, in the Tigers’ 1948 conference opener, struck out 20 Ole Miss batters to set a new Auburn and SEC record. In his next outing, Nixon was perhaps even better. He tossed a no-hitter against the University of Tennessee, striking out 18 batters and walking four. When he next faced the Vols, only a “scratch” eighth-inning single deprived him of a second no-hitter. In that game, Nixon contributed four hits, including a 370-foot home run, and the Rome News Tribune observed that “folks in Knoxville think that [Nixon] is the greatest college player of all time.”21 

Others held similar opinions. Danny Doyle, his Auburn coach, called Nixon “the greatest prospect I’ve ever coached,” adding that “the team wouldn’t have been much without him.” Teammate Erskine (Erk) Russell, who later became a legendary football coach at the University of Georgia and Georgia Southern University, recalled, “I never thought about losing when Willard was pitching. He was so good that you just knew when he pitched you were going to win.”22

Auburn won the SEC Eastern Division title, and Nixon pitched the final regular season game in front of scouts from 14 major-league teams. He finished the season with 145 strikeouts (an SEC record that would stand for 39 years) and a 10–1 record. He also led Auburn in hitting with a .448 batting average. 

Every team except the Chicago White Sox and the Philadelphia Athletics bid for Nixon’s services, and two days after the season ended, he signed a contract with the Boston Red Sox. Mace Brown, in the first year of his long scouting career with the BoSox, proudly declared that Willard Nixon was “the greatest college pitcher” he had seen and predicted that “he can’t miss being a big leaguer.”23

Nixon reportedly was offered bonuses of as much as $30,000, but, knowing that such a bonus would limit his time in the minor leagues, he chose to take less money. He later explained his decision, saying, “Although nobody in the world needed the money more than I did, I just didn’t think I was good enough to start at the top. I was afraid I might get that money and go up to the majors and flop. Then that bonus money might be all I’d ever get out of baseball.”24

Willard Nixon had been a successful pitcher in two different and very competitive environments, but, until he was invited to Cleveland by Lou Boudreau toward the end of his college career, he had never even seen a major-league game. He wanted to be sure that he had time to fully test his skills against other professional players before joining a major-league team. That way, he would earn his place on a major-league roster. 

HUGH FRANK RADCLIFFE: SCHOOLBOY STRIKEOUT KING 

Hugh Radcliffe gained national attention in April 1948, when he struck out 28 opposing batters in a nine-inning high school baseball game. Radcliffe, pitching for Robert E. Lee Institute, faced 33 Lanier High batters, who managed to make contact with only 10 of his pitches for seven foul balls, two infield grounders that his teammates booted, and the lone hit that he surrendered—another infield roller that Coach J. E. Richards said “should have been fielded, but the boys are too accustomed to watching Radcliffe play the game by himself.”25 Four times, a third strike eluded the R. E. Lee catcher. Three times he was able to throw the batter out at first base, but the fourth batter reached first safely, giving Hugh the opportunity to record an “extra” strikeout to complete his one-hit, two-walk shutout of a team that had won a pennant the previous year. 

Following this game, the opposing coach predicted, “Radcliffe has the physical equipment and pitching know-how to be a truly great pitcher.”26 One of the players who faced Hugh that day was Inman “Coot” Veal, who was destined for a six-year major-league career. He described Hugh’s curveball as the best he ever saw, noting that it “broke straight down at your feet.”27 The Atlanta Journal waxed poetic in an editorial, gushing: “Georgia, home state of Ty Cobb and Nap Rucker, of Sherrod Smith and Carlisle Smith, of Rudy York and Johnny Mize and Spurgeon Chandler, of Luke Appling and Martin Marion and Hugh Casey, should be proud of the towering R. E. Lee Institute athlete whose feat we confidently predict will never be equaled.”28

This record-setting game was the capstone of a youthful athletic career that had made Radcliffe a local legend in and around Thomaston, Georgia, where oldtimers still call him by his dual first names—“Hugh Frank.” He earned All-State honors in football, track, basketball, and (of course) baseball. His high-school coach called him “the best high school punter he ever saw,” and he once booted a football 78 yards in the air. He won the district pole-vaulting championship with a record jump of 11’4″ despite a sprained ankle. He was the starting guard on the R. E. Lee basketball team, and many observers believed that he had enough talent for a pro career in that sport.29 His American Legion baseball coach said, “[Hugh] can play any position on the field well; he can even catch.”30

This versatile athlete had first attracted the attention of professional baseball scouts in 1946, when he led Thomaston’s American Legion team to the state championship and then to the regional crown before losing to New Orleans, the eventual national champion, in the sectional playoffs. These sectional games attracted as many as five thousand fans, giving Hugh and his teammates their first experience playing before such large crowds. 

Radcliffe finished his senior year at R. E. Lee with 210 strikeouts in 81 2/3 innings—an average of 2.6 strikeouts per inning. He tossed two seven-inning no-hitters, and in his three nine-inning games, he averaged 24+ strikeouts and threw two one-hitters. He allowed only 16 hits and three earned runs for the season while compiling a 9–0 record.31 He accomplished all this with a pitching arsenal that included a 95 mph fastball, a “diving” sinker, and two different curve balls—a “wide-sweeping” one and the overhand “bottomless” version that Coot Veal described.32

Hugh led his team into the state championship tournament, where on June 2 (one day after graduating) he pitched his last high-school game. He went the full nine innings and struck out 24 batters, matching his season average, but R. E. Lee made nine errors and lost 8–6. The next day, after considering offers from 14 major-league scouts (including Branch Rickey himself and fellow Georgian Spud Chandler), Hugh Radcliffe accepted a $40,000 bonus from the Philadelphia Phillies. A rival scout reported later that Johnny Nee, the Phillie scout who won the “Radcliffe Sweepstakes,” had “told everybody he had no limit. His club . . . told him to sign Radcliffe and to go as high as he had to to get him.”33

According to the local paper in an article looking back at Radcliffe’s career, the youngster “was just as eager as any teen-ager to get to the top as fast as possible, particularly on an ‘earn as you learn’ basis.”34 He had had no more exposure to major-league baseball than the slightly older Nixon, but with the unbridled confidence of youth he must have been sure that he had the talent needed to succeed. He had achieved amazing things on the diamond, and a bevy of experienced baseball men were bidding for his services. Surely, their expectations were reasonable. How could he turn down that kind of money? 

NIXON AND RADCLIFFE: PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL CAREERS 

Immediately after signing professional contracts, the two young Georgians were sent north to join minorleague teams. Nixon went to the Scranton (Pennsylvania) Red Sox in the Class A Eastern League, and Radcliffe reported to the Wilmington (Delaware) Blue Rocks in the Class B Interstate League. He arrived the same day that fellow “Bonus Baby” Robin Roberts was promoted to the major-league club.35

Radcliffe left his first start in the seventh inning, trailing 5–0, but went on to compile a respectable 7–3 record. Nixon’s debut, one day before his twentieth birthday, was more impressive. He struck out the first batter he faced and pitched an eight-hit shutout against the Wilkes-Barre Barons. Local sportswriter Chic Feldman exclaimed that “the door to a glittering future opened at the stadium last night and in strode Willard Nixon, blond and beautiful (both physically and baseballically).”36 He closed the regular season with five consecutive victories to end the season with an 11–5 mark, and his final victory clinched the league championship for Scranton. His final game came in the postseason, and it was a “masterful two hitter”37 in frigid weather. 

Despite his winning record and acceptable ERA (4.12), the Phillies did not put Radcliffe on the major league roster at the end of the season. Sportswriter Jeff Moshier speculated that the “Phillies already were overburdened with bonus men.”38 Perhaps the major league decision makers also were concerned about Hugh’s control problems; he walked 82 batters in 92 innings. Whatever the reasoning, Hugh Radcliffe was still in the minor leagues at the end of the 1948 season, making him available to be drafted by other teams. He was among “the most publicized and highest paid” of the 270 “bonus tag” players whom big-league clubs left exposed to the draft in 1948,39 but there were no takers. 

Both Nixon and Radcliffe started their sophomore seasons at the triple-A level. Nixon was assigned to the Louisville Colonels of the American Association; the Phils sent Radcliffe to the Toronto Maple Leafs in the International League. Neither of the youngsters fared well at that level. Nixon recorded three losses and a “no decision” in four games for Louisville and was demoted to the Birmingham Barons in the double-A Southern Association. Radcliffe saw limited duty in Toronto, appearing in only nine games and compiling a 1–1 record and a 1.91 WHIP in a mere 22 innings. The Phils’ brass said that injuries prevented Hugh from playing more, but others accused them of using the youngster sparingly “in hopes that he would escape the draft.”40 If that were their plan, it did not work; the New York Yankees drafted Hugh Radcliffe in November.

After being reassigned to double-A ball and following a slow start at that level, Willard Nixon had an outstanding 1949 season. He lost his first three games for the Barons, making him 0–6 for the season, but he then won 14 of his final 18 decisions to finish the regular Southern Association season at 14–7, and at least two of his losses were due to poor defensive support. A local sportswriter described his pitching as “phenomenal after a shaky start.”41 He also had the highest batting average (.345) on the team. 

The highlight of the 1949 season for Willard Nixon came on Monday, August 15, at Ponce de Leon Park in Atlanta. With a large contingent of fans from his home town among the 4,996 in the stands and even more watching the game on television at the American Legion clubhouse in Lindale, Willard dominated the Atlanta Crackers. The final score was 5–4, and Nixon had pitched all nine innings and driven in all five Baron runs. As Langdon B. Gammon reported: “He was the whole show, producer and star.”42

Two years after making their decisions regarding immediate riches versus the potential for delayed gratification, the two young pitching prospects from Georgia each had experienced some success and some tribulation. Neither was yet in the major leagues, but one remained with his original suitor, while the other was facing an uncertain future with a new organization. 

After facing major-league hitters during spring training, both players started the 1950 season at Triple A. Nixon went back to Louisville, and the Yankees assigned Radcliffe to the Kansas City Blues. At the time, Casey Stengel said that both he and young Eddie Ford had “excellent prospects of climbing back fast.”43

Although both Georgia youngsters were now in the American Association, they did not face off as mound opponents. The junior Georgian pitched in only two innings in two games for the Blues, compiling a losing record (0–1) and a WHIP of 4.00. On May 6, he was reassigned to Binghamton in the Class A Eastern League, three days before Nixon faced Kansas City for the first time. Hugh prospered a bit in the lower classification, appearing in 25 games and managing a winning record (9–8), although his ERA (4.14) and his WHIP (1.71) remained high. 

While Radcliffe’s triple-A performance earned him a demotion, Nixon proved that his earlier difficulties at that level were a clear case of premature promotion. This time around, he got off to a fast start, winning his first three games. On July 2, he won his sixth consecutive game, bringing his record to 11–2. On July 6, he was promoted to the parent club. His 97 strikeouts led the American Association, and he was batting .345. Just over two years after signing with the Red Sox, Willard Nixon had gotten the minor-league seasoning that he thought he needed. He joined the Big Sox in New York and received his major-league baptism immediately. On July 7, he pitched the last two innings of a 5–2 Red Sox loss to the Yankees. He allowed one run on three hits, walked three batters, and struck out none—not especially impressive, but manager Steve O’Neill was happy with the results. He noted that Nixon “fired the ball hard and had those Yankees refraining from taking toe holds.”44 By season’s end, Willard had appeared in 22 games and compiled a winning (8–6) record. 

Willard Nixon was in the big leagues to stay. He spent the next eight years with the Red Sox, although he never achieved the stardom that many baseball experts continued to predict for him. Early in his career, he struggled to control his pitches and his temper; later, he often pitched despite a painful shoulder. His best two years came in 1954–1955, when his overall 23–22 record was overshadowed by his mastery over the powerful New York Yankees, which earned him a spot on the cover of The Sporting News45 and the nickname of “Yankee Killer.” He beat the Yankees four consecutive times in 1954, yielding no more than one earned run in any game, and he won his first two games against them in 1955—a streak of six straight wins over the Bronx Bombers. Although his dominance over the Yankees did not continue and while he was not as successful against many of his lesser opponents, Willard would have finished his career with an overall winning record had he not tried to pitch through arm trouble in 1958. He compiled a woeful 1–7 record that year, dropping his career record to 69–72. He returned to the minors in 1959 with the triple-A Minneapolis Millers in an attempt to “pitch [his] way back to the majors,”46 but after nine seasons in the majors, his big-league career was over.47 

Hugh Radcliffe, by contrast, was destined to be a career minor leaguer. Following his winning 1950 season in Binghamton, the Yankees gave him a contract for another year, and he joined the team in Phoenix48 for spring training. After a successful start in an intrasquad game,49 he struggled and was farmed out to Kansas City after giving up seven runs to Cleveland in a two-inning outing that included five walks and a wild pitch. He spent only a month in Kansas City, appearing in three games and compiling a 1–0 record, before being assigned to Beaumont in the double-A Texas League, where he won six, lost eight, and amassed a 1.74 WHIP. In September, he was one of 12 minor leaguers “recalled” by the Yankees but not asked to report immediately. In January 1952, the Yankees announced his “outright release,” leading the New York Times to say it was “the end of the trail” for “bonus baby” Hugh Radcliffe.50 

This pronouncement proved to be premature, as Hugh signed on with Kansas City. He did not play for the Blues, however. He was assigned and reassigned three times, opening the 1952 season back in Beaumont, spending six weeks with the Tyler East Texans51 of the Class B Big State League, and then going back to Class A Binghamton for the last month of the season. Hugh was taking the “journeyman ballplayer” appellation literally: his travels took him to three teams at three different classifications, for a combined record of 9–7 and WHIP of 1.54. Following the season, Hugh said that he had asked the Beaumont club to send him to a team where he could be part of the regular rotation. He added that he had learned more in the last half of the season than in four years of professional baseball, having “turned from a thrower to a pitcher.”52 He admitted later, however, that while with this club, he suffered the injury that effectively ended his hopes of a big-league career. He said that he had been put into a game on a chilly night without proper warmup, and his arm “went bad” and was never the same.53 He was still the property of the Kansas City club and was eligible for the draft, but only a major-league team could claim him; none did. 

Before he threw a pitch in 1953, Hugh Radcliffe had been the property of four minor-league clubs—Kansas City, Birmingham (Double A, Southern League), Syracuse (Triple A, International League), and Natchez (Class C, Cotton States League). With this last club, Hugh saw more action than in any of his other minor-league seasons. He appeared in 33 games, winning 13 and losing an equal number. His ERA was 3.74, and his WHIP was 1.51. At the end of the season, Birmingham reclaimed and reserved his rights. 

Birmingham assigned Hugh to Winston-Salem (Class B, Carolina League) before the 1954 season started. He appeared in only three games, losing his only decision, before being returned to the Barons on May 1. Four days later, the Barons released him, and his trail truly came to an end. The $40,000 bonus baby had spent seven years in the minor leagues, playing for eight different teams in eight different leagues at every minor-league classification above Class D. He had managed an overall winning record (46–42) although with only two winning seasons. He had constantly struggled with his control, averaging 6+ walks per nine innings pitched over his career. 

Both these Peach State natives expressed some regrets as they looked back over their professional baseball careers. For obvious reasons, Nixon’s regrets were fewer. He summed up his playing days by saying, “I didn’t get the most out of my ability, but I’m happy with [my career]. Baseball’s been good to me. I wouldn’t have had anything if it hadn’t been for baseball.”54 Radcliffe openly rued his decision regarding the bonus money. In 1955, the year after his career ended, he said: “If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t be a bonus boy. They bring the bonus boys up too fast and they don’t get the chance that some of the other players get. If I had had a chance to come up a little slower, and had had a little time to spend with a few pitching coaches, I think I’d be up there winning today.”55 In his later years, Hugh Frank was more philosophical; looking back in 2009, he said, “I’m kinda glad I didn’t make it. I would have had to raise my family up there and wouldn’t have gotten to spend as much time with them.”56 

LIFE AFTER BASEBALL 

Both Willard Nixon and Hugh Frank Radcliffe had long, productive lives after their baseball days had ended. Both found careers beyond the ballpark. Both raised families. Both found pleasure in active hobbies. Both retained legendary status in their hometowns. As with their baseball careers, they took somewhat different paths, but now the results were much more similar. 

The first year of professional baseball was the last year of bachelorhood for both young men, and they found lifelong partners. Willard and Nancy Nixon had been married for more than 51 years when he passed away in 2000; together they raised three children. Hugh and Marge Radcliffe have now been married for more than 60 years and have raised four children.57

League Abbreviations: AA (American Association); BSL (Big State League); CL (Carolina League); CSL (Cotton States League); EL (Eastern League); IL (International League); ISL (Interstate League); SA (Southern Association); TL (Texas League). Statistics from Baseball-Reference.com.

When their baseball days ended, both players took full-time jobs with the companies where they had worked during the offseasons. Hugh worked for the telephone company that later became Alltel (and was later acquired by Verizon), starting out as a lineman and moving up to supervisor. He left them for a few years to serve as a recreation director in Cordele, Georgia, but then returned and remained until his retirement some twenty years ago. Willard spent five years as a Red Sox scout before returning to Pepperell Mills, where since his high-school days he had worked when he was not playing baseball. He left Pepperell in 1968 rather than relocate and held a variety of positions—clerk of the Floyd County Board of Commissioners, County Court investigator, chief of police for Floyd County, and transportation director for the Floyd County School System—until he retired in 1989. 

Even before he retired, Nixon became one of the most popular and successful amateur golfers in Northwest Georgia and maintained this status until failing health forced him off the links. Radcliffe also became an avid golfer and fisherman and retired to Florida so that he could pursue both hobbies, which he is again enjoying after recovering from a bout with cancer.58 Hugh’s decision to retire to Florida reflects another major difference in the lives of these two Georgians. Willard Nixon arranged his life so that he never lived more than 10 miles from his birthplace; Hugh Radcliffe never lived in Thomaston after he graduated from high school, although he did return often to visit family members59 and to participate in ceremonies honoring his accomplishments. 

In 2004, Hugh Frank Radcliffe was among the first 15 athletes inducted into the Thomaston–Upson County Sports Hall of Fame. Willard Nixon had received a similar honor in 1971, when the Rome–Floyd County Sports Hall of Fame inducted its inaugural class of seven. Nixon was also elected to the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1993. That honor has so far eluded Radcliffe, but in 1998, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution commending his athletic achievements in four sports and especially honoring “the golden day he struck out 28 batters.”60 Radcliffe’s most recent honor came in 2008, when the clubhouse at Thomaston’s Silvertown Ballpark (the site of his historic performance) was named in his honor. 

HUGH RADCLIFFE: POSTER BOY FOR THE EVILS OF THE BONUS RULE—OR NOT? 

The two heroes of this story faced similar situations, made very different decisions, and achieved very different results. The intriguing question is the degree to which their decisions to accept or reject large bonuses impacted their upward mobility. 

Willard Nixon thought he needed minor-league experience before he would be ready to pitch in the majors. In two and a half years, he got that experience, moving smoothly through Classes A, AA, and AAA. His only slip during that climb came when he was promoted from Class A to Triple A before he was ready. When he faltered at the higher level, he went to Double A and pitched well. 

In contrast, after the pitching-rich Phils chose not to protect their investment in Hugh Radcliffe by adding him to the big-league roster, they promoted him all the way to triple-A Toronto to ensure that only another major-league team could draft him. He had been somewhat successful in Class B, but he skipped Class A and AA and spent his entire sophomore year at the triple-A level, getting little opportunity to prove himself there. 

Radcliffe’s belief that he would have done better if he had rejected the bonus offer, of course, echoes the concerns voiced by opponents of the bonus rule, but can we be sure that his “bonus boy” status is what prevented him from becoming a major leaguer? In spite of a reasonably successful first season, no other major-league club saw enough potential to add him to their roster after the Phillies exposed him to the draft. If his limited use at Toronto was truly a ruse to keep other teams from noticing him, then his bonus status certainly retarded his progress. If he was kept at the triple-A level to reduce the number of teams who could draft him, his bonus status hurt him further. Radcliffe himself believes to this day that the Phillies “tried to hide me.”61 If such were not the case, there seems to be little justification for not using him more in 1949, either in Toronto or at a lower minor-league classification. 

There is little doubt, therefore, that Hugh Radcliffe’s development suffered because he was a bonus baby, but other factors may have kept him in the minors while his fellow Georgian advanced to the majors. Radcliffe had the disadvantage of being selected by teams that had an abundance of pitchers. The Phillies had signed a bevy of bonus-level pitchers and reaped the benefits in 1950 when the “Whiz Kids” won the National League pennant behind the starting pitching of three Bonus Babies—Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, and Bob Miller. The Yankees of the early 1950s dominated the American League, winning five consecutive pennants between 1949 and 1953, with a pitching staff built around Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, Eddie Lopat, and (later) Johnny Sain and Whitey Ford. 

While he got less minor-league training than Nixon, Radcliffe probably needed it more. He had pitched extremely well, but typically against players younger than he was. During the summer between his junior and senior years in high school, Hugh did pitch for Swainsboro in the semipro Ogeechee League,62 where most of his opponents had played college ball. He also pitched “a few games” for the local textile-mill teams,63 but he was 19 years old throughout his dominant final year in high school; most high-school seniors are a year younger than that. In contrast, Willard Nixon had pitched extensively in the textile leagues against men who were five to ten years his senior, and he had prospered against that competition.

Both players suffered from sore arms during their careers, but here again there was an important difference. Nixon hurt his arm after proving that he could pitch at the major-league level. Radcliffe’s injury came while he was struggling in the minors, effectively sidetracking any hope that he could succeed in the majors. 

There seems to be little doubt that the 1948 bonus rule played a role in Hugh Frank Radcliffe’s failure to reach the major leagues. The Phillies certainly got little (if any) benefit from their $40,000 investment. There is some irony in the fact that the younger of the two players we have considered, the one who was perhaps most in need of minor-league seasoning, opted for the route that made such seasoning least likely. Yet he got minor-league experience anyway, although perhaps not in the proper sequence. Other factors also helped to keep the youngster in the minors, so the overarching lesson here may be that paying large sums for “can’t miss” (but untried) pitchers was just as risky in 1948 as it is today—and as it will likely be in 2048. 

WYNN MONTGOMERY, author of the biography of Willard Nixon for SABR’s BioProject, has seen ballgames in every major league city except Arlington, Texas, and in almost fifty minor-league parks. He is coeditor, with Ken Fenster, of The National Pastime: Baseball in the Peach State, the 2010 SABR convention journal.

Sources

My most valuable resource for the portion of this article dealing with Willard Nixon was Mrs. Nancy Nixon, who freely shared with me her memories and her extensive collection of scrapbooks (one for almost every year he played, 1945–59) and related materials that chronicled her husband’s career. Several unattributed quotations were found in unlabeled articles in those scrapbooks. Hugh Frank Radcliffe himself graciously participated in a telephone interview and shared his memories with me, as did his long-time friends Jim Fowler and Charles Gordy. Steve Densa, Minor League Baseball’s media relations director, provided Radcliffe’s “player record card.” In addition to these resources and the specific publications cited above, the following additional sources were invaluable during the preparation of this article.

Libraries (Newspaper Archives and Staff) and Organizations

• Auburn University Library (especially Joyce Hicks) 
• Boston Public Library 
• Rome/Floyd County Public Library (especially Dawn Hampton) 
• Upson Historical Society (specifically Penny Cliff and Patty Morgan)

Online

• Baseball Reference www.baseball-reference.com 
• Newspaper Archive www.newspaperarchive.com 
• New York Times www.nytimes.com 
• Paper of Record www.paperofrecord.com
• Retrosheet www.retrosheet.org, for box scores and play-by-play descriptions 
• SABR research tools sabr.org

Notes

1 Brent Kelley, Baseball’s Biggest Blunder: The Bonus Rule of 1953–1957 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Books, 1997).

2 Paul Hemphill, “Whatever Happened to What’s-His-Name?” True (June 1972). Collected in Paul Hemphill, Lost in the Lights: Sports, Dreams, and Life (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).

3 Steve Treder, “Cash in the Cradle: The Bonus Babies,” The Hardball Times (November 11, 2004).

4 John Drebinger, New York Times, February 3, 1946.

5 Michael J. Haupert, “The Economic History of Major League Baseball,” in EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples; “The Century in Dollars and Cents,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (2002), www.seattlepi.com/specials/moneyinsports/sportstimeline.pdf.

6 U.S. Census Bureau’s Historical Income Tables-Families, www.census.gov.

7 Salt Lake City Deseret News, October 20, 1949.

8 Frank Eck, Massillon (Ohio) Evening Independent, July 2, 1948.

9 Charleston (W.V.) Daily Mail, December 4, 1949.

10 New York Times, April 3, 1948.

11 Portsmouth (Ohio) Times, June 4, 1949.

12 Arthur Daley, New York Times, September 4, 1949.

13 Arthur Daley, New York Times, September 4, 1949.

14 Arthur Daley, New York Times, December 15, 1950.

15 Hemphill, “Whatever Happened to What’s-His-Name?”

16 Steve Treder, “Cash in the Cradle: The Bonus Babies,” The Hardball Times, November 11, 2004.

17 Kelley, Baseball’s Biggest Blunder.

18 Langdon B. Gannon, Rome News Tribune, April 22, 1943.

19 Owen Davis, The Auburn Bulletin, August 28, 1974.

20 This quotation comes from an undated newspaper clipping in one of the many scrapbooks (this one labeled 1947) maintained by Mrs. Nancy Nixon, Willard’s widow. After graduating from the University of Georgia, Spurgeon Ferdinand “Spud” Chandler pitched for the New York Yankees for 11 years (1937–47), compiling a 109–43 record—the highest winning percentage for any pitcher in history with 100 or more games.

21 Rome (Ga.) News Tribune, April 29, 1948.

22 Inside the Auburn Tigers (a monthly magazine for Auburn fans), August 1983.

23 Undated clipping in Nancy Nixon’s 1948 scrapbook.

24 Roger Birtwell, Boston Globe, March 14, 1949.

25 Thomaston Times, April 23, 1948.

26 Thomaston Times, April 23, 1948.

27 Thomaston-Upson Sports Hall of Fame.

28 Atlanta Journal, 22 April 1948. Most of the names in this list will be familiar to all baseball fans. The two Smiths are the least well known; both had long but relatively undistinguished major-league careers. Carlisle, who was better known as “Red,” was not born in Georgia, nor was Martin (Marty) Marion, who was a prep star at Atlanta’s Tech High. The Journal’s choice of players with whom to compare Radcliffe was less insightful than the prediction that the record would not fall; no one has yet matched or topped that standard.

29 Atlanta Journal, April 22, 1948.

30 Florence (S.C.) Morning News, August 17, 1946.

31 Hagerstown (Md.) Daily Mail, June 4, 1948.

32 Thomaston-Upson Sports Hall of Fame.

33 Wayne Minshew, “Scouting Big League Talent Has Changed with the Years” Baseball Digest, July 1976.

34 Thomaston Times, June 17, 1955.

35 Doug Gelbert, The Great Delaware Sports Book (Montchanin, Del.: Manatee Books, 1995).

36 Chic Feldman, Scranton Tribune, June 17, 1948.

37 Chic Feldman, Scranton Tribune, September 22, 1948.

38 Jeff Moshier, Saint Petersburg Independent, November 22, 1949.

39 Saint Petersburg Times, November 9, 1948.

40 Jeff Moshier, Saint Petersburg Independent, November 22, 1949.

41 Naylor Stone, Birmingham Post, September 13, 1949.

42 Langdon B. Gammon, “Lindale News,” Rome News Tribune, August 15, 1949. 

43 New York Times, 30 March 1950. Eddie Ford, better known as “Whitey,” climbed back and began his Hall of Fame career on July 1.

44 Arthur Sampson, Boston Traveler, July 13, 1950.

45 The Sporting News, May 4, 1955.

46 Tom Briere, Minneapolis Tribune, April 12, 1959.

47 Thirty other American League pitchers made their major–league debut in the same year as Nixon, and only three (Lew Burdette, Whitey Ford, and Ray Herbert) pitched longer and won more games. Two fellow 1950 Red Sox rookie pitchers (Dick Littlefield and Jim McDonald) equaled his longevity, but neither matched his record. The average career for 1950’s other 25 American League rookie pitchers was 3.6 years.

48 This is the only time that the Yankees have gone west for spring training. Yankees co-owner Del Webb, a resident of Phoenix, swapped training sites with the New York Giants, who came east to use the Yankees’ usual site in St. Petersburg, Florida.

49 In an interview on October 21, 2009, Radcliffe recalled that he pitched the first five innings of a game that pitted the Yankees rookies against each other and gave up only one hit—a triple to Mickey Mantle, who was experiencing his first spring training.

50 New York Times, January 31, 1952.

51 On July 15, 1952, Hugh Radcliffe participated (as a pinch-runner) in a 20-inning Tyler loss (3–2) to the Texarkana Bears.

52 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 21, 1952.

53 Thomaston Times, June 17, 1955.

54 Undated article in Nancy Nixon’s scrapbook.

55 Undated article in Nancy Nixon’s scrapbook.

56 Interview with Hugh Frank Radcliffe, 21 October 2009.

57 Radcliffe interview. Hugh said that he named one of his sons “Rip” after Raymond Allen (Rip) Radcliff, who had a 10-year major-league career (1934–43). He mistakenly thought they shared a common spelling of their last names.

58 Radcliffe interview.

59 Hugh came from a large family. He had ten siblings, and one of them did make it to the major leagues. His older sister, Emma Lou Radcliffe Boss (1922–2007), spent 17 years as an administrative assistant to Hank Aaron and the Atlanta Braves.

60 Georgia House of Representatives, HR 1258.

61 Georgia House of Representatives, HR 1258.

62 The Ogeechee League, which derived its name from Georgia’s Ogeechee River, operated in middle and southern Georgia during the 1940s and 1950s. Teams represented small towns such as Glenville, Greenwood, Louisville, Metter, Millen, Statesboro, Swainsboro, Sylvania, Thomson, and Wrightsville. According to an article (April 23, 2009) in the multititled Louisville News and Farmer & Wadley Herald & Jefferson (County) Reporter, the Louisville team bore the name “Mudcats” long before Columbus’s Southern League team adopted that nickname and retained it even after moving to North Carolina.

63 Interview with Hugh Frank Radcliffe, October 21, 2009.