As Midsummer Classics go, this one has been a doozy.

The runner dances off third as the pitcher gets his sign, goes into the set, waits a couple of beats … then quickly delivers a low outside fastball that the right-handed hitter pulls deep into the hole to the right of the shortstop, Rabbit Maranville, who backhands the ball and one-hops the throw to his first baseman, Hal Chase—alas, a step too late to get the out. And so Ray Chapman gets his single, moving Wally Pipp to second and scoring Tris Speaker from third, and ex-Buf-Fed hurler Fred Anderson is now on the hook for the loss for the Nationals, which finally does come to pass as Anderson himself strikes out in the bottom of the frame to end the contest and hand the Americans a 5–4 victory on this warm and rainy July Friday at the Polo Grounds.

At this point, you, the “knowing Fan,” might have simultaneously snapped your neck, blinked hard, and stared into the preceding paragraph asking yourself, “Wait, what? Rabbit Maranville? Hal Chase? Ray Chapman, Wally Pipp, Tris Speaker? These guys were never in the All-Star Game, were they? And who the heck is Fred Anderson, anyway?”

And you’d be right: They never were in a real All-Star Game, because we all know that the first one wasn’t played until 1933 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. But it was not for lack of the All-Star Game idea to ever come up in the first place, for it did as early as 1914, in a series of articles in the popular monthly Baseball Magazine. So it might have happened. And with the help of some modern-day innovations, we did make it “happen,” using a combination of the most comprehensive baseball stats website on the planet, a simple-to-use online survey website, and one of the very best game simulators on the market.

But the best thing you’ll learn from this article is that, as much fun as it was to play the games out and to see those results unfold, it was uncovering an unexpected insight into the legacy of the stars from that era that surprised and delighted us the most.

INCEPTION

The idea for the Retroactive All-Star Game (RASG) project first occurred to Chuck Hildebrandt in February of 2013, when Baseball-Reference.com (B–R) added splits back to the 1916 season in their excellent Play Index.1 Included within the new feature were the standard half-season splits, and the idea of putting together All-Star rosters based on first-half stats immediately leapt to Chuck’s mind. He jotted down this project idea and set it aside.

About a year later, thumbing through an old Baseball Research Journal, Chuck came across an article written by Lyle Spatz about retroactive Cy Young Award winners, and later, an online article Lyle wrote about retroactive Rookie of the Year awards, both going back to 1901 and featuring winners chosen by SABR member vote.2, 3

Reminded of his own idea, Chuck googled around online to see whether there was a record of anybody ever having undertaken anything like a retroactive All-Star game project, or having written an article about the idea. Outside of threads existing in various online forums, he didn’t find anything like this specifically, but during his research he did find that between late 1914 and early 1916, Baseball Magazine had advocated for a midseason All-Star game (or more exactly, an All-Star series). The timing of the magazine articles lined up well with the availability of the splits data back to 1916 at B–R, and now there was a plausible historical context to support the idea. This all struck Chuck as kismet, and so the impetus to go forward with the RASG project was born.

The next several sections provide a great amount of detail about how the project was developed and managed. If you’re not so interested in how the sausage was made, feel free to skip ahead to the section labeled “Topline Results” below. However, if you’re a process nerd as the authors are, then here you go!

GROUNDWORK

The first thing Chuck wanted to find out was, just what had been said about the All-Star concept before the actual games were launched in 1933? He reasoned that if there were a way to tie in this project to what had actually been said or written about the topic, it would make the premise seem all the more historically plausible.

Baseball Magazine published four separate articles about the possibility of an All-Star Series. The articles’ timing of 1914 through 1916 was a great coincidence, since the splits data featured went back to 1916, creating a credible natural starting point for the first games of the project.4

At the time the articles were written, the choosing of all-time All-Star teams (referred to by the magazine as the “All America Baseball Club”) was considered a “universal fad,” and one article cites efforts by Spalding’s Record to assemble All-Star teams (which they termed “National All-America” teams) covering five-year periods from 1871 on, culminating in a final All-Star (“Grand National All-America”) team for the whole of baseball history through then-present day 1913.5

But the idea of playing actual live contests between “All-Star” teams consisting of the greatest players of the current time first appeared in the magazine in 1915, which the authors presciently envisioned as occurring midseason to slake the fans’ thirst for determining which league was the better one even before the “World’s Series” in the fall pitted both leagues’ top teams against each other. The article also argued that a midseason All-Star series would “stimulate [fan] interest [and] vary the monotony of a long stretch of 150 games,” the latter of which they deemed to be “a serious handicap,” and which would also “advance the reconstruction period” following “two years of wanton destruction” wrought by “the Federal League war.”

The magazine went on to claim that an All-Star series would even provide something a World Series between two great but still flawed teams could not: “the best baseball the game can offer,” even going so far as to maintain that such a Midsummer Classic would “represent a perfect baseball series under as nearly ideal circumstances as possible.”6, 7

It’s interesting that the articles that influenced the RASG project specifically called for an All-Star series, versus a single game. Originally, the proposal was for a seven game series, “a single week’s work,” and preferably to be played in New York, Boston, or Chicago in order to best handle the large crowds they believed such a series would generate, believing it would spark so much interest that “a man might well journey from the Pacific Coast” to take it in.8

The magazine justified the idea of a weeklong series by maintaining that regular season schedules would still proceed uninterrupted, and that the stars would simply vacate their teams for the week to play in the All-Star series while their regular teams continued to toil.9 This proposal was the main reason the decision was made that our Retroactive All-Star contests would at first start out as a series, and an educated guess was made as to how it might evolve from there. (It was imagined that several owners, especially those in the heat of a pennant race, would have objected to losing their stars for a whole week at a stretch, and that a compromise of a three-game series would have been reached to mollify their concerns and secure their support.)

Next, Chuck sought a partner to “sim” the games, someone who was already an expert at doing so. He put out the call for a sim partner on the SABR-L listserv, and out of several responses agreed to work with Mike Lynch, proprietor of the website Seamheads.com. Mike is an expert at using the Out of the Park (OOTP) game simulator, generally considered the most advanced baseball management simulation game available at the time of this project. It is also great good luck that Mike happens to be the proprietor of a popular and terrific historical feature website, and he was willing to write up game accounts and publish them on the site as the project evolved.

PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

With the partnership in place, and having established that the RASG would start with a three-game series during the 1916 season, the project details started coming together. Voting for All-Star starters would be conducted using SurveyMonkey.com, a website that allows ordinary people to field online surveys and polls. SABR also uses SurveyMonkey to conduct its own polls, and again as luck would have it, SABR generously offered to share its account to allow us to conduct the voting for the RASG project. After the voting for a season’s All-Stars was to be completed, the reserves would be manually selected to fill out the rosters, which would then be sent to Mike to sim the game using OOTP 14, the latest available version of that game at the time.

Mike had been using OOTP to simulate games for almost 15 years and, as a big fan of the game, understood how the plethora of features it offered made it the right choice for this project. The ability to import historical seasons with ease and pinpoint accuracy (for example, roster sizes, strategic tendencies, and league stat totals are realistically reflected for each year), and also to easily manipulate rosters, kept setup and implementation time to a minimum. Employing the game’s unique set of features to best effect, Mike was able to easily customize the simulated games for the Retroactive All-Star Project with minimum effort but also maximum accuracy, all the way down to stadium configurations and their ballpark factors.

Because of the many options available in OOTP, Mike could set up each All-Star Game to be managed by the game’s artificial intelligence engine, which eliminated any bias he himself might have inadvertently brought to play-calling during the game, while maintaining control of substitutions, an important aspect given the requirement to pull pitchers after three innings (or sooner if necessary), as well as to make the frequent pinch-hitting and defensive substitutions needed to accurately represent the unique in-game dynamic that typifies an All-Star Game.

The process of selecting venues for the game posed an interesting riddle. To reflect a real-life likelihood, we wanted to ensure that the game would be spread among the parks of the major-league teams, but without occurring too close in time to when those same clubs hosted their actual first All-Star games. It was decided to host the inaugural RASG series in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, where the first All-Star game had been hosted in real life, and to alternate home-team status between leagues, as is done today.

To select locations for subsequent All-Star contests, we reviewed real-life actual All-Star Game venues for the first 20 or so years in history, in order to obtain a fair spread between the years a team hosts the games in its venue and make it equitable among all the franchises in the majors. Since the RASG was conducted in 16 separate seasons (we imagined that Retroactive All-Star contest would have been canceled for war during the 1918 season in RASG, as it had been in 1945 in real life), that created a neat situation in which each of the 16 major-league teams could host a RASG once each, with the spread between their first (RASG) game and their next real-life game ranging between 10 and 27 years, the fairest spread we could manage.

RASGs were also awarded to clubs who had recently expanded their ballparks in real life, including Chicago’s Cubs Park (1924), the Athletics’ Shibe Park (1925), the Cardinals’ Sportsman’s Park (1926), and the Reds’ Redland Field (1928).

(Note: The 1932 RASG game was awarded to the Phillies, who we imagine would have arranged with the Athletics to host the game at spacious Shibe [33,000 capacity], as their own Baker Bowl [18,800 capacity] would have been deemed too tiny at the time.)

VOTING/SELECTION PROCESS

The first step in setting up the RASG voting structure was to download the first-half stats for each player, for each year 1916 through 1932, and export them into an Excel spreadsheet, from which we could then format and post the stats for each team’s starters onto the RASG ballot. Batters were, of course, listed with one set of stats; pitchers with another set. (Interesting tidbit: Even as late as the 1930s, the RBI was still not a commonly reported stat, even though it had become an official stat in 1920.10 For example, when the Chicago Tribune published major-league averages during the season, they did not start including RBIs in the table until 1931.11, 12 Given this historical reality, players’ RBIs were not included on the RASG ballots.)

Next, we created a poll for each RASG on which we posted the candidates for each position in each league, with their first-half stats. The regular starters for each team were included on the ballot as long as they satisfied a minimum number of plate appearances (100) or innings pitched (77), which would have defined them as their teams’ starters and thus tracks logically with how players are listed on All-Star ballots today. This created seemingly (and entertainingly) absurd situations in which players having terrible seasons ended up on ballots, such as A’s right fielder Bill Johnson in 1917 (hitting .173 with only six runs scored); Indians catcher Steve O’Neill, also in 1917 (.179 average, no homers or steals); and Cubs shortstop Clyde Beck in 1930 (a .232 hitter during a year in which the entire league batted .303).

But, as long as a player satisfied the aforementioned minimums and was his team’s primary player at the position, he appeared on the ballot. Exceptions: pitchers with obviously terrible won-loss records were excluded, as long as there were teammates who had better records that could be listed. (Spoiler alert: None of the three players mentioned above was voted in as starters.)

Concurrently, we developed a “marketing plan” to stimulate voting interest, which called for promotional text written in the parlance of the times to be included in emails posted through SABR-L, posts in the This Week in SABR email newsletter, on the SABR website, and on each of the 30 MLB team blogs hosted by SBNation.com. We also benefited initially from a blog post and front page appearance on B–R, which led to over 1,000 votes cast in the very first RASG.

By the third RASG, it finally dawned on us to maintain an email opt-in list so we could contact confirmed voters of previous RASGs, to remind them to both vote in the new RASG and to read the results and game accounts posted at Seamheads.com after the games were simmed and written up by Mike. This plan led to nearly nine thousand votes being cast throughout the life of the project.

The voting for each RASG began on a Friday and ran for two weeks, and included an initial announcement and two reminders to vote for that RASG. After the fourteenth and final day of voting, the ballot for that season’s RASG ended and the ballot for a new season’s RASG began, both as scheduled. Once a ballot ended, Chuck tabulated the votes to determine the eleven elected starters (one position starter plus three pitchers for each team) for each squad, and then each team’s reserves were selected based on the most logical circumstance reflecting vote totals and/or first-half stats.

In a nod to real-life situations, before submitting rosters, Chuck would review the list of elected starters against B–R’s terrific Defensive Lineup tool, which reports the starting lineup fielded by each team for each game played every season since 1914.13 The goal was to make sure that the starter who was voted in for that game was not injured and out of his team’s lineup in real life, thus rendering him unable to play even a simmed All-Star game that day. If a voted starter was indeed injured, he would be replaced by the next logical candidate, usually the player who received the second most votes.

In one case, the Yankees’ Bob Meusel was elected as the starting left fielder to the 1926 RASG, but in real life he had broken his left ankle sliding into a base in late June, putting him out for six weeks.14 Since the RASG for that year was scheduled for July 13, Meusel could not have conceivably played the game, so the Senators’ uninjured Goose Goslin was chosen to replace him.

In another more colorful incident, AL starting catcher-elect Bill Dickey had to be replaced on the 1932 squad as, at the time of that year’s RASG, he was in the process of serving a 30-day suspension arising from a Fourth of July donnybrook during which he slugged Senators runners Carl Reynolds, who’d bowled him over at the plate, breaking Reynolds’s jaw in two places.15 The comparatively saintly “Black Mike” Cochrane of the Athletics was selected to replace Dickey in that ’32 affair.

As it so happened, in the majority of RASGs, there was at least one starter voted in who would not have been able to play that day because of injury or otherwise; the 1922 RASG saw four injured elected starters who needed to be replaced in this fashion.

Once this part of the process was completed and the entire roster was assembled, it was sent along to Mike so he could sim the game. At the same time, voting for the next RASG would have commenced and this voting/selection process would repeat itself.

SIMMING THE GAMES AND WRITING UP THE RESULTS

Once Mike received the roster for a year’s RASG, he would begin the simming process by creating a new historical league in OOTP corresponding to the season in which that game was to take place. For the 1921 game, for example, he imported OOTP’s 1921 season, including all 16 major-league teams and their actual rosters. He would then manually add a team to each league called “All-Stars,” to be populated with players who’d been elected or selected to that league’s All-Star team.

After selecting the OOTP options appropriate to the season being played—roster sizes, injuries, rules reflecting the era, etc.—Mike would transfer players from their regular teams to their league’s All-Star team. Once the rosters were filled, Mike would create starting lineups and depth charts based on RASG voting by the “Knowing Fan.” Batting orders would be constructed contingent upon where the players batted in their regular team’s actual order, the handedness of the batter, and where his particular set of skills would be most useful during the game.

The top vote-getters among pitchers got their All-Star team’s starting assignment, with the remainder being used as relievers. During the game itself, Mike would actively perform the role of manager for both teams only when it came to substitutions; otherwise, he allowed OOTP to manage in-game strategy itself: calling for steals, employing the hit-and-run, issuing intentional walks, etc. Substitutions would be made based on the inning, score, situation, and player’s OOTP skill ratings. For example, a slugger with a poor glove would most likely pinch-hit early in the game, while a player with a good glove would typically be used later and stay in as a defensive replacement. Such decisions were emblematic of the level of realism we sought to inject into the project.

Once the games were played, Mike would carefully review the box scores and game logs so he could write the game accounts accordingly, simulating as closely as possible the writing style used by newspapermen of that era, and post the stories to the Seamheads website.

TOPLINE RESULTS

The first three-game Retroactive All-Star series was played during the weekend of July 14–16, 1916, with the American League hosting the Nationals at Comiskey Park at the corner of 35th Street and S. Shields on Chicago’s South Side. The Junior Circuit took the first game, 4–0, as none other than Walter Johnson and Babe Ruth dominated the Nationals from the mound, but then the Seniors stormed back to take the next two games, 6–3 and 4–2, to win the set. In a series featuring 13 eventual Hall of Famers, including nine on the American side, the linchpin of the Nationals’ series victory was Giants right fielder Dave Robertson, who went 7-for-12 and scored four of the NL’s 10 total runs, including the game-winner in the pivotal Sunday rubber match.

The 1917 series was played in New York at the Giants’ Polo Grounds, in which the American League returned the favor to the National League and took two games out of three, with the first-ever RASG home runs hit by Phillies slugger Gavvy Cravath and Cubs keystone sacker Larry Doyle. Notable in this series was the falling attendance throughout: from over 38,400 in Game One, to about 33,400 in Game Two and all the way down to well under 28,000 for the final tilt, it was becoming clear that All-Star fatigue was defeating the gate over time.

After the All-Star proceedings were canceled in 1918 due to World War I, the Retroactive Midsummer Classic was reduced to a single game in July 1919 and played at the Red Sox’ Fenway Park in Boston, where the Seniors dumped the Juniors, 4–3, the former holding off a ninth-inning rally by the latter, stranding the tying run in the person of hometown shortstop Everett Scott on third base.

The Retroactive All-Star Games continued on through the Roaring Twenties and on into the early Depression years until the game returned once again to Comiskey Park for the 1933 “real” All-Star Game, featuring the real-life exploits we know so well today. But there were also several heroic moments that occurred during the simmed Retroactive games as well:

1. Guy Morton and Hippo Vaughn each threw six scoreless innings against their star-studded opposition in 1916 and 1917, respectively.
2. Ray Chapman went 5-for-5 in Game One of the 1917 series, a record that would have held up through at least 2015.
3. Ken Williams became the first player to homer twice in a game in 1923; Chuck Klein replicated this feat in 1930.
4. Eddie Collins set a record with four runs scored in 1925, and Earle Combs did the same with five RBIs in 1929, both of which would still be tied for the all-time record as of 2015.
5. Dazzy Vance “Carl-Hubbelled” the Americans in 1927, fanning five of the 12 batters he faced, all Yankees and three of them Hall of Famers (Gehrig, Lazzeri, and Ruth twice, adding Meusel for good measure).
6. Eddie Collins dominated his competition throughout his RASG career by going 15-for-35, plus six walks, in 13 games that included two doubles, a triple, a home run, and eleven runs scored, resulting in a scorching slash line of .429/.512/.629, the best for any All-Star with over 40 plate appearances, real or retro. (Closest: Ted Williams, .304/.439/.652 in 46 at-bats.)

For a complete listing of retroactive All-Star Game results, click here or see the table below.

THE UNEXPECTED INSIGHT

As interesting as the results of the simulated games and players’ performances might be—or might not be, more likely, even for most serious baseball fans—the more interesting, and initially unexpected, insight we took from this project might very well be the idea of how players may have been viewed very differently than they are today, if they could have included any number of All-Star Games on their playing résumés, but simply never had the opportunity.

For instance, what if a very good player who finished his career before the first actual All-Star Game in 1933 had played several All-Star Games before that, if such games had been played as far back as 1916? Would we rate him significantly higher than he really is today? Or, what if a player who played in the first few real All-Star Games toward the end of his stellar career had instead played in a whole slew of them, had they existed during the prior seventeen seasons? What would be the effect on his legacy?

And perhaps most interestingly, who are some of the players we practically never give a first thought to, let alone a second thought, that we would regard much more highly had they played or even started several All-Star Games between 1916 through 1932, since they were among the best players at their position in their league at the time?

In considering the effect that playing many All-Star Games has on a player’s legacy, we believe that the best proxy for determining how good or great his career is involves the Hall of Fame: if he’s already in, how the player has been inducted and how quickly; or if he’s not in, whether he received votes, how many, and for how many ballots. We believe this idea lines up closely with how fans regard players, as well. And as far as we can tell, playing in All-Star Games really does matter: Through 2014, of the 128 Hall of Famers who played much or all of their careers in the real-life All-Star era, 53 of them—a full 41 percent—have their All-Star Game participation mentioned right on their plaques.16

Additionally, Bill James, in his seminal book Whatever Happened to the Hall Of Fame?, cites participation in All-Star Games as a criterion within his “Keltner List” of Hall qualifications, and also awards points to a player for each All-Star Game he participated in as part of the Hall of Fame Monitor evaluation method that he proposed in the book.17

It’s possible that baseball writers or veterans don’t always explicitly consider a player’s participation in All-Star Games as a key criterion to guide their voting, but it also seems implausible to suggest that they give the idea less than short shrift by disregarding it entirely.

With that in mind, let’s explore how participation in All-Star Games during the 1916–32 period might have affected the candidacy of certain players.

INNER CIRCLE HALL OF FAMERS

The first idea to address is whether any current inner circle Hall of Famer would have significantly benefited from playing in any of the All-Star Games that might have taken place between 1916 and 1932, or whether doing so would merely have afforded at least a minor boost by dint of its establishing his place in that particular section of baseball history.

Babe Ruth is probably the best example to contemplate here. In real life, the Babe played in two Midsummer Classics — the first two ever played, actually — and started both. But had the Classic been launched in 1916, the Babe would have made, and started, the games from the very beginning, and, of course, as a pitcher for the first two years. Whether as a starter or as a reserve, Ruth would have made the squad in 16 seasons, tying him with Mickey Mantle, and behind only fellow inner circle Hall of Famers Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Cal Ripken, Rod Carew, Ted Williams, and Carl Yastrzemski, as well as Pete Rose. Ruth would have started games in 15 of those years, as well (he lost the 1922 vote to the Browns’ Ken Williams—more on him later), the same as Carew, and behind only Mays, Ripken, and Aaron. (Note: Appearances and starts for every All-Star in history, including appearances of All-Stars who did not enter the game, as well as pitchers who did not bat, can be found in the All-Star Game Player Career Batting Register at Baseball-Reference.com.)[/fn]“All-Star Game Player Career Batting Register”, accessed August 12, 2014, www.baseball-reference.com/allstar/bat-register.shtml.[/fn]

Making 16 All-Star teams would have been a great accomplishment, of course, and something we would absolutely expect of the greatest baseball player in history. Which is the point: Babe Ruth is already considered the greatest baseball player in history even without all the All-Star Game appearances he surely would have made. The idea that he might have played in 16 of them, rather than just the two in reality, does nothing to further elevate his status, but only because he is already at the pinnacle of the game’s pantheon, and by definition, no one can be elevated above a pinnacle.

This same idea could be applied to a handful of other all-time greats, such as Lou Gehrig, who would have made 13 All-Star teams and started 10 games instead of the actual seven teams and five starts he made; Walter Johnson making six years of All-Star Games and starting three; Grover Cleveland (“Pete”) Alexander with three starts in nine years of making the team; Ty Cobb starting seven games in seven years; or Honus Wagner starting every game of the first two (Retroactive) All-Star series during the last two years of his career.

Making the All-Star rosters, and even being voted All-Star starters, would have been nice incremental honors for these players and may have even provided a handy data point to further argue for their supremacy, but even so, this probably would not have burnished their legacies to any substantive degree, simply because the legacy of each of these players is so nearly perfect to start with.

MIDDLE AND OUTER CIRCLE HALL OF FAMERS

On the other hand, there are some Hall of Famers outside the Inner Circle playing during the RASG period who may have, in a practical sense, benefited from numerous appearances in All-Star Games had they been played between 1916 and 1932.

Harry Heilmann is a good example. Author of a .342/.410/.520 slash line affixed by his 2,660 base hits; winner of four batting titles, including a .403 effort in 1923; and owner of a 148 career OPS+ (which is on-base-plus-slugging indexed to an average of 100, and adjusted for league and park factors); it nevertheless took Heilmann 12 ballots to finally make the Hall of Fame. Alas, Heilmann played his final full season in 1930, three years before the real Midsummer Classic began. Had the All-Star Game begun in 1916, though, our voting would have had him starting nine All-Star Games.

Would this have been enough of a boost by itself to help get him elected to the Hall sooner than he was? Let’s look at a list of the 26 players who started at least nine All-Star Games in real life:

n/e: not yet eligible as of 2015.

Of the players on this list of 26 elites, 18 are Hall of Famers voted in by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA). Of the eight who are not, five are either active players as of early 2015, or are recently retired and not yet Hall-eligible. Of the three retired players who have achieved eligibility status, one is practically certain to be voted in: Mike Piazza, who has received 57.8 percent, 62.2 percent and 69.9 percent of total votes on his first three ballots, respectively. The candidacy of Barry Bonds, undeniably one of the greatest hitters in history, has been stuck in neutral in his first three ballots due to broad (and controversial) allegations of steroid usage. Steve Garvey is the only player on this list of nine-time (or more) All-Star Game starters who failed to make the Hall after 15 years on the ballot, although in fairness, no one would confuse Garvey’s .294/.329/.446 slash line and 117 OPS+ with Heilmann’s gaudy numbers.

But just as important a point to consider is how quickly the eligible players were voted into the Hall. Fourteen of the 18 Hall of Famers above were first-ballot inductees, two went in on the second ballot, and the other two on the third ballot. That is to say, none of these 18 eligible players had to wait even as long as four ballots. Bonds (who has his own peculiar set of problems) and Garvey (who simply did not have a Hall-worthy career) notwithstanding, Piazza is the first of this list to have to wait at least that long, but only because of the glut of slam-dunk first ballot inner circle Hall of Famers that arrived in 2014 (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas) and 2015 (Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz).

Given his strong showing on his third ballot in 2015, and with the addition of only one surefire first ballot Hall of Famer in Ken Griffey, Jr. the following year, it seems likely that Piazza will go into the Hall in 2016, his fourth ballot. However, that is still a far sight ahead of the 12 ballots it took to elect Heilmann. But then, Heilmann had no All-Star starts or appearances to boast. If Heilmann had had nine All-Star starts listed on his legacy baseball card, though—perhaps he would have gone in much sooner? Probably? Certainly? Our opinion is that the answer might lie closer to the right side of the perhaps-to-certainly continuum than to the left.

Bill Terry was, in reality, a three-time All-Star starter, but had the Game existed before 1933, he is likely to have been an eight-time All-Star, as well as a starter in six seasons. He is well-known as the most recent National Leaguer to have hit over .400 in a season (.401 in 1930), but he is also the current owner of the fifteenth-highest career batting average in history, at .341, higher than such first-ballot elects as Lou Gehrig, Tony Gwynn, and Stan Musial. Terry was a dangerous spray hitter who could hit doubles, triples, and home runs each in great numbers, and he ended his career with a gaudy 136 OPS+ after 14 years.

Terry also had to wait 14 ballots before finally getting his Hall nod. How does that compare to Hall-eligible All-Star Game starters for six seasons in real life?

Mgr: Elected as Manager; Vet: Veterans Committee selection.

As with Heilmann, Bill Terry’s selection to the Hall seems to have been unusually delayed when compared to others who actually did achieve what might have been Terry’s level of All-Star Game renown. The key exception appears to be Joe Torre, who in his maximum 15 ballots could not obtain any more than 22 percent of the vote. Granted, Torre had a fine 129 OPS+, which is within shouting distance of Terry’s, but he also had a .297 lifetime batting average, which falls short of the minimum benchmark of .300 typically required of those who would be considered great hitters. Dickey‘s (.313 lifetime BA) OPS+ was 127; Gehringer’s (.320) was 124; and Puckett’s (.318) was 124. As hitters, they were clearly not as good as Terry on either a batting average or OPS+ basis, yet they all got inducted far sooner than Terry. As for non-Hall of Famers Fred Lynn (.283/.360/.484, 129 OPS+, off after two ballots) and Walker Cooper (.285/.332/.464, 116 OPS+, three wartime AS selections, off after 10 ballots), the combination of low batting average and the absence of other key HoF markers worked to prevent serious consideration for their induction.

There are a few others to note here: Frankie Frisch (.316/.369/.432, 110 OPS+) was on three All-Star teams and started twice in reality, but would have been on 11 teams and started five times; he went in on the sixth ballot. Gabby Hartnett (.297/.370/.489, 126 OPS+) was on six teams and started thrice, but would have been on 11 teams with seven starts; he did not go in until the twelfth ballot. Jimmie Foxx (.325/.428/.609, 163 OPS+) was on nine All-Star teams already along with four starts, but he would have been on 13 and started seven; he for some reason was made to wait until his seventh ballot for the call. Al Simmons (.334/.380/.535, 133 OPS+) was a starter on all three of his All-Star teams, but would have been on nine teams with eight starts; he was held out from the Hall until the ninth ballot. Dazzy Vance would have been in rare company among pitchers: Already well into his forties with the advent of the All-Star Game, he would have been only one of seven pitchers to start four or more All-Star Games, which, combined with his NL record seven straight league-leading strikeout totals, three ERA titles, and MVP award, may very well have gotten him a writers’ nod to the Hall well before his sixteenth ballot. (Editor’s note: Click here to read “Dazzling Dazzy in the K-Zone” from the Spring 2015 BRJ.)

All this is not to say that lack of, or even paucity of, All-Star Games was the sole reason the elections of these players to the Hall were delayed by several years beyond what would seem reasonable, given their accomplishments. But it is fair to ask: If most similarly accomplished, or even less accomplished, players with long real-life All-Star records were able to skate into the Hall far, far sooner, would the existence of the All-Star Game before 1933—giving a great player like Heilmann the opportunity to be referred to as a nine-time All-Star starter, versus being unable to mention it altogether—have shortened the path to their election by any number of ballots?

Rogers Hornsby is a bit of a special case. Falling sharply off the performance cliff like Wile E. Coyote just before the real-life All-Star Games started, Hornsby would have placed on the RASG roster in 14 seasons, and started every one of them. He is arguably the greatest right-handed hitter in baseball history, owner among starboard-siders of the all-time highest career batting average that anchors a slash line of .358/.434/.577, while clubbing 301 home runs at a time when that was a truly remarkable total. (It was, in fact, the fifth-highest career total at the time of his retirement). Hornsby was a seven-time batting champion, a two-time MVP, and boasts a career OPS+ of 175 that still ranks fifth-highest all-time. Even so, he still did not enter the Hall until his fifth ballot, even ignominiously placing sixteenth on his third ballot behind Johnny Evers and Rabbit Maranville, and barely ahead of Ray Schalk. Would eighteen All-Star starts have helped Hornsby’s case for an earlier election, even as his gaudy stats did not? Considering that Hornsby was universally regarded as a jerk, not least of all by the beat writers of the time, our guess is probably not.

VETERANS COMMITTEE HALL OF FAMERS

Contrary to the opinions of some, the Veterans Committee serves as a good and necessary counterbalance to the neglect of certain qualified players by the voting baseball writers. It’s true that the Veterans Committee sometimes takes a lot of heat, and deservedly so at those times their selections appear to be little more than a sop to certain players of slight talent and accomplishment because they happened to be dandy fellas and/or gritty guys, players such as Ray Schalk, Lloyd Waner, Rick Ferrell, and perhaps a dozen or so others you could name. But sometimes, there is a real injustice that the Veterans Committee addresses with the selection of some players who clearly deserve inclusion on the merits of their records, but for whatever reason were not voted in within their allotted number of ballots by the sportswriters.

Consider the case of Joe Sewell. Seen through the prism of the Hall of Fame, he appears to have possessed borderline talents. He finished his fourteen-year career with a slash line of .312/.391/.413, which translates to an OPS+ of 108, and had a reputation for two things: (1) defense ranging from average to decent; and (2) practically never striking out. He was not elected to the Hall of Fame by the writers, instead falling off the ballot after seven tries. But the Veterans Committee did see fit to elect him in 1977, maybe in part because he was a good guy from the old days, but probably also realizing that even though his numbers may have been only slightly above average for the time, he was still one of the three best shortstops in the game between the world wars. And the RASG voting bears that out: Sewell got eight straight starting nods from RASG voters between 1921 and 1928, and earned a ninth appearance as a reserve in 1929. How might an eight-time All-Star starter have fared with the voting baseball writers of the 1940s and 1950s? Probably better than falling off the ballot after only seven tries.

Another example is Zack Wheat, a fine left fielder and a worthy Hall of Famer, at least as far as the Veterans Committee was concerned. Despite his line of .317/.367/.450, his 129 OPS+ and 2,884 base hits in his exactly 10,000 plate appearances between 1909 and 1927, Wheat was shut out on 16 Hall of Fame ballots, never earning more than 23 percent of the writer vote. On six of those ballots, his vote tally totaled in the single digits. Yet in our RASG, Wheat earned starting nods for seven games in five years between 1916 and 1925, and possibly would have been named to three more had the Games been played before 1916. With that kind of pedigree on his CV, it’s easier to envision Zack Wheat earning a sportswriters’ nod for the Hall.

Then there’s Chuck Klein, who at age 23 entered the National League like gangbusters. During his first six seasons and 3,710 plate appearances, he hit .359 overall and led the NL in home runs an astounding four times; runs scored three times; hits, doubles, and RBIs twice, and even led the loop in stolen bases once. Oh, and he won a Triple Crown, as well. The problem is, he accomplished most of this prior to 1933, when there was no actual All-Star Game. He was named to the real All-Star team twice, in ’33 and ’34, with a starting nod that first year, but he certainly would have been voted starter a total of five times, and to the team six times, in his first seven seasons. Given the likely positive bias people naturally have for players who accomplish great things early in their careers, many more All-Star Games would almost certainly have made a substantial impact on Hall of Fame voters. As it turns out, with only two actual Games and a single start on his baseball card, Klein fell off the ballot after 12 tries and was granted a posthumous entry from the Veterans Committee in 1980. If he’d had five All-Star starts in his first seven seasons, though, how might that have affected his chances with the baseball writers voting on his bid for Cooperstown glory?

Other BBWAA vote results for real-life Veterans Committee Hall of Famers include Travis Jackson, a 1982 inductee, a career .291 hitting shortstop with enough muscle to power out 135 home runs, and who started one actual All-Star Game, but made six more Retro All-Star teams including four more starts—he fell off the ballot after 12 tries; Earl Averill, a center fielder who slashed .318/.395/.534 and was rostered on six actual All-Star teams and a starter on three, but who would have been on nine All-Star squads and started five—gone from the ballot after seven years; Jim Bottomley, the 1928 National League MVP who at various times in his career led his loop in hits, doubles, triples, homers, and RBIs, did not make a single real-life All-Star squad, but would have made six RASG squads with a starting bid in three of them—adios after 12 ballots; Ross Youngs, the Giant right fielder who during his ten-year career, which ended after the 1926 season at age 29, slashed .322/.399/.441, had an OPS+ of 130, and would have earned four All-Star starts in the Retroactive era and been named as a reserve on a fifth squad, somehow still made it through 17 ballots before falling off; and perhaps most surprisingly, Frank “Home Run” Baker, who you’d be forgiven for believing easily earned a BBWAA election to the Hall given his three home run crowns, his .307 career batting average, his 135 OPS+, and his evocative sobriquet, but who in fact fell off the ballot after his eleventh bid in 1951 and then easily picked up a Veterans Committee nod four years later.

Perhaps not all of these Veterans Committee selections would have made the grade with the writers during that phase of Hall of Fame qualification, but it does seem likely that with the ability to claim multiple All-Star Game starting bids and overall team selections, they would have done much better in the balloting than they actually did.

NON-HALL OF FAMERS: “DO YOU KNOW ME?”

Not every player who was good enough for a long enough stretch of time to earn multiple All-Star nods during the RASG era would have been, or even should have been, voted into the Hall of Fame (although with the notorious version of the Veterans Committee operating in the 1970s, they still might have made it in—who knows?). But even so, many of the players who made multiple appearances in our Retroactive All-Star Games are not at all well-known, or are downright anonymous even to savvy fans of baseball history.

Marty McManus fills this bill. After a teenaged stint working for Uncle Sam during and immediately after World War I, McManus saw a season in the Western League at Tulsa in 1920 before finishing out the year for the Browns in St. Louis, and he never went back down to the minors before completing his long major-league career. McManus averaged over 130 games per year spread out among every spot in the infield over the next 14 seasons with the Browns, Tigers, and Red Sox before moving to the Braves for his last season in 1934, finishing with a slash line of .289/.357/.430 for an OPS+ of 102, very respectable for a middle infielder. He fell just 74 hits short of 2,000, and smacked 120 homers (third all-time among second basemen at retirement) and 401 doubles while stealing 126 bases (leading his league with 23 thefts in 1930), receiving MVP votes four of his seasons. A man characterized by his own wife as having an “ungovernable temper,” he was nevertheless acknowledged in an AP report when traded as being “one of the best second basemen in the game.”18

The fans participating in RASG recognized as much from his stats, too, voting him a three-time starter, and he made the roster as a reserve for three more teams. During the period 1922 to 1930, only Joe Sewell was a better American League infielder (outside of first basemen) in terms of lifetime Wins Above Replacement (WAR), and McManus’s own WAR was the equal of that of Pie Traynor, an elected Hall of Famer who was roughly the same age, and higher than that of Rabbit Maranville, both in their prime at the same time and both fairly well-known today. Yet, judging by his puny total of four Hall votes in 1958 and 1960, it’s fair to say that McManus himself is largely unknown today. If Marty McManus could claim six actual All-Star appearances, might he be at least as well-known as Traynor and Maranville?

Cy Williams is probably better known than McManus because of his power exploits at the plate. A lifelong National Leaguer who plied his trade first with the Cubs and then with the Phillies, Williams was one of the first players in the live-ball era to start clouting home runs at a prodigious rate, although he also led the league in home runs during the dead-ball year of 1916, one of four times he eventually led his loop in circuit clouts. Like McManus, he, too, stopped just short of 2,000 hits (finishing with 1,981), but he also retired in 1930 with 251 career home runs, which at that time was the third-highest career homers in history behind only Ruth and Hornsby. Williams slashed .292/.365/.470 for an OPS+ of 125 and eventually earned himself placement on 13 Hall of Fame ballots between 1938 and 1960, even though he never achieved even as much as 6 percent of the baseball writers’ votes in any given year. There seems little doubt his home-run power gave him some staying power on Hall of Fame ballots, even if he could not break through to the other side, but despite this circumstance and his on-field achievements, it seems odd he did not get a Veterans Committee nod for his body of work. Perhaps, though, had he been voted an All-Star starter five years while starting seven All-Star games, as he did in RASG, he might have gotten the boost he needed to be considered a better bet for the Hall of Fame, at least by the Old-Timers.

We mentioned earlier the other power-hitting Williams of this era, Ken Williams. He’s not very well-known today and that might be due in part to his name: “Ken Williams” is a fine name, sure, but it’s also a fairly generic-sounding name; it’s a name that’s similar to the guy in the paragraph above who started belting lots of homers at about the same time; and theirs is a last name that in later years became more or less the sole property of one of the greatest pure hitters in the history of the game.

Even more starkly than his not-brother Cy, Ken started belting home runs quite suddenly with the advent of the live ball, going from 10 in 1920 to 24 the next year to an American League-leading 39 the year after that. When Ken hung up his spikes at the age of 39 after the 1929 season, he, too, was quite far up the list of career home run leaders—fourth to be exact, with 196. But he was also a more accomplished hitter overall than Cy. In over two thousand fewer plate appearances, he hit more triples and almost as many doubles as Cy; his lifetime batting average of .319 exceeded Cy’s by nearly 30 points; and his slugging exceeded Cy’s by 60. Ken’s career slash stats after 14 years, mostly with the Browns but also during stints with the Red Sox and Reds, crossed the finish line at .319/.393/.530 accompanied by an OPS+ of 138, roughly equivalent to those of Reggie Jackson, Duke Snider, Chuck Klein, and Bill Terry, Hall of Famers all.

Ken Williams probably could not expect to make the Hall with only 5,600 or so plate appearances (although having fewer than that didn’t seem to hurt Hack Wilson or Frank Chance), but had Ken Williams actually made the six All-Star appearances with four voted starts that he earned in the RASG project, it’s a good bet that we would have a better idea today of who he is and what he did.

Here’s a question that, if you offered it up to the knowledgeable baseball fan of today, you might very well get a blank stare in return: “What can you tell me about Larry Doyle?”

Yet, the baseball fans of a hundred years ago probably could have told you a lot about Larry Doyle. After all, Doyle was voted the MVP of the National League while playing second base for the league-champion Giants in 1912—and this after having finished third in the voting for MVP for the league-champion Giants the year before. In fact, so well-known and highly regarded at the time was Doyle that Baseball Magazine, in one of its articles advocating an All-Star Series, specifically mentioned Doyle, along with Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, and Gavvy Cravath, as being among “the greatest aggregation of batters in the world.”19

Doyle was a career .290/.357/.408-hitting second baseman, and if that sounds just so-so at first blush, consider that his lifetime 126 OPS+ is the eighth-highest among keystone sackers in baseball history—just six points behind Joe Morgan and Jackie Robinson, the same as Robinson Cano (as of mid-2014), and ahead of 13 second basemen currently enshrined at Cooperstown, including BBWAA-elected Charlie Gehringer, Roberto Alomar, Ryne Sandberg, and Frankie Frisch. Doyle led the NL in hits twice; doubles, triples, and batting average once each; and he slugged 74 homers at a time when that really meant something. Sadly, even though he was considered the equal of many inner-circle Hall members at the time, he is barely known today, perhaps in part because he fell off the Hall ballot after three years and only seven votes. But had he been voted an All-Star starter four straight years as he was in RASG—and at the end of his career to boot—how would that have helped his chances for both the Hall and posterity?

As illuminating as these examples are, there are two that stand out as particular favorites of ours:

Larry Gardner was, by election and selection, a three-time RASG All-Star and two-time starter. Certainly not bad, considering his career tracked along that of Larry Doyle’s, so he would have been at the end of his career when RASG started, as well. He is also a largely anonymous player from the period, even though he was second-best third baseman, after Home Run Baker, in all of baseball from 1910 to 1921 in terms of WAR. Much of that high ranking results from his fielding, as he had the best dWAR (a player-comparison metric of defensive value that incorporates offensive productivity weighted by position) during the period, but he was no slouch with the bat, either. He led all third sackers of the period in hits and triples, and was second in doubles. Gardner ended with a .289/.355/.384 slash line, and a 109 OPS+. This is quite a nice line, but seemingly not Hall-worthy…until you consider that George Kell, another third sacker, finished his career with a 112 OPS+, the rough equivalent of Gardner’s. Yet George Kell ended up in the Hall of Fame, while Larry Gardner did not earn even a single vote from the writers! (By the way: Kell was named to 10 All-Star teams and a starter on six of them. Think that might have had something to do with his selection?)

Lastly, let’s consider the case of Jack Fournier. A veteran of 13 full seasons in the majors, with a three-year Pacific Coast League-sized hole in the middle, Fournier swung a mean bat. He clubbed the horsehide at a .313/.392/.483 clip in his career, and once the live ball made its debut, added the home run to his skill set, even leading the NL as a Dodger with 27 in 1924. Fournier, of course, never played in a real All-Star Game, although the sweet-swinging first baseman placed on the RASG roster four times, and was voted a starter three times, during the 1920s. But of course, there was no actual All-Star Game in the 1920s, and possibly as a result Fournier, like Gardner, did not receive a single Hall of Fame vote from the writers.

Fournier ended his career with an OPS+ of 142 and a lifetime oWAR of 44.9. This is the rough equivalent to the output of a star who played a decade later: Hack Wilson, possessor of a lifetime OPS+ of 144 but an oWAR of only 42.5. (oWAR is a player comparison metric that includes a player’s offensive production and a positional adjustment.) Yet Hack is a Hall of Famer who, although selected by the Veterans rather than being voted in by the BBWAA, nevertheless was a mainstay on 15 ballots before his eventual old-timers selection. Some people would point out that Hack Wilson was never an All-Star himself, as his decline coincided with the beginning of the Midsummer Classic, and that he led the league in home runs four times while setting a league season record in that stat, as well as a major-league season record of 191 RBIs, a level of accomplishment that Fournier could not match on any front. And all that would be correct.

But the point here is not to advocate that Jack Fournier should be a Hall of Famer as Hack Wilson is, or that Wilson should not be if Fournier isn’t. The point is that without the kind of credentials that help a player’s Hall chances, such as league leadership in key stats or season records—or All-Star appearances—we get a situation in which a player who had essentially the same career as a well-known Hall of Famer ends up being, for all practical purposes, an anonymous footnote in the annals of baseball history.

Even casual baseball fans know who Hack Wilson is. But only hard-core baseball nerds would have any idea who Jack Fournier is, let alone what he accomplished, and for all that he did accomplish, it seems very unjust that he should not have received even a single vote for the Hall of Fame. Several All-Star appearances, and starts, might have helped Fournier’s legacy.

As sim-gaming baseball geeks, when we first started the RASG project, we were most interested in how the games might come out, perhaps showing us who the better league might have been, or at least which one had the better stars, and how All-Star Game records might have been rewritten. But as we got further into the project, we realized that the true insights arising from this exercise lay in how players who never had the opportunity to play in All-Star Games during the peaks of their careers may have suffered in their legacies and their chances at the Hall of Fame, when compared to players of similar or even lesser accomplishments in later generations.

That is ultimately what made this an eye-opening experience for us, and we hope it was for you, as well.

CHUCK HILDEBRANDT has served as chair of the Baseball and the Media Committee since 2013, and has been a SABR member since 1988. Chuck lives with his lovely wife, Terrie, in Chicago, where he is an exiled Tigers fan who compensates with Cubs season tickets.

MIKE LYNCH was born in the heart of Red Sox Nation in the year of Yastrzemski and has been a diehard Red Sox fan ever since. A member of SABR since 2004, he lives in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. He is the author of three books, “Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League,” which was named a finalist for the 2009 Larry Ritter Award in addition to being nominated for the Seymour Medal; “It Ain’t So: A Might-Have-Been History of the White Sox in 1919 and Beyond”; and “Baseball’s Untold History: Vol I—The People.” His work has also been featured in SABR books about the 1912 Boston Red Sox and 1914 Boston Braves.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jacob Pomrenke of SABR for providing access to the Society’s SurveyMonkey.com account, from which we conducted public voting for the starters of the Retroactive All-Star Games; Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference.com, who provided a blog post and tweets, which increased visibility of the project; and the proprietors of the 30 MLB team websites at SBNation, who allowed us to publicize the project and publish game results as FanPosts on their sites.

Notes

1 “Baseball-Reference.com Play Index,” accessed August 12, 2014, http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/. Paid subscription required as of February 2015 to access the Play Index.

2 Lyle Spatz, “Retroactive Cy Young Awards,” Baseball Research Journal 17 (1988): 2–5.

3 Lyle Spatz, “SABR Picks 1900-1948 Rookies of the Year,” Baseball Research Journal 15 (1986), accessed August 12, 2014.

4 A few months after RASG started, B-R added splits data for 1914 and 1915, but the project had advanced too far by that time to practically go back and include those seasons.

5 F.C. Lane, “The All-America Baseball Club,” Baseball Magazine, 1913 December Vol. XII No. 2: 33–44; F.C. Lane, “The Greatest Baseball Team of All History,” Baseball Magazine, 1914 May Vol. XIII No. 1: 33–42, 96.

6 F.C. Lane, “An All-Star Baseball Contest for a Greater Championship,” Baseball Magazine, 1915 November Vol. XVI No. 1: 57–64.

7 F.C. Lane, “Why Baseball Should Have an All-Star Series,” Baseball Magazine, 1916 March Vol. XVI No. 5: 48–52.

8 Lane, “An All-Star Baseball Contest for a Greater Championship,” 64.

9 “Why Baseball Should Have an All-Star Series,” 52.

10 Mike Lynch, “The Complicated History of RBI,” Sports Reference, August 6, 2014, http://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2014/08/the-complicated-history-of-rbi.

11 “Major League Averages,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1930.

12 “Major League Averages,” Chicago Tribune, August 16, 1931.

13 Neil Paine, “Feature Watch: Team Batting Orders & Lineups,” Sports Reference, August 24, 2009, http://www.baseball-reference.com/blog/archives/2286.

14 Bill Deane, Baseball Myths: Debating, Debunking, and Disproving Tales from the Diamond (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 121.

15 “Baseball Brawls: Bill Dickey Broke Carl Reynolds’ Jaw With One Punch,” Reading Eagle, August 14, 1960.

16 “National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum: Plaque Gallery”, accessed August 12, 2014, http://baseballhall.org/museum/experience/plaque-gallery.

17 Bill James, Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?: Baseball, Cooperstown, and the Politics of Glory (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1994, 1995), 284, 360.

18 Bill Nowlin, “Marty McManus,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, accessed September 17, 2014, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/3567429b.

19 “Why Baseball Should Have an All-Star Series,” 51.

Appendix A: Retroactive All-Star Game results

Appendix B: Real-Life All-Star Appearances vs. Combined Appearances

(Click image to enlarge.)

Appendix C: Combined Retroactive All-Star/Real Life All-Star Top Performances

(Click image to enlarge.)

6.05 A batter is out when— … (b) A third strike is legally caught by the catcher…

6.09 The batter becomes a runner when— … (b) The third strike called by the umpire is not caught, providing (1) first base is unoccupied, or (2) first base is occupied with two out…

— Official Baseball Rules 2014 Edition

The dropped third strike is a peculiar rule.1 Three strikes and you are out seems a fundamental element of baseball, yet there is this odd exception. If the catcher fails to catch the ball on a third strike, and first base is open, or there are two outs, then the batter becomes a runner. Most of the time this makes no difference: The catcher blocks the ball, and as the batter begins to stroll back to the dugout the catcher picks it up and tags him, if only for form’s sake. Occasionally the ball gets a few feet past the catcher, and the batter takes this more seriously and makes a run for first base, only to be called out as the ball beats him there.

But on rare, magical occasions, the rule matters. The pitcher throws a breaking ball in the dirt: the batter and the catcher lunge after it, neither successfully; it skitters to the backstop; and the batter ends up at first base with the gift of a new life. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does it can be costly, as the Dodgers found in the 1941 World Series, when with two outs in the ninth inning the Yankees’ Tommy Henrich missed the strike three, followed immediately by catcher Mickey Owen missing it as well, extending the inning and allowing the Yankees to score four runs to take the lead and win the game.

Why is this? What purpose does it serve? If it is a penalty for wild pitching or poor catching, why only on the third strike? The rule seems inexplicably random.

The answers to these questions lie in the very early days of baseball. The strike out and the dropped third strike turn out to be sibling rules, and the strike out not quite so fundamental to the game as it would seem. The strike out would grow into a centerpiece of the struggle between the pitcher and the batter, while the dropped third strike would move to the margins, surviving as a vestige of the early game.

The story begins in an unexpected source: a German book of children’s games published in 1796 titled Spiele zur Uebung und Erholung des Körpers and Geistes für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde Unschuldiger Jugendfreuden i.e. “Games for the exercise and recreation and body and spirit for the youth and his educator and all friends in innocent joys of youth,” by Johann Christoph Friedrich Gutsmuths.2 Gutsmuths was an early advocate of physical education. He is best known today, outside the rarified field of baseball origins, for his promotion of gymnastics. In 1793 he published the first gymnastics textbook, Gymnastik für die Jugend, i.e.”Gymnastics for Youth.” His 1796 work extended the scope to additional games. These include a chapter Ball mit Freystäten (oder das Englische Base-ball), i.e. “Ball with Free Station, or English Base-ball.”

The game he describes, in quite some detail, is clearly an early form of baseball. There are two teams of equal size. The game is divided into innings, with the two sides alternating between being batting and fielding. A member of the fielding side delivers a ball to a batter, who attempts to hit it. Once he hits the ball, he attempts to run around a circuit of bases, which serve as safe havens, and to score by completing the circuit. The fielding side, in the meantime, attempts to put him out.

There are, of course, many differences from the modern game. Prominent among them is that there are only swinging strikes. Called strikes are as yet far in the future (enacted in 1858, and not even remotely consistently enforced before 1866). Less obvious is that there was no strike out in the modern sense. The feature that would evolve into the strike out was, in Gutsmuths’ time, a special case of being thrown out.

The pitcher in Gutsmuths stands close to the batter, five or six steps (fünf bis sechs Schrit) away. He tosses the ball to the batter in a high arc (in einem gestrecken Bogen: literally ‘in a stretched bow’). There are no called strikes or balls. The pitcher is not required to deliver the ball to any particular spot, nor the batter to swing at any given pitch, but neither is there any incentive for the pitcher to toss a purposely ill-placed ball, or the batter to refuse to swing at a well-placed ball.

This presents a problem. If the pitcher proves so inept that he cannot make a good toss, he can be replaced by a more capable teammate. But what about an inept batter? The game can be brought to a halt by a sufficiently incompetent batter, unable to hit even these soft tosses. The solution is to add a special rule. The batter is given three tries to hit the ball (Der Schläger hat im Mal drei Schläge.) On his third try, the ball is in play whether he manages to hit it or not. He has to run toward the first base once he hits the ball, or he has missed three times (oder hat er dreimal durchgeschlagen). Either way, any fielder, including the pitcher, can retrieve the ball and attempt to put the batter out by throwing it at him. Thus a missed third swing is equivalent to hitting the ball.

This solution is very inclusive. It allows even the hapless batter to join in the fun of running the bases and having the ball thrown at him, which a harsher penalty of an automatic out would deny him. Gutsmuths points out that the batter is at a disadvantage with a missed third swing, since the pitcher is close at hand to pick up the ball and throw it at him (und da der Aufwerfer den Ball gleich bei der Hand hat, so wirft er gewöhnlich nach ihm), so the batter’s ineptitude is penalized, but the fielding side still has to work for the out.

We see in the likelihood of the batter being put out the ancestor of the modern strike out. We see in the possibility of his reaching the first base the ancestor of the dropped third strike rule. Both would come to fruition a half century later.

By 1845, when the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club put their rules in writing, some structural changes had been introduced that would change the effect of the three-strike rule. The pitcher had moved away from the batter, toward the center of the infield. This meant that the pitch was no longer a soft lob in a high arc but was swifter, with a more horizontal path. This in turn required that one of the fielding side be positioned to block balls that went past the batter. Another difference was that in the Knickerbocker game, unlike the version described by Gutsmuths, a batted ball could be caught for an out either on the fly or on the first bound.

The three-strike rule in 1845 takes this form: “Three balls being struck at and missed and the last one caught, is a hand out; if not caught is considered fair, and the striker bound to run.” This retains the logic of the rule in Gutsmuths, but with the possibility of the third strike being caught by the catcher: Should the batter swing at and miss three pitches, the ball is in play, just as if he had struck it. If the catcher catches the ball, either on the fly or on the first bound, then the batter is out. This is no different from if any fielder had caught a batted ball. If the catcher fails to catch the ball, the batter runs for first base, just as if a batted ball had gone uncaught.

Is this a strike-out rule, or a missed third strike rule? The Knickerbocker rules make no distinction. They are the same rule. Over the ensuing years the strike out aspect would move to the center and the missed third strike aspect move to the margins, surviving as an oddball vestige of an earlier age.

This unity was more theoretical than practical. Although balls got past the catcher far more commonly than they do today, through a combination of pitchers wildly overthrowing and the catcher having no mitt or protective equipment, even then the normal expectation was that the catcher would take the ball, sometimes on the fly but more often on the bound. A third strike usually meant an out, and this became the status quo to be maintained.

This became an issue in December of 1864, when the rules were amended to adopt the “fly game.” Fair balls caught on the bound were no longer outs. They had to be caught on the fly. This change applied only to fair balls. Foul balls caught on the bound were still outs. This allowed catchers a chance to take foul balls hit into the dirt: a difficult and much admired play. This play gradually disappeared as catchers adopted protective equipment and moved up closer to the batter, leaving the less attractive play of a first or third baseman fielding a foul ball on the bound. The foul bound was eventually abandoned when the modern rule was adopted, briefly in 1879 and permanently in 1883 in the National League, followed in 1885 by the American Association.

The Knickerbocker rules stated that a third strike “if not caught is considered fair”—language which was retained through 1867. With the adoption of the fly game, it would seem to logically follow that a missed third strike, being considered fair, would only be an out if caught on the fly, like any other fair ball. The rules did not explicitly address this, and when the question was raised it was perfunctorily dismissed based on obscure and inconsistent logic:

Every ball caught on the bound—unless the strike be a fair ball caught in the field—puts a player out just the same in the fly game as in the bound. Thus a player is put out on three strikes by a bound catch in the fly game; for although the ball is not called foul, it is equivalent to being so from the fact of its first touching the ground behind the line of the bases, like a foul ball.3

[Enterprise vs. Gotham 6/6/1865] In this innings the Enterprise were put out in one, two, three order, the last man being put out on three strikes by the usual bound catch. By many present this was regarded as an illegitimate style of play in the fly game, but the rules admit of the bound catch in this instance, it being regarded in light of a foul ball from striking the ground back of the home base, the sentence in rule 11, which reads, “It shall be considered fair,” referring to the character of the strike and not the ball.4

Not until 1868 was the text of the rule brought in line with the practice: “If three balls are struck at and missed, and the last one is not caught, either flying or upon the first bound, the striker must attempt to make his run, and he can be put out on the bases in the same manner as if he had struck a fair ball.” This revision, while not euphonious, removes any mysterious distinction between the strike and the ball being fair.

The missed third strike had been divorced from its original logic. No longer was a third strike regarded as a fair ball, which might or might not be caught. A third strike was expected to be an out. The catcher failing to catch the pitch, much less the batter taking first on a missed third strike was the exception to this expectation. The fly rule was not understood to have anything to do with this. The fly game rule had been a topic of lively debate since it was first proposed in 1857. There is no record of third strikes entering into this discussion. When the fly game was finally enacted, the rules makers had no intention of it affecting third strikes. They seem not to have realized the logic of the matter before the fly game was adopted. By the time this was brought to their attention it was too late to rewrite the dropped third strike rule to accommodate the fly game. At that point they really had no choice but to bluff.

Had they succumbed to the argument that a third strike caught on the bound was not an out, this would have resulted in an important unintended consequence. A missed third strike, while usually to the benefit of the batter, could instead result in a double—or even triple—play. Catchers tried to take advantage of this by dropping the ball deliberately:

[Mutual vs. Union of Lansingburgh 9/17/1868] [bases loaded] Galvin … struck twice ineffectually; as he struck at the ball for the third time and failed to hit it, Craver, who, as usual, was playing close behind the bat, dropped the ball and deliberately picking it up stepped on the home base and threw it to third; Abrams passed it to second, but not before Hunt, who ran from first, reached the base. This sharp feat of Craver’s was much applauded…5

This was not an easy or common play. Fielders did not yet wear gloves. There was no such thing as a routine play:

[Baltimore vs. Philadelphia 8/7/1873] The umpire gave [Charlie] Fulmer his base on called balls, and a singular series of misplays followed. Treacy made three strikes, and McVey [the catcher] missed the last in order to effect a double-play. He threw the ball splendidly to Carey [the second baseman], who missed it, and, instead of catching Fulmer, Charlie was soon trotting to third, where he would have been caught had not Radcliffe [the third baseman] missed the ball sent to him by Carey. Fulmer got home, and Treacy to second.6

Intentionally dropping the third strike to get a double play was an acceptable tactic precisely because it was difficult, requiring skillful execution. Had the dropped third strike rule applied to pitches taken on the bound, this play would have become more common, and much easier. The catcher would no longer have to consciously drop the ball while taking care not genuinely to lose control of it. Rather, a catcher playing back from the batter would automatically activate the rule, with the catcher well positioned to make his throw. The dropped third strike would move in from the margins, which the rules makers neither intended nor desired.

The logical discrepancy was removed in 1879, when the bound catch was removed both for foul balls and third strikes. The 1878 rules state that “The batsman shall be declared out by the umpire … if after three strikes have been called, the ball be caught before touching the ground or after touching the ground but once.” The 1879 version removes the clause “or after touching the ground but once.” The elimination of the foul bound out had been discussed for several years. The discussion of abolishing third strike bound catch went along with it, if only for the sake of consistency.7 This turned out to be premature for the foul bound out. It was restored the following year, and not permanently abolished from the NL until 1883 and the AA in 1885. The new third strike rule remained in place.

With this change the logic of the rule was restored. Through the 1880s one section of the rules stated when the batter became a runner, including (quoting the 1880 version) “when three strikes have been declared by the Umpire.” This is much as Gutsmuths had described it over eighty years before. But then in a subsequent section, the rules stated how the base runner could be put out, including “if, when the Umpire has declared three strikes on him while Batsman, the third strike be momentarily held by a Fielder before it touch the ground…” The modern rules organize these possibilities differently, but with the same result.

Such elegance was short lived. The final change was to remove the incentive for the catcher to intentionally drop the third strike. The logic of the intentionally dropped third strike is familiar: it is the same as that of the intentionally dropped infield fly—a play also well understood in 1860s. In both, the fielder responds to a perverse incentive. Fielders usually are admired for their skill at catching the ball, but in these plays he instead purposely muffs it. In both, the base runner cannot know whether to stay at his base or to run. The result, if the play is well executed, is a double play where normally there would be but one out.

The intentionally dropped third strike and the intentionally dropped infield fly were considered skillful plays so long as they were difficult to execute. Both plays became easier as fielding equipment improved, and a sense of injustice developed. The infield fly rule was enacted in 1895, making an infield fly (with first and second bases occupied and fewer than two outs) an automatic out. The dropped third strike rule similarly was amended in 1887, to substantially its modern form. A runner on first base now removes the dropped third strike rule, thereby removing the potential for a cheap double play on a force, unless there are two outs, neutralizing the concern. This is confusing, but largely goes unnoticed.

The infield fly rule invites controversy. A memorable example was on October 5, 2012, in a wild card playoff between Atlanta and St. Louis, when Atlanta’s Andrelton Simmons hit a soft fly ball to shallow left field with runners on first and second. The ball dropped between the St. Louis shortstop and left fielder, as umpire Sam Holbrook called it an infield fly. Controversy followed about whether the infield fly rule should have been invoked, or if the rule should even exist. The dropped third strike rule avoids similar controversy, benefitting from unambiguous implementation. A casual observer might not understand when it does or does not apply or why, but there are no questions raised by its being invoked or not.

While the tactical purpose of intentionally dropping the third strike is long gone, at least one catcher of the twentieth century is purported to have done it three times in one game (though that story may be apocryphal). Marty Appel tells of the day in the early 1970s when he, in his capacity as Yankees public relations director, included in his daily press notes that Carlton Fisk had two more assists than did Thurman Munson. Munson took this poorly, and proceeded in that day’s game to set the record straight with three dropped third strikes, each followed by a throw to first for an assist. His point made, whether about Fisk or the meaningfulness of the statistic, he completed the game in the normal manner.⁸

What is the place of the rule today? It could be abolished and few would notice. Neither, on the other hand, is there any movement to abolish it. It flies under the radar. Absent a reform movement to completely rewrite the rules, it will remain indefinitely. It is a quirky rule, seemingly without purpose, a vestige of baseball’s earliest days. It is part of the charm of the game.

RICHARD HERSHBERGER is a paralegal in Maryland. He has written numerous articles on early baseball, concentrating on its origins and its organizational history. He is a member of the SABR Nineteenth Century and Origins committees. Reach him at rrhersh@yahoo.com.

Notes

1 The rule is variously called the dropped, missed, or uncaught third strike rule. “Uncaught” is the most accurate of the three, but the least euphonious and by far the rarest. Google n-grams shows that “dropped third strike” is by far the most common, and so is used throughout this article.

2 This discussion is based on the translation by Mary Akitiff, published in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2005, 275-279.

3 New York Clipper March 25, 1865. Henry Chadwick was at this time both the baseball editor of the Clipper and a member of the National Association’s rules committee, and so his opinions, if not quite authoritative, were at the least those of an informed insider.

4 New York Clipper June 17, 1865.

5 New York Clipper September 26, 1868.

6 Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch August 10, 1873

7 See for example New York Sunday Mercury November 12, 1876, with a discussion of proposed rules changes to abolish fair-foul hits, i.e. hits that initially land fair then go foul. At that time such hits were considered fair. The proposal was to adopt the modern rule, and to abolish the foul bound out in compensation to maintain the balance between offense and defense.

8 Marty Appel, “Day Munson Taught Yankees’ P.R. a Lesson,” Baseball Research Journal 1984.

By the late 1930s, professional baseball front office personnel began to value the importance of psychological training for successful athletic performance.3 Specifically, Coleman Griffith and Jack Sterrett were hired by Philip Wrigley to provide psychological expertise to the Chicago Cubs organization for the 1938 baseball season.4 Griffith believed that his experience consulting with the Chicago Cubs clearly showed the value of having a psychologist provide services to professional athletes. In fact, Griffith stated: “The experience gained during the summer of 1938 shows clearly that the method of having a trained man travel with the team can produce results of great value.”5

Approximately a decade later, the St. Louis Browns hired David Tracy to provide hypnosis and psychological consulting to the St. Louis Browns.6 Tracy chronicled his work in a book titled, Psychologist at Bat.7 After Tracy’s work with the St. Louis Browns others in professional baseball took note of how psychology could influence performance both on and off the field of play. Not surprisingly, hypnosis began to be an intervention used with baseball players. Accounts of hypnotists aiding professional baseball players began to become more common in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.8 For instance, an example of psychological consulting in baseball was the Kansas City Royals utilization of psychologists as part of the training and scouting of baseball players.9 In fact, during the 1970s additional reports of psychologists consulting with professional baseball teams began to be chronicled.10

In general before the 1960s there was little application of sport psychology to aid athletes and coaches in using mental skills to help athletes enhance performance. However, in the 1970s leaders in the field of sport psychology began to work with athletes on the mental side of sport. In fact, the United States Olympic Committee formed a sport psychology committee to help to advance sport psychology work with athletes. By the 1980s, the use of sport psychology became increasingly popular with Olympic and professional athletes.11

Although psychologists have a long history of involvement within professional baseball, a dearth of literature has explained how professional baseball organizations began to utilize the services of full-time mental training consultants during the 1980s. An individual who began consulting full-time as a mental training consultant in professional baseball during this time period was Harvey Dorfman. For over twenty-seven years, Dorfman worked with three professional baseball organizations and the Scott Boras Corporation. Additionally, to advance the field of mental training applied to baseball, Dorfman produced four baseball specific mental training books.12 Moreover, Dorfman explained his employment in professional baseball in a three part autobiographical memoir documenting his life’s work.13

Thus, the purpose of the present manuscript is to pay tribute to the life and work of Harvey Dorfman (1935-2011). In order to document Dorfman’s work, primary source material was utilized from three autobiographical texts: Persuasion of My Days, Copying it Down, and Each Branch, Each Needle.14 Also, newspaper and magazine articles written about Dorfman were used as well as additional books that Dorfman composed.

Therefore, the manuscript begins by providing a discussion of Dorfman’s life prior to consulting. This is then followed by a description of how Dorfman began working in professional baseball. His approach to consulting with athletes is overviewed next. A description of his work with the Oakland Athletics, the Florida Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays and the Scott Boras Corporation follows. Finally, the paper concludes with feedback from those that consulted with Dorfman and the current status of mental training in professional baseball today.

WHO WAS HARVEY DORFMAN?

Harvey Allen Dorfman was born on the northeast side of New York City in the Bronx in 1935. Throughout Dorfman’s early life, although not able to participate in much physical activity, baseball had a profound influence on his early years. For instance, Dorfman recounted a memory of his first baseball game at the Polo Grounds. In this contest the New York Giants competed against the Chicago Cubs. Dorfman recalled that his father encouraged him to pay attention to the game. Throughout the game, he sat silently observing the competition and was fascinated by the athletes’ movements rather than what was occurring within the contest. Dorfman believed that his attendance at that game led him to develop a desire to actively participate in baseball.15

Initially, Dorfman became involved in baseball during the eighth grade. While playing for the Sharks who were a community league team, Dorfman became more confident in his baseball ability. Subsequently, he left the Sharks and joined a team closer to his home. Dorfman reminisced that the highlight of his baseball career was pitching a two-hit shutout during high school.16

After completing high school, Dorfman entered Brockport College in September of 1953. Dorfman majored in general education and was the goalie for the soccer team.17 In fact, Dorfman’s soccer team at Brockport College won a co-national championship.18 After graduation, Dorfman entered into employment as a teacher and coach. Throughout these early years of teaching and coaching, Dorfman coached football and basketball and also served as an athletic director.19 Later in his career, Dorfman served as an academic dean. Additionally, in 1980, his final season as a basketball coach, Dorfman’s team won the Vermont State Girls Basketball Championship.20

In 1960, Dorfman married Anita Wiklund and they had two children, Melissa and Danny. Dorfman earned a master’s degree in educational psychology from Brockport College in 1961.21 Throughout his career Dorfman became an influential mental training consultant in professional baseball working with three professional baseball organizations and the Scott Boras Corporation. Additionally, Dorfman also consulted with National Hockey League (NHL) teams including the Vancouver Canucks and the New York Islanders.22 His many influential publications related to the mental game of baseball included the following books, The Mental Game of Baseball, The Mental Keys to Hitting, The Mental ABC’s of Pitching, and Coaching the Mental Game.23

HOW DORFMAN BEGAN CONSULTING IN PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL

After Dorfman completed his coaching tenure, he continued to instruct at the high school level and also taught evening and summer graduate level courses at the University of Vermont, St. Joseph the Provider, and Castleton State College.24 Additionally, he was a freelance writer for the Rutland Herald. Many of the articles he authored have been published in a recent book.25 These articles related to people and places in Vermont and his articles appeared in a column titled “Miscellany.” In addition, Dorfman began writing baseball columns for the Berkshire Sampler. A main purpose of these articles was to gain interest and attention for the Pittsfield (Massachusetts) Rangers, a Double-A minor league team of the Texas Rangers organization.26

The baseball columns written for the Berkshire Sampler led to an interview with Roy Smalley who was the number one draft pick for the Texas Rangers organization. According to Dorfman, their conversation was quite extensive and they subsequently developed a friendship. Specifically, whenever Smalley traveled to Boston as member of the Texas Rangers, they would meet for lunch. These meetings were sustained even after Smalley joined the Minnesota Twins.27

After Smalley was traded to Minnesota he became acquainted with Karl Kuehl who was a coach for the organization. Smalley then introduced Dorfman to Kuehl prior to a game because he believed that they would have a lot in common. This initial meeting led to various breakfast gatherings between Dorfman and Kuehl. Dorfman recalled a meeting in which Kuehl brought 3×5 cards with notes all over. These cards contained details about the thought patterns of baseball players during competition. Kuehl’s hope was to use this information to author a text on the mental game of baseball.28

Dorfman had the background that Kuehl surmised could help him complete a book related to the mental component of baseball. Specifically, Dorfman had an adequate comprehension of the game, academic training in psychology, and was an author. Hence, Kuehl asked Dorfman to co-author a book on the mental game of baseball. Initially, Dorfman declined Kuehl’s offer; however, he eventually agreed to co-author the text. In order to prepare the manuscript for publication, Dorfman began to interview athletes during the 1983 baseball season.29 During this process Dorfman was provided with positive feedback about the mental game of baseball. Additionally, these interviews resulted in players asking Dorfman for assistance with the mental game of baseball.30

While Dorfman continued gathering research data for the manuscript, Kuehl left Minnesota and served as a consultant to the Oakland and Philadelphia organizations.31 In August of 1983, Kuehl joined the Oakland Athletics organization as the team’s director of the minor leagues.32 With a strong belief in the importance of the mental game and the knowledge that other teams had previously hired performance enhancement consultants, Kuehl hired Dorfman.33

In a consulting role, Dorfman was a counselor/instructor during the summer of 1984 with the Oakland A’s Double-A affiliate in Albany, New York. He provided mental game consultation to players and staff. As Dorfman experienced success, he was offered full-time employment with the Oakland Athletics. Initially, Dorfman was unsure about accepting the position, however with Kuehl’s encouragement, Dorfman agreed to join the Athletics organization as a full-time instructor.34

When Dorfman was hired by the Oakland Athletics in 1984, he became one of the few full-time mental training consultants employed by a professional baseball club. However, other organizations were utilizing the services of mental training consultants. For instance, the Houston Astros, in 1986, initiated a mental skills training program enlisting Jim Johnson and Ronald Smith to work with the Astros organization.35 Similarly, Ken Ravizza began consulting with the California Angels organization during the mid-1980s and implemented mental training programs both at the major and minor league levels.36 The Baltimore Orioles, Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, and Texas Rangers were also reported to have consultants as part of their staff.37

In addition to providing services to major league baseball organizations, Dorfman was an active contributor in helping to advance the field of sport psychology. For instance, Dorfman was part of a panel who described their work in professional baseball at the inaugural Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) conference in 1986. The panel titled, Sport Psychology Consultation for Professional Baseball, was organized by Ken Ravizza and included Ron Smith and Karl Kuehl.38 Additionally, Dorfman, while still with the Oakland A’s organization, was part of 1993 AAASP panel titled, Issues and Implications in Professional Sport Consulting.39 Ronald Smith noted Dorfman’s contributions to baseball and the sport psychology discipline when he stated, “Since 1989, the baseball specific sport psychology market has been dominated by Harvey Dorfman and Karl Kuehl’s seminal work, The Mental Game of Baseball.”40

DORFMAN’S TEACHING OF MENTAL SKILLS AND CONSULTATION PHILOSOPHY

Dorfman’s main responsibility with the Oakland Athletics organization was to provide performance enhancement consulting. Within the provision of mental training services to the organization, Dorfman explained the mental skills he taught to baseball players in his book, The Mental Game of Baseball and also published an article in The Sport Psychologist which detailed his approach.41 The consulting services provided were primarily focused on mental skills training for the purpose of enhancing performance. His philosophical belief was that on-field distractions were the cause of an athlete’s anxiety. Hence, this nervousness could usually be alleviated by educating and teaching athletes specific mental skills to relieve tension.42 Specifically, Dorfman stated, “I work on performance first and foremost … But mental skills are a tremendous part of the game. Just like a hitting coach, or a pitching coach, I am a mental skills coach.”43

Dorfman preferred to provide mental training to athletes during individual sessions rather than group sessions. He believed that even the most successful athletes tend to be self-conscious in group meetings. Thus, generally, the only time group meetings were held was during spring training and instructional league camp. These meetings consisted of baseball related themes such as courage, responsibility, preparation for at-bats, playing with pain, and winning attitudes.44

Although Dorfman generally focused on providing mental training services he noted that other consulting services were available through the organization.45 One such service that Dorfman provided while employed with the Oakland Athletics was academic services which were provided to all players in the minor and major leagues. Dorfman’s job was to act as the liaison between the player and the college or university he was attending or wished to attend. The Oakland Athletics organization encouraged athletes to obtain a college degree and wanted to accommodate their academic needs in order to not affect their baseball careers.46 The team also encouraged community service as players were involved in the community in order to establish a connection between the professional athlete and the fans. Despite the wide range of services provided, Dorfman’s main responsibility was to serve as a performance enhancement instructor.47

In 1997 Dorfman explained the type of knowledge that one needs to provide mental skills training to athletes. Dorfman stated that, “There are three things to need to know in order to do what I do … Obviously you have to know psychology, what’s inside people’s heads. Two you have to be a communicator. You have to be able to talk to players in their language. The third thing is, you have to know the game.”48 Dorfman also stated, “If I’m just talking about relaxation techniques or feeling or thinking blue, the players are not going to relate to that. But I can talk to them in the context of their at-bats, of their deliveries, of the game.”49

Throughout the years since Dorfman began consulting with major league baseball players, sport psychology research has demonstrated the importance of the mental aspects in successful baseball performance. Specifically, Ronald Smith and Donald Christensen found that a minor league baseball player’s mental skills were predictive of whether or not they persisted in their pursuit of playing in the MLB. Thus, they found that those with lower levels of coping ability were more likely to not be playing professional baseball two to three years after their mental and physical skills were assessed (Smith & Christensen, 1995).50

One approach that Dorfman focused on with his athletes was helping them to develop a routine before each pitch or each at bat. Recent research has been supportive of the use of routines in helping athletes improve their pitching performance.51 In general, the sport psychology research conducted by sport psychology researchers since the 1980s has shown that mental skills training (such as the type of techniques taught by Dorfman) has been effective in enhancing performance (Weinberg & Gould, 2015).52

THE FLORIDA MARLINS

At the start of the 1993 Major League Baseball (MLB) season, the Florida Marlins joined the National League as an expansion team. As a new organization, Dave Dombrowski, the General Manager of the Marlins, sought the assistance of Dorfman. The Oakland Athletics allowed Dorfman to provide consultation to the Marlins while also consulting with the Oakland Athletics.53 Dorfman’s work with the Florida Marlins was reported in April of 1993.54 Initially, Dorfman was a temporary mental training consultant for the organization and also provided presentations to the Marlins major and minor league staffs.55 In addition, Dorfman also provided consultation to Dombrowski about hiring a full-time mental skills consultant.56 Ultimately, Dorfman would be hired in November of 1993 as the full-time instructor and performance enhancement consultant for the Florida Marlins.57

As Dorfman began working for the Marlins, Renee Lachemann, the manager, was very accepting of Dorfman’s work. This was demonstrated as Lachemann distributed copies of The Mental Game of Baseball to every player during spring training. Also, during Dorfman’s first visit to Miami, Lachemann stated, “He told me he was coming … I said, Yeah I can use you.”58 Lachemann also believed that it was helpful to have Dorfman on staff because of the helpful information he provided.59

Dorfman was very busy while serving as a consultant for the Marlins. Specifically, a newspaper report stated, “team counselor Harvey Dorfman has a full appointment book.”60 During the many appointments, consultation was provided during both practice and in uniform while sitting in the dugout during games. Initially, most of Dorfman’s work with the Florida Marlins was with the major league staff, while very little time was spent providing consultation to the minor league teams. Also, approximately seventy five percent of his time was spent working directly with the pitching staff.61

The Marlins had great success while Dorfman was employed by the organization. In fact, in 1997 the Florida Marlins made the World Series. During the games Dorfman was able sit in the dugout where he assisted players by helping them stay focused on what they needed to do to be successful and also support them in staying positive about their effort.62 Dorfman helped the Florida Marlins have success as they won the 1997 World Series. As a result, Dorfman received a Florida Marlins World Series ring.63

THE TAMPA BAY DEVIL RAYS

After the Florida Marlins won the World Series, Dorfman made the decision to take a new position with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.64 As this transition occurred, the Rays’ general manager Chuck Lamar stated the following about Dorfman joining the organization, “It’s a tremendous plus for any organization, especially one just starting out that has to maximize players’ abilities.”65 Dorfman was influenced to join the Devil Rays by his friend and Marlins pitching coach Larry Rothschild, who was the Devil Rays first coach.66 In recounting Dorfman’s work, Larry Rothschild stated, “He’s irreplaceable. He just had an unbelievable way of describing in one sentence something that it took other people paragraphs to describe.” Rothschild also stated, “He had a way of getting right to the point and analyzing things quickly.”67 Due to a family illness Dorfman decided to end his association with the Tampa Rays at the end of the 1998 baseball season.68

SCOTT BORAS CORPORATION

After leaving the Tampa Bay Rays, Dorfman joined the Scott Boras Corporation. Working for this organization was ideal for Dorfman since he was able to provide consultation while not having to travel as much. Initially, Dorfman began working with Scott Boras clients in 1999. His work with the Scott Boras Corporation remained consistent with the past services he provided for the A’s, Marlins, and Devil Rays organizations. Specifically, Dorfman worked with those that approached him for assistance and thus did not initiate mental training sessions with athletes.69

When Dorfman joined the organization, clients represented by Boras were made aware of the services that Dorfman provided. To initiate consulting, Dorfman met with players during the 1999 spring training in Florida and Arizona. During the season, Dorfman traveled to meet with players when they needed assistance and subsequently he would follow up with phone calls. During the off-season, players would visit Dorfman’s home for consultation. Dorfman continued to travel to provide consultation to athletes until approximately 2006 when he stopped traveling and only met with clients in North Carolina.70

INFLUENCING FUTURE MENTAL TRAINING CONSULTANTS AND PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES

Dorfman was certainly interested in advancing the profession of sport psychology. Specifically, he was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) and participated on various panels at professional sport psychology conferences. He also contributed to the development of the profession through taking part in think tanks with other mental training consultants.71 Additionally, in his last published memoir he discussed those individuals he mentored as they prepared for a career in sport psychology. In particular, Dorfman provided his thoughts about obtaining employment in the sport psychology profession. He explained that over the years he was contacted by many individuals interested in obtaining a career in sport psychology.72

In addition to influencing individuals to become mental training consultants and providing insight to those with an interest in sport psychology, Dorfman consulted with many athletes and coaches who had great success in the game of baseball. Several have credited Dorfman with being influential in their attainment of success. However, Dorfman did not believe that mental training consultants should take credit for the success of those that they have worked with.73 Although, Dorfman did not take credit for an athlete’s performance success, many of the athletes he worked with were very complimentary toward Dorfman’s work. See Appendix 1 at the bottom of this page for professional baseball player’s thoughts about Dorfman’s work.

CURRENT STATE OF MENTAL TRAINING CONSULTATION IN MLB

When Dorfman began consulting with major league baseball players, few professional teams had full-time mental training consultants. However, not long after Dorfman began to work full-time with the Oakland Athletics organization, other teams began employing sport psychologists and mental training consultants to work with their organizations. Presently, almost 30 years later, most MLB teams employ a mental training consultant or sport psychologist. For instance, teams that have been reported to have consultants through media reports or have listed professionals on their websites include:

• Arizona Diamondbacks74
• Atlanta Braves75
• Baltimore Orioles76
• Boston Red Sox77
• Chicago Cubs78
• Chicago White Sox79
• Cleveland Indians80
• Colorado Rockies81
• Detroit Tigers82
• Kansas City Royals83
• Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim84
• Milwaukee Brewers85
• Miami Marlins86
• Minnesota Twins87
• Pittsburgh Pirates88
• New York Mets89
• New York Yankees90
• Texas Rangers91
• San Francisco Giants92
• Seattle Mariners93
• Tampa Bay Rays94
• Washington Nationals95.

In total, at least 22 of the league’s 30 teams have been reported to have a sport psychologist or mental training consultant on staff. Clearly, Dorfman’s work has had an influence on changing the culture and acceptance of mental training and sport psychology as integral part of professional baseball today.

SUMMARY

Harvey Dorfman had a very accomplished life which is documented in Appendix 2 at the bottom of this page. He spent 21 years (1962-1983) as an educator, academic dean, athletic director, and coach. As an athlete, Dorfman’s 1955 collegiate soccer team won the National Championship. While coaching, Dorfman’s basketball team won the Vermont state championship. In addition, he was an author and also taught at the college level.

An article that Dorfman wrote led him to Roy Smalley who then introduced Dorfman to Karl Kuehl. In 1983, Kuehl and Dorfman began research on a joint project that would result in a book, The Mental Game of Baseball. Before the text was published, Kuehl influenced Dorfman to become a full-time professional baseball instructor. Dorfman officially joined the Oakland Athletics in 1984 as a mental training instructor, making him one of the few full-time mental training consultants in professional baseball. During his tenure with the organization, the A’s won the 1989 World Series.

Dorfman provided services to the Florida Marlins beginning in 1993. Following the end of the season, Dorfman opted to join the Florida Marlins full-time and began working with the team for the 1994 season. In Oakland, Dorfman split his time between the major league team and all of the minor league affiliates; however, in Florida, he initially spent most of his time in Miami with the major league team and also was in the dugout for almost every game. With the help of Dorfman, the Marlins won the 1997 World Series. Following the Marlins World Series victory, Dorfman joined the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Dorfman spent one season with the expansion team and then began consulting with the Scott Boras Corporation in 1999.

Harvey Allen Dorfman passed away on February 28, 2011. Harvey Dorfman had a very profound life. Perhaps one of the greatest things that can be taken away from his work is the influence he had on the individuals that he worked and what he has done for the game of baseball. He helped numerous clients through mental training consultation and some went on to be the greatest players in the game. For those interested in becoming consultants his work is a great example of how mental training can help baseball players enhance performance. Students studying sport psychology that plan to work as mental training consultants can learn about the success that Dorfman achieved. Dorfman was one of the first full-time mental training consultants to have a tremendous amount of success over a long period of time in professional baseball.

ANDREW D. KNAPP completed his undergraduate degree in Sport Studies at the University of Akron and his master’s degree in Sport Psychology at the University of Tennessee. Currently, Andrew is the Interim Head Cross Country Coach/Interim Co-Head Track and Field Coach at Marietta College.

ALAN S. KORNSPAN is an Associate Professor in the School of Sport Science and Wellness Education at the University of Akron. Alan received his Ed.D. from West Virginia University in Sport Behavior. His research interests include the history of baseball, the history of the sport sciences, and professional issues in sport psychology.

APPENDIX 1: Baseball Players’ Thoughts about Dorfman’s Work

• Jim Abbott: “When I was playing major league baseball, Harvey Dorfman’s teaching would help guide my approach, on and off the field. Little did I know that years after I had retired, I would still find myself asking how Harvey would view a certain situation.”96 
• Rick Ankiel: “He’s the best”….“I like the way he talks about baseball. He teaches you different keys on focusing.”97
• Jeff Conine: “He breaks it down and brings common sense to the forefront…Things you already know he just reinforces. I don’t know if you just forget them or what but he just says do this or why don’t you think about this. Just common sense stuff that everybody knows but in the process of getting into a slump you forget about. He’s really good at waking you up and making it simple.”98 
• Roy Halladay: “I’m certain I never would have had the success I’ve had if it weren’t for the time I’ve spent with him and the things I’ve learned from him.”99 
• Raul Ibanez: “The stuff he taught us, for the players and the people whose lives he blessed, those teachings — and the caring, and the passion — we can pass that along to other people. And through them, he can live on longer than any of us will be alive, if we can make sure it just keeps getting passed down. And I hope that happens because I wouldn’t have had the career I’ve had without him.”100 
• Mark Kotsay: “He’s a good guy. … He asked me what I was trying to do in those situations. And I said I was trying to drive the guy in. That I felt responsible for getting him in. He said that’s not the thing. That all I could control was trying to have a quality at-bat. So that’s what I am doing now, just trying to relax”101 
• Al Leiter: “What helped me it was after years of a lot of understanding of what a pitcher’s job was. Harvey Dorfman got my mind where it needed to be. That’s the whole part of superior athletes that are able to separate what the emotions are and what the elevated anxiety will be to being able to focus at the task at hand.”102
• Jamie Moyer: “The mental side of the game has gotten me to where I am today. Author and friend Harvey Dorfman really helped me in that area.”103
• Dustin Pedroia: “He matched his message with the person who needed to hear it, which is exactly why he is the best sports psychologist in the world. He’s the kind of guy who can figure out your personality in five seconds. Talk about being born to do a job. Harvey was born to do what he does.”104 

APPENDIX 2: A Timeline of Harvey Dorfman’s Work

• 1953: Entered Brockport College
• 1955: Dorfman’s soccer team shares national championship
• 1957: Graduated from Brockport College
• 1961: Earned Master’s degree from Brockport College
• 1975: Dorfman begins writing a baseball column for the Berkshire Sampler
• 1984: Dorfman begins full-time consulting work with Oakland A’s
• 1986: Dorfman presents work with the Oakland A’s at the First Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology Conference
• 1989: Oakland A’s win the World Series
• 1989: Dorfman and Kuehl publish Mental Game of Baseball
• 1993: Dorfman begins full-time consulting work with the Florida Marlins
• 1997: Florida Marlins win the World Series
• 1998: Dorfman hired as full-time consultant for Tampa Bay Devil Rays
• 1999: Dorfman hired by the Scott Boras Corporation
• 2000: Dorfman Publishes The Mental ABC’s of Pitching
• 2001: Dorfman Publishes The Mental Keys to Hitting
• 2003: Dorfman publishes Coaching The Mental Game
• 2010: Inducted into the College at Brockport: State University of New York Golden Eagles Athletic Hall of Fame
• 2010: Dorfman Publishes two autobiographical memoirs about his life’s work in professional baseball including, Copying It Down; An Anecdotal Memoir: Sport as Art and Each Branch, Each Needle; An Anecdotal Memoir: The Final Stories
• 2013: Dorfman’s book Babbling Echoes: Soundings from Yesteryear is published posthumously

Notes

Like most businesses, major league baseball (MLB) owners strive for optimizing profits by expanding revenue and limiting costs. Clearly, recent revenues have significantly increased with larger attendance, pricier tickets, the sale of MLB merchandise, and most importantly the growing and sizable television contracts. With revenue rising, it has been easier to negotiate with the Major League Baseball Players Association and share the larger economic pie and avoid costly shutdowns. Player salaries account for the majority of costs, consequently owners continuously look for ways to minimize financial outlays but still maintain the quality of their individual teams.

Table 1: Salaries ($millions) and Performance of Players with Multiyear Contracts, 2003–14

Table 2: Regression results

Table 3. Salary and Cost-Saving Estimates

(Click image to enlarge)

BARRY KRISSOFF is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland University College and retired senior economist at Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture. His research interest is on the business of baseball, with a current focus on the role of sports’ agents in the industry. His first article in the “Baseball Research Journal,” “Society and Baseball Face Rising Income Inequality,” was a finalist for the 2014 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards in the category of Historical Analysis/Commentary. He continues to look forward to a World Series in Washington DC—maybe this is the year!

Appendix – Data

Our main source of data is from Baseball Prospectus’ Cot’s Contracts 2009–2014 (www.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots). It includes information on the player’s total and yearly salary under contract, the length of contract, the team he plays for, his fielding position, the number of years of major league experience, and the sports agent who negotiated the contract on behalf of the player. The contracts, which are in effect for the year 2009, start anywhere between 2003 and 2009, thus we have contracts originating as early as 2003. We use the guaranteed compensation including any annual salary, bonuses, and options. We do not include bonus incentives or salary if a team exercises an option since this occurs ex post to the contract. Performance statistics are also obtained from Baseball Prospectus. Major League Baseball was generous in supplying the data on the number of days a player was on the disabled list. Additional sources were used when information was incomplete, notably from Baseball-Reference.com, Spotrac.com, and MLBTradeRumors.com. MLB Trade Rumors, in particular, contained the most complete and up-to-date information on the various sports agencies working on behalf of the players.  

Acknowledgments

The author appreciates the thoughtful review comments and suggestions from John Wainio and two anonymous peer reviewers, and the editorial assistance from Cecilia Tan, Clifford Blau, and Rod Nelson. We want to also acknowledge baseball websites, most notably Baseball Prospectus, for developing and making available large data sets. Of course, any errors that remain are the responsibility of the author.

Notes

1. Jason Heyward was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals November 2014 for a young promising pitcher, Shelby Miller, a relief pitcher Jordan Walden, and a minor leaguer.

2. Cameron, Dave. “Braves Lock-up Andrelton Simmons Keep Inflating Extensions.” Fangraphs, February 20, 2014 www.Fangraphs.com/blogs/ braves-lock-up-andrelton-simmons-keep-inflating-extensions.

3. See Krautmann, Anthony (1999) “What’s Wrong with Skully-Estimates of a Player’s Marginal Revenue Product.” Economic Inquiry, 37(2): 369–81; Krautmann, Anthony and Margaret Oppenheimer (2002). “Contract Length and the Return to Performance in Major League Baseball.” Journal of Sports Economics 3(1) 6–17; Meltzer, Josh (2005). “Average Salary and Contract Length in Major League Baseball: When Do They Diverge?” Unpublished manuscript Stanford University; and Link, Charles and Martin Yosifov (2012). “Contract Length and Salaries Compensating Wage Differentials in Major League Baseball.” Journal of Sports Economics 13(1): 3–19.

4. To our knowledge this has not be done with one exception. Cameron does a bivariate analysis of the total value of contract salaries and cumulative projected WAR over the contract for 2014 free agents, “A Basic Model of Free Agent Pricing” Fangraphs March 10, 2014, www.Fangraphs.com/ blogs/a-basic-model-of-2014-free-agent-pricing.

5. The estimate is derived from Cot’s Contract data 2009–13. It includes players with contracts as early as 2003 that extend into 2009 or later and players that have signed contracts between 2009 and 2013 including extensions. To the database, we added contracts that were signed right at or before the beginning of the 2014 season, but not those that were negotiated during or after the season. The appendix indicates a complete list of our data sources. We deflated annual salaries by the Consumer Price Index using 2010 = 100. All salaries are reported in 2010 dollars, unless otherwise stated.

6. Prior to 2008, Cabrera had one year contracts with the Florida Marlins. More recently, Cabrera and Detroit Tigers have agreed to an extension to 2023.

7. Baumer and Zimbalist refer to WAR as measuring marginal physical product although they express concern about the lack of industry standardization of WAR estimates from the three major sources, Fangraphs, Baseball-Reference, and Baseball Prospectus. Benjamin Baumer and Andrew Zimbalist. The Sabermetric Revolution, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

8. For players with less than three year’s playing time, the average was calculated based on one or two years’ of experience. For players who were disabled for any of the three years prior to the signing of the contract, we assigned a WAR of 0 for the disabled year. This may understate the potential contribution of the player but it also may reflect the potential for injury during the length of the multiyear contract.

9. For a player who had no major league experience, we assigned a WAR of 0 and are likely understating their potential contribution. Since first-generation players are more affected by this limitation than free agents, we may be understating the contribution of first-generation players.

10. We use the four first-generation status variables in the equation, which are compared to free agent status.

11. Baumer, Benjamin and Andrew Zimbalist. The Sabermetric Revolution University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Other authors, such as Gennaro Diamond Dollar$ 2007 Maple Street Press, have a more detailed discussion of the value of a win in different regional markets.

12. Major League Baseball Trade Rumors, MLBTR Agency Database, www.mlbtraderumors.com/agencydatabase.

13. See for example, B.J. Rains “Why I Chose My Agent: David Wright” (March 13, 2013), part of a series of interviews conducted by Major League Baseball Trade Rumors, www.mlbtraderumors.com/2013/03/why-i-chose-my-agency-david-wright.html.

14. Ronald Blum. “Boras Blasts Mets, Cubs, Astros,” November 14, 2013 http://finance.yahoo.com/news/boras-bashes-mets-cubs-astros-122953166.html.

15. See Dave Cameron, “Max Scherzer and the Incentives to Self-Insure” Fangraphs June 9, 2014, www.Fangraphs.com/blogs/max-scherzer-and-the-incentives-to-self-insure.

Televised replay made its debut during the December 7, 1963, Army-Navy football game when 29-year-old CBS director Tony Verna, who passed away January 18, 2015, at the age of 81, pressed “rewind” on his Ampex tape machine for the first time during a game broadcast.2,3 Since that effort 51 years ago, the technology has spread to all televised and otherwise streamed sports, culminating with the National Football League’s pioneering decision in 1986 to try using replay to review the officials’ on-field calls wherein a brand new off-field replay official had the power to stop play to conduct such a review.

After the system was taken out of commission in 1991 due to concerns of delays, interruptions to game flow and overall sluggishness, replay was tweaked in an effort to better engage fans and teams alike (meanwhile, the NHL adopted its own version of limited replay in 1991).4 When the NFL’s system resurfaced in 1999, it was accompanied by a cutting-edge, engaging, and exciting challenge system: for the first time, coaches could decide which plays to review. At first, the coach received two challenges before being rewarded for successful appeals: a coach would receive a third challenge if he got his first two right.

Baseball was long resistant to adopting replay in any form—it was the last of the four major sports to adopt the technology and boasted lively attitudes against its adoption, including throwbacks to the pace-of-game arguments that took the NFL’s system temporarily offline in 1991.5 Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem once said, when confronted with a photograph of a purported blown call, “Gentlemen, he was out because I said he was out,” reflecting the human element and umpire-as-final-say argument also used against replay in baseball.6 FOX Sports’ Reid Forgrave penned the sardonic slogan, “Better Baseball Through Technology”7—while others quickly connected the dots between replay adoption and a lengthier ballgame.8

Nonetheless, pro baseball’s journey into instant replay review followed football’s path in several ways. During an otherwise benign May 31, 1999, Cardinals-Marlins contest, Florida batter Cliff Floyd drove a Kent Bottenfield fastball to deep left-center field, where it bounced off or atop the left field scoreboard and was ruled a double by second base umpire Greg Gibson. After a Marlins complaint that the fly ball struck the panel behind the Pro Player Stadium scoreboard, and therefore should have been ruled a home run, the umpires changed the call to a four-base award, prompting an equal-yet-opposite argument from St. Louis. This time, crew chief Frank Pulli opted to consult a dugout-adjacent TV camera to review the play. After the first replay review in MLB history, Pulli changed the call back to a double—effectively confirming Gibson’s initial call. The Marlins responded by filing a protest in their 5–2 loss, which was ultimately denied by National League President Len Coleman, who acknowledged and admonished Pulli for unauthorized use of video replay while denying the Marlins’ protest for Pulli’s judgment call.9

Baseball would not revisit replay until 2008, when the league became the last of the four major American sports to authorize replay reviews for select on-field calls—whether a potential home run was fair, foul, in or out of play, or subject to spectator (fan) interference. At the time of its midseason adoption, baseball required its umpires to initiate and adjudicate the entire replay process while some managers, led by Chicago’s Lou Piniella, already were campaigning for a challenge system: “I’d love to throw a red hankie.”10 Though limited replay remained in force from 2008 through 2013—producing 392 total replays in five-plus seasons, 132 of which (33.7%) were overturned11— Piniella would get his wish in late 2013, when MLB experimented with the notion of expanded replay and NFL-esque challenges. Having selected five games in the 2013 Arizona Fall League in which to experiment with a modified “unlimited challenge” version of the modern replay review system, MLB watched umpiring crew chief Tripp Gibson don the now-familiar headset 15 times, affirming 12 calls while overturning three for a 20% overturn rate.12

In a related story, a 2010 ESPN study of nearly 10,000 calls found that umpires are 20% inaccurate when it comes to “close” calls, which, all else equal, would support a 20% overturned call rate for an unlimited replay system, as occurred in the 2013 Arizona Fall League.13 On the other hand, since ESPN’s analysis also found that just 1.3 calls per game, on average, were close enough to merit replay review, further extrapolation of the data found that umpires are inaccurate less than 0.5% of the time, or, alternately, are 99.5% accurate.14

GROUND RULES: PREPARING FOR EXPANDED INSTANT REPLAY’S INAUGURAL SEASON

As Opening Day 2014 approached, Commissioner Bud Selig’s Special Committee for On-Field Matters pared down the fall’s unlimited replay regimen, settling on just one challenge per manager with the reward system of a second possible challenge if the manager experienced success with challenge number one.15 Further adding to the mystique of replay, MLB announced that, beginning in the 7th inning, the umpiring crew chief could initiate replay review if a manager was out of challenges. To make strategic matters even more delicious, limited replays circa-2008 were grandfathered and combined with matters concerning new home plate collision Rule 7.13 into a replay class that would be unchallengeable—only the crew chief could initiate home run boundary or plate-blocking replay reviews. In order to appease the umpires’ union, MLB agreed to staff its league’s new state-of-the-art Replay Operations Center with two crews of umpires, which accounted for baseball’s hiring of seven new officials to the full-time MLB staff in advance of the 2014 season.16 In order to appease its owners, MLB authorized its teams to staff replay coordinators in clubhouses to review multiple feeds and camera angles, with a direct phone line to the dugout in order to advise a team whether it should challenge a play.17

Based on expanded replay’s framework, teams would have to become “replay smart” to make the most of baseball’s new technology. In addition to choosing the right replay coordinator—some teams chose rules-smart umpires—managers themselves not only would have to hone their argument craft to ‘turn’ or delay the umpire, thus allowing the coordinator more time to review video, they would have to figure out, in a world with finite challenges, just when to use one.18

For instance, when Giants manager Bruce Bochy unsuccessfully challenged an early-inning close call at first base in Arizona less than a week into the 2014 season, he lost his challenge for the rest of the game and had to argue the old-fashioned way when the Diamondbacks scored on an ensuing passed ball— although replays indicate the plate umpire’s call was incorrect, the challenge-less Bochy couldn’t do a thing about it: Score one run for bad replay strategy, and potentially one win, too, as Arizona won the ballgame by one, 5–4.19

METHODS: CHOOSING THE VARIABLES TO TRACK

With a bevy of data set to head our way in 2014, choosing the proper variables to document proved a most important task. Reframing the task in a way that considered the potential effect of replay review on the course of a game, however, made such a chore much simpler. In the end, replay reviews were logged individually (even in the case of two replay reviews which occurred during the same play20) and included the following variables:

• Type: Manager’s Challenge or Crew Chief Review
• Umpires:
  –    Name
  –    Position (HP/1B/2B/3B)
  –    Status (Full-Time MLB or Triple-A Fill-in)
  –    Crew Chief (e.g., the umpire who actually spoke with New York)
• Quality of Correctness/Outcome: Call Confirmed/Stands/Overturned
• Teams:
  –    City Short-Code (e.g., CIN for Cincinnati, TB for Tampa Bay)
  –    Active Manager Name (e.g., the person who spoke with the umpire)
• Reason:
  –    Appeal Plays
  –    Base Touches
  –    Boundary or Ground Rules
  –    Catch/No Catch (e.g., a ball dropped on the transfer)
  –    Catch/Trap (e.g., a ball either caught or trapped by a diving outfielder)
  –    Fair/Foul
  –    HBP/Foul (e.g., questions concerning a pitched ball vs. the batter)
  –    HR Boundary Calls (those that were reviewable dating back to 2008)
  –    Non-HR Fan Interference
  –    Passing Runners
  –    Rule 7.13 (the home plate collision rule)
  –    Safe/Out
  –    Time Plays (did the run score prior to the third out being recorded?)
• Variable Game Situation:
  –    Inning-of-Review (including Top/Bottom)
  –    Offense/Defense (was the requesting team at bat or in the field?)
  –    W/L Pre-Review (was the requesting team winning/losing/tied at the time of review?)
  –    W/L Final (did the requesting team win or lose the ballgame?)
  –    Runs Scored by the requesting team
  –    Runs Scored by the opposing team
  –    Day of Week

NEW MEASURES OF PERFORMANCE

The following sabermetric definitions were created specifically for replay review analysis: Review Affirmation Percentage (RAP) is also known as collective replay quality of correctness and is a value representing the frequency with which an umpire’s call is affirmed (confirmed or stands) by replay affected as the result of both managers’challenges and crew chief reviews. Team Success Percentage (TSP) frames the issue from the team’s perspective and is thus the inverse of RAP, while Manager’s Challenge Success Percentage (MCSP) is similar to TSP, except that it only accounts for managers’ challenges, removing crew chief reviews from the equation. None of these measures includes reviews of the record-keeping variety. In short:

• RAP = Calls Affirmed by Replay Review / Total Calls Replayed
• TSP = 1.000 – RAP (or, alternately, Calls Overturned / Total Calls Replayed)
• MCSP = Challenges Overturned by Replay Review / Total Calls Challenged

Please note that for the purposes of the instant replay review analysis contained herein, the term “percentage” is used, akin to the colloquially used “winning percentage.” This term accordingly has taken on a vernacular meaning such that a replay-based “percentage” is presented in the form of an average running from .000 to 1.000, similar to the commonly used statistic, “batting average.” The mathematical conversion from RAP, TSP or MCSP average to conventional percent is RAP/TSP/MCSP * 100. To illustrate, a RAP of .500 corresponds to a review being affirmed 50.0% of the time. For instance, Team A plays a game that features three reviews: Team A’s manager challenges a safe call in the fifth inning and, after the manager’s challenge, the original call stands. In the sixth, Team A’s manager requests the umpires review a home plate collision (Rule 7.13) play in which Team A’s runner was ruled out, and, after the crew chief review, the original call is confirmed. In the seventh, Team A’s manager requests the umpires review a safe call at first base and, after the crew chief review, the call is overturned. RAP, TSP and MCSP for this game would be calculated as follows:

• RAP = 2 / 3 = .667 (reviews were affirmed at a rate of .667, or 66.7% percent of the time)
• TSP = 1.000 – .667 = .333 (the team’s success percentage for all reviews was .333)
• MCSP = 0 / 1 = .000 (the manager’s challenge success percentage was .000)

As an aside, if this game featured a fourth review, filed by Team B, the above statistics for Team A would be unaffected.

DATA AND TRENDS: TEAMS AND MANAGERS

Data were collected from the first MLB games with expanded replay on March 31, 2014, through the final day of the regular season on September 28. With 1,274 total replay reviews across 2,428 regular season contests (the replay system was unavailable for the two Dodgers-Diamondbacks Opening Series games in Sydney, Australia)21, MLB saw an average of just over one replay review for every two games played, which featured 601 overturned calls, while 353 stood and 310 were confirmed (10 additional reviews were of the record-keeping variety).22,23 In other words, a call was overturned slightly less frequently than once every four games, which aligns quite well with the ESPN data showing that umpires miss 20% of all close calls.24 Collaterally, the present analysis on replay’s 2014 debut serves to affirm the veracity of ESPN’s 2010 study.

Replay use by team varied from a low of 32 (Milwaukee Brewers, New York Yankees) to a high of 61 (Chicago Cubs)—the average team experienced 42 reviews with 20 overturns (which follows the overall 47% overturn rate described above)25—yet there was actually a negative correlation between frequency of replay use and percentage of calls overturned.26 For instance, no team in the top 11 of replay users had more than 50% of their replayed calls reversed; seven of the bottom 12 replay users (three teams tied for the 10th-least-used position) had greater than 50% of their replayed calls reversed (see Table 1). The upper 53% of teams ranked by replay usage (two tied for 15th place) accounted for 753 (59.6%) of all reviews, with 341 calls overturned (rate of overturn=45.3%). Meanwhile, the lower 47% of teams went to replay a combined 511 times (40.4%), with 260 of their reviewed calls being overturned (rate of overturn= 50.9%). Roughly, the more reviews experienced by a given team, the greater the chance that some of these reviews were unsuccessful and/or frivolous.

To further illustrate the point, consider that when decision-making factored into replay use, defined as a team voluntarily electing to file a finite manager’s challenge as opposed to requesting a “free” umpire-initiated crew chief review, teams fared much better than when the review was a freebie: 1,053 replay reviews were managerially challenged to the tune of a .474 RAP, whereas 221 reviews were of the crew chief variety and, at a RAP of .769, the .295-point difference in RAP constituted a sizeable distinction. Furthermore, the two most successful managers in challenging calls were New York Yankees skipper Joe Girardi and Miami’s Mike Redmond, whose .793 and .731 MCSPs, respectively, were also associated with the fewest number of affirmed calls for any individual teams (nine and 14, respectively). At this point, it is important to note that the Yankees and Marlins ranked tied-for-29th and 27th, respectively, among individual team replay use (Manager Ron Roenicke of the tied-for-29th-place Brewers ranked 12th in MCSP), giving some credence to the notion of replay discretion. As if in perfect balance, the worst-performing manager was Toronto’s John Gibbons, whose .340 MCSP also featured the most affirmed calls for any individual team (39); the Blue Jays went to replay a total of 57 times, third-most in the league (#1 Chicago’s Rick Renteria’s .455 MCSP appeared noticeably below the league-average MCSP of .526 while #2 Tampa Bay’s Joe Maddon fared even worse, with a .438 MCSP). As a corollary to the previous paragraph’s conclusion, it appears the reverse was true as well. The fewer reviews experienced by a given team, the less the chance that some of these reviews were unsuccessful and/or frivolous.

DATA AND TRENDS: UMPIRES

Replay review statistics also advertised individual umpire affinity, revealing several trends amongst the men in black and powder blue. For instance, umpire Chris Guccione fared supreme with a .941 RAP (16/17) while minor-league fill-in Tom Woodring’s .167 (1/6) was the lowest RAP of all umpires with more than five replays to their name (MiLB colleagues Jon Byrne, Jeff Gosney and Ben May all scored a .000 RAP, but only had two reviews apiece). As a whole, less tenured full-time MLB umpires, such as Guccione (hired full-time in 2009), second-place Scott Barry (.875 RAP, hired in 2011), fourth-place Vic Carapazza (.833 RAP, hired in 2013) and fifth-place Mike Estabrook (.813 RAP, hired in 2014) performed much better than both veteran full-timers with significant experience—Crew chiefs Gerry Davis (hired in 1984), Jerry Layne (1989), Tim Welke (1984), Gary Cederstrom (1997) and Jim Joyce (1989) all scored below .385 (MLB’s longest-tenured umpire, Joe West [1978], for those wondering, was the outlier and performed well above average with his 28th-best .600 RAP)—and rookie call-ups with fewer than 100 MLB games under their belt, such as below-.300’ers John Tumpane, Stu Scheurwater, Seth Buckminster, and Woodring.

On the other hand, veteran minor league fill-ins such as Mark Ripperger and Will Little (.714 and .667 RAPs, respectively) performed quite well. For the umpires, a peak window of replay performance existed sometime after working 100 games as a minor-league call-up and, often, before spending many years as a full-time big-leaguer.

Umpires at the first-base position were apt to have their calls overturned more often than at any other base (.448 RAP), while home plate umpires experienced affirmed rulings with more frequency than their field umpire counterparts (.742 RAP).27

Umpires were most questioned about safe/out calls at first base (n=954), followed by HR boundary calls that would also have been reviewable dating back to 2008 (n=97), issues of home-plate collision Rule 7.13 (n=92) and whether a pitch at the plate hit the batter, bat, or nothing (n=46). Issues of catch/trap in the outfield and fair/foul tied for the fifth-most common reason for review, with 21 reviews apiece. The most common overturned call was the catch/trap call (overturned 76.2% of the time), while the least overturned call concerned Rule 7.13 (overturned just 14.1% of the time).28

Though replay is still in its infancy, the fact that Major League Baseball in January 2015 hired some of replay’s top performers amongst fill-in umpires— Ripperger and Little—to the full-time big league staff may reveal a new method of evaluation at MLB headquarters, especially after Park Avenue admitted that its 2014 postseason umpires were selected, in part, due to instant replay performance.29,30

INSTANT REPLAY DYNAMICS AND IMPACT ON GAME OUTCOME

At the end of the day, replay review may be about getting the individual call right, but it also has, from time to time, had an impact on how a game plays out. For instance, of the 1264 non-recordkeeping replays in 2014, teams entered the call-to-be-reviewed play leading 444 times, trailing 488 times, and tied 332 times. As it turns out, this 444–488–332 record turned into 614 wins and 650 losses at game’s end, which corresponds to a .486 winning average. The measured change in W–L record from pre-replay to game final was plus 170 wins and 162 losses, a winning average of .512. In an all-else-equal world where the expected league average change in winning average would be .500, one could say that a team’s invocation of replay review had a somewhat positive correlation with game outcome.

Filtering the data uncovered an interesting and powerful effect: When replay review resulted in an overturned call in 2014—in other words, when the outcome of replay benefited the team that challenged (or prodded the umpires to initiate)—teams that entered the replay situation with a 203–228–170 record finished their games with a record of 319–282 (.531 winning average), a net gain of 116 wins and 54 losses, or a whopping .682 winning average (see Figure 1).

When replay review resulted in a confirmed or upheld call that did not benefit the requesting team, on the other hand, this delta-winning average dropped dramatically to just .329, a game-changing overturned vs. affirmed difference of .353 points (see Figure 2).31 Thus, the data indicate a correlation between replay success and winning a ballgame while also indicating a correlation between lack of replay success and losing.

Breaking down the data specifically by the 484 individual games in which the pre- and final statuses were incongruent—the 332 games tied at the time of review as well as those in which losing situations turned into wins (81 times), and vice versa (71 wins-to-losses)—the following results emerged:

• When Call was Affirmed: Teams stole 27 wins (L-to-W) and 39 losses (W-to-L). Ties turned into 66 wins and 96 losses (93–135 overall, .408).
• When Call was Reversed: Teams stole 54 wins and 32 losses. Ties turned into 95 wins and 75 losses (149–107 overall, .582).

Accordingly, result stealing (defined as a win-to-loss or loss-to-win outcome) occurred in 66 of the 663 affirmed cases and 85 of the 601 reversed cases. Proportionally, this favored the supposition that reversed calls were more strongly associated with change-to-outcome than affirmed calls, while the 81 total stolen wins (53+27) still only accounted for 6.4% of the 1264 total replay reviews; meanwhile, the 71 stolen losses (39+32) accounted for 5.6% of the 1264 total reviews, suggesting that, all else equal, randomly choosing to replay a call has a slightly better shot of turning a loss into a win than a win into a loss. Of course, a loss remained a loss in a majority of those pre-loss cases (407 times), while a win remained a win 373 times—this “same pre-to-final” outcome manifested in 61.7% of all replay pairings, meaning that, all else equal, replay unequivocally had no bearing on win-loss game outcome a majority of the time.

As for our 332 ties, 161 became wins and 171 became losses (.485 WPCT), whose deviation from the zero-sum state of .500 pales in comparison to the distributions related to replay outcome: whether the call was affirmed or reversed (.408 and .582, respectively).

Replay review impact has also been measured by its tangible effect on runs scored or erased, broken into the categories of “mild,” “medium,” and “spicy” (see Figure 3).32

Succinctly, these impact categories only apply to an overturned call pursuant to the following schedule:33

• A mild impact is one in which an overturned call did not lead to any incremental runs being scored or erased.
• A medium impact is one in which a reversed call led to a run(s) being scored or erased, but these runs did not determine the game outcome.
• A spicy impact is one in which a reversed call led to run(s) scored or erased that did determine which team won the game.

For instance, an overturned safe call in the bottom of the ninth inning of a 13–3 ballgame would both effectively end the game and be assigned an impact of “mild.” Meanwhile, an overturned out call at home plate in the bottom of the ninth inning of this same 13–3 blowout would both make the score 13–4 and, barring a miraculous comeback, be assigned an impact rating of “medium.” Finally, this same overturned out call at home plate in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tied ballgame would effectively end the game by scoring the winning run for the home team and, thus, merit the impact rating of “spicy.”

Replay impact was mild a majority of the time (n=432, 71.9%), followed by medium (137, 22.8%) and spicy (32, 5.3%). These 32 spicy plays account for 2.5% of the 1264 total non-recordkeeping replays. Sifting through these 32 spicy replay situations shows that all except one pair of replays were exclusive to one particular game—that is, only one game featured two spicy replay outcomes. That game was the August 19 Tigers-Rays contest, in which a fourth inning home run call was overturned to a foul ball and, in the fifth, a catch was overturned to a trap. The HR play took a run off the board for Tampa Bay while the trap gave Detroit an extra run. The Tigers ultimately won the game in extra innings.34 As such, 31 of MLB’s 2428 replay-capable games contained a “spicy” replay review, a percentage of 1.3%.

Thus, by this metric, replay rarely had a directly observable impact on game outcome and was correlated with a changed outcome of games a distinct minority of the time.

REPLAY BY TIME OF INVOCATION

By game phase, teams were more likely to have a successful replay outcome (an overturned call) early than late; league-wide TSP for the ballgame’s first third (innings #1–3) was .585. This number steadily decreased throughout the contest, such that the mid-game (innings #4–6) TSP was .496 and the late game (seventh-inning onward) TSP was .388.35 The most successful individual inning for review was the second, with 81 overturned calls out of 123 total replays (.659 TSP). When filtering out the freebie crew chief-initiated reviews, teams again fared better while actually amplifying the downward trend of success present in league-wide TSP: .680 MCSP for innings #1–3, .541 for innings #4–6 and .416 for innings #7+.36 Umpires either improved and/or replay initiators (managers for challenges and crew chiefs otherwise) regressed as games progressed into the later innings.

By day-of-week, most challenged calls were overturned during weekend series, specifically on Sundays and Saturdays (.570 and .563 MCSPs, respectively), followed by Fridays (.550), Thursdays (.518), Wednesdays (.506), Tuesdays (.489) and Mondays (.454), as if managers became better challengers as the week wore on, only to repeat the cycle the following week.37

As for time of year and the question of whether more calls were reversed later in the season, the data suggest no relationship between time-of-year and percentage of calls overturned.38 The greatest percentage of overturned calls came in June 2014 (52.1% overturned) while the lowest followed in July (43.5% overturned). Meanwhile, number of replays requested peaked in August (229 replays, or 0.54 per game) after a valley in April (389 replays, or 0.47 per game). Due to the All-Star Break, July actually had the highest replays per game (.55) with the fewest number of games played. The month of September experienced the second-fewest number of total replays as well as replays per game (205 and 0.52, respectively). Thus, teams did not appear to consistently improve as the season wore on, though reviews occurred more frequently after the regular season’s first month and prior to its final month.

IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE REPLAY STRATEGY

Insofar as team strategy is concerned, maximizing the benefit of the challenge is key. For instance, teams can “save” this crucial challenge by opting for the freebie crew-chief initiated review, if and when available, either as a preventative measure (e.g., against losing replay capability later on) or as a protective one (e.g., by keeping the challenge).

As a preventative measure, replay challenge opportunity cost decreases throughout the contest, especially as inning number seven approaches, when the crew chief can initiate a review even if a team is out of challenges. With the probability of a missed call occurring during a game firmly lodged at less than 0.5%, the equal distribution of a missed call occurring during any particular half-inning of play is just .028%. With such odds, challenging any perceived missed call might seem like a no-brainer—except if you just happen to be the Giants playing the Diamondbacks in April 2014: then, a bad challenge can cost you a game.

Even if the odds are squarely in a team’s favor, it behooves every team to develop and invest in their video coordinators, replay technology and related education—especially early on in a weekend series game (perhaps in the second inning of a Sunday matinee as umpire eyes adjust to the bright skies and, more importantly, television cameras experience better frame rates to decipher close plays in the surplus of daylight39), when the chances of a call being overturned are highest. After all, replay review is an example of a scenario in which a clubhouse employee can have a direct impact on a team’s winning percentage or probability.

Early in 2014, MLB stated that the purpose of expanded instant replay was “for critical game situations and obvious misses, not the ‘bang-bang’ play.”40 It accordingly follows that a club’s video replay coordinator should be very adept at not simply knowing whether Glove A actually tagged Jersey B, but should be able to decipher this caper with confidence. The chance that any single replay review was confirmed in 2014 was 24.5%, compared to 27.9% for ‘stands’ and 47.5% for ‘overturned,’ meaning that, pursuant to MLB’s own framework, replay was used as intended just 47.5% of the time—and was flat out abused at least 24.5% of the time. The sure thing of overturning an “obvious miss” turned into somewhat of a coin flip because teams simply didn’t use the new technology correctly, perhaps because video coordinators, bench coaches and/or managers—notably those in Toronto, Tampa Bay, and the other “lower half” teams—didn’t know what to look for, didn’t know the rules, or simply were unable to think like an umpire.

As a protective measure, rules regarding crew chief-initiated reviews prior to (and, to a lesser extent, after) the seventh inning suggest that sly managers would do well to request an umpire-initiated freebie review whenever possible, given that 47.5% of reviewed plays result in overturned calls.41 On the other hand, crew chief reviewed plays were affirmed 76.9% of the time. Because the grandfathered home run boundary 7.13 call cannot be challenged and instead must be initiated by the crew chief—and because replay officials consider all aspects of a play during the review, which means the issue of fan interference is considered during a HR boundary call, for example—managers would be wise to request a crew chief review for any close play at the wall. Returning to the Bochy problem in Arizona, had the Giants requested a review pursuant to the Rule 7.13 framework, that, in 2014, mandated this type of review be initiated by the crew chief, perhaps the Giants would have been the beneficiaries of a crucial overturned call. After all, the Los Angeles Dodgers were granted a Rule 7.13 crew chief-initiated review in June on a tag play at home plate that didn’t even involve the catcher!42

As a matter of strategy, managers would be wise to challenge or request an-otherwise benign review when on defense, during stressful situations. Although replay regulations may prohibit actual mound visits during reviews, 2014’s league-average 1:46 review— 2:15 if the call stood—was precisely one minute and forty-six seconds of extra time for a reliever to prepare in the bullpen: over the course of the season, baseball spent 37 hours, 32 minutes, and 30 seconds watching umpires wear headsets, which should prove ample time for all manner of stall tactics.43 Since reviews are freebies after the sixth inning anyway, and most bullpen management occurs during these later innings, exploitation of replay for warm-up time gain seems self-fulfilling.

Finally, while losing a replay review dropped a team’s W–L average to .342, compounding this effort with an ejection for arguing the review’s outcome was a nearly sure-fire way to lose the ballgame. There were 24 ejections for arguing a replay review in 2014, with the ejected party’s team entering the ejection situation winning five times, losing 13 times and tied six times. Those ejected teams went on to win the game six times while experiencing a loss 18 times, for a net change of 1–5 (16.7 WPCT). Though the sample size is small, the trend is clear and has been occurring with ejections for years: Getting thrown out of a ballgame, especially for arguing a replay review, decreases win probability even in the relatively unusual circumstance in which the manager was right, which was the case in less than 30% of the 199 total ejections during the 2014 season.44

CONCLUSION

Baseball’s foray into expanded instant replay review uncovered an entirely new arena for statistical analysis and opened a Pandora’s box for adopting and applying strategy to a part of the game that didn’t even exist prior to 2014. When baseball’s replay committee first considered expanded instant replay, the committee discussed its implementation for “the game-changing play,” with committee member Tony La Russa noting that, “it doesn’t come around all that often.”45 As the 2010 “close call” study and 2014 replay review statistics both confirm, replay will not overturn a call all that often—just once every four games—yet when it does, the positive effect this produces for the benefitting team can be notable, on the order of being associated with 116 additional wins, to 54 losses (WPCT 68.2), as opposed to the additional 53 wins and 108 losses (WPCT 32.9) associated with an unsuccessful replay. With a sample size of 1264 replays, however, significance was diminished by the simple fact that most games in which a team was winning ended up as a win, while most games that a team was already losing ended up as a loss. Replay had an impact on game outcome a minority of the time, and a direct “spicy” impact at a much lower rate.

Whether via manager’s challenge or crew chief initiated review, game outcome correlated with replay result is worse for the replay-loser (affirmed call) and better for the replay-winner (reversed call). The key will continue to be discretion, and reserving challenge usage for situations in which an overturned call is the most likely outcome, which most often occurs during the third inning of a Sunday game on a catch/trap call by the first base umpire.

LINDSAY IMBER is a baseball rules expert and is a member of SABR’s Umpires and Rules Research Committee. She is the founder and chief commissioner of the Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, dedicated to the objective analysis of close and controversial calls in sport with great regard for the rules and spirit of the game.

Notes

1. Ken Davidoff, “MLB to tweak replay system, but managers’ challenges will stay,” New York Post, http://nypost.com/2014/11/21/mlb-to-tweak-replay-system-but-managers-challenges-will-stay/, November 21, 2014 (accessed November 25, 2014).

2. Jack Dickey, “Let’s Review 50 Years of Instant Replay,” TIME, http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/07/lets-review-50-years-of-instant-replay/, December 7, 2013 (accessed November 2, 2014).

3. Chris Erskine, “Tony Verna, TV director who introduced instant replay, dies at 81,” Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/ la-me-tony-verna-20150119-story.html, January 18, 2015 (accessed February 6, 2015).

4. Gary Miles, “The NHL Gives OK to Replays, Reviews to Begin in 1991–92 Season,” Philly.com, http://articles.philly.com/1991-06-25/sports/ 25787282_1_instant-replay-video-replays-nhl-officials, June 25, 1991 (accessed November 6, 2014).

5. Jack Curry, “Baseball to Use Replay Review on Homers,” The New York Times,www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/sports/baseball/ 27replay.html?_r=0, August 26, 2008 (accessed November 8, 2014).

6. “Bill Klem Quotes,” Baseball Almanac, www.baseball-almanac.com/ quotes/quoklem.shtml (accessed November 25, 2014).

7. Reid Forgrave, “Human element the heart of baseball,” FOX Sports, www.foxsports.com/mlb/story/Baseball-replay-expansion-winter-meetings-heart-of-the-game-120111, May 28, 2014 (accessed January 7, 2015).

8. Cork Gaines, “MLB Games Are Taking Longer Than Ever And The New Replay System Is Making It Worse,” Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/mlb-games-length-instant-replay-system-2014-4, April 4, 2014 (accessed January 7, 2015).

9. “Marlins’ ‘Replay’ Protest Denied,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1999.

10. Associated Press, “MLB approves replay in series that start Thursday,” ESPN, http://articles.philly.com/1991-06-25/sports/25787282_1_ instant-replay-video-replays-nhl-officials, August 27, 2008 (accessed November 8, 2014).

11. Major League Baseball, 2014 Umpire Media Guide, Ed. Michael Teevan and Donald Muller, 90.

12. “AFL Instant Replay: 20% of Challenged Calls Overturned,” Close Call Sports/Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, www.closecallsports.com/2013/11/afl-instant-replay-20-of-challenged.html, November 10, 2013 (accessed November 10, 2014).

13. T.J. Quinn and Willie Weinbaum, “Study shows 1 in 5 close calls wrong,” ESPN, http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=5464015, August 16, 2010 (accessed November 10, 2014).

14. Gil Imber, “Stats Prove MLB Umpires Call 99.5 Percent of Plays Correctly,” Bleacher Report, http://bleacherreport.com/articles/ 911552-defining-the-human-element-mlb-umpires-call-995-of- plays-correctly, October 26, 2011 (accessed November 10, 2014).

15. Paul Hagen, “Expanded replay approved, to begin this season,” MLB.com, http://m.mlb.com/news/article/66737912/mlb-approves-expanded-instant-replay-beginning-with-2014-season, January 16, 2014 (accessed November 15, 2014).

16. “Confirmed: MLB Hires 7 New Umpires to Full-Time Staff,” Close Call Sports/Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, www.closecallsports.com/2014/01/mlb-hires-umpires-baker-blaser-rackley.html, January 14, 2014 (accessed November 15, 2014).

17. Ben Walker, “Replay wizards becoming key positions on MLB teams,” Yahoo! Sports, www.closecallsports.com/2014/01/mlb-hires-umpires-baker-blaser-rackley.html, March 21, 2014 (accessed November 15, 2014).

18. Ken Fidlin, “Blue Jays’ intrasquad game a fine warmup,” Toronto Sun, www.torontosun.com/2014/02/25/blue-jays-intrasquad-game-a-fine-warmup, February 25, 2014 (accessed January 8, 2015).

19. Chris Haft, “Bochy loses challenge, then key opportunity,” MLB.com, http://m.mlb.com/news/article/70668478/the-d-backs-scored-a-run-after-a-call-at-first-was-upheld-after-a-giants-challenge, April 2, 2014 (accessed November 16, 2014).

20. David Brown, “Two replay reviews confirm Indians triple play against Dodgers,” Yahoo! Sports, http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/big-league-stew/two-replay-reviews-confirm-indians-triple-play-against-dodgers- 144150176.html, July 2, 2014 (accessed November 18, 2014).

21. Steve Gilbert, “Australia series to skip new replay system,” MLB.com, http://m.dbacks.mlb.com/news/article/69150110/australia-series-to-skip-new-replay-system, March 11, 2014 (accessed November 18, 2014).

22. Gil Imber, “Umpire Ejection Fantasy League Portal: Historical Data,” Close Call Sports, http://portal.closecallsports.com/historical-data (accessed November 20, 2014).

23. Although some sources indicate 1275 total replays, one of these plays was not reviewable. On September 20, during the sixth inning of the Tigers-Royals game, the Royals had runners on second and third with one out. The batter hit a line drive that was caught on the fly by Detroit’s second baseman, who threw wildly past second base and into left field. By the end of this play, the Royals baserunner from third base had scored and the runner from second stood at third. Detroit subsequently appealed that the runner from third base failed to timely tag up and, after umpires signaled the runner safe, Detroit attempted to challenge the play. The umpires donned the replay headsets to New York, but were told the play was not reviewable and reconvened on the infield to discuss the sequence amongst themselves, the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, Kauffman Stadium’s “Crown Vision” video board displayed its own replays of the contentious play, pursuant to MLB’s replay protocol for in-Stadium video. At least one report states that one of the umpires saw the replays on Crown Vision and elected to reverse the call based on this unauthorized video review, which I have not considered an official review—thus the 1274 vs. 1275 discrepancy. For more information, please see “Appeals: The Legalese of Reviewable Base Touching,” Close Call Sports/Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, www.closecallsports.com/ 2014/09/appeals-legalize-of-reviewable-base.html, September 20, 2014 (accessed February 8, 2015).

24. 2428 games / 601 overturned calls = 4.04 games per overturned call. This is very similar to ESPN’s 2010 data referenced in endnotes #13 and 14: 20% of 1.3 calls per game were missed, or 0.26 missed calls per game, which is the equivalent of approximately one missed call for every four games played.

25. 601 overturned calls / 1264 reviews = 47.5% overturn rate; the team average 20 overturned calls / 42 average reviews = 47.6% overturned.

26. “MLB Ejection & Replay Stats: 2014 Season Sabermetrics,” Close Call Sports/Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, www.closecallsports.com/2014/ 09/mlb-ejection-replay-stats-2014-season.html, September 30, 2014 (accessed November 20, 2014).

27. 1B Umpires: 249 affirmed calls/556 replays = .448. 2B Umpires: 173 affirmed calls/349 replays = .496. 3B: 80 affirmed calls/134 replays = .403. HP: 167 affirmed calls/225 replays = .742.

28. Safe/Out: 451 affirmed/954 replays = .473 RAP. HR/Not HR: 71/97 = .732. Rule 7.13: 79/92 = .859. HBP/Foul: 24/46 = .522. Catch/Trap: 5/21 = .238. Fair/Foul: 14/21 = .667. Catch/No-Catch: 3/9 = .333. Ground Rule/Not HR Boundary: 6/9 = .667. Base Touch: 4/5 = .800. Other Fan Interference: 1/4 = .225. Time Play: 2/3 = .667…

29. “MLB Hires Tripp Gibson, Mark Ripperger, Will Little,” Close Call Sports/ Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, www.closecallsports.com/2015/01/ mlb-hires-hw-grads-tripp-gibson-and.html, January 11, 2015 (accessed January 12, 2015).

30. “Report: Four first-time Series umps,” The Associated Press & ESPN, http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2014/story/_/id/11715511/ four-umpires-get-first-world-series-call, October 17, 2014 (accessed January 12, 2015).

31. W/L pre-of 241-260-162 became a W/L final of 295-368, or .445 winning average. The added 53 wins and 108 losses produced a winning average of just .329.

32. “Replay Impacts,” ReplayOMeter, www.replayometer.com/impacts (accessed January 12, 2015).

33. “FAQ,” ReplayOMeter, www.replayometer.com/faq (accessed January 12, 2015).

34. “Tigers @ Rays,” MLB Advanced Media, http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/ gameday/index.jsp?gid=2014_08_19_detmlb_tbamlb_1&mode=plays, August 19, 2014 (accessed January 14, 2015).

35. For innings #1-3, 200 overturned calls/342 replays = .585. For innings #4-6, 199 overturned calls/401 replays = .496. For innings #7+, 202 overturned calls/521 replays = .388.

36. For innings #1-3, 187 overturned calls/275 replays = .680. For innings #4-6, 184 overturned calls/340 replays = .541. For innings #7+, 185 overturned calls/445 replays = .416.

37. Sunday: 102/179 = .570. Monday: 54/119 = .454. Tuesday: 69/141 = .489. Wednesday: 83/164 = .506. Thursday: 59/114 = .518. Friday: 88/160 = .550. Saturday: 99/176 = .563.

38. “Replays by Month,” ReplayOMeter, www.replayometer.com/months (accessed January 12, 2015).

39. “Lighting for High Speed,” Love High Speed, www.lovehighspeed.com/ lighting-for-high-speed/ (accessed November 25, 2014).

40. Rick Hummel, “La Russa says expanded replay is ‘remarkably effective,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/ la-russa-says-expanded-replay-is-remarkably-effective/article_ d4c4d76e-08c0-5188-aae1-e0a5affa51b8.html, April 27, 2014 (accessed November 20, 2014).

41. 601 overturned / 1264 total calls = .475 TSP.

42. Derrick Goold, “Dodgers drub Cards, Lynn,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/cardinal-beat/dodgers-drub-cards-lynn/article_d3968561-e404-5f03-8de1-7efdcf241657.html, June 28, 2014 (accessed January 14, 2015).

43. Tom Gatto, “MLB says it wants faster games; here’s what it can do,” The Sporting News, www.sportingnews.com/mlb/story/2014-09-23/ bud-selig-pace-of-game-baseball-mlb-long-games-3-hours-replay, September 23, 2014 (accessed November 20, 2014).

44. Gil Imber, “Umpire Ejection Fantasy League Portal: Historical Data,” Close Call Sports, http://portal.closecallsports.com/historical-data (accessed November 20, 2014).

45. Tyler Kepner, “Baseball’s Expanded Replay Adds to Managerial Strategy,” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/sports/baseball/ major-league-baseball-adopts-expanded-video-review.html?_r=0, January 16, 2014 (accessed November 20, 2014).

According to the official averages reported in the November 28, 1912, issue of The Sporting News, Heinie Zimmerman won the 1912 National League batting championship with a .372 average and the home run title with 14.1 Five weeks later, The Sporting News reported that—according to the research of baseball writer Ernie Lanigan—Zimmerman also had the most RBIs (98).2,3 Having topped the league in all three categories, Zimmerman won the Triple Crown.4,5

Table 1: Triple Crown Winners: Batting, according to MLB.com (accessed January 12, 2015)

Notes: (1) According to the Elias Sports Bureau—the official statistician of Major League Baseball—Ty Cobb’s Batting Average was .376 in 1909 and Lou Gehrig had 166 Runs Batted In in 1934. (2) According to several sources, Ty Cobb had 107 Runs Batted In in 1909.

Table 3: Unofficial 1912 NL RBI Leaders, according to the present research

Table 4: NL Batting Leaders for 1912, as presented on Retrosheet (accessed January 12, 2015)

HERM KRABBENHOFT, a SABR member since 1981, is a retired research chemist. His baseball research has focused on ultimate grand slam home runs, leadoff batters, triple plays, the uniform numbers of Detroit Tigers, and consecutive games streaks for scoring runs and batting in runs—which requires having accurate game-by-game runs and RBI statistics—which requires correcting the runs and RBI errors in baseball’s official records. He proudly dedicates this article to Seymour Siwoff, the editor since 1953 of “The Little Red Book of Baseball” and since 1972 its renamed successor “The (Elias) Book of Baseball Records.” Thanks, Seymour!

Acknowledgments

With tremendous gratitude I gratefully thank the following people for the fantastic help and cooperation they have provided to me in this research endeavor: Steve Boren, Keith Carlson, Dave Newman, Pete Palmer, Gary Stone, Dixie Tourangeau, and Dave Smith and Tom Ruane and their fellow Retrosheet volunteers.

Notes

1. “National League Batting Averages For 1912 Season,” The Sporting News, November 28, 1912, 2.

2. “Hitting in a Pinch,” The Sporting News, January 2, 1913, 5.

3. Fred Lieb, “Ernie Lanigan, Patron Saint of SABR,” The Baseball Research Journal, Volume 2 (1973), 29. See also: Fred Lieb, “Ernie Lanigan,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org website. Lieb wrote, “[Lanigan’s] big gift to the field of baseball statistics is the important Runs Batted In (RBI) column of today.”

4. It is pointed out that the term “Triple Crown” had not yet been used in baseball when Zimmerman achieved the feat. According to The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the first use of the term “Triple Crown” in baseball was on page five of the July 9, 1936, issue of The Sporting News: “Gehrig insists that he will win the Triple Crown again…—batting, homers, and runs driven in.” See: Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, Third Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York (2009), 891.

5. “Runs Batted In” was not an officially-recorded statistic when Zimmerman accomplished his Triple Crown achievement. RBIs became an official stat in 1920. From 1907 through 1919, RBIs were tracked unofficially by Ernie Lanigan, his RBI numbers having been reported annually in various publications, such as The Sporting News, Baseball Magazine, and Sporting Life.

6. Hy Turkin and S.C. Thompson, The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, A.S. Barnes and Company, New York (1951). While no specific list of Triple Crown winners is given, the “League Leaders” section shows that for 1912 Heinie Zimmerman led the National League in batting (.372), home runs (14), and runs batted in (106). Each of Zimmerman’s league-leading Triple Crown numbers was repeated in each subsequent edition through the final edition in 1979. The “106” RBIs shown for Zimmerman does not agree with the “98” RBIs first reported in The Sporting News (note 2) and subsequently given in notes 7 and 8. I should add that I have not been able to find out the original source of the “106” RBIs; I have also not seen the “106” RBIs mentioned anywhere besides The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball.

7. Leonard Gettelson, One For The Book, The Sporting News (Charles C. Spink & Son), St. Louis (1956), 78. The title of the book was changed to Baseball Record Book in 1972, to Official Baseball Record Book in 1973, and to The Complete Baseball Record Book in 1990. Zimmerman is included in the list of Triple Crown winners in each edition through 2004; Zimmerman was not included in the list of Triple Crown winners in the final four editions, 2005–08.

8. Seymour Siwoff, The Little Red Book of Major League Baseball, Al Munro Elias Baseball Bureau, Inc., New York (1957), 19. The title of the book was changed to The Book of Baseball Records in 1972, in which the list of Triple Crown winners was discontinued and in which only official RBI stats (i.e., those from 1920 forward) were included.

9. The list of “Triple Crown Winners: Batting” given on MLB.com can be accessed as follows: (a) in the “Search” field, type “Triple Crown Winners” and click enter; (b) click on the second link—“Rare Feats | MLB.com: History…Triple Crown Winners: Batting.”

10. Seymour Siwoff, The Elias Book of Baseball Records, Elias Sports Bureau, New York (2014), 378, 379, 382, 383, 394, 395.

11. David S. Neft (Director of Research, Information Concepts Incorporated), Lee Allen (Historian, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum), and Robert Markel (Executive Editor, Macmillan Company), The Baseball Encyclopedia, Macmillan, New York (1969).

12. John Thorn, Phil Birnbaum, Bill Deane, Total Baseball, Sport Media Publishing, New York, Eighth Edition (2004).

13. Gary Gillette, Pete Palmer, The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Sterling Publishing, New York, Fifth Edition (2008).

14. Baseball-Reference.com—accessed on January 12, 2015.

15. Neft, The Baseball Encyclopedia.

16. Herm Krabbenhoft, “RBI records 1891–1919,” email to Pete Palmer (March 18, 2014 at 1:48 pm) in which I wrote, “Subsequent to Big-Mac, you used Neft’s RBI numbers—exclusively (i.e., none of Lanigan’s RBI numbers)—in your baseball statistics data base. Subsequently, your baseball statistics data base has been used in your BB Encyclopedias (Total Baseball with John Thorn and The ESPN BB Encyclopedia with Gary Gillette) as well as some/all Internet sites presenting RBI stats—e.g., Baseball-Reference. So, all of the 1891–1919 RBI numbers out there now are from your baseball statistics database and ultimately from Neft’s RBI numbers in the first Big-Mac.” On March 18, 2014 at 5:42 pm, Palmer replied to me via email, “I have no argument with anything you said.” In a subsequent email to me (January 9, 2015) Palmer wrote that MLB.com obtained his data base of baseball statistics “probably in 2001 or so” and that “MLB has not done much with the data besides adding in current years.” Along that line, in an email (July 16, 2012) to me from John Thorn (the Official Historian of Major League Baseball) about Hank Greenberg’s 1935 RBI stats, John wrote: “Herm I have no sway with the mlb.com data. It is Pete Palmer’s old Total Baseball database, with some tinkering by unknown hands.”

17. Herm Krabbenhoft, “RBIs before 1920,” retrolist@yahoo.com, post submitted March 29, 2014 at 12:57PM, with courtesy copies to John Thorn and David S. Neft. Here is one of the key items I expressed: “David S. Neft was the third person to compile RBI stats for the seasons before 1920. According to the presentation given in The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz, Neft recruited people (many of them being college students) to go through game accounts in microfilmed newspapers and generate DBD RBI numbers for those players who played from 1891 through 1919. The result of Neft’s research project was the first edition of Big-Mac—which utilized Tattersall’s RBI numbers for the 1876–1890 seasons, Neft’s RBI numbers for the 1891–1919 seasons, and the official DBD RBI numbers for the 1920–68 seasons. Neft’s RBI numbers for the 1891–1919 seasons—as well as Tattersall’s RBI numbers for the 1876–90 seasons—were subsequently incorporated by Pete Palmer into his data base of baseball statistics. Palmer’s data base of baseball statistics—including Neft’s RBI numbers for the 1891–1919 seasons and Tattersall’s RBI numbers for the 1876-1890 seasons—has been utilized extensively in both printed encyclopedias (e.g., Total Baseball and The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia) and on Internet websites (e.g., Baseball-Reference.com and MLB.com). It is important to point out that Neft’s RBI numbers for the players from the 1891–1904 seasons are supported by DBD records (‘ICI sheets’) which are available on microfilm at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library. Regrettably, Neft’s DBD RBI records for the players from the 1905–1919 seasons are no longer available.” On March 29, 2014 at 1:09PM, Thorn responded via an email to me, “Fine summation, Herm. I have no quibbles with any of it.” On March 29, 2014 at 4:37PM, Neft replied via an email to me, “Thanks for sending this to me. As far as I know this is an accurate statement of the history of this research.”

18. “Hitting in a Pinch,” The Sporting News, January 2, 1913, 5.

19. Neft, The Baseball Encyclopedia.

20. In a telephone conversation with Mr. Neft on June 25, 1913, I asked him about there not being any game-by-game RBI data for the 1905–1919 seasons. Mr. Neft told me that the intention was to donate the original 1905–1919 files to the Baseball Hall of Fame, as had been done with the 1891–1904 files. In the meantime, however, the 1905–1919 files were stored in a warehouse, which had a fire and apparently all of the 1905–1919 files were destroyed. I also asked Mr. Neft if there were any back-up files or printouts for the 1905–1919 files. He said that he was not aware of any. I then asked, “So, does that mean there are no data available to support your RBI numbers for the 1905–1919 seasons?” Mr. Neft answered, “That appears to be so.”

21. Krabbenhoft, “Accurate RBI Records for the Players of the Deadball Era: Part 1—The Players on the 1906 Detroit Tigers,” The Inside Game, Volume XIV, Number 1 (February 2014), 1.

22. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Accurate RBI Records for the Players of the Deadball Era: Part 2—The Players on the 1906 Detroit Tigers,” The Inside Game, Volume XIV, Number 3 (June 2014), 4.

23. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Accurate RBI Numbers for the Players of the Deadball Era: Part 3—The Players on the 1919 Detroit Tigers,” The Inside Game, Volume XIV, Number 4 (September 2014), 11.

24. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Accurate RBI Records for the Players of the Deadball Era: Part 4—The Players on the 1912 Braves, Cubs, Giants, and Pirates,” The Inside Game, Volume XV, Number 1 (February 2015), 5.

25. Herm Krabbenhoft, “The Definitive Resolution of the 1912 NL Triple Crown Discrepancy,” Research Presentation given at the annual Society for American Baseball Research Convention, Houston, TX, August 2, 2014.

26. Krabbenhoft, The Inside Game, Volume XV, Number 1. The Appendices to this article (available as a “Supplement” on SABR.org in the Deadball Era Committee Newsletters) provide (a) complete details for each run scored by each team: the identity of the player who scored the run, the run-scoring event, and the identity of the player who completed his plate appearance during the run-scoring event; (b) a game-by-game log of each run scored and each run batted in by each player on each team; (c) the text descriptions from multiple independent newspaper accounts for each run-scoring event in which a fielding error was involved for each of the top-six RBI accumulators.

27. For the text descriptions given in the various newspaper accounts for each of the 756 runs scored by the Chicago Cubs in 1912, see: Herm Krabbenhoft, “Accurate Runs-Scored Statistics for the Players on the 1912 Chicago Cubs,” The Inside Game, Volume XIV, Number 6 (December 2014), 1.

28. Krabbenhoft, The Inside Game, Volume XV, Number 1. Krabbenhoft, The Inside Game, Volume XIV, Number 6.

29. Krabbenhoft, The Inside Game, Volume XIV, Number 1–4, Volume XV, Number 1. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Consecutive Games RUN Batted In (CGRUNBI) Streaks for Players on the Detroit Tigers—1914–1919,” Research Presentation given at the annual Retrosheet Meeting, Houston, TX, July 31, 2014.

30. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Accurate RBI Numbers for the Players on the 1895 Philadelphia Phillies,” Research Presentation given at the annual SABR Baseball Records Committee Meeting, Houston, TX, August 2, 2014.

31. Herm Krabbenhoft, email to Pete Palmer, November 2, 2014.

32. Pete Palmer, email to Herm Krabbenhoft, November 8, 2014.

33. Retrosheet’s semi-annual release on December 14, 2014, includes the runs-batted-in information from Pete Palmer’s updated data base of baseball statistics—which are in 100% agreement with my RBI numbers for all of the players on the 1912 Braves, Cubs, Giants, and Pirates.

34. Baseball-Reference.com, accessed on February 22, 2015.

35. The final draft of this manuscript was provided to Cory Schwartz (Vice President of MLB.com with the responsibility for the statistics presented on MLB.com).

36. As these conclusions are incorporated across baseball, biographical articles on Heinie Zimmerman will need to be updated as well. For example, the SABR BioProject entry on Zimmerman read as of February 22, 2015, “It was believed at the time that Zimmerman also paced the circuit with 103 RBIs, which would have made him the National League’s first Triple Crown winner since…1894. Research conducted a half-century later, however, determined that his actual RBI total was only 99, ranking third behind Honus Wagner (102) and Bill Sweeney (100).”

Baseball pitching is an intricate athletic skill requiring a complex and systematic activation of body segments to create maximal velocity at the distal aspect of the throwing arm.1 The pitching motion can be divided into six phases: (a) wind-up, (b) stride, (c) arm cocking, (d) acceleration, (e) deceleration and (f) follow-through.2 These phases are performed sequentially, and result in mechanical energy transfer through the segments of the kinetic chain, from the lower extremity to the throwing arm.3,4,5

Proper mechanics are crucial for injury prevention and facilitate consistent, successful pitching performance. Previous research suggests that erratic throwing mechanics decrease pitching performance and increase the likelihood of injury.6 Studies that have investigated the pelvic region typically focus on mechanics during the later stages of the pitching sequence.7,8,9,10

Chaudhari et al. investigated the relationship between pelvic motion in the sagittal plane (Fig. 1) during transition from two-foot to single-foot stance and pitcher’s total innings pitched, batting average against, strikeouts per inning, walks per inning, walks plus hits per innings pitched, and days missed due to injury.11,12 These researchers observed that pitchers who exhibited less pelvic motion in the sagittal plane performed better through the course of a season and missed less time due to injury, indicating that pelvic mechanics are crucial to overall performance.13,14 Moreover, a key benefit to the pelvic motion assessment utilized by Chaudhari et al. is the practicality of its implication as a field test to be utilized by coaches who aim to continuously improve pitcher longevity and throwing performance.15,16 While Chaudhari et al. observed an association between pelvic motion in the sagittal plane and performance over the length of a season, the effect of pelvic motion on the pitch itself has not been addressed.17,18 Additionally, while anterior-posterior (AP, Fig. 1) tilt is important, it is only one component of total hip motion. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the association between a field test assessment of biplanar pelvic motion (AP and medial-lateral (ML, Fig. 1) and hand velocity during the execution of a maximum effort fastball pitch.

Figure 1. Directional terminology

Methods

Participants

Nine National Club Baseball Association pitchers from a university club baseball team served as participants (Age: 21.33 ± 2.45 yrs; Height: 1.84 ± 0.04 m; Mass: 86.13 ± 18.05 kg; Arm Length: 59.75 ± 3.01). Pitchers were free from recent injury and had at least five years of competitive pitching experience.

Data Collection and Analyses

A custom-built pitching mound was constructed to meet National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) baseball regulations. From the mound, pitches were thrown into a net from a distance of 18.4 m. A rectangular target (0.64 m high x 0.38 m wide), with a small square in the middle, was secured onto the net.

Three-dimensional kinematic data were captured using a motion analysis system (Vicon Systems, Centennial, Colorado). Seven Vicon T-20 cameras sampling at 300 Hz tracked retro-reflective markers placed directly on the skin in accordance with the full-body plug-in gait model provided by Vicon. Three-dimensional raw position data were processed using Vicon Nexus software (Vicon Systems, Centennial, Colorado). Gaps were interpolated and data were smoothed using Woltring’s quintic spline routine.19

The order of the pelvic motion test and the hand velocity test was randomized. All participants performed both tests. Prior to testing, participants were allowed unrestricted time to warm up (~10–15 min) as they normally would before a practice or game.

Pelvic Motion Test. Participants performed a modified pelvic motion test where they transitioned from a two-foot to one-foot stance by lifting and holding their kicking leg approximately 10cm above the ground (Fig. 2). Participants repeated this test five times. Using bilateral ASIS and PSIS markers, Nexus defined the pelvis segment with an axis of rotation located at the midpoint between the two ASIS markers. Three-dimensional angular positions were computed for the pelvis segment by Nexus and exported into Excel. For each trial, AP and ML ranges were computed in Excel by taking the difference between the maximum and minimum values for angular position.

Figure 2. Participant performing the Pelvic Motion Test

Pitching Hand Velocity Test. In addition to the warm-up, the participants performed 5 to 10 submaximal pitches to become comfortable pitching with reflective markers attached to their bodies. Once comfortable, pitchers were instructed to throw fastball pitches as fast and as accurate as possible from the wind-up position. They were asked to aim for a small square suspended in the middle of the target box. Participants repeated the pitching test for a total of 5 pitches. A 30–60 second rest was allowed between pitches. Three-dimensional position data for the throwing hand (third metacarpal) were differentiated with respect to time in Nexus, resulting in three-dimensional linear velocities. The three-dimensional velocity data were then exported into Excel and composed into a single, resultant vector for each time point using the Pythagorean Theorem. The maximum value for resultant velocity was selected and normalized to body weight (N) and arm length (cm).

Statistical Analyses

For each participant, five successful pitching trials and five pelvic motion trials were used to compute mean peak pitch velocity and mean pelvic tilt in the frontal and sagittal planes. Prior to statistical analysis, distribution of the data set was assessed using the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality. The Shapiro-Wilk test on mean hand velocity and mean pelvic tilt (AP/ML) revealed no significant deviation from normality. Empirical correlation coefficients (θ_o) between peak pitch velocity and pelvic tilt (AP/ML) were then computed using the Pearson’s r method. The data sets (AP/Hand Velocity, ML/Hand Velocity) were then resampled using the Jackknife procedure in which single data pairs were excluded sequentially resulting in n estimates for Pearson’s r.20 The mean of resampled correlation coefficients served as an estimate of the true sample correlation (θ ^).21 The distributions of Pearson’s r estimates obtained from resampling were assessed using the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality. The Shapiro-Wilk test on the Pearson’s r estimates revealed no significant deviation from normality. Variances of the Pearson’s r estimates were then estimated using Equation 1.22

Estimated 95 percent confidence intervals for the association between hand velocity and pelvic tilt (AP and ML) were then computed using Equation 2.23

Reliability

Coefficients of variation (C_v=100 ∙ standard deviation/mean) on the sample and inter-trial variability of each participant were computed for hand velocity and both pelvic motion variables.

Results

Mean hand velocity was 8.99 ± 2.27 m∙s-1 ∙ N-1∙cm-1 (C_v = 25%),

Mean AP tilt was 4.99 ± 2.56° (C_v = 51%), and

Mean ML tilt was 8.27 ± 1.79° (C_v = 22%).

Coefficients of variation assessing inter-trial variability ranged from 1% to 4% for hand velocity, 16% to 70% for AP tilt, and 3% to 38% for ML tilt.

Table 1. 

Results of the Jackknife estimation of correlation coefficients are presented in Table 1. Based on the estimated 95 percent confidence intervals, we observed a negative correlation between anterior-posterior pelvic tilt and hand velocity (Figure 3) and a positive correlation between ML pelvic tilt and hand velocity (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Ninety-five percent Confidence intervals estimating the correlation co-efficient (Pearson’s r) between hand velocity and pelvic motion in the AP: anterior-posterior (-0.42 < r < -0.69) and ML: medial-lateral (0.18 < r < 0.66) directions

Discussion

We observed a median AP tilt of 7.89°, while Chaudhari et al. reported a median tilt of 7°.24 This is quite similar given the magnitude of movement variability in the pelvic region and the subtle modifications to the pelvic motion test used in the present study. In general, our results support the assertion that the pelvic region is a crucial component of the kinetic chain as evidenced by the plane-specific relationships reported in Figure 3.

Optimizing control and position of the pelvis may contribute to pitching performance and longevity as evidenced by a significant increase in total innings pitched, a significant decrease in time missed due to injury, walks plus hits per innings pitched, as well as improvements in opponents’ batting average, strikeouts per inning, and walks per inning.25,26 Results of this study support this view and, although our predicted confidence intervals are descriptive and should be considered preliminary, they suggest a positive correlation exists between ML tilt and hand velocity, and the opposite for AP tilt.

Conclusion

While preliminary, this study does provide evidence that the pelvis plays an important role in pitching mechanics and performance. The pelvic motion assessment utilized in the present study is a practical field test accessible to coaches aiming to improve upon the longevity and performance of the pitching staff. Also, pitchers and coaches could implement directed practice focusing on pelvic position and motion by providing feedback regarding pelvic position, practicing in front of a mirror, or utilizing video recordings of pelvic motion. n

WILL HORLBECK is a Certified Athletic Trainer and a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. He completed his Master’s Degree in health and human movement at Utah State University in 2014. He is currently working as a personal trainer in Boulder, Colorado, while studying at the University of Colorado at Boulder in pursuit of his physician’s assistant certification.

TALIN LOUDER is a doctoral student at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. He is studying in the Pathokinesiology specialization of the Disability Disciplines PhD program and works as a Presidential Doctoral Research Fellow in Dr. Eadric Bressel’s biomechanics laboratory. His research interests are in sport and clinical biomechanics.

EADRIC BRESSEL is a professor in the health, physical education, and recreation department at Utah State University. He received his B.S. (1994) and M.S. (1995) in exercise science from California State University, Fresno, and he received his EdD in biomechanics from the University of Northern Colorado (1999). His research examines neuromechanical adaptations to therapeutic exercise, anatomical and biomechanical determinants of Achilles tendon rupture, and neuromechanics of cycling. He is a member of the American and International Societies of Biomechanics and of the American College of Sports Medicine.

REFERENCES

Chaudhari, Ajit MW, Christopher S. McKenzie, James R. Borchers, and Thomas M. Best. “Lumbopelvic Control and Pitching Performance of Professional Baseball Pitchers.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 25, no. 8 (2011): 2127–32.

Chaudhari, Ajit MW, Christopher S. McKenzie, Xueliang Pan, and James A. Oñate. “Lumbopelvic Control and Days Missed Because of Injury in Professional Baseball Pitchers.” The American Journal of Sports Medicine (2014): 0363546514545861.

Fleisig, Glenn S., The Biomechanics of Baseball Pitching (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL (1994).

Fleisig, Glenn S., James R. Andrews, Charles J. Dillman, and Rafael F. Escamilla. “Kinetics of Baseball Pitching with Implications about Injury Mechanisms.” The American Journal of Sports Medicine 23, no. 2 (1995): 233–39.

Fleisig, Glenn S., Steve W. Barrentine, Nigel Zheng, Rafael F. Escamilla, and James R. Andrews. “Kinematic and Kinetic Comparison of Baseball Pitching Among Various Levels of Development.” Journal of Biomechanics 32, no. 12 (1999): 1371–75.

Seroyer, Shane T., Shane J. Nho, Bernard R. Bach, Charles A. Bush-Joseph, Gregory P. Nicholson, and Anthony A. Romeo. “The Kinetic Chain in Overhand Pitching: Its Potential Role for Performance Enhancement and Injury Prevention.” Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach 2, no. 2 (2010): 135–46.

Stodden, David F., Glenn S. Fleisig, Scott P. McLean, and James R. Andrews. “Relationship of Biomechanical Factors to Baseball Pitching Velocity: Within Pitcher Variation.” J Appl Biomech 21, no. 1 (2005): 44-56.

Stodden, David F., Glenn S. Fleisig, Scott P. McLean, Stephen L. Lyman, and James R. Andrews. “Relationship of Pelvis and Upper Torso Kinematics to Pitched Baseball Velocity.” Journal of Applied Biomechanics 17, no. 2 (2001): 164–72.

Wight, Jeff, James Richards, and Susan Hall. “Baseball: Influence of Pelvis Rotation Styles on Baseball Pitching Mechanics.” Sports Biomechanics 3, no. 1 (2004): 67–84.

Wilk, Kevin E., Keith Meister, Glenn Fleisig, and James R. Andrews. “Biomechanics of the Overhead Throwing Motion.” Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Review 8, no. 2 (2000): 124–34.

Woltring, Herman J. “A FORTRAN Package for Generalized, Cross-Validatory Spline Smoothing and Differentiation.” Advances in Engineering Software (1978) 8, no. 2 (1986): 104–13.

Zhou, Xiao-Hua, Nancy A. Obuchowski, and Donna K. McClish. Statistical Methods in Diagnostic Medicine. Vol. 712. John Wiley & Sons, 2011. 

Notes

1. Kevin Wilk, “Biomechanics of the overhead throwing motion.” Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Review 8, no. 2 (2000): 124–34.

2. Glenn Fleisig. “Kinetics of baseball pitching with implications about injury mechanisms.” The American Journal of Sports Medicine 23, no. 2 (1995): 233–39.

3. Ajit Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and pitching performance of professional baseball pitchers.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 25, no. 8 (2011): 2127–32.

4. Ajit Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and days missed because of injury in professional baseball pitchers.” The American Journal of Sports Medicine (2014): 2734–40.

5. Shane Seroyer. “The kinetic chain in overhand pitching: its potential role for performance enhancement and injury prevention.” Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach 2, no. 2 (2010): 135–46.

6. Glenn Fleisig. “Kinematic and kinetic comparison of baseball pitching among various levels of development.” Journal of Biomechanics 32, no. 12 (1999): 1371–5.

7. Glenn Fleisig. The biomechanics of baseball pitching (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL (1994).

8. David Stodden. “Relationship of pelvis and upper torso kinematics to pitched baseball velocity.” Journal of Applied Biomechanics 17, no. 2 (2001): 164–72.

9. David Stodden. “Relationship of biomechanical factors to baseball pitching velocity: within pitcher variation.” Journal of Applied Biomechanics 21, no. 1 (2005): 44–56.

10. Jeff Wight. “Baseball: Influence of pelvis rotation styles on baseball pitching mechanics.” Sports Biomechanics 3, no. 1 (2004): 67–84.

11. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and pitching performance of professional baseball pitchers.” 2127–32.

12. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and days missed because of injury in professional baseball pitchers.” 2734–40.

13. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and pitching performance of professional baseball pitchers.” 2127–32.

14. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and days missed because of injury in professional baseball pitchers.” 2734–40.

15. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and pitching performance of professional baseball pitchers.” 2127–32.

16. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and days missed because of injury in professional baseball pitchers.” 2734–40.

17. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and pitching performance of professional baseball pitchers.” 2127–32.

18. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and days missed because of injury in professional baseball pitchers.” 2734–40.

19. Herman Woltring. “A FORTRAN package for generalized, cross-validatory spline smoothing and differentiation.” Advances in Engineering Software (1978) 8, no. 2 (1986): 104–13.

20. Xiao-Hua Zhou. Statistical Methods in Diagnostic Medicine. Vol. 712. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and pitching performance of professional baseball pitchers.” 2127–32.

25. Ibid.

26. Chaudhari. “Lumbopelvic control and days missed because of injury in professional baseball pitchers.” 2734–40.

Former Nebraska State League president Albert Felt umpired the September 13, 1915, contest between his fellow inmates at Leavenworth Prison and the Kansas City Packers when Federal League umpires missed their train.

In one way, everyone on the diamond was a prisoner. The nine Leavenworth federal prison convicts were obvious; those wearing the blue and gray road uniforms of the Kansas City Packers only slightly less so. The Packers were members of the Federal League, a 1914–15 major league peopled by players trying to escape from their own “prison”—organized baseball’s reserve clause which bound players to teams throughout their careers. It was part baseball, part labor action.

On an 89-degree September 13, 1915, the Packers became the first major league team to play a squad of convicts inside a prison.1 It also was near the end of the team’s and league’s existence. Bankrupt and unable to win its lawsuit against the National and American Leagues that would have ensured parity, the Federal League would fold after the season as would its Kansas City franchise, also bankrupt.

The prison team, called the White Sox, would be more stable. It was an all star team of white players that would last until 1933 when the prison integrated the institution’s ball clubs.2

The prisoners were ready for the game against the professionals. All 1,500 inmates were in the stands except for eight who were in solitary confinement. Possibly among the solitaries was Robert Stroud, later well known as the Birdman of Alcatraz. Stroud spent most of his prison life locked up in solitary, although the record is silent on the date of the game. Also present at the ballpark that day was the Reverend A. J. Soldan, a Lutheran minister and prison chaplain, whose duties included oversight of the baseball program. Probably there was Dr. Walter Cronkite Sr., prison dentist and future father of the legendary CBS newscaster.3

The crowd seemed awe-struck as they watched the Packers enter the prison’s sally port. The New Era, the prison newspaper, noted:

As the giant Packers rolled in through the Sallyport gate, they sure did look formidable. Each man was about the size of two of ours with arms and legs like centipedes. It was a question of whether they’d come to make a barbeque of the White Sox or trim ’em on the diamond.4

Even Warden Thomas W. Morgan had little faith in his charges’ fortunes when he saw the size of the professionals. As convict umpire Bert Felt passed the warden’s box before the game, Morgan said to him, “Felt, it looks like it’s up to you.”5

The view from center field of the prison ballpark in Leavenworth, Kansas. Leavenworth’s famous Big Top dome is visible in the background.

Bert may have had some experience in affecting outcomes. When he was president of the Nebraska State League, he had been accused of fixing games and inflating players’ batting averages. But those weren’t the reasons he was in Leavenworth. Money disappearing while he was president of a bank in Superior, Nebraska, had forced him to take his baseball role to Kansas.6

Felt became umpire that day when two Federal League officials did not appear. Two days after the game, The New Era said they refused to enter the prison. But on October 1 the newspaper apologized, saying the umpires, Fred Westervelt and William Finneran, had wanted to attend but had not been invited.“They tried to make the train that brought the Packers over and would have been here as spectators if not as umpires had they not been too late. Both umpires wish the statement that they declined to come corrected in The New Era which is most cheerfully done,” the paper reported.7

Actually the size of the Packers was relative, even small by today’s standards. Of the 15 “formidable” men who performed that day for Kansas City, only one was taller than six feet and none weighed as much as 200 pounds. The 15 averaged a bit over 5-foot-8 and 175 pounds. By contrast, the shortest 21st century major leaguers are about 5-foot-8.8

Typical of the prisoners’ size, though, was that of Irish O’Malley, a career convict, who pinch hit that day and in later seasons was the White Sox’ regular catcher. O’Malley was just 5-foot-6 and weighed only 130 pounds. William Basore, the prisoners’ pitcher, was more nearly Packer-sized at 5-foot-8 and 150 pounds.9

Basore was probably living out the dream of every American boy, pitching to a major league baseball team. Unfortunately, his parents and friends back in Neodesha, Kansas, were not on the invitation list. Some 300 local residents along with the major league players’ wives were allowed to watch—although the women were kept outside and could see only through a gate. Most women had been banned from inside since a near riot two summers earlier when a woman entered the prison wearing a slit skirt.10

The Kansas City delegates had arrived at the prison in a special rail car arranged by Phillip J. McCarthy, a Kansas City businessman who also had arranged the game. Known as the city’s “chief goodfellow” to some, McCarthy supported prison charities and getting the Packers together with the White Sox resulted from his efforts.11

Convicts at Leavenworth were there for every conceivable crime including serial killings. But pitcher Basore’s was literally a nut case. A 22-year-old barber who apparently decided he needed more cash flow, Basore began placing ads like this one from the Omaha, Nebraska, World-Herald:

Parcel Post

For Sale—Pecans, by parcel post, prepaid, anywhere; fresh, fine, eighteen pound sack $1 currency.

– Charles Wagner, Kansas City, Kansas, Armour Station

From Omaha, Basore received an order from the Mercantile Protective Bureau, provider of “law and collections, Our Past Record is our Future Guarantee.” He also heard from Dresher the Tailor in Omaha, a dairy farmer at Parsons, Kansas, and Charles O. Follett at Petrolia, Kansas, among others. Unfortunately, the promised pecans were never delivered and that led Francis M. Brady, assistant U.S. attorney, to haul Basore into Federal court. Charged with using the mails to defraud, he was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth.12

Once there he was a model prisoner. When his minister, the Reverend John Hopping of Elk Falls, Kansas, wrote the warden about Basore’s conduct, the prison official replied, “He [Basore] has made an excellent record here and has been in no trouble of any kind since his arrival at the prison…. He is the pitcher for one of our best baseball teams.”13

Basore was a sandlot product, but with promise. In his lone season pitching in prison, he won 7 games, lost 2, and tied 1. In the season’s opener against a Catholic high school team, he struck out 18, including a clean-up hitter named Christ.14

Shortly after pitching against the Packers, Basore went to a regularly scheduled parole hearing, made a strong case and was released after having served less than half his two-year sentence. Once free, he moved to Missouri, continued his career as a barber and operated a small resort.15

While the professionals were facing a sandlot pitcher, the toughness of the audience may have caused concern. Prison baseball was rough. “Do you think it is fair for a man in the bleachers to punch a third baseman in the ribs when he is trying to catch a fly?” asked the sports editor of The New Era after another game. Another Leavenworth prison team found itself on the wrong side of prison “fair play.” It forfeited a game to the Kansas State Penitentiary nine rather than keep looking into the sharp flashes of light reflected from Kansas prison mirrors during the game.16

On that fateful mid-September day of 1915, though, it took little time for the Packers to show which team was made up of professionals and which of convicts. Kansas City second baseman Pep Goodwin led off by bunting safely. Art Krueger followed with a double. And when inning number one had ended, the Packers had scored four runs, two more than they would need all day, as it turned out.17

Newspaper coverage was widespread in the region. What the prison paper called “the crack sportswriters” from Kansas City and Leavenworth accompanied the Packers for the face off.

The Kansas City Star writer used an all-star lineup of prison clichés in his story. “Their Lone Run a Theft,” the headline said of the White Sox’ tally. “Stoves Invade Federal Prison and Within Committed all Known Crimes of Baseball—Krueger Drove One to Freedom—No. 9478 Stayed In,” the sub-head noted. The Star’s box score used no prisoner’s name, only numbers.18

The coverage was of a game that ended about as most had expected. The prisoners were no match for the professionals. Kansas City won 23–1 in 2 hours and 10 minutes, a game long for the time. “I guess we’ll just have to accept that score as part of our punishment,” one unnamed prisoner was quoted as saying.19

Amazingly, Basore pitched all nine innings, giving up 23 hits and 20 earned runs although he shut out the Federals in two innings. Packer George Perring was one of eight Kansas City players to have multiple hits, adding injury to insult by using a bat made from the scaffold at the old Ohio Penitentiary. Even under this uncanny attack, Basore’s earned-run average was better than the only genuine Major League pitcher imprisoned at Leavenworth. Eul Eubanks, who had pitched in two games for the Chicago Cubs, and had an earned run average for his short major league career of 27.00. Eubanks would enter Leavenworth in 1933 for bootlegging, but was transferred to another penitentiary before he had a chance to play baseball for the prison team.20

Basore did field superbly, handling five chances including a pick-off and starting a double play, all without erring. “Basore pitched able, but unlucky ball,” one sports page account said after the game.21

His teammates were less sure of hand, making seven errors and getting just four hits although two of them were doubles. The prisoners’ only run came in the seventh inning. The Leavenworth shortstop singled and went to second when George “Chief” Johnson walked Basore. Johnson’s wild pitch sent the convict runner to third. He then stole home while Drummond Brown was trying to throw Basore out at second.22

The run cost hundreds of prisoners their tobacco hordes. Tobacco was the currency of the prison’s underground economy and most prisoners had bet their team would not score. Scores of sacks of Bull Durham furtively changed hands after the run came home.23

In that dead ball era (the leading home run hitter in the Federal League in 1915, Hal Chase, hit only 17 homers) only one was hit well enough to clear the prison’s 40-foot walls. Art Krueger, the Packer left fielder, drove one of his four hits to freedom. “There was many a spectator who wished he could have been sitting on top of that pill when Art soaked it,” the Leavenworth Times’s reporter wrote.24

Kansas City never let up. Stovall used five pitchers including Johnson with 17 wins and Nick Cullop with 22 and a 2.44 earned-run average. The team was bunting and stealing bases through the ninth inning.25

But not everything went the visitors’ way. The prison team twice reeled off double plays. The right fielder played a line drive carom off the wall and threw out Packer Al Shaw at first base. At least three prisoners were cited by Packer manager George Stovall as good professional prospects—catcher Joe White, first baseman John Gilbert, and center fielder Clarence Gillis. Gilbert claimed professional experience in the International League before going to Leavenworth, but this was a cell house fiction.26

The inmates appeared to appreciate the Packers’ take-no-prisoners approach to the game. The New Era said:

One gratifying feature of the game was that the visitors showed no mercy at any time, starting off with four runs in the first inning, swatting all the balls that came their way and reaching out for any additional sparrows, crows or buzzards that happened to be motoring through the ozone or nearby. When they rolled up seven in the seventh, a great groan shook the bleachers and all bets were off. It was no contest. No man in prison was so little sportsman as to collect wagers on that game.27

Even with the guards sitting among them unarmed, the prisoners behaved flawlessly. Deputy Warden A.J. Renoe called the crowd perfect and said he was well pleased with his charges’ conduct. Packer manager George “Firebrand” Stovall told the Leavenworth Times his team had a “fine experience. I’m in favor of making this an annual event.”28

But it was not to be. Even though the Packers were successful on the field—finishing fourth only five and a half games out of first—the league folded after the season. Its players for the most part returned to the other major leagues and high minors where they had performed before moving to the Federal League.

Stovall did take home a bouquet of flowers grown in prison flower beds. White Sox captain and catcher White presented them to him before the game, while Native American inmates gave a buttonhook to Packer pitcher Chief Johnson, a Nebraska Winnebago tribe member. Between innings, Stovall won prisoners’ respect by chatting and telling them baseball stories. After the game he handed the ball to the groundskeeper, a 15-year convict identified only as “Number 84––”, who quickly stuffed it into his pocket.29

At season’s end, the news got better for the prisoners. The Packers had announced early that they would give their uniforms to the prison team. Several players contributed their gloves, shoes, catcher’s gear, and other needed items. The New Era hailed the gifts in its October 1 edition:

Last Wednesday a shipment of ten pairs of shoes, mask, chest protector, shin guards, three finger mitts and catcher’s gloves arrived from Jack Enzenroth, the Packers’ famous catcher, and Manager Stovall of that team consigned to Joe White…. The goods were parceled out among the boys and all were delighted.30

A few days prior to the arrival White received the following letter from Enzenroth:

I am in receipt of your letter and present for which I thank you very much. You will receive shortly a box of shoes, gloves, etc., which we all hope you will be able to use, and our only regret is that we haven’t more to send. Am sending to you so that you can first pick out what you want and distribute the remainder among your friends.31

While the Packers no doubt would have beaten any team the convicts put together, the prison did not send its best ball players against the professionals. The White Sox were the prison’s white all-stars. Another team made up of black prisoners called the Booker T. Washingtons (Booker T’s) regularly defeated the Sox in intramural play, winning 41 of the 59 games the two clubs played over the years. The Booker T’s also twice won Kansas state independent semipro champ-ionships. In 1922 and 1924 they played the Kansas City Monarchs, losing but making the games competitive. In 1929 the African-American Kansas City Call described them as “one of the strongest colored baseball teams in the west.”32

But there may have been a reason the prison didn’t send the Bookers or an integrated team against the Packers. The New Era, shortly after the Jack Johnson-Jess Willard heavyweight boxing title fight in April 1915, editorialized:

The New Era suggests now this battle between two men of different races has been settled, all future fistic encounters of championship nature be between two men of their own color, thus eliminating the race feeling always attendant upon a white man and a colored man meeting in combat.33

In light of the riots across the county that followed the classic black vs. white boxing match, the prison administration may well have wanted to avoid any chance of a racially-inspired riot within Leavenworth walls. Coincidentally, Johnson would arrive at Leavenworth just a few years later to serve a year and a day for violation of the Mann Act. “Lil’ Arthur” boxed and umpired baseball games during his time in Leavenworth, all without incident although his ring opponents were all African Americans.34

Baseball was important to the prison administration. When the sport was introduced in the prison system in the late nineteenth century, Leavenworth warden R. W. McClaughry summarized its place by saying, “Baseball takes the mind of the prisoner off his troubles, stimulates him to better efforts and…is one of the best diversions available.”35

The sport had evolved at Leavenworth, perhaps owing its start to William (“Baseball”) Wilson, a three-year big leaguer sent to prison for forging money orders. In 1910 he was allowed to receive the gift of a bat from an Omaha beer distributor. Using it during the occasional two-hour outdoor periods granted to prisoners who behaved, he likely boosted the game’s start within the walls. While the sport may have lived on in the prison because of Wilson, he, unfortunately, did not. He died in a barroom fight a dozen years later in St. Paul, “the last chapter of his life… written with knives by his enemies” the St. Paul (Minnesota) Dispatch reported.36

Leavenworth was a logical place to begin games between a big league and prison league team. Perched on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, the town of Leavenworth is the oldest city in Kansas. It and the surrounding Leavenworth County are to the corrections industry what Hollywood is to film and Silicon Valley to computers. No fewer than five prisons are located there, housing some 6,000 prisoners.

Best known—and the one where the game took place—is the United States Penitentiary-Leavenworth. Formidable looking with a capitol-like dome in the center called “the big top,” it is surrounded by stone walls standing 40 feet high and extending 40 feet below ground level to discourage attempts at tunneling. Built with prison labor and opened in 1903, it holds 1,870, including 400 in a nearby minimum security camp.37

Four miles away is the United States Army’s Disciplinary Barracks which opened in 1874 but moved into new buildings in 2002.38 It houses up to 515 prisoners and serves as the military’s maximum security prison. In 2010 a separate Joint Regional Correctional Facility for medium security offenders was opened nearby. Also at Leavenworth is a 460-bed facility operated by the Corrections Corporation of America for the U.S. Marshals Service.

In a suburb on the south side of Leavenworth stands the state of Kansas’ Lansing Correctional Facility. Housing almost 2,500, it was opened in 1868 and for 20 years also was home for Oklahoma’s offenders. The facility also housed female federal prisoners until a federal penitentiary was constructed in Alderson, West Virginia.39

With both the Packers and Monarchs a distant memory, there were further Leavenworth prison encounters with professional baseball. After World War II, the Leavenworth Braves of the Class C Western Association played pre-season exhibitions against the prisoners in 1946–48. The prisoners captured the final game, 9–6. Although box scores have not survived, the Braves roster that season included future star catcher and manager Del Crandall.40

The Reverend A.J. Soldan left the prison in 1917. He spent much of his post-Leavenworth career in southern California where he served as minister of the Village Church in Westwood and as chaplain to the Los Angeles Police Department. Soldan was also on call to conduct funerals at the Westwood Memorial cemetery. As the baseball gods would have it, Soldan was called on August 8, 1962, to officiate at the funeral of Marilyn Monroe, a ceremony arranged by her former husband Joe DiMaggio, for one final unlikely brush with big league history.41

BOB RIVES is retired from business and from Wichita State University where he was an adjunct instructor. He lives in Wichita and is Tim’s father. TIM RIVES has written extensively about baseball history. He is the supervisory archivist and deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas.

Notes

1. Our claim that this was the first game played between a prison team and a major league team is based on a thorough search of online newspaper databases (Proquest, Newspaper Archive, Chronicling America, The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Constitution, and Los Angeles Times), a discussion thread on SABR-L Archives, and research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Archives and Manuscript Collection at Cooperstown in 2003. Harold Seymour and Dorothy Jane Mills note the Mutual Welfare League games at Sing Sing between inmates and the New York Yankees and New York Giants began in the 1920s. Harold Seymour, Baseball: The People’s Game (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 414. We also consulted the Harold and Dorothy Seymour Papers, 1830–1998, Box 2, Folders 4–5, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University.

2. Marc Okkonen, The Federal League of 1914–1915 (The Society for American Baseball Research, 1989), 3; 24–5; The African American and white teams were occasionally combined for big games in the late 1920s. The merger became official in 1933 when the Great Depression reduced prison recreation budgets. “Baseball Ballyhoo,” New Era, May–June, 1933, 8.

3. “Wind and Science,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4; Paul W. Keve, Prisons and the American Conscience: A History of U.S. Federal Corrections (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 58; “Dentists Every Day,” New Era, October 1, 1915, 4.

4. New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

5. Ibid.

6. Bartholomew R. Burns, “Fielders’ Choice: A Selected History of the Nebraska State League,” Unpublished Honors Thesis, University of Nebraska, 1992, 33, 44; Andrea Faling, Nebraska State Historical Society, email to Tim Rives, May 2, 2001; Albert Felt File; Inmate Case Files; United States Penitentiary-Leavenworth; Records of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Record Group 129; National Archives at Kansas City. Additional Leavenworth files will be cited by inmate’s name only.

7. “Prison Chatter,” New Era, October 1, 1915, 3.

8. www.baseball-reference.com/teams/KCP/1915.shtml.

9. Irish O’Malley File; William Basore File.

10. Basore File; “Prison Chatter,” New Era, May 7, 1915, 3; “Wind and Science,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4; “1,500 Convicts Attend Game,” The Leavenworth Post, September 13, 1915, n.p.

11. “Prison Chatter,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

12. Basore File. United States vs. William Basore; Criminal Case Files; US District Court for the District of Kansas, First Division; Records of the US District Courts, Record Group 21; National Archives at Kansas City.

13. Basore File.

14. “Basore, Pitcher, an Enigma,” New Era, May 7, 1915, 4.

15. Basore obituary, Kansas City Star, October 30, 1977, 16B.

16. “Clean Sportsmanship,” New Era, June 27, 1919, 4.

17. “Wind and Science,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

18. “Their Lone Run A Theft,” Kansas City Star, September 14, 1915, 8. William Basore was inmate 9478.

19. “Wind and Science,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

20. Eubanks File; “A Grewsome Bat,” New Era, July 30, 1915, 4.

21. “Wind and Science,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

22. Ibid.; “Their Lone Run a Theft,” Kansas City Star, September 14, 1915, 8.

23. “Wind and Science,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

24. “Their Lone Run a Theft,” Kansas City Star, September 14, 1915, 8.

25. “Wind and Science,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

26. “Their Lone Run a Theft,” Kansas City Star, September 14, 1915, 8.

27. “Wind and Science, New Era, September 17, 1915, 4.

28. “Make It Annual Event,” Leavenworth Times, September 15, 1915, 5.

29. New Era, September 17, 1915, 4; “Prison Chatter,” New Era, September 17, 1915, 3; “It’s a Gala Day at Prison When K.C. Feds Play,” Leavenworth Times, September 14, 1915, 3.

30. “Packers’ Gift,” New Era, October 1, 1915, 4.

31. Ibid.

32. “Baseball Season Ends,” New Era, October 1927, 3; “Booker T’s Win Final Game of Series 2 to 1,” Leavenworth Times, October 7, 1929, 7; “Booker T’s Meet Catholics Sunday,” Kansas City Call, August 19, 1927, 6.

33. “A New Champion,” Leavenworth New Era, April 9, 1915, 4.

34. Geoffrey Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Vintage, Reprint Edition, 2006), 410–3.

35. “Penal Court in US Penitentiary Here is Unique,” Leavenworth Times, May 18, 1913, 2.

36. Wilson File; “11 Men, 4 Women Shed No Tears at Funeral for Baseball Wilson,” St. Paul (Minnesota) Dispatch, May 16, 1924, n.p.

37. United States Penitentiary-Leavenworth was established in 1895, but the inmates did not occupy the current building until 1903.

38. The original United States Disciplinary Barracks was located on the old Fort Leavenworth post about a mile north of the U.S. penitentiary site. It is now about three miles farther north.

39. Keve, 83.

40. Leavenworth New Era, April–June 1946, 87; Leavenworth New Era Annual Issue, 1947, 61; Leavenworth New Era, January-March 1949, 45; Del Crandall: www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/crandde01.shtml.

41. Albert T. Bostelmann, “Adolph John Soldan, 1877–1971,” Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, Winter 1985, 169-70; Soldan is visible in footage of Monroe’s funeral on YouTube. He is the tall man in the clerical robe at the head of the procession: www.youtube.com/watch?v= 3S3b9RJCfNw.

Rube Waddell. Walter Johnson. Lefty Grove. Bob Feller. Sandy Koufax. Sam McDowell. Nolan Ryan. Doc Gooden. Roger Clemens. Pedro Martinez. Randy Johnson. (There are others, of course.) Their names are synonymous with “overpowering strikeout pitcher.” Even as time marches on, their names are not forgotten because each has been a standard against which subsequent generations of strikeout pitchers are measured. Relative to their peers, however, none of them, nor any other pitcher, was as dominant in the “K-Zone” in any single season as Dazzy Vance in 1924.1 And he pitched in the toughest year to strike out batters.

BRYAN SODERHOLM-DIFATTE is a frequent contributor to the “Baseball Research Journal” and presenter at SABR conferences. Read more SABR articles from Bryan by clicking here. He also writes the blog Baseball Historical Insight.

Notes

1. The “K-Zone” is a term popularized by ESPN in its televised baseball broadcasts to refer to the strike zone. ESPN uses exclusive technology that allows viewers to see the location of pitches in relation to the batter’s notional strike zone, as defined by the rule book.

2. Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (NY: The Free Press, 2001), 869.

3. Bill James and Rob Neyer, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers: An (sic) Historical Compendium on Pitching, Pitchers, and Pitches (NY: Fireside Books, 2004), pp. 410–11, and Richard Goldstein, Superstars and Screwballs: 100 Years of Brooklyn Baseball (NY: Plume Books, 1992), 142.

4. All statistical data in this article are from the indispensable website for baseball research, Baseball-Reference.com.

5. Strikeouts in the years 1918 and 1919 were not included for the Deadball Era in this decade comparison because the exigencies of World War I caused major league baseball to play less than a 154-game schedule both years. Strikeouts in the Federal League—whose records count for the major leagues—in 1914 and 1915 were also excluded.

6. See splits data for Dazzy Vance in Baseball-Reference.com.

7. With 245 strikeouts in 227.1 innings in his rookie season, Herb Score became the first major league pitcher to strikeout at least one batter an inning. To prove it was no fluke, Score did it again in his second season (a K/9 average of 9.5 in 1956, compared to 9.7 the year before), and might have made it three in a row, going on who knows how many, were it not for a devastating line-drive to the face off the bat of the Yankees’ Gil McDougald early in the 1957 season.

8. Ryan is the only pitcher to have outpaced his closest rival in K/9 average by at least 30 percent in four different years, also doing so in 1977 (by 34 percent over Bert Blyleven), in 1987 (32 percent over Mark Langston) and in 1989 (34 percent over Langston). Vance, as already noted, did so three years in a row from 1923 to 1925.

9. Ryan is the only pitcher to have outpaced his closest rival in K/9 average by at least 30 percent in four different years, also doing so in 1977 (by 34 percent over Bert Blyleven), in 1987 (32 percent over Mark Langston) and in 1989 (34 percent over Langston). Vance, as already noted, did so three years in a row from 1923 to 1925.

Nonetheless, while researching Great Baseball Films, it became apparent that some of the most revealing baseball sequences exist in non-sports films.1 Since the book’s publication, countless additional examples have come to the fore.

Take, for example, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). The title character is Tom Rath (Gregory Peck), a harried suburbanite and World War II veteran who commutes into Manhattan every workday. One day, while passing time on the train, Tom’s mind wanders and he recalls an incident from a decade earlier—and a world away from mid-1950s America—in which he killed a young German soldier. Then in an instant, he is thrust back into the reality of 1956 when the man sitting next to him grimly declares, “There’s no use trying. I just can’t get used to it.”

“Used to what?” Tom asks.

His fellow commuter responds: “The idea of the Brooklyn Dodgers as world champions.”

The world had indeed changed in the decade since the end of the war.2

Then there is On Moonlight Bay (1951), a nostalgia-filled romance that mirrors the role of women in American society during a bygone era. The year is 1917 and Marjorie Winfield (Doris Day) is a teenaged tomboy who can swing a bat as well as any male. However, one look at William Sherman (Gordon MacRae), the handsome boy next door, and Marjorie readily exchanges her mud-stained baseball flannels for the frilly pink party dress she will wear on their first date. As she prepares for the date, Marjorie’s mother (Rosemary DeCamp) advises her to “try not to walk like a first baseman,” and her father (Leon Ames) quips, “I hope he doesn’t try to dance with her. He’s liable to get spiked.”

As they converse, William, a University of Indiana senior, describes his college experience as “a farce. All the fellas are interested in is playing football and baseball…”

“What’s wrong with baseball?” Marjorie asks.

William responds: “Baseball! It’s the national insanity. At a time like this, when civilization is crumbling beneath our feet, our generation is playing baseball…”

Who is the now-smitten Marjorie to disagree? For after all, the man is always right.

Before their date ends, Marjorie already is changing her worldview. At one point William asks her to dance, but she hesitates. “Oh, I guess I thought you were a southpaw,” she says, but she quickly catches herself and declares, “I mean left-handed.”

As the evening concludes and they kiss goodnight, Marjorie’s white-gloved left hand pushes aside forever the cap and ball that are resting on the table behind her. She and William are now courting, and her father is worried about her because, as he explains, “Marjorie is young and inexperienced. All she knows about men is their batting averages.”

Quips Stella (Mary Wickes), the family housekeeper: “In case you’re interested, this one’s batting a thousand.”

Unquestionably, mere mentions of baseball abound in the most unusual non-baseball situations. For example, in one brief scene in Grease (1978), the Rydell High School athletic coach (Sid Caesar) attempts to explain the finer points of sports to Danny Zuko (John Travolta). This sequence will fascinate anyone who is captivated by the image of Travolta garbed in a Rydell jersey and awkwardly swinging a baseball bat. But there is no baseball-related cultural context here. What most fascinates is the presence of a larger context, which exists in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and On Moonlight Bay: films featuring baseball sequences that reflect on the eras in which they were made.

Some non-baseball films cite real-baseball scandals. For example, two Jewish gangsters—one fictional and one real—are featured and referenced in The Godfather: Part II (1974). At one point, Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) declares, “I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919.” Others cite memorable in-season games. In One, Two, Three (1961), C.R. McNamara (James Cagney), a Coca-Cola executive who heads to West Germany to promote his product, reports, “On Sunday, August 13, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation’s capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs number 44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we’re dealing with—real shifty.” And “real shifty” does not refer to any Senators hurler who might consider hitting Maris with a pitch rather than challenging him with a fastball down the middle.

Brooklyn-born Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the hero of Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), starts out as a 90-pound weakling. The time is World War II, and the borough is introduced onscreen with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background and some kids playing baseball in a street: an image that links the sport to mom’s apple pie Americanism. As the plot unfolds, Rogers is transformed into the muscular title character and, upon waking up after winning out in contemporary action-movie fashion over the megalomaniacal villain, he finds himself in a room. A Dodgers game is being broadcast on a radio. “Just an absolutely gorgeous day here at Ebbets Field,” the play-by-play man declares. He reports that the Dodgers are battling the Phillies; the game is tied 4–4; the home team is at bat with the bases loaded; and the hitter smashes a drive into the outfield. “Three runs’ll score,” the broadcaster adds. “Durocher’s gonna wave them in… Pete Reiser with an inside-the-park grand slam… What a game we have here today, folks.”

Only there’s a problem: Rogers has performed his heroics during World War II, yet this game was played pre-Pearl Harbor, in May 1941. How does he know this? Because he was in the stands that day. Something is amiss… and this knowledge on Rogers’ part further propels the plot. And here is where “real” mixes with “reel.” On May 26, 1941, Louis Effrat noted in the New York Times that, a month earlier, Reiser was hit by a pitch thrown by Philadelphia Phillies hurler Ike Pearson and ended up hospitalized, with his career—and his life—imperiled. But Reiser survived and, as Effrat reported, “At Ebbets Field yesterday, Reiser faced Pearson for the first time since the accident on April 23, faced him in a situation that couldn’t have been more dramatic if it were part of a Hollywood scenario.” Effrat added that the score was tied at four and the bases were loaded when Reiser strode to the plate. “Was he frightened?” Effrat wondered. “Did he flinch? The result, more than anything else, answers these questions…” as Pistol Pete belted a 3-and-1 pitch against the center-field screen, ending up with an inside-the-park dinger. The fictional Steve Rogers was one of the 12,941 fans on hand that day—and one can see how Effrat’s reportage might have inspired the screenwriters of Captain America: The First Avenger.3

Other sequences spotlight iconic baseball moments. Predictably, in the Boston-centric Good Will Hunting (1997), Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) explains to Will Hunting (Matt Damon) that, on October 21, 1975, he knew that he had met the woman of his dreams. Why? Because that was Game 6 of the World Series. “Biggest game in Red Sox history,” he declares, because this was the one in which Carlton Fisk belted his now-legendary dinger. Maguire adds that he and his friends had slept on the sidewalk all night to cop tickets. However, before the game, he was sitting in a bar and “in walks this girl.” He soon reveals that he never made it to the game and was not present to experience first-hand a slice of Red Sox lore. But Maguire has no regrets because the woman was such a “stunner”—as well as his future wife.

Hall of Famers are cited onscreen in a range of ways. Whip It (2009) features a roller derby player who nicknames herself “Babe Ruthless.” There is comic irony in the following dialogue from Father’s Day (1997). Here, Jack Lawrence (Billy Crystal) tells Dale Putley (Robin Williams): “You’re a tragic hero. You’re Lou Gehrig.” Putley’s one-word response is: “Who?” Lawrence tells him, “Lou Gehrig. Everybody knows Lou Gehrig. The baseball player. He died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” The still clueless Putley’s rejoinder is “Wow, what are the odds on that?”

The central character in Ace in the Hole (1951), also known as The Big Carnival, is Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a New York newspaperman who’s been sentenced to media oblivion in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While complaining to one of his new paper’s unhip employees, Tatum observes that in the American Southwest there is “No Yogi Berra. What do you know about Yogi Berra, Miss Deverich?” “Yogi?” she responds. “Why, it’s a sort of religion, isn’t it?” In a Ruthian swing for the fences, Tatum retorts, “You bet it is—a belief in the New York Yankees.” Meanwhile, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), made almost six decades after Ace in the Hole, also references the beloved Berra. This serves to mirror his longevity on the American scene.

From the following dialogue in French Connection II (1975), one can guess the age of “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman), a New York narcotics cop who is working in Marseilles and conversing with French Inspector Henri Barthelemy (Bernard Fresson):

Doyle: “You know, I had a tryout with the Yankees. You know what the Yankees are?”

Barthelemy: “Yes. As in ‘Yankee go home.’”

Doyle: “Yeah. NO! No, uh…uh…no, the Yankee baseball…baseball team. Yeah, I had a tryout with them and…they sent me down to the…the minors. And the…problem was that…there was a fuckin’ kid there, and he was…the fastest bastard, he was fuckin’ FAST. And he…he played shortstop at the time, and he…he could hit the ball a fuckin’ ton. A fuckin’ TON! You know what ‘fuck’ means?”

Barthelemy: “Yeah.”

Doyle: “Yeah. Well, I was in spring training…and I saw this kid…and I just immediately took the test for cops. That kid was Mickey Mantle. You know who Mickey Mantle was?

Barthelemy: “No, I can’t say that I know.”

Doyle: “You don’t know who Mickey Mantle was? Huh? How about Willie Mays? Say hey! Willie Mays! The mighty Willie Mays! See?”

Barthelemy: “No.”

Moments later, the subject returns to baseball.

Doyle: “Well, and…Whitey Ford. Goddamn. You know who Whitey Ford was?…He was a dandy little southpaw. That’s what we called him. He was a dandy little southpaw.”

Barthelemy: “Southpaw?”

Doyle: “Yeah. He was a lefty.”

Barthelemy: “You mean a communist?”

Doyle: “No, he was a Republican. But he was somethin’, I tell you. He was somethin’…”

A throwaway line in On the Waterfront (1954) links the year in which the film was released to the haplessness of one major league team at this moment in time. At one point, a downtrodden dockworker notes that his beat-up windbreaker is “more full of holes than the Pittsburgh infield.” But there is another line in On the Waterfront that resonates. In the film, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) has been subpoenaed to appear before a waterfront crime commission and is conflicted as to whether he should testify against union hooligan Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). Terry explains to Father Barry (Karl Malden) that Friendly “used to take me to the ballgames when I was a kid.” Father Barry responds: “Ballgames. Don’t break my heart. I wouldn’t care if he gave you a life pass to the Polo Grounds…You’ve got some other brothers, and they’re getting’ the short hand while your Johnny’s gettin’ mustard on his face at the Polo Grounds.”

In the early 1950s, the “life pass to the Polo Grounds” reference was appropriate for a New York City-area scenario. When On the Waterfront was scripted, who knew that, in just a few years, the Giants would abandon Coogan’s Bluff for San Francisco and a “life pass to the Polo Grounds” would be meaningless—and worthless?

Similar references are found in another mid-1950s New York City-centric film: Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Here, slimy press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) tells the secretary of ruthless newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), “Don’t try to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. I happen to know it belongs to the Dodgers.”

Later on, Falco tells Hunsecker: “I won’t get Kello,” referring to a thuggish NYPD lieutenant. “Not for a lifetime pass to the Polo Grounds.” Baseball citations permeate Sweet Smell of Success. As he argues with Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), the boyfriend of his kid sister (Susan Harrison), Hunsecker observes, “Well, son, it looks like we may have to call this game on account of darkness.”

In referencing his sister, Hunsecker notes: “If Sidney ever gets anywhere near Susie, I’d take a baseball bat and break it over his head.”

The latter lines are obvious examples of how baseball is occasionally employed in a manner that has nothing to do with athletics. In some, baseball is akin to fate—and poetry. In Grand Canyon (1991), Mack (Kevin Kline), an entertainment industry accountant, recalls an incident in which he was almost run over by a bus but was grabbed by a stranger and yanked to safety. He explains, “I thanked this stranger, this woman in a baseball cap, but I was pretty much in a daze. When I thanked her, she said, ‘My pleasure.’ I didn’t notice till the last moment that the cap was from the Pittsburgh Pirates, my favorite team since I was a kid. I never got over the idea that I should have thanked that woman more, talked to her awhile, something.”

Then he adds, “How come she was wearing a Pirates cap? I just wondered, later on, was she for real, you know? Was that a real person or was that something else, you know, sent from somewhere else, to grab me back from that curb?”

Then again, with Hunsecker’s threat to Falco in mind, endless films feature baseballs and baseball bats as weapons. One of the characters in Inglourious Basterds (2009) is a Jewish GI who relishes killing Nazis by smashing their skulls with bats. (This is contrasted with the stereotype of the Jew as brainy rather than brawny, which is explored in Liberty Heights (1999) via the following bit of dialogue: “There are very few Jewish ballplayers. You’ll never hear, ‘Ground ball to short. Flo Ziegfeld moves to his right, scoops it to Leonard Bernstein at second, who fires to first. George Gershwin stretches. Double play.’ It’s not gonna happen.”)

In The Gambler (1974), a character known as Hips (Paul Sorvino) warns Axel Freed (James Caan), a literature professor and gambling addict, that the “only thing that’s standing between your skull and a baseball bat is my word.”

Stand By Me (1986) features boys playing “Mailbox Baseball,” in which they smash mailboxes with a bat from a moving car. Then in The Client (1994), a young boy (Brad Renfro) disparages the behavior of alcohol-abusing fathers by noting that “they come home wasted and beat on you and your mother so bad that you gotta hit ’em in the face with a baseball bat!”

In Manhattan (1979), Isaac Davis (Woody Allen), making conversation at a party, observes, “Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey?…We should go down there, get some guys together, y’know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.” In Blackboard Jungle (1955), Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford), an idealistic teacher, takes a job in a tough inner-city New York high school. As he finishes writing his name on the blackboard, an unidentified student hurls a baseball at the board, smashing it and partially obliterating Dadier’s name. But the teacher has the final word. “Whoever threw that,” Dadier says, “you’ll never pitch for the Yanks, boy.”

Not all such perpetrators are male. In Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy) observes, “I’m worried about my little friend Evelyn. She said her husband, Ed, would just be sitting around watching his sports on TV…and she has an urge to hit him in the head with a baseball bat.”

In Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), Harry Deever (Charles Halton), referring to the wife of David Smith (Robert Montgomery), declares, “I guess she’s changed some, huh?”

David responds, “Well, she’s…changed a little.”

Harry chimes in, “She once chased a dogcatcher half a mile with a baseball bat,” and David quips, “Well, she hasn’t changed as much as you think.”

The potential of baseball bats as weapons is further alluded to in Mississippi Burning (1988). Here, two FBI agents arrive in the title locale to investigate the disappearance of some civil rights activists, and one of them (Gene Hackman) describes a baseball game as “the only time when a black man can wave a stick at a white man and not start a riot.” But the sport is connected to the worst kind of violence in Clear and Present Danger (1994). One of the villains is Ernesto Escobedo (Miguel Sandoval), a wealthy Colombian drug lord who shamelessly brags about his omnipotence while hitting baseballs from a pitching machine in a room in his hacienda. Not surprisingly, Escobedo’s bat eventually is transformed into a weapon, which he menacingly wields against a man who has betrayed him.

Occasionally, a bit of introspection accompanies the violence. In The Untouchables (1987), Al Capone (Robert De Niro) observes: “What is that which gives me joy? Baseball! A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team. Teamwork…Looks, throws, catches, hustles. Part of one big team. Bats himself the live-long day, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and so on. If his team don’t field…what is he? You follow me? No one. Sunny day, the stands are full of fans. What does he have to say? I’m goin’ out there for myself. But…I get nowhere unless the team wins.”

Following these words, Capone beats one of his hoods to death with a baseball bat.

Thankfully, not all “poetic” baseball references are accompanied by aggression. An extra-special baseball homage occurs at the opening of Woody Allen’s aforementioned Manhattan. With Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on the soundtrack, Allen opens the film with a visual homage to the title New York City borough. You see ever-so-brief shots of the Empire State Building, the United Nations, unidentified skyscrapers, apartment houses, restaurants, bridges, crowds, traffic, ferries, Washington Square, the Guggenheim Museum, the Plaza Hotel, Central Park, Broadway, Lincoln Center, the Radio City Music Hall, and Times Square. The next-to-last shot, which lingers, is Yankee Stadium—which of course isn’t even located in the borough of Manhattan. (The final image consists of fireworks over the mid-Manhattan skyline.) Another, similar Yankee Stadium shot is found in Serpico (1973). When honest cop Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) affirms that he will not play ball—no pun intended—with his corrupt fellow police officers, the scene is played on a hill that offers a panoramic view of The House That Ruth Built.

One of the highlights of the musical The West Point Story (1950) is a “Brooklyn” production number. Of course, one of the first lines is: “They know my shield from Ebbets Field to Cheyenne…” Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) features Ginger Rogers as a Brooklyn native who grew up near Ebbets Field and quips: “Foul balls used to light in my backyard” before sighing “Dem lovely Bums.” The opening sequence in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) features loudmouthed Brooklyn Dodgers fans and brawling players at Ebbets Field. New York baseball is touched upon in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Here, a father (Dustin Hoffman) who hails from Brooklyn tells his son (Justin Henry) about his childhood: “We listened to the radio… We didn’t have diet soda. We had egg creams… We didn’t have the Mets, but we had the Brooklyn Dodgers. And we had the Polo Grounds. And we had Ebbets Field. Oh boy, those were the days.”

But not all movie references glorify New York nines. The Chicago location of While You Were Sleeping (1995) is established via a series of city landmarks. One, of course, is Wrigley Field, which is as much a symbol of the town as Yankee Stadium is a monument to New York. The New York teams are not the only teams that are admired. In Boys Town (1938), Freddie Fuller (Frankie Thomas), one of the residents of the title home for juvenile boys, is showing off the facilities to Whitey Marsh (Mickey Rooney), a hoodlum-in-training.

Freddie says, “There’s our baseball field…last year one of our players was drafted by the St. Louis Browns.”

Whitey responds: “Well, I like the Yankees”… and Freddie’s rejoinder is, “You would!”

In so many films, baseball serves as a metaphor for healthy, thoughtful parenting and parent-child bonding. In Stolen Summer (2002), Joe O’Malley (Aidan Quinn), the father of a second-grader, wisely observes, “Baseball should be the only thing on an eight-year-old boy’s mind.” In Critic’s Choice (1963), theater critic Parker Ballantine (Bob Hope) comically wrecks his back during a father-son game. While the sequence is played for laughs, the depiction of a post-World War II suburbia in which fathers toss horsehides to sons and parents cheer on their boys at Little League games is ever-present.

Baseball sequences also reflect on social interaction between children. In The Happy Years (1950), set in the 1890s, young Dink Stover (Dean Stockwell), an athletically inept prep-school student, is subjected to bullying. Upon entering a ballgame as a pinch hitter, Dink first hesitates while approaching home plate and then awkwardly holds the bat. The first pitch sails over his head and he falls to the ground, but his teammates taunt him. “Why didn’t you let it hit ya?” one of them yells. “You’d have been on base. That’s as good as a hit.” The next pitch is a called strike. It’s also a hit-and-run play, and the runner on base is thrown out.

A chorus of voices rings out at Dink: “What’s the matter with you?” “Go on home to your mother.” “Can’t you play ball?” Next, Dink is stationed in the outfield. After dropping an easy fly ball, he is chased off the field by all his teammates. He ends up locking himself in his dorm room, donning a catcher’s mask for protection and grabbing a bat, which he will employ as a weapon if the boys so much as touch him. In The Happy Years (which, given the film’s scenario, is a purposefully ironic title), Dink’s treatment is harsh and graceless. Still, his travails are depicted as a ritual of boyhood. In this regard, the film reflects the era in which it was made, rather than more contemporary attitudes toward bullying.

Other screen references mirror the manner in which baseball terminology has transcended the sport and become part of the culture. In Crash (2004), Flanagan (William Fichtner), an aide to the Los Angeles district attorney, tells Detective Graham Waters (Don Cheadle), “Actually, we were thinking of you until we saw that. It’s your brother’s file. Twenty-something years old and already three felonies. ‘Three Strikes’ Law, the kid’s going away for life for stealing a car. Christ, that’s a shitty law.”

The following bit of action and dialogue is found in Judge Dredd (1995):

Mean Machine: “You got three strikes, lawman!” (The title character attacks Mean, but Mean blocks the blow with his mechanical arm.)

Mean Machine: “Strike one! He-he-he…”

(Dredd strikes back and, again, Mean blocks the blow.)

Mean Machine: “Strike two!”

(Dredd smashes a bar on Mean’s head: a blow that would crack a human skull but leaves no impression on Mean.)

Mean Machine: “Strike three. You’re out, lawman!”

Other references, which are clever attempts to incorporate baseball into casual conversation, are reflections of how the sport has become engrained in American culture. In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), set just after the turn of the 20th century, seventeen-year-old Esther Smith (Judy Garland) offers some advice to her lawyer-father (Leon Ames):

“Papa, if losing a case depresses you so, why don’t you quit practicing law and go into another line of business?”

“That’s a good idea,” he says. “Starting tomorrow, I intend to play first base for the Baltimore Orioles.”

In Back to Bataan (1945), Americans and Filipinos are battling the Japanese at the title locale. During the heat of combat, Col. Joseph Madden (John Wayne) calls to a fellow GI (Paul Fix), “Hey, Bindle…How’s your pitchin’ arm?” Bindle then heaves a grenade at the enemy, and it’s the equivalent of a 100-mph strike. In Vital Signs (1990), a doctor (Jimmy Smits) observes, regarding the hazards faced by third-year medical students, “Third year is like being a rookie pitcher called on to pitch the seventh game of the World Series… blindfolded.” In The Odd Couple II (1998), Brucey (Jonathan Silverman), the son of Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau), tells his father, “Mom was married three times. You were married one time, and then never again for 30 years. Hers were too many, yours were not enough. So tell me…What is it about marriage that frightens everybody so much?”

Oscar answers, “I don’t know, Brucey. It’s like baseball: Either you can play or you can’t play. Your mother could play; I couldn’t play. Trouble with your mother was she kept getting traded all the time.”

Examples of how baseball terminology has entered the culture are endless. One example: In Ziegfeld Girl (1941), wannabe stage performer Susan Gallagher (Judy Garland) casually observes, “This is Annie’s night out, so I’m pinch-hitting for her.” Plenty of these have sexual connotations. In That Hagen Girl (1947), a guy named Dewey Koons (Conrad Janis) hits on a gal named Sharon Bailey (Jean Porter) by asking her, “How ’bout it? C’mon, let’s hit the high spots.” Bailey is not impressed. “Why don’t you go somewhere and catch yourself, you foul ball!” she says.

In Follow the Fleet (1936), Kitty Collins (Lucille Ball) asks a sailor who is trying to pick her up, “Tell me, little boy, did you get a whistle or baseball bat with that suit?”

A decade later, Ball spoke similar dialogue in The Dark Corner (1946). Here, her character is Kathleen Stewart. After her boss makes a pass at her, Kathleen responds, “I haven’t worked for you very long, Mr. Galt, but I know when you’re pitching a curve at me—and I always carry a catcher’s mitt.”

A defensive Mr. Galt replies, “No offense. A guy’s gotta try to score, doesn’t he?”

Kathleen’s response is: “Not in my league.”

And then in Storm Warning (1951), Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) is propositioned by her boss. “I thought…we could have a quiet dinner together,” he tells her. “Just you and me. There’s a cute French restaurant in Riverport.” But Marsha will have none of it.

“Look, Cliff,” she responds, “don’t ya ever give up? You made a pitch in Baltimore, a wrong play in Mobile, and you fouled out in Atlanta. Cliff, in any league, three strikes is out.”

Not all such baseball references are put-downs. In Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Rika (Patsy Kensit) are having fun between the sheets. At one point, Riggs observes, “I think it’s time for the seventh-inning stretch.” After a pause, he explains, “That’s a baseball expression.”

“I know,” Rika says. “But we’re only up to the fourth inning.”

To which Riggs replies, “Batter up!”

The phrase “getting to first base” has come to refer to kissing—or, the initial stage of romantic or sexual intimacy—and it has been written into endless scripts. In Lost in a Harem (1944), an Abbott and Costello farce, the Abbott character chides Costello by telling him, “Oh, come on, you wouldn’t get to first base with a beautiful girl like that.”

In more recent decades, with the demise of the Hollywood Production Code, onscreen language has become more graphic—and raunchier. In 1941 (1979), United States Army Captain Loomis Birkhead (Tim Matheson) observes, “No man has ever gotten to first base with her on the ground. But get her up in a plane, she’ll bat your balls right out of the park.”

Other films simply offer snapshots of Hollywood at a moment in time: Who the popular stars were, and how baseball was woven into the social fabric of the era. In Hollywood Hobbies (1939), a one-reel short, two females take a “movie guide tour” through Tinseltown. After spying on a number of celebrities at work and play, they end up at a “big movie baseball game” (filmed on location at Gilmore Field in Los Angeles) whose participants are celluloid royalty.4 Truman Bradley, then a popular radio broadcaster, announces from the press box and describes the charity event as “the world’s screwiest baseball game” pitting the “Comedians” against the “Leading Men.” Attending the game are James Stewart, George Murphy, Cesar Romero, Joan Davis, Spencer Tracy, Virginia Bruce, Tyrone Power, Jane Withers, and James Cagney and his mother. The managers are Joe E. Brown and Harry Ritz. The players include Buddy Ebsen (wearing a “Sauk Center” jersey and NY cap); John Boles; Buster Keaton (described as “that frozen-faced comic”); and Milton Berle (“Hippity-hop with the hat of a cop, it’s Milton Berle to play shortstop”). Mary Pickford throws out the first pitch. The Ritz Brothers (presumably minus Harry) are the umpires. Arthur “Dagwood” Lake joins Bradley in the press box, and “crooner” Dick Powell swings a bat and belts a dinger.

All these baseball-in-non-baseball-film citations are a tiny sampling of the films I’ve researched or stumbled upon over the years.5 Such citations keep appearing onscreen to the present day.

Two examples: Baseball bats are a constant presence in Neighbors (2014); they are in the hands of some raucous frat boys, and they are not being used in a spirited intramural sporting contest. In Fading Gigolo (2013), a character named Murray (Woody Allen) teaches youngsters how to hit baseballs. It is no coincidence that Murray, who is Caucasian and Jewish, lives with an African-American woman, and the kids he is mentoring are her kids. One of the themes in Fading Gigolo is the importance of assimilating into the American melting pot 21st-century-style. Here, the baseball connection is employed to reflect the notion that all Americans, regardless of race or religion, can play—and love—our National Pastime.

Note: A version of this paper was presented at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, held at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum in 2014.

ROB EDELMAN teaches film history at the University at Albany and offers film commentary on WAMC (Northeast) Public Radio. His books include “Great Baseball Films” and “Baseball on the Web” (which Amazon.com cited as a Top 10 Internet book), and he is a frequent contributor to “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.” His writing also may be found in “NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture,” “Total Baseball,” “The Total Baseball Catalog,” “Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond,” and “Baseball in the Classroom: Teaching America’s National Pastime.” With Audrey Kupferberg, he has coauthored “Matthau: A Life” and “Meet the Mertzes,” a double biography of I Love Lucy’s Vivian Vance and super baseball fan William Frawley. Read more SABR articles by Rob by clicking here.

Notes

1. Among the many examples cited in Great Baseball Films are: College (1927); Speedy (1928); The Cameraman (1928); Up the River (1930); A Night at the Opera (1935); Black Legion (1936); Manhattan Merry-Go-Round (1937); Brother Rat (1938); Brother Rat and a Baby (1940); Remember the Day (1941); Meet John Doe (1941); Woman of the Year (1942); The Talk of the Town (1942); Larceny, Inc. (1942); Hitler’s Children (1943); Whistling in Brooklyn (1943); Guadalcanal Diary (1943); Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944); The Naughty Nineties (1945); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); Deadline at Dawn (1946); Boys’ Ranch (1946); A Foreign Affair (1948); Sunset Boulevard (1950); About Face (1952); Strategic Air Command (1955); Three Stripes in the Sun (1955); 12 Angry Men (1957); Escapade in Japan (1957); The Geisha Boy (1958); Experiment in Terror (1962); The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962); Boys’ Night Out (1962); That Touch of Mink (1962); The Family Jewels (1965); Ship of Fools (1965); The Odd Couple (1968); One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975); Chapter Two (1979); The Chosen (1982); Cannery Row (1982); Max Dugan Returns (1983); Zelig (1983); Under Fire (1983); A Soldier’s Story (1984); Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984); Protocol (1984); Birdy (1984); Gung Ho (1986); Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986); About Last Night… (1986); Brighton Beach Memoirs (1987); Radio Days (1987); Ironweed (1987); Funny Farm (1988); Big (1988); Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988); Rain Man (1988); Parenthood (1989); Hook (1991); City Slickers (1991); Bad Lieutenant (1992); Simple Men (1992); Dave (1993); Sleepless in Seattle (1993) …

2. Even though The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit references the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was cited in “New York Mets in the Movies,” a paper presented in 2012 at the 50th anniversary New York Mets conference at Hofstra University. Non-baseball films with Mets-related sequences and references include: Alice in the Cities (1974); The Wiz (1978); Do the Right Thing (1989); 3 Men and a Little Lady (1990); Mo’ Better Blues (1990); Jungle Fever (1991); Men in Black (1997); Frequency (2000); Small Time Crooks (2000); Kate & Leopold (2001); Two Weeks Notice (2002); Old Dogs (2009); and Friends With Benefits (2011). A version of this paper may be found at: http://sabr.org/latest/edelman-new-york-mets-movies.

3. Louis Effrat. “Dodgers Stage Rally in Sixth to Triumph Over Phillies,” New York Times, May 26, 1941, 25.

4. http://www.imdb.com.

5. Plenty of other non-baseball films may be added to those cited here. Air Force (1943), Battleground (1949), Lafayette Escadrille (1958), and We Were Soldiers (2002) link American GIs and baseball. Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962) and War of the Worlds (2005) emphasize father-son baseball connections, while It Could Happen to You (1994) spotlights the importance of adults employing baseball as a tool for mentoring youngsters. Smoke (1995) and its follow-up, Blue in the Face (1995), wax nostalgic about the late, lamented Brooklyn Dodgers and mirror the manner in which the sport is linked to civic pride and identity. The Big Picture (1989) underscores the fact that baseball heroes are among the most recognizable figures in American history. The Lady Vanishes (1938) and The Miniver Story (1950) connect Brits and baseball. The talents of women ballplayers are emphasized in Cass Timberlane (1947). Baseball card collecting and collectors are referenced in Girl 6 (1996) and Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing & Charm School (2005). The list goes on …