Caguas has won 18 league titles in Puerto Rico and played in 14 Caribbean Series. Its five wins were in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1954; Hermosillo, Mexico, in 1974 and 1987; Culiacán, Mexico, in 2017; and Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2018. The Caribbean Series is now a five-team event between champions of the Cuban National Series, the Dominican Winter League, the Mexican Pacific League, the Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente Professional Baseball League, and the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League.

The powerhouse Caguas Criollos of the Roberto Clemente Professional Baseball League have won 18 league titles in Puerto Rico and played in 14 Caribbean Series, winning five of them, including back-to-back championships in 2017 and ’18. (Courtesy of Serie del Caribe.)

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: CAGUAS AND ROBERTO CLEMENTE PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUE

Caguas is 20 miles south of San Juan. Its name comes from the Taíno chieftain Caguax. “Criollo,” within the context of Puerto Rico, refers to those who are natives of and indigenous to the island. Native players representing Caribbean Series teams are “criollos,” a source of pride. Luis Olmo was an original 1938-39 Caguas Criollo; Víctor Pellot (Vic Power) was a Caguas star and seven-time AL Gold Glover. Caguas stars included Roberto Vargas, Jim Rivera, Félix Mantilla, Félix Millán, José Pagán, Julio Navarro, Willie Montañez, Jerry Morales, José “Cheo” Cruz, Eduardo Figueroa, Sixto Lezcano, Henry Cotto, Francisco Oliveras, Bernie Williams, Omar Olivares, Juan González, Joey and Alex Cora, Roberto Clemente, Roberto Alomar, and Iván “Pudge” Rodríguez.

Caguas was one of six franchises in the inaugural 40-game season in 1938-39.1 It merged with the Santurce Cangrejeros (Crabbers) during World War II and again in 1992–94 as cost-cutting measures. The Criollos won 1940–41 and 1947–48 league titles prior to their first Caribbean Series in 1950, a tiebreaker loss to Panama’s Carta Vieja Yankees. The 1950­–51 Criollos lost a dramatic final series to Santurce, on the “Pepelucazo,” a two-out walk-off home run by Pepe Lucas, on February 16, 1951.2 This was Puerto Rico’s version of Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” Caguas won the 1954 Caribbean Series after a five-team, 80-game regular season plus league finals. Its 1974 championship team went through a six-team, 70-game season and two playoff series. The 1987 champs had participated in a six-team, 54-game regular season, a 12-game round-robin, and league finals.3 The 2017 Caribbean Series winners were in a five-team, 40-game regular season, then semifinals and finals. The abbreviated four-team, 18-game regular season in January 2018 was a result of damage from Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. Table 1 highlights the five Caribbean Series title seasons.

Table 1. Caguas Five Caribbean Series Winners

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1954 SERIES: SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO

Mickey Owen was a marvelous player-manager. Caguas won 15 of its last 17 regular-season games with Owen catching to overtake San Juan. Owen said, “Brooks Lawrence was the best pitcher on the Caguas staff; could start or relieve . . . reason I went back to catching. Lawrence moved the ball around the plate with a sliding curve/big curveball; Guigui Lucas [Pepe Lucas’s brother] felt uncomfortable catching certain pitches. Guigui was a character—carried his money and even a paycheck in his back pocket; played in lots of places where money was taken from locker rooms.”4

Hank Aaron contributed to Caguas’s regular-season and league title series efforts but returned to the States after Caguas won Puerto Rico’s league title. Aaron’s two homers in the All-Star Game on December 23, 1953, duplicated Josh Gibson’s feat 12 years earlier. Vic Power recalled: “Aaron, Jim Rivera, Bob Buhl, Brooks Lawrence, and I were the key players that championship season.”5

Caribbean Series reinforcements were and are a common practice. Aaron was replaced on Caguas’s roster by Bill Howerton Sr., a Mayagüez outfielder in 1953–54 after his release by a Cuban team. Caguas also reinforced itself with two more position players—outfielder Carlos Bernier of Mayagüez and second baseman Jack Cassini of San Juan—plus four pitchers: Luis Arroyo and Jack Sanford (Ponce), Rubén Gómez (Santurce) and Corky Valentine (Mayagüez).

The four teams in the six-game round-robin series were Almendares Alacranes from Cuba; Panama’s Carta Vieja Yankees; Venezuela’s Pastora Lecheros (Milkers); and host Caguas. Games were played at San Juan’s Sixto Escobar Stadium. The key Game Three was Almendares-Caguas. The Cubans were up 1–0 in the seventh inning but Howerton tied the game with a homer and Rance Pless won it 3–1 with another. Billy Howerton Jr. recalled that after the Cuba game, “Fans began to torch newspapers and anything they could lay their hands on. It was like a huge bonfire. After the game, I remember my father being interviewed for several radio stations. He received gift certificates.”6 Howerton Sr. had revenge on his mind: “I had been released by Cuba’s Marianao team early that season; but I could always hit.”

Rance Pless recalls serenades all night long after Caguas won four series games to clinch the title. Pless gave a speech in the Caguas town plaza.7 He received a portable TV and other gifts and noticed fans were passed out everywhere the next morning. Caguas center fielder Jim Rivera was the series MVP. Player-manager Owen rode the team mascot, a mule or “yeguita,” around the field in a victory celebration. Vern Benson made the 1954 Caribbean Series All-Star team for Venezuela’s Pastora Lecheros. He recalled Luis Aparicio, his backup, got a lot of playing time in Aparicio’s first Caribbean Series.8 Luis Arroyo, Rubén Gómez, Jack Sanford, and Corky Valentine pitched well for Caguas in the series. Tables 2, 3, and 4 have series standings, awards, and All-Star team.9

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CAGUAS FALLS SHORT

Caguas won league titles in 1955–56, 1957–58, and 1959–60, but not a Caribbean Series. Cuba won five straight from 1956 to 1960 before the series was discontinued for a decade. First baseman Lou Limmer and pitcher Tom Lasorda were Caguas contributors on the 1955-56 team; Limmer’s three homers in the 1956 series placed him on the All-Star team. Power was the 1956 All-Star third baseman. Roberto Clemente’s .391 batting average and .609 SLG earned him series All-Star laurels in 1958. Tommy Davis was the 1960 Caribbean Series MVP with a .409 batting average, three homers, six RBIs, seven runs, and two stolen bases.10 Caguas’s 1955-59 transactions included the purchase of Clemente, Juan Pizarro, and Ronnie Samford in late December 1956 from Santurce for $30,000; the acquisition of Julio Navarro and Jose Pagán from Santurce in 1959 for Pizarro and $10,000; and the 1959 trade that sent Clemente and two minor leaguers—José Santiago and Marcial Allen—to the San Juan Senadores for $30,000 and two other minor leaguers, Herminio Cortés and Rafael Salamo.11

Caguas contended in the 1960s and early ’70s, winning the 1967-68 title over Santurce. Luis Tiant was a 1961-62 Caguas star. Two other imports were Pete Richert and Frank Howard of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Richert appreciated his teammates showing him a good time. “It was fun. José [Pagán] and Félix [Mantilla] found a way to take care of us,” said Richert. “After a game, four or five of us would get in a car and drive to San Juan for a show and something to eat.” Richert said Puerto Rico was a great place to play and learn about someone else’s culture and lifestyle.12 Howard hit the longest home run in Caguas history, conservatively estimated at 536 feet, against Jack Fisher of San Juan, in a January 1961 championship series game. “You learned to hit in old Sixto Escobar Stadium when you faced Bob Gibson, Juan Pizarro, Bob Bolin and Tite Arroyo,” said Howard. “Every young player should play two or three years of Winter League baseball to refine their skills. The Puerto Rico league kept me in the big leagues and toughened me up. It was better than Triple A.”13

Caguas had loyal and rabid fans who could double as groundskeepers. John Strohmayer was pitching in 1970–71 at Caguas when a deluge stopped play in the fourth inning. “Within 20 minutes, the entire infield was covered with two inches of water,” he recalled. “I put my arm in a bucket of ice.” Fans who lived in neighboring houses went home and got their wheelbarrows. A big pile of loam was under the stands and put to use. It stopped raining and play resumed 40 minutes later!14

José Cruz Sr., left, receives the Puerto Rico League’s 1976–77 MVP trophy from Angel Colón, President of the Puerto Rico Professional Baseball Players Association. (Courtesy of Angel Colón.)

1974 SERIES: HERMOSILLO, MEXICO

Venezuela did not participate because of a players’ strike. Two teams from host Mexico: Mazatlán Venados (Deer) and Yaquis de Obregón, participated, with the Tigres del Licey, managed by Lasorda, plus the Criollos. Caguas won over defending champion Licey. Héctor Barea, Caguas’s public relations official, said: “This was the best team Caguas ever produced, with Gary Carter and Jim Essian catching; Willie Montañez at first, Félix Millán and Pedro García at second; Mike Schmidt at third; Rudy Meoli at short; an outfield with Jay Johnstone, Jerry Morales, and Otto Vélez. Their starting pitchers were Craig Swan, Eduardo Figueroa, John Montague, and Eduardo Rodríguez. Willie Hernández, Bombo Rivera, and Sixto Lezcano were on that team.”15 Millán also ranked the 1973-74 Caguas team as the best one, position by position. Its chemistry was the icing on the cake. “That’s why we won,” said Millán. “We were a family who came together toward season’s end.”16

Jerry Morales noted: “Don’t forget I hit 14 homers as the leadoff hitter.”17 Morales led Caguas in homers, followed by Schmidt (12) and Johnstone (10). Barea saw Schmidt and Johnstone playing chess en route to Mexico for the 1974 Caribbean Series. Bob Apodaca’s relief work for Caguas prepared him for 1974 spring training with the New York Mets, where he threw 18 scoreless innings to impress manager Yogi Berra. “You had to go down there and reestablish yourself in Puerto Rico,” said Apodaca, who left Puerto Rico prior to the postseason.18 Caguas reinforced itself with two relievers for the Caribbean Series: Ponce’s Steve Blateric and Santurce’s Ramón “Mon” Hernández. The latter’s two saves earned him a spot on the series All-Star team. Woody Huyke, a Caguas coach, praised the team’s Puerto Rican major-league players—Figueroa, Millán, Montañez, Morales, Vélez, and Eduardo Rodríguez—as “true professionals who set a positive tone for the younger players.”19 Schmidt said, “Winning the Caribbean Series was one of the highlights of my pro career.”20 Vélez added that there was “no envy on this team.”21

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Broadcaster Howard Cosell enjoys a behind-the-scenes moment with league and team officials at Juan Ramón Loubriel Stadium, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 1980–81 season, during a Caguas-Bayamón game. From left: Angel Colón, Luis Rodríguez Olmo, Roberto Inclán and Luis Rodríguez Mayoral. (Courtesy of Angel Colón.)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND CANCELLATION OF 1981 SERIES IN CARACAS

Caguas won the 1976–77 and 1978–79 league titles but did not fare well in either Caribbean Series, finishing 1–5 and 2–4, respectively. Their 1976–77 club hit .307, with seven regulars surpassing .300. José Cruz Sr. won league MVP laurels with a .338 average, 14 homers, 40 RBIs, and a .615 SLG, the all-time single-season record for a native.22 Caguas’s 1976–77 rotation was Dennis Martínez, Scott McGregor, Mike Krukow, Miguel Cuellar, and Rodríguez. Martínez, Caguas’s best pitcher from 1976 to 1981, also outpitched Jack Morris of Mayagüez in Game Seven of the 1978–79 finals.

The 1980–81 Criollos, under skipper Ray Miller, finished fourth but bested first-place Bayamón in the semis and Mayagüez in the finals. Howard Cosell, on vacation, enjoyed a 1980–81 Caguas-Bayamón game. A strike by Venezuelan League players resulted in the cancellation of the 1981 Caribbean Series. Cal Ripken Jr., the Caguas third baseman, didn’t get to play, nor did pitcher Mike Boddicker. Teams to have faced Caguas in that series were host Leones de Caracas, managed by Alfonso Carrasquel; Leones de Escogido, managed by Felipe Alou; and the Yaquis de Obregón.

“We had a lot of big-leaguers in Puerto Rico,” recalled Ripken. “Our Caguas team, God, had at least six to seven good big-league players. A lot of the pitching was Triple-A, so the level was between Triple-A and the big leagues. So coming out of Double-A [in 1980], I had to compete at a higher level and learned quite a few things playing all those games.”23

Francisco Oliveras, a Caguas mainstay and the league’s top pitcher in 1984-85 with an 8–0 record, won a Caribbean Series game reinforcing San Juan. “When I started [1980-81], the league had a lot of big-league players,” said Oliveras. “Around 1984-85 things began to change, with fewer big-leaguers. I played for Vic Power that season and it was fun.”24 Power enjoyed managing Caguas and helping Don Mattingly, his 1983–84 first baseman, with fielding and hitting. Randy Ready of Mayagüez was challenging Mattingly for the batting title. “We were up against a tough lefty, and I suggested Mattingly take the night off,” Power said. “If he goes hitless, he falls behind Ready. But Mattingly wanted to play; went 3-for-4.”25 Mattingly won the batting title, .368 to .361 for Ready.

The 1986–87 Caguas Criollos, Puerto Rico and Caribbean Series Champions. Team photo taken prior to Caguas roster changes for the February 1987 Caribbean Series. Bernie Williams is pictured third row, second from left. Roberto Alomar is pictured top row, second from left. (Courtesy of Angel Colón.)

1986–87 REGULAR SEASON AND 1987 SERIES: HERMOSILLO, MEXICO

Bernie Williams, a reserve outfielder in 1986–87, appeared in 27 regular-season games for Caguas. “The 1986–87 group was terrific,” Williams said. “I was 18 and looking forward to a career in baseball. I’ll never forget the time when Iván Calderón gave me one of his gloves in the 1985–86 season when I practiced with Caguas.”26 Fellow Caguas rookie Omar Olivares complimented Figueroa, the team’s pitching coach and the first Puerto Rico-born 20-game-winner in the majors. “Eduardo Figueroa really helped me that winter and gave me confidence,” Olivares said.27

Ellis Burks, like Aaron 33 years earlier, helped Caguas win the league title, but did not play in the Caribbean Series. “It was fun,” Burks said. “Everyone would compliment each other and have a positive attitude. Tim Foli was a very aggressive manager. Ramón Avilés and Jerry Morales were coaches who helped a lot. So did [general manager] Félix Millán. I opted to go home and relax after the finals. . . . Caribbean Series would have been a good experience.”28

Burks and teammate Van Snider were replaced by Arecibo’s Candy Maldonado and Mayagüez’s Bobby Bonilla on Caguas’s 1987 Caribbean Series roster. Snider furnished valuable perspective from an import: “Everyone should be busting their butt to really do good—try hard for yourself to make sure you still have a job,” said Snider. “The pressure in winter ball, even though it’s a team game, is to put up numbers, because if you don’t, they’re going to release you and get someone else to take your place.”29

Caguas and the Aguilas Cibaeñas, from the Dominican Republic, played a tiebreaker to decide the series after each finished with a 4–2 record. Aguilas had beaten Caguas 14–13 in the third game, a contest that featured eight homers and eight errors by the Criollos. Carmelo Martínez (2), Eddie Vargas (2), Bonilla, Henry Cotto, Maldonado, and Germán Rivera homered. Roberto Alomar committed two errors on his 19th birthday—February 5, 1987. General Manager Millán argued with skipper Foli after the 14–13 loss and fired him the next day, the first time a manager had ever been fired in a Caribbean Series.30 Foli was replaced by coach Ramón Avilés. “I felt for Tim Foli because he has the ability to manage in the majors,” Avilés said. “In Puerto Rico, he displayed a temper and I tried to help him. During the regular season, when I took the lineup card to the plate, there were times the umpires would ask me what inning would I like to manage the team because they planned to send him to the showers. I would defend Foli and tell the umps that this wasn’t right, they shouldn’t think this way.”31 Alomar called Foli an “aggressive type who taught me quite a bit.” Alomar loved to play under pressure, noting: “After that [14–13] loss, we came back.”32

Caguas won its next three games to reach the tiebreaker final: Henry Cotto stole four bases in a 6–1 win over Mazatlán; Francisco Oliveras pitched a 7–1 win over Caracas; and Juan Nieves threw six innings of one-hit shutout ball against the Dominicans, with David Cone getting the save in the 4–0 win. The Caribbean Series title carried special meaning for Nieves: “On the field, there is so much pride in representing your country. Puerto Rico was in our heart. Off the field, we would share moments with opposing players and hear music at the night spots and discos, talk about our big-league aspirations. But when we played, it was serious business.” 33

The Criollos routed the Dominicans 13–2 in the seventh game behind Jim Siwy, Luis de León, Cone, and Olivares. Alomar, Maldonado, and Martínez did the hitting. José Rijo took the loss. Oliveras and Nieves made the All-Star team with Orlando Mercado, Martínez, and Vargas. The 18 Caguas homers in this 1987 series eclipsed the record of 12 held by Panama’s Chesterfield Smokers in 1956.34 Tables 8, 9, and 10 have standings, leaders and the All-Star team.35

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This was the fifth and last Caribbean Series for Mario Mendoza in a 20-year winter-ball career in Mexico. He relished playing against Tony Peña of Aguilas Cibaeñas; Andrés Galarraga and Tony Armas of Caracas; and Maldonado of Caguas.36 Maldonado, Alomar, de León, Martínez, and Williams were 1987 Caribbean Series players inducted into the Caribbean Series Hall of Fame (Pabellón de la Fama del Caribe). Table 11 lists inductees with Caguas connections..37

Table 11. Caribbean Series Hall of Famers with a Caguas Connection

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CAGUAS UPDATES: ECONOMIC CHANGES, 1989-2013

Higher major-league salaries affected winter ball by the late 1980s. Big-league teams stopped sending top prospects to Puerto Rico. Pudge Rodríguez joined Caguas in 1989–90. Caguas acquired 20-year-old Juan González from Ponce by trading Alomar, who wanted to play for his father, Sandy Alomar Sr. Caguas director of player personnel Moisés González got feedback from Sandy Johnson, the Texas Rangers’ director of player personnel and scouting, who felt the Rangers outfielder was ready to play regularly.38 González welcomed the trade: “Ramón Avilés gave me a chance to showcase my skills,” he said. “I proved to everyone Juan González could play on an everyday basis.”39

González played in the 1995 Caribbean Series, hosted by San Juan. The “Dream Team” won this classic with a 6–0 record. Series MVP Roberto Alomar—with San Juan—was joined by Carlos Baerga, Carmelo Martínez, Carlos Delgado, Rey Sánchez, and Edgar Martínez; plus reinforcements González (Caguas), Rubén Sierra (Santurce), and Williams (Arecibo).40

Caguas won three league titles between 2001 and 2013 but disappointed its fans in the 2001, 2011, and 2013 Caribbean Series. Sandy Alomar Sr. managed the 2000-01 team to a 2–4 record and fourth place in Culiacán, Mexico. Carlos Beltrán made the 2001 Series All-Star team by hitting .409 with seven RBIs. So did teammate Gary Matthews Jr., who hit .360 with six RBIs. The 2011 Caribbean Series, hosted by Mayagüez, was dedicated to Roberto Alomar; Caguas, at 3–3, tied for second-place. The 2012–13 Criollos played in Hermosillo and won two of six games for a third-place tie.41

2017 SERIES: CULICAN, MEXICO

Caguas won its fourth Caribbean Series title, and first in 30 years, after defeating the Santurce Cangrejeros in a best-of-nine finals. Ex-Caguas catcher Pudge Rodríguez had his number 7 retired prior to Game Eight on January 25, 2017.42 Alex Cora, Caguas’s fifth-year general manager, expressed confidence in his team going into the 2017 Caribbean Series.43 The Criollos finished fourth in the preliminary round before defeating Venezuela’s Tigres de Aragua in the semifinal 9-6 and besting the Aguilas de Mexicali 1–0 in 10 innings in the final.

David Vidal of Caguas, the 2017 Caribbean Series MVP, had played for the Somerset Patriots, an independent league team, in 2015 and 2016. The 27-year-old third baseman hit three homers and drove in five runs to earn a 2017 All-Star berth alongside teammate Iván de Jesús Jr.44 Jonathan Morales, who drove in the only run in the win over Mexicali with a 10th-inning sacrifice fly, said, “This is incredible—the biggest moment of my life; 16 years since the last time we won it. Sixteen years ago I was a kid with no clue of what I wanted to do for a living. This is unreal.”45

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Jeff Idelson, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, attended the 2017 series in Culiacán. He took back jerseys belonging to Jonathan Morales and Randy Ruiz. “The artifacts we collect can end up anywhere in the museum,” Idelson said to Jesse Sánchez of MLB.com. “Viva Béisbol!, our first bilingual exhibit, talks about great baseball countries like Puerto Rico and Mexico. What we collect could very well end up in Viva Béisbol!”46 Table 15 lists 13 ex-Caguas regular-season players and managersinducted in Cooperstown.

Table 15. Caguas to Cooperstown

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The Criollos arrived back on the Island Wednesday evening, February 8, 2017, and Caguas hosted a major celebration on February 10. Thirty-eight-year-old rookie manager Luis Matos, said: “Fans need to support and fall in love with this team; with its players . . . some of whom hope to make it to MLB. This [Puerto Rico] league must continue. It’s not just a workshop for the players, but others. Look at the experience I acquired. It will be beneficial for managing in the States.47 Matos then led Caguas to a 2018 league title and 2018 Caribbean Series crown. He became the first manager in 60 years to win back-to-back Caribbean Series titles.48

JANUARY 2018 SEASON AND 2018 SERIES: GUADALAJARA, MEXICO

Hurricane María put a damper on the 2017–18 Roberto Clemente Professional Baseball League season. A compressed 18-game schedule in January 2018 was followed by an elimination game between second- and third-place teams. Caguas played its home games six miles to the east, in Gurabo’s Evaristo “Varo” Roldán Stadium, also used as a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center.49 The 18 regular-season games were played in daylight hours due to power outages and electrical problems. The Criollos won their 18th league title prior to flying to Mexico for the Caribbean Series. Their plane stopped in the Dominican Republic to pick up the Aguilas Cibaeñas, winners of the Dominican League.

The Opening Ceremonies before the Caguas-Culiacán game on February 2, 2018, featured an appearance by former US President Bill Clinton, who was seen in the Puerto Rico dugout, shaking hands and inquiring about players’ families in the aftermath of the hurricane. Guadalajara native Saúl “Canelo” Alvarez, a world middleweight boxing champion, threw the first pitch. Caguas won the opener; had a February 3 bye; lost to the Dominicans on February 4; rebounded with a 12–7 win over Venezuela’s Caribes de Anzoátegui on February 5; and lost to Cuba’s Alazanes de Granma 6–3 to end the preliminary round in third place.

Caguas bested Venezuela 6–5 in the semifinals on February 7, behind Anthony García’s grand slam and closer Miguel Mejía’s save. Series MVP García had a .556 on-base percentage, 1.042 SLG, and 1.598 OPS. In the final on February 8, Caguas trailed the Aguilas 4–3 in the seventh inning. Catcher Jonathan Morales’s three-run homer gave Caguas a 6–4 lead, and the Criollos went on to win 9–4.50 When Morales reached home, he pounded his chest and stomped on home plate like the game was over. “This victory means a lot for me and my country of Puerto Rico, because it’s been hard and it’s been a tough situation because of the hurricane,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter, because when you have God in your heart, you play and you get that W. I feel blessed.” 51 Table 16 summarizes the series. Luis Matos was thankful his players came through.52 The team returned to Puerto Rico on February 9, stopping in the Dominican Republic to drop off the Dominican team. The Criollos took part in a Governor’s Mansion reception honoring them on February 12.

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THOMAS E. VAN HYNING was US correspondent for the Puerto Rico Professional Baseball Hall of Fame, 1991–96. He authored “Puerto Rico’s Winter League” and “The Santurce Crabbers.” Tom’s articles have appeared in “The National Pastime” and “Baseball Research Journal,” including pieces on Rickey Henderson, Dennis Martínez, and the Santurce Cangrejeros. He has written 10 SABR BioProject biographies, including Rubén Gómez, Joe Gibbon, Randy Ready, Pat Kelly, and Dick Hughes. A member of the Robinson-Kell SABR Chapter, Tom is Tourism Economist & Data Analyst, Mississippi Development Authority. His BBA degree is from the University of Georgia. He has two masters’ degrees.

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment to Monte Cely, SABR’s Rogers Hornsby Chapter, San Antonio-Austin, Texas, for 2017 and 2018 Caribbean Series updates. Caguas resident Nestor Duprey and historian Jorge Colón Delgado secured permission from Carmen Pérez, Caguas Criollos Public Relations official, for use of the February 12, 2018, photo of the team’s visit to La Fortaleza.

Sources

Internet

http://www.beisbol101.com/2018/02/09/arrasa-anthony-garcia-en-la-serie-del-caribe

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/-/id/22375794/puerto-rico-wins-back-back-caribbean-series-titles-rally-dominican-republic

http://en.granma.cu/deportes/2018-02-13/the-entire-team-has-been-present-here-in-spirit

www.primerahora.com

http://www.purobeisbol.mx/?noticia=criollos-hace-historia

Journals

Thomas E. Van Hyning, “Hall of Famers Shine in Puerto Rico,” The National Pastime, no. 12, (1992): 14-16.

Thomas E. Van Hyning, “Dennis Martinez’s Winter League Career,” The National Pastime, no. 16, (1996): 51-53.

Notes

In my opinion, there is no more effective way of strengthening mutual understanding among nations than through the people to people approach, and I am convinced that international sports engagements are playing a very important role in building international friendship and good will. For that reason, I particularly appreciate this opportunity to congratulate KMOX Radio and all those responsible for broadcasting the games which the St. Louis Cardinals will be playing in Japan. Because of your efforts a maximum number of both Japanese and Americans will be able to communicate with each other through the common medium of baseball, and thereby promote the spirit of sportsmanship and international understanding. It gives me great pleasure to join baseball fans in extending best wishes to all those associated with KMOX Radio and good luck to the St. Louis Cardinals on what I know will be a most enjoyable and rewarding trip.

Richard M. Nixon
Vice-President1

They played in Honolulu, Manila, Seoul, Tokyo, Sendai, Sapporo, Osaka, and Hiroshima; Shimonoseki, Mito, Fukuoka, and elsewhere. The average attendance was 25,000, including 40,000 fans for the two final games, a doubleheader in Tokyo. The team left by plane for Kahului on October 11, 1958, less than two weeks after the conclusion of a fifth-place finish in the National League.2 By the 13th they were in Honolulu, where Jim Brosnan had already submitted his first dispatch.

The St. Louis Cardinals had embarked on their 1958 tour of Japan in the midst of management changes and a rebuilding effort, the impending twilight of Stan Musial’s career and the dawn of a new age of Japanese baseball. Watching it all was Jim Brosnan, whose series of articles would be some of the first words written from the perspective of an American ballplayer on playing in postwar Japan. They would go on to form a literary foundation not only for his own writing, but for the future of baseball literature.

American pros had been visiting Japan for over half a century. The Reach All-America Team had visited in 1908, Herb Hunter’s All-Stars twice in the 1920s and once in 1931, as well as the Negro Leagues All-Star squad the Philadelphia Royal Giants and a major league All-Star team in 1931.3 The 1934 tour, however, outshone the rest in its grand scope as well as its importance to the foundation of professional baseball in Japan. The tour introduced, in the flesh, the almighty Babe Ruth to the baseball-hungry fans of Japan, gave birth to new heroes like Eiji Sawamura and, in the person of Moe Berg, played a role in international intrigue. It led to the formation of Japan’s first professional team and set the standard for diplomacy that would become the hallmark of the postwar tours.

In 1949, spurred on by the occupation government, the PCL San Francisco Seals became the first American team since the mid-1930s to play against teams in Japan, and inspired the expansion of the professional leagues into a two-league system the following year. More All-Star tours followed, including the Joe DiMaggio-led bunch in 1951 and the Eddie Lopat All-Stars in ’53, before the American and National leagues finally relented and allowed actual major league teams to tour after the season (bypassing a rule in practice for decades not allowing more than three teammates to barnstorm together after the season).4 All three New York teams took turns playing against a combination of established Central and Pacific league teams (usually headed by the Yomiuri Giants) as well as All-Star teams formed by various players.

After several visits from New York teams 1953–57, the Cardinals’ tour of 1958 stands out as the first to represent the rest of the majors. Mainichi Newspapers proposed that the ’58 tour include a number of changes to coincide with the Cardinals, including a fully representative group of Japanese All-Stars to play the majority of the games.5 The fifth-place Cardinals had not been a powerhouse for most of the decade. Despite the star power of Musial, the tour was really a vehicle to show off the new era of talent in Japan against an established team from the United States.

After “The Long Season ” was published, author Jim Brosnan was called a “kookie beatnik” by Joe Garagiola and “an intellectual meathead” by Frank Lane, the general manager of the Indians. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

THE PROFESSOR

Ignominy! For Shame! Fie on us! In the cold, cold city of Sendai, where the other touring United States clubs have had a rough time, the Cardinals bit the mud (it’s still raining) for the first time since leaving the U.S.A. Solly Hemus, previously undefeated as Cardinal manager, has thus suffered the first stings sic] and arrows of outrageous fortune. To the smiling, bowing Japanese press Solly graciously admitted — “We gave ’em the game.” — Jim Brosnan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 2, 19586

Though he was on the planes and in the bullpen and at the cocktail parties, Jim Brosnan did not make a pitching appearance against the Japanese stars until November 3 in Osaka, when he pitched a perfect 10th inning after future congressman Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell almost lost the game in the ninth.7 Brosnan had eased into the relief role in his three major league seasons with the Cubs after starting out in pro ball in 1947 as a 17-year-old in the Appalachian League.

After pitching the Cubs to an Opening Day victory over the Cardinals in April 1958 (over future teammate Mizell), Brosnan had been traded to St. Louis for Alvin Dark in mid-May, an event Dark “had considered a grave insult.”8 That season all his appearances were as a starter. No longer would he spend all his time in the bullpen, alone with his thoughts and his pen. Instead, he would start all of his Cubs appearances and, beginning in May with the Cardinals, he was made a spot starter, finishing the season 11–8 with seven saves. Though a swingman, he still had time to keep writing, which was more and more at the forefront of his ambition.

Brosnan had spent close to two years in the Army in the early ’50s, where he had discovered an aptitude for writing to go along with his lifelong love of music. After making it to the majors, he continued to pursue this avenue through short pieces that eventually led to a relationship with Bob Boyle, whom he met when Boyle visited the Cubs on assignment from Time magazine to write a piece about Philip K. Wrigley.9 Boyle, who also wrote for Sports Illustrated, encouraged Brosnan to submit a diary about his trade to the Cardinals, which was subsequently published in the July 21, 1958, issue of SI (titled “Now Pitching for St. Louis: … The Rookie Psychiatrist”).10

It was a revelation — a player thinking, recording, and publishing his thoughts on the game. No doubt it also ruffled a few feathers. After the success of “The Rookie Psychiatrist” and another piece, “Me and Hutch,” Bob Creamer, an editor at Sports Illustrated, approached Brosnan to write a series of articles about the upcoming goodwill tour of Japan. Bob Broeg of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch subsequently learned of the agreement and offered Brosnan a chance to write a series of articles on the same topic, for which he would pay $100 per dispatch.11 Known as a pitcher, it was as a writer that Brosnan really wanted to be remembered.

Though intellectual pursuits were not generally associated with the life of a ballplayer, Brosnan’s ambitions were not unprecedented. Throughout baseball history, there had been a few ballplayers, most notably Sol White and John Montgomery Ward, who were known to both play and write. There had been many books “authored” by players both well-known and otherwise, but they had been ghostwritten, usually by sportswriters such as Ford Frick. This includes Pitching in a Pinch by Christy Mathewson, though ghostwritten by John Wheeler, which is considered one of the first “tell-all” baseball books.

Needless to say, baseball books were not taken seriously, with one exception: Ring Lardner, a respected sportswriter and friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote a series of short stories based on the “busher” Jack Keefe, as well as what is probably the first respectable baseball novel, You Know Me Al.12 Other than Lardner’s Keefe, baseball fiction was dominated by the all-American, goody two shoes, Frank Merriwell type, and aimed at bolstering the notion of heroism to boys across America.13 It wasn’t until after World War II that the first serious group of baseball novels emerged. In 1952, Bernard Malamud, a master of the short story, published The Natural, a book as much about American myth and magic as about baseball. The long history of baseball literature up to that point, focused on perpetuating the myth-building essential to the culture, served as a perfect canvas for Malamud’s allegorical Roy Hobbs.

The other significant baseball novel published at roughly the same time, The Southpaw (1953), took a different approach. Author Mark Harris had written about baseball in essays and stories for a decade, with a perspective rooted in the realism of the game’s place in American culture. His book proved to be a kind of anti-Malamud, and his protagonist the anti-Roy Hobbs. Henry “Author” Wiggen spoke in a vernacular much closer to the everyday speech heard on a ball field than was typically seen in print, and, in a way, harked back to the style popularized by Lardner’s Jack Keefe.14

Jim Brosnan was Author Wiggen. Just as Wiggen was known as “Author,” Brosnan was known as “The Professor.” He saw himself as a writer as much as a pitcher, and he even looked the part, with his thick glasses and books under his arm. The two authors knew each other’s work — Brosnan had reviewed Harris in an obscure journal called Etcetera back in the mid-’50s, a piece that had jump-started his own literary career.15 Harris would review The Long Season for the New York Times in 1960, praising Brosnan’s gift to literature and baseball — a glimpse into the mind of the average ballplayer. Harris wrote: “Fortunately, however, [Brosnan’s] enthusiasm for the game is at least equaled by his passion for observing, for listening and for recording who said what to whom and why in what bull-pen where, how the Cincinnati Reds fare at bridge, how the airline hostess responds to Mark Twain’s literary criticism, what it feels like to be booed; the nature and extent of racial integration among big-league baseball players; the relationship between Team and Self. ‘Carefully I preserve these artifacts of an expiring career.’”16

Harris, the anti-Malamud, had written his books in the voice of such a player, and that writing had influenced Brosnan’s voice — and, in a cyclical nature, so too had Brosnan’s voice, that of “the thousands of baseball players not blessed with extraordinary gifts who will never knock at the door of Cooperstown,” influenced Harris. In The Long Season, Harris sees the positive in the brainy Brosnan’s “dwelling intimately upon the particular, tell[ing] us much we have never been able to know of the mute thousands.”17

These similarities help explain Brosnan’s “character.” That character took shape first in his diaries, and then in the dispatches sent from Japan. “I had not been happy with the baseball books that I had read when I was a kid,” he told an interviewer later in life. “I wrote about what interested me — what I overheard in the clubhouse. … The editors said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’”18

Sports Illustrated ended up passing on whatever Brosnan submitted to them after the tour, but the effort resulted in another meeting with Creamer. Not only did Creamer provide “The Professor” with an impromptu journalism lesson, he proposed a meeting between Brosnan and a friend of his at Harper & Row. That meeting would eventually produce a contract and post-war baseball’s first notable book by a player, The Long Season.19

“Initially, I was told to take out [the references to] martinis. Then I got a call from the top editor … and he said ‘Ignore that last message. Put more martinis in.’”20

The Post-Dispatch was more than happy with the dispatches sent by Brosnan, and the published articles netted Brosnan over $1,000 in extra pay. The first dispatch, published on October 13 and titled “’Eastward, Ho!’ With Brosnan, Or, Getting Way Up With Birds,” set the tone not only for the remaining articles, but for the diary Brosnon kept with the Cardinals during the ’59 season, which would become The Long Season. It exemplified the style of the rest, a free-form, literate style influenced by jazz but grounded in the real observational elements cherished by Harris and Author Wiggen.

A ticket stub to the final game of the tour. (Author’s collection)

THE FIRST DISPATCH

In early October 1958, Brosnan was headed to Honolulu, writing from the plane about the long flight and the stomach-churning reality of a 28-hour long, multi-time-zone day. He was already attempting to flex a sense of style. He began:

“From one of the longest runways in the world, San Francisco, we took off on the longest trip of this or any other year. By sunrise on the tenth we gained four hours changing time zones and explaining to the stomach wha’ hoppen in our 28-hour day.”21

His claustrophobia related not only to a lengthy plane ride but to the celebrity and status that were the reason for that plane ride, inexorably tying the two together for the reader. And he lamented the insurance value of his life:

“Gives a man a feeling of power to be worth more money dead than alive. Macabre, that describes this game.”22

He wrote of the “distractions” — the wives, yes, but especially the “stewardesses,” even going so far as to describe one’s outfit in detail, a segment demonstrating the kind of sexist overtones accepted as routine in the sports world of that time. He wrote, too, of the food, relating the size of the plane’s kitchen and its propensity for putting out “sizzling steak sandwiches” and breakfast. Still, with style, he remarked, “I mean this ship was big, man,” and piled on the self-deprecating humor: “Ignoring the champagne left over from the take-off party (man, what a tough way to make a buck) we prepared fresh morning coffee.”

Just as important as the cocktail parties was the Honolulu sunset:

Down the winding stairway I went to the lounge to watch the sunrise. As a working ballplayer, I don’t ordinarily cover sunrises, but I have seen some. This one was a first in one sense, however, an Oriental mirage perhaps, but I swore to myself that I was seeing a ring around the earth just above the horizon. Nothing but clouds, water and whales below, so I sat, in voiceless contemplation of the rising sun. (Fifteen years ago, I would have been shot for using the expression!)23

Brosnan was aware that most of his teammates, as well as most of the Japanese All-Stars, had come up in the aftermath of World War II, and were slightly less encumbered than ballplayers of the previous generation by the weight of the war’s prejudices, as well as the horrors of having participated. This was a new era dawning, and he saw clearly the hope that was at the heart of this diplomatic trip to Japan.

Yet other prejudices prevailed. Though Brosnan seems to avoid utilizing the racially insensitive language employed in headlines and coverage of the tour in the United States (for example, the Post-Dispatch headlines “Boyer Most Honorable Batter as Cards Beat Japanese in 10th” and “So-Sorry Cards Make Sad Sam at Home in Japan, Boot Game”), he was still a product of his time, employing tropes of women and Japanese ballplayers that would be perceived as insensitive today.24

He concluded with a lament on lost bridge partners — Del Ennis and Billy Muffett, scheduled to make the trip but traded just before takeoff, were half of a four-man game rounded out by Larry Jackson. But the beauty before him, Larry, and, of course, the cocktail parties and receptions, replaced any reverie for the past life or routine of the season, and set the tone, not just for Brosnan and the team but for the reader, that the best was yet to come.

“The problem of finding a fourth was not our concern immediately, though. Molokai, the leper colony island, was on our left, Diamond Head just a few minutes away, and the scent of jasmine was being wafted skyward from the island of Oahu.”25 The first three games were in Hawaii, against local stars and semipros led by Bob Turley, Lew Burdette, and Eddie Matthews, who had accompanied the Cards up to the Hawaiian stops. Strong fall rain forced the cancellation of a game in Guam, but otherwise the Cardinals shut out the opposition before boarding the plane to Japan.26

The Cardinals continued winning after arriving in Tokyo. However, the young squad of All-Stars from Japan’s Central and Pacific leagues did not disappoint. Futoshi Nakanishi of the Nishitetsu Lions hit several towering homers, including one off Vinegar Bend Mizell and a grand slam off Bob Blaylock, which secured one of only two victories for the Japanese squad.27 Kazuhisa “Iron Man” Inao pitched admirably considering he had come off of a season during which he pitched 373 innings and nearly single-handedly won the Japan Series for the Lions, pitching in six games and securing victories in all four team wins. But it was the rookie Shigeo Nagashima who would be unanimously voted the best of the All-Stars by the touring Cardinals.28 His clutch hitting, including an inside-the-park homer, and fine fielding at third base showcased not only the wonders of his own talent, but demonstrated to an international audience the level of skill to be found in the younger generation of Japanese pro ballplayers. He would go on to hit his famous “Sayonara Home Run” before the emperor the following year, and become known as “Mr. Baseball.”

Brosnan would write 11 further dispatches before the Cardinals headed home, describing the game and culture of Japan from a perspective only a player could represent. In the November 6 dispatch, he told of running into “Carl Hanta, a Nisei from Honolulu, with whom I played in the Texas League,” who would point out to Brosnan the “many differences not immediately evident” between baseball in Japan and in the United States.

“Carl played for one of the Japanese professional teams here, although he arrived too late this year to make the All-Japan nine. Did you know, he asked, that: ‘The average major league player in Japan makes about $100 a month? That nobody goes home after the season ends? The players remain in the club home town to train for next season? … That the Number One pitcher in the league makes twice as much money as the Prime Minister? That the typical youngster in Japan would rather be the No. 1 pitcher than Prime Minister?”29

And as Brosnan educated American fans about the game, he continued to develop his style, peppering in jazz and humor:

“Noro Morales — he’s the jazz man, Cats — attended one of our games. He says, if I may try to quote: ‘It was a gas, man. Those cats come on like they dig the up-beat, the down-beat and the off-beat. But dig the crazy infield. These cats are supposed to know how to sow the seed. And there it is, all skin, man! I mean it’s bare, boy! And hey, they put you down with the long ball. Like, let’s do the home-run bit. Like, Swingin’ Stan the Man — let’s swing, dads.’ Which all means, I think, that the Japanese really look the part of pro baseball players; that there is no grass on the infield because of clay in the soil; that the Japanese All-Stars hit two home runs and the Cardinals hit none, and that Morales knows about Stan Musial.”30

His dispatches would bring to life both the unique excitement and painful boredom of a professional ballplayer on tour in another country in a way that the press corps couldn’t. This included Joe Garagiola, who would later be critical of Brosnan’s writing, reporting on the tour for KMOX.31 Garagiola, as well as many other players (including Joe Adcock, who, after hitting a home run off Brosnan in the wake of The Long Season told Jim to “stick that in your book” as he rounded the bases), were upset by the reality reflected in Brosnan’s writing.32 However, it was that reality that made his writing, including his dispatches from Japan, so important. They introduced a world of baseball to an American audience mostly unaware of the level of talent competing halfway across the world. Names like Nagashima and Kawakami, “The Big Buffalo” and Iron Man Inao. Exactly as Author Wiggen might.

From left: Futoshi Nakanishi, Kazuhisa “Iron Man” Inao, Shigeo Nagashima. (Author’s collection)

GOTTA START SOMEPLACE

George Plimpton’s “small ball” theory of sports literature suggests that “the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature.”33 As an example, he cites Brosnan’s writing and his insistence on realism. Known more for Paper Lion, as the founder of the Paris Review, and as a sullen New York Giants fan, Plimpton was what the Spanish call an espontáneo — a “haunted young man who starts moving down from his cheap seats toward the bullring … [to] run across the open sand” — in Paper Lion and his other sports books, including the baseball book Out of My League.34 In a way, Brosnan was a kind of reverse espontáneo, moving from the “cheap seats” of the bullpen to the “open sand” of the publishing world. The 1958 tour of Japan, which provided the Cardinals with a chance to travel and Brosnan a chance to once again prove his chops as a writer, served as a necessary building block in that process.

During the trip, several of the American pitchers were offered large contracts to stay and pitch in the Japanese pro leagues. Phil Paine and Bill Wight declined. The third Cardinal offered cash to stay was Jim Brosnan. He turned down the offer as well, thinking of his family. It was a good move.35 His 1959 season would prove excellent fodder for The Long Season, paving the way not only for the publication of Plimpton’s Out of My League in 1961, but easing the path for the success of baseball literature and its integration into American literature.

The publication of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four a decade after The Long Season was rightly hailed as a watershed moment in sports history. That Ball Four owes a certain debt to Brosnon is evidenced not only by its publication, but by the similar (though more visceral) reaction to it from the baseball community. Brosnan, as Bouton would be, was shunned after The Long Season was published, called a “kookie beatnik” by Garagiola and “an intellectual meathead” by Frank Lane, the general manager of the Indians.36 Brosnan’s personification of the Author Wiggen character, as well as the influence Harris’ writing had on his own, gave rise to his “tell-all,” “from-the-pitcher’s-point-of-view” and “espontáneo” articles in Sports Illustrated and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The success of these resulted in his meetings with the eventual publishers of The Long Season.

Later in life he would correspond with Harris about his influence as well as Brosnan’s own career as a writer of children’s baseball books (in his words, “gotta start someplace”) and sports pieces. In a letter dated January 2, 1968, he addressed Harris: “You once suggested I keep a complete list of my published writings. Have done so. For ten years’ work the compendium now covers five pages: 52 magazine articles; 5 books; over 50 newspaper columns; a dozen reviews and essays; half a dozen re-prints; two prefaces and a pair of short stories.”37 It all started, though, with the Cardinals and Japan.

ADAM BERENBAK is an archivist in the National Archives Center for Legislative Archives. He earned a Master of Library Science degree with a focus in archives from North Carolina Central University and was a 2008 Frank and Peggy Steele Intern at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center in Cooperstown, New York. He has previously published “Congressional Play-by-Play on Baseball” in “Prologue” (Summer 2011 edition), and “Henderson, Cartwright, and the 1953 US Congress” in the Fall 2014 “Baseball Research Journal.” He has written informally about baseball in Japan for the past decade here: http://noboruaota.blogspot.com.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dan Lillienkamp of the St. Louis Public Library Special Collections and Curtis Small of the University of Delaware Libraries. This work is an excerpt of a longer work on the 1958 Cardinals’ tour of Japan on which the author spoke at the Cooperstown Symposium and hopes to publish as a full-length book. An exhibit featuring tour-related artifacts is planned for Summer 2018 at the Japanese Embassy Cultural Center in Washington, DC.

Notes

1 “Nixon Lauds Station KMOX for Airing Cardinal Games,” The Sporting News, October 29, 1958.

2 J. T. Taylor Spink, The Sporting News Baseball Guide and Record Book (St. Louis: Charles C. Spink & Son, 1959).

3 Daniel E. Johnson, Japanese Baseball: A Statistical Handbook (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 1999).

4 “Giants Invited to Become First Major Club to Make Baseball Tour of Japan as Unit,” New York Times, June 30, 1953.

5 Lee Kavetski, “Cards to Face 50 of Japan’s Best on Jaunt,” The Sporting News, October 15, 1958

6 Jim Brosnan, “Old Cardinal Refrain ‘We Gave ‘Em Game’ Heard Anew in Japan,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 2, 1958.

7 “Boyer Most Honorable Batter as Cards Beat Japanese in 10th,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 3, 1958.

8 David Davis, “An Interview with Jim Brosnan,” SoCal Sports Observed, July 17, 2007, http://www.laobserved.com/sports/2007/07/an_interview_with_jim_brosnan.php, last accessed January 17, 2018.

9 Charles Demotte, “Writing From The Bullpen: Jim Brosnan and Jim Bouton, Two Baseball Diarists,” Writing From The Bullpen, January 24, 2014 (https://chasdemotte.wordpress.com/, last accessed January 17, 2018.

10 Charles Demotte, “Writing From The Bullpen: Jim Brosnan and Jim Bouton, Two Baseball Diarists,” Writing From The Bullpen, January 24, 2014 (https://chasdemotte.wordpress.com/, last accessed January 17, 2018.

11 Peter Golenbock, The Spirit of St. Louis: A History of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns (New York: HarperEntertainment, 2000) 422-431.

12 Christian K. Messenger, “Expansion Draft: Baseball Fiction of the 1980s” in The Achievement of American Sport Literature: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Wiley Lee Umphlett (Rutheford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991).

13 John A. Lauricella, Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 1999).

14 John A. Lauricella, Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 1999).

15 Golenbock, The Spirit of St. Louis, 422-431.

16 Mark Harris, “Between Pitches, There was a Lot to Think About,” New York Times, July 10, 1960.

17 Harris, “Between Pitches.”

18 Davis, “An Interview with Jim Brosnan.”

19 Golenbock, The Spirit of St. Louis, 422-431.

20 Davis, “An Interview with Jim Brosnan.”

21 Brosnan, “Boyer Most Honorable Batter as Cards Beat Japanese in 10th.”

22 Brosnan, “Boyer Most Honorable Batter as Cards Beat Japanese in 10th.”

23 Brosnan, “Boyer Most Honorable Batter as Cards Beat Japanese in 10th.”

24 Brosnan, “So-Sorry Cards Make Sad Sam at Home in Japan, Boot Game,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 27, 1958.

25 Brosnan, “Boyer Most Honorable Batter as Cards Beat Japanese in 10th.”

26 Red McQueen, “Cardinals Pound Burdette and Turley Before Small Crowds in Hawaii Games,” The Sporting News, October 22, 1958.

27 “Grand Slam Homer Hit Off Blaylock As Cards Lose 9-2,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 4, 1958.

28 Lee Kavetski, “Cardinals Vote Nagashima Top Nippon Player,” The Sporting News, November 26, 1958.

29 Jim Brosnan, “Firecrackers, Pigeons, Balloons Help to Start Game in Japan,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 6, 1958.

30 Jim Brosnan, “Tourist Brosnan Finds 65,000 Boy Scouts Lost in Japan,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 31, 1958.

31 John Corry, “No Comic Books For Brosnan,” New York Times, August 28, 1960.

32 Davis, “An Interview with Jim Brosnan.”

33 George Plimpton, “The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature,” New York Times, May 31, 1992.

34 George Plimpton, Out of My League (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1961).

35 Golenbock, The Spirit of St. Louis, 422-431.

36 Corry, “No Comic Books For Brosnan.”

37 Jim Brosnan to Mark Harris, January 2, 1968, Mark Harris Papers, Manuscript Collection No. 101; Series I: Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 2, University of Delaware Library, Newark, DE.

It all started as a lark. Back in the mid-1990s, during the Internet’s infancy, Usenet bulletin boards were the virtual water coolers we all gathered around to discuss our favorite topics. Over on the rec.sport.baseball board, Christina Kahrl and a bunch of like-minded individuals were marveling over the statistical quirks of Rob Deer. Deer had the unusual ability to not put the ball in play. At a time when about a-quarter of all plate appearances ended in a walk, home run, or strikeout, Deer managed that outcome nearly half the time.1

The members of the Usenet board organized a “Rob Deer Fan Club” and, as Kahrl says:

We basically trolled people over how this was a guy playing the game the right way, because he was generating runs and avoiding double plays. I wrote a silly Conan/Robert E. Howard sort of backstory about how “The Deer” was inspired by the “ur-Deer” (Gorman Thomas, of course), and since we were already steeping it in our semi-ridiculous absolute faith in our hero, I referred to his delivering “the Three True Outcomes.2

Baseball Prospectus was the first major website to note the Three True Outcomes (TTO). In August 2000 on that site, Rany Jazayerli whimsically proclaimed:

The Revolution that will spread the Gospel of the Three True Outcomes to every man, woman and child on Earth.

What are the Three True Outcomes, you ask? They are:

• The Home Run, the weapon with which we fight the evil legions of Little Ball.
• The Strikeout, a symbol of our refusal to compromise.
• The Base on Balls, which brings balance to our cause.

Together, the Three True Outcomes distill the game to its essence, the battle of pitcher against hitter, free from the distractions of the defense, the distortion of foot speed or the corruption of managerial tactics like the bunt and his wicked brother, the hit-and-run.3

The next year, TTO got a further boost in prominence and an actual air of legitimacy when BP’s Voros McCracken wrote about seeking to determine what impact fielding had on pitching. His work referenced aspects of TTO, as components that the fielders had no control over:

The first thing I did was create something called “Defense Independent Pitching Stats.” DIPS are the representation of a pitcher’s stat line without any possible influence from the defense behind the pitcher. I calculated the various rates for walks, strikeouts, home runs, hit batsmen, etc. as a function of batters faced, and inserted them into the pitcher’s line.4

In the following years, BP’s Keith Woolner reported on the annual leaders in TTO percentage and noted when a player broke the record for highest percentage in a season. In 2004, Woolner introduced an update to those calculations, normalizing individual player rates based on major league averages.5

With each passing year, additional baseball websites dipped their toes into the TTO waters, reporting on the yearly leaders and/or trailers (most times without normalization to major league average for that season). This author applied TTO analysis on the team level in a post to her own baseball blog in 2012, providing a look at the teams from 1973 through 2011 with the highest and lowest TTO percentages relative to major league average. In so doing, it was discovered that a team’s TTO rate had very little impact on its overall record. There had been winning and losing teams on both sides of the TTO spectrum.6

In August 2017, during a season in which the TTO rate in the majors would ultimately hit a record 33.5 percent, Michael Baumann of the Ringer offered up an immersive run-through of TTO’s ever-increasing footprint on the game. The article was ominously titled “The End of Baseball As We Know It” and it proclaimed: “With the march of three true outcomes — walks, strikeouts, and home runs — the sport has been pushed to its efficient extreme. MLB has undergone a quiet revolution without anyone stopping to ask the question: Is this what we really want?” Baumann placed the TTO explosion within the context of the steroid era, the increasing height and weight of players, and the increasing velocity of pitchers.7

In this paper TTO growth will be examined and possible explanations for the upward trend will be presented.

HISTORICAL GROWTH IN TTO CATEGORIES

Babe Ruth set an incredible standard as a TTO leader during his career, compiling the ten highest all-time TTO rates relative to major league average, as shown in Table 1. For example, in 1920 the big-league TTO rate was 15.5 percent. Ruth’s 46.1 figure nearly tripled that, and the nine other marks were also at least double the standard for the corresponding season.

Table 1: Top Ten TTO Percentage Differences (all by Babe Ruth), By Season

Table 2 shows the highest single-season TTO percentage difference for each decade. Ruth of course dominates the list, and we see the aforementioned Deer and Thomas. Dave Nicholson set a then-major league record with 175 strikeouts in 1963 as a part of his TTO stats.

Table 2: Highest Single-Season TTO Percentage Differences for Batting Title Qualifiers, By Decade

(Click image to enlarge.)

As shown in Figure 1 below, Three True Outcomes made up no more than 20 percent of all plate appearances from 1913 through 1945. The one-quarter threshold was broken in 1961, and the 30 percent mark was eclipsed for the first time in 2012. The rate jumped considerably in each of the last three seasons, from 30.3 percent to 30.7 percent in 2015, 32.3 percent in 2016, and finally the record of 33.5 percent this past year.

Figure 1: MLB Three True Outcome Percentage, 1913-2017

Three True Outcome rates have been rising steadily, especially in the last 25 years.

Walk rates have remained relatively static over time, and while home run rates did hit a record 3.3 percent of plate appearances in 2017.8 They remain the smallest component of TTO. Figure 2 shows the rapid increase in strikeout rate across the majors, especially since the early 1990s. It is the increase in strikeouts that is driving the TTO explosion.

Figure 2: MLB Homer, Walk and Strikeout Rates, 1913-2017

Strikeout-rate growth has outpaced the other two components in the Three True Outcomes, especially since the early 1990s.

Major league baseball set a record with 21.6 percent of all plate appearances ending in a strikeout in 2017, and as Table 3 shows, the last ten years have seen a nearly 25 percent increase in the overall strikeout rate.

Table 3: Strikeout Percentage in MLB, 2008-2017

REASONS FOR TTO GROWTH

With strikeouts being the largest component of TTO, it would make sense to examine the reasons for the increasing strikeout (and therefore TTO) rate. There are five main reasons:

REASON 1: MARCH OF THE RELIEVERS

The frequency of managers employing the strategy of “shortening” games—using seventh-inning relievers, setup men, lefty and righty specialists and the like to get the game to the closer—has risen sharply in the past decade. As shown in Table 4, relievers took part in 38 percent of all plate appearances (PA%) in 2017, compared to only 33 percent back in 2005.9

Table 4: Starter and Reliever Percentage of Plate Appearances, with Strikeout and TTO rates, 2005-2017

(Click image to enlarge.)

This is important to the TTO discussion because relievers have higher strikeout rates than starters, going as far back as 1969.

REASON 2: INFUSION OF YOUTH IN GAME BROUGHT WITH IT A FREE-SWINGING ATTITUDE

Table 5 shows the percentage of plate appearances given to each of four distinct age groups in the major leagues. The year 2004 was chosen as that was the most recent nadir in terms of the youngest group’s percentage of all plate appearances. “K Pct. Diff.” is the difference between each group’s strikeout rate and the majors as a whole that season. For example, in 2004 the “Ages <= 25” group had a strikeout rate of 19.4 percent against a major league average of 16.9, for a “K Pct. Diff” of 15 percent above average. Similarly, “TTO Pct. Diff” is the difference between the group’s TTO percentage and the majors as a whole that season. In 2004 the “Ages <= 25” group had a 29.9 TTO percentage against a major league average of 28.4, and was therefore 5 percent higher (29.9/28.4 = 105 percent).

Since 2004, the percentage of plate appearances given to “youngsters” has risen by ten full points, offsetting a drop in that group’s strikeout-percentage difference from 15 percent above average to 8 above average. Notice that in 2017, the younger the group was, the higher the strikeout rate and TTO percentage. The prospects and/or youngest players coming into the big leagues are driving the rising strikeout rate, which in turn raises the current TTO rate.10

Table 5: Comparison of Strikeout and TTO Rates with Percentage Differences, by Age Group in 2004 and 2017

(Click image to enlarge.)

REASON 3: “SMALL BALL” IS WANING

In 2011, there were 1,667 sacrifice bunts. In 2017, that number was down 45 percent to 925. There were 4,540 stolen base attempts and 1,274 sacrifice flies in 2011. Six years later, those numbers were 3,461 and 1,168 respectively.11 It appears teams no longer play for one run unless absolutely necessary. The “Earl Weaver special” of a three-run homer is the weapon of choice nowadays, and TTO is taking over.12

One look at an “expected runs matrix” should show why. Table 6 shows the 24 base-out states possible in an inning, along with the expected runs scored in each circumstance during 2017.13

Table 6: Expected Runs Matrix for MLB, 2017

For example, with no outs and a runner on first, one should expect to score 0.89 runs. That expectancy actually drops to 0.69 runs if you sacrifice bunt or otherwise “productively” move the runner to second while making an out.

More and more, teams are forsaking small ball and relying upon the long ball. Table 7 shows the percentage of runs scored via the home run since 2007. The 42.3 percent figure in 2017 is an all-time record.14

Table 7: Percentage of Runs Scored in MLB via Home Run, 2007-2017

This homer-happy thinking has been fueled by a dramatic increase in the percentage of fly balls that resulted in homers over the past few seasons. Table 8 shows that nearly 14 percent of all fly balls left the yard in 2017, a record since these data became available.15

Table 8: Homers as a Percentage of Fly Balls, 2011-2017

Fly balls traveled an average of 316 feet in 2015. For whatever reason (batters changing their launch angle, which will be discussed shortly, or baseballs being more lively, are two possibilities), that average jumped to 319 feet in 2016 and 321 feet in 2017.16 Those five additional feet turn some routine outs into hits or even homers. Even if the fly ball doesn’t go out, it has become less of a pox on batters. In 2014 batters hit .212 on fly balls. That average grew to .251 in 2017.17 This leads into our next reason.

REASON 4: ADVANCED ANALYTICS HAVE MADE LAUNCH ANGLE THE “IN” THING

The 2015 introduction and growing use by teams of Statcast data, which tracks the movement of every ball and fielder in each park/game, has changed the way some players have approached hitting.18 Where once hitters were limited to video review and advanced scouting of pitcher tendencies, now they have almost instantaneous access to the exit velocity and launch angle of their batted balls.19,20

A June 2017 article in the Washington Post went into great detail on this: “More batters are focusing not only on hitting the ball hard, but hitting the ball high into the air. The average launch angle—the angle at which the ball flies after being hit—rose from 10.5 degrees in 2015 to 11.5 degrees in 2016.” By May 21, 2017, the average launch angle was up to 12.8. Those two degrees may not sound like much, but they can make the difference between a ground ball and a line drive. “Balls hit with a high launch angle are more likely to result in a hit. Hit fast enough and at the right angle [generally over 95 miles per hour at an angle between 25 and 35 degrees], they become home runs.”21

The Post made Washington hometown hitter Daniel Murphy their example of a batter who adjusted his swing to hit the ball higher, noting that his “launch angle rose from 11.1 degrees in 2015 to 16.6 degrees in 2016″ and “his batting average rose from .281 in 2015 to .347 in 2016. He also hit eleven more home runs.”22

But when one swings hard and tries to hit the bottom half of the ball to generate loft, there will be an increased tendency to swing and miss, which leads brings us to the last reason.

REASON 5: THE STRIKEOUT HAS BEEN DESTIGMATIZED

“I’ve quit trying to hit home runs every time I go to bat. … From now on I’m just trying to keep from striking out. All I want to do is meet the ball. If I do that I’ll have a good year.” — Mickey Mantle in April of 195623

“Ralph Houk … has advised me to try choking up the bat when I’m up there left-handed and the pitcher has two strikes against me. I’m going to try it.” — Mantle in January of 196124

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, Mickey Mantle was frequently criticized for his high strikeout totals, despite a high batting average, immense power, and, as it turned out, all his best intentions. Table 9 shows how in nearly every season of his career, including his MVP seasons of 1956, 1957, and 1962, Mantle far exceeded the major league strikeout rate (and consequently one-upped the league TTO rate also).25

Table 9: MLB and Mickey Mantle’s Strikeout and TTO rates with Percentage Differences, 1951-1968

(Click image to enlarge.)

Contrast that with today’s players and environment:

“There’s no doubt the pitchers throw harder now than when I first got to the league, but there is also a different mentality from players these days. … They feel like if they strike out, it’s not a big deal. I personally hate strikeouts … but that’s my mentality. Yes, I see more homers and more strikeouts, but I guess that’s, like, the new baseball.” — Carlos Beltran26

Beltran made the majors in 1998. During that season, 23 batting title qualifiers ended the season with more walks than strikeouts.27 Since 2012, there have been no more than five qualifying players in any season.28

One need look no further than arguably the two best and most popular players in the game, Bryce Harper and Mike Trout, to witness the new world order of Strikeouts Are Okay. During his career, Harper has struck out 20.4 percent of the time, which coincidentally matches Mantle’s worst season, but is just a hair below the major league average of 20.5 percent.29 No one has suggested the five-time All-Star try cutting down his swing. Meanwhile, Trout struck out an American League-leading 184 times in 2014, and still led the league in offensive WAR and won the MVP that year.30 He also strikes out just above the major league average over his career (21.5 percent to 20.3 percent). There have been no reports of Mike Scioscia suggesting Trout choke up with two strikes against a tough righty.

Most recently, this past season, Aaron Judge became only the fifth rookie to qualify for the batting title while striking out in more than 30 percent of his plate appearances (Table 10).31 Note that all of these have occurred since 1995, and three of them have taken place in the last three seasons.

Table 10: Batting Title Qualifying Rookies with 30 Percent Strikeout Rate in Season

Judge also set a TTO rookie record in 2017 with an amazing 57.1 percent of his plate appearances ending in a walk, strikeout, or homer. According to Nate Silver, Judge became only the eighth player to lead his league in all three TTO categories in the same year.32 Regardless of how voters felt about his TTO prowess, Judge earned the 2017 American League Rookie of the Year, and was a second-place finisher in AL Most Valuable Player balloting. Fans seemed more enamored with his rookie record 52 homers than concerned about his (also) rookie record 208 strikeouts, as he had the most popular jersey at MLBShop.com.33

Judge’s assault on the TTO record this past season was actually upstaged by Joey Gallo, who broke Jack Cust’s 2007 record of 58.2 percent TTO. Gallo’s 58.6 TTO percentage means that three of the top ten highest TTO rates occurred in 2017 (Table 11).

Table 11: Top Ten Individual Season TTO Rates of Batting Title Qualifiers, 1913 to 2017

IMPACT OF TTO ON TODAY’S GAME

Tickets sold to major league games have declined relatively steadily from a 2007 peak of 79.5 million to 2017’s 72.7 million.34 Reasons for this decline have included the hot-button phrase “pace of play,” as some believe that the increasing length of games (an average two hours and 49 minutes in 2005, which grew to three hours and eight minutes in 2017) has bored and/or deterred fans. 35

Some of this increase in game length can be attributed to the previously mentioned glut of relief appearances in today’s game. Teams are using half a pitching appearance more on average per game in 2017 compared to 2005 (4.22 vs. 3.71). Additionally, pitches per plate appearance have increased from 3.74 in 2005 to 3.89 in 2017.36 The longer plate appearances extend into time between pitches also. As of mid-June 2017, players were taking 1.1 seconds more between pitches in 2017 than 2016, an unprecedented one-year jump in the 11 seasons such records have been available.37 As for game length being driven upward by increased offense, you can’t blame it on more batters coming to the plate, as the average plate appearances per game has decreased slightly between from 2005 to 2017.38

A natural question to ask is whether TTO outcomes are to blame for longer plate appearances. To answer that, one would need to figure out how many pitches on average it took to achieve each of the TTO events, versus all other plate-appearance outcomes. Table 12 shows the results of taking Baseball Reference Play Index data for 2005 and 2017 and splitting out the pitch counts for strikeouts, walks, homers, and all other events.39 The table reveals that the TTO outcomes—especially walks and strikeouts (both above the overall average in pitches)—lead to longer at-bats. In fact, it took more pitches in 2017 to finish any kind of plate appearance. Those longer at-bats are part of the reason for longer games.

Even though the average number of pitches to achieve a strikeout has increased only slightly between 2005 and 2017, there were nearly ten thousand more such events in 2017. An additional 46,473 pitches were thrown during strikeouts in 2017 compared to 2005. That works out to an average of 19 additional pitches per game, roughly one-half inning’s worth.

Table 12: Pitches per Plate Appearance for Various Events in 2005 and 2017 (excluding zero-pitch intentional walks)

(Click image to enlarge.)

THE FUTURE OF TTO

Still we’ve only had one run scored that was manufactured. It’s millennial. This is millennial baseball right now. You get up, you take a big swing, you strike out. You don’t try to get the runners over very often. Nobody bunts. Nobody hit-and-runs. We’re a team that has to get guys on and we got five hits. I mean, six runs and five hits is what you call efficiency, except if you lose.

— Steve Garvey on Game Two of the 2017 World Series40

Game Two of the 2017 World Series featured 19 strikeouts, eight homers, and eight walks amid 90 plate appearances.41 The Astros 7–6 win over the Dodgers had 35 three-true-outcome events, which was apparently too much for former major leaguer Garvey.

Regardless of whether you call it “millennial baseball” or TTO, there doesn’t appear to be enough of a groundswell within Major League Baseball or the Players Association themselves to change the direction toward more TTO. Pace of play initiatives have focused on intentional walks, mound visit durations, and time between pitches and pitching changes.

From the player’s perspective, why shouldn’t they adopt a TTO approach, given the increasing use of defensive shifts on the infield? You can see the impact of infield shifts on batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in Table 13. The normal BABIP in a season is right around .300. With shifts, balls on the ground resulted in a measly .237 BABIP in 2017—and that was the second highest figure in the last seven years.42 So why put the ball in play on the ground?

Table 13: BABIP on Groundballs Hit into Shifts, 2011–2017

When you do put the ball in play, fielders are now as good as they’ve ever been, shifted or not. The .984 fielding average in the majors in 2017 was just below the all-time high of .985 in 2013.43 There has been no tangible increase in batting average on balls in play in the past 25 years.44 There is little in the way of new incentives to put the ball in play on the ground, and with whispers of a livelier ball being used since the middle of 2015, homers and other extra-base hits are easier to come by if you adjust your launch angle.45

With the rare exceptions of lowering the mound and reducing the strike zone in 1969, and the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973, baseball has not tinkered with the fundamental workings of the game in the past 50 years. Those changes were for the purposes of boosting offense and hopefully attendance along with them. If attendance continues to drop, baseball might be inclined to implement similar radical changes. Would MLB consider, for example, something as drastic as deadening the ball to reduce home runs? It’s not that there is “too much offense” in the game right now; it’s that the offensive strategies, on a “molecular” level, have dynamically changed the game flow. However, the TTO revolution, which started as an Internet goof and has become a reality due to the reasons addressed herein, is apparently here to stay.

DAVID (D.B.) FIRSTMAN is a Data Analyst for the City of New York, crunching large datasets using SPSS and Excel. He has been a member of SABR off and on since the late 1980s. Besides his own baseball blog (Value Over Replacement Grit), his work has appeared at ESPN, Bronx Banter, Baseball Prospectus, The Hardball Times, and in The Village Voice. He wonders if the Royals will ever learn to love the Three True Outcomes.

Notes

1 “Rob Deer Stats,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/share.fcgi?id=jB3cC.

2 “Appreciating TOOTBLAN & other new baseball lingo,” FOX Sports, June 29, 2015. Accessed October 29, 2017. http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/just-a-bit-outside/story/appreciating-new-baseball-lingo-tootblan-maddux-three-true-outcomes-062915.

3 Rany Jazayerli, “Doctoring the Numbers: The Doctor is…Gone,” Baseball Prospectus, August 15, 2000. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/724/doctoring-the-numbers-the-doctor-is-gone/.

4 Voros McCracken, “Pitching and Defense: How Much Control Do Hurlers Have?” Baseball Prospectus, January 23, 2001. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/878/pitching-and-defense-how-much-control-do-hurlers-have/.

5 Keith Woolner, “Aim For The Head: Three True Outcomes, 2003,” Baseball Prospectus, January 21, 2004. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/2518/aim-for-the-head-three-true-outcomes-2003/.

6 Diane Firstman, “Applying ‘Three True Outcomes’ to a Team,” Value Over Replacement Grit, February 19, 2013. Accessed October 29, 2017. http://valueoverreplacementgrit.com/2012/02/06/applying-three-true-outcomes-to-a-team/.

7 Michael Baumann, “The End of Baseball As We Know It,” The Ringer, August 3, 2017. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.theringer.com/2017/8/7/16108098/the-end-of-baseball-as-we-know-it.

8 “2017 Major League Baseball Batting Ratios,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2017-ratio-batting.shtml.

9 “Team Pitching Split Finder,.” Baseball-Reference.com.. Accessed October 29, 2017,. https://www.baseball-reference.com/tiny/QEx8N.

10  “Team Batting Split Finder,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/tiny/rTfeH.

11  “Major League Baseball Batting Year-by-Year Averages,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/bat.shtml.

12  Diane Firstman, “Earl Weaver’s Love Affair with the Three-Run Homer,.” Value Over Replacement Grit, January 22, 2013. Accessed October 29, 2017. http://valueoverreplacementgrit.com/2013/01/20/earl-weavers-love-affair-with-the-three-run-homer/.

13  “Custom Statistics Report: Run Expectations,” Baseball Prospectus. Accessed October 29, 2017. http://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/sortable/index.php?cid=1918829.

14  Baseball Prospectus. | Statistics | “Custom Statistic Reports: Team Batting,” Baseball Prospectus. Accessed October 29, 2017. http://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/sortable/index.php?cid=2474935.

15  “Leaderboard, League Stats, Batting, Batted Ball,” FanGraphs. Accessed October 26, 2017. https://tinyurl.com/y7oztkcy.

16  “Statcast Search,” BaseballSavant. Accessed October 31, 2017. https://tinyurl.com/yaeakoxy.

17  “Major League Total Stats,” » 2017 » Batters » Standard Statistics | FanGraphs Baseball FanGraphs. Accessed November 1, 2017. https://tinyurl.com/ybpkgbyj.

18  “Glossary: Statcast,” MLB.com. Accessed December 27, 2017. http://m.mlb.com/glossary/statcast.

19  “Glossary: What is a Exit Velocity (EV)? | Glossary,” MLB.com. Accessed December 27, 2017. http://m.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/exit-velocity.

20  “Glossary: What is a Launch Angle (LA)? | Glossary.” MLB.com. Accessed December 27, 2017. http://m.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/launch-angle.

21  Dave Sheinin, “Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles,” Washington Post, June 1, 2017. Accessed December 27, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/sports/mlb-launch-angles-story/?utm_term=.5afef4d70b4b.

22  Sheinin, “Why MLB hitters are suddenly obsessed with launch angles.”

23  Arthur Daly, “A Reformed Man,” New York Times, April 22, 1956, 28. Accessed October 26, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/1956/04/22/archives/article-7-no-title-a-reformed-man.html

24  Louis Effrat, “Mantle Accepts $75,000 Yankee Pact and Will Curtail Outside Interests,” New York Times, January 17, 1961., 43. Accessed October 27, 2017. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1961/01/17/118013388.html?pageNumber=43. Accessed October 27, 2017.

25  “Mickey Mantle Batting Stats: Ratio Batting,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/m/mantlmi01-bat.shtml#batting_ratio::none.

26  Baumann, “The End of Baseball As We Know It.”

27  “Batting Season Finder,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 31, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/tiny/EaiM7.

28  “Batting Season Finder,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 31, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/tiny/R8Arr.

29  “Bryce Harper Batting Stats: Ratio Batting,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/h/harpebr03-bat.shtml#batting_ratio::none.

30  “Mike Trout Stats,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/troutmi01.shtml.

31  “Batting Season Finder,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/tiny/TJcSk.

32  Nate Silver, tweet, Twitter.com, September 30, 2017. https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/914230214955282432?lang=en

33  “Aaron Judge’s No. 99 is the best-selling jersey of 2017.” SI.com. Accessed February 20, 2018. https://www.si.com/mlb/2017/10/03/aaron-judge-best-selling-jersey-2017-mlb-season.

34  “Major League Baseball Miscellaneous Year-by-Year Averages and Totals,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/misc.shtml.

35  Ibid.

36  Ibid.

37  Tom Verducci, “Baseball’s pressing question: What happens to a sport when nothing happens?,” SI.com, June 20, 2017. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.si.com/mlb/2017/06/20/standstill-pace-play-cody-bellinger-clayton-kershaw.

38  “Major League Baseball Miscellaneous Year-by-Year Averages and Totals.” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/misc.shtml.

39  Ibid.

40  Bill Baer, “Steve Garvey blames ‘millennial baseball’ for Game 2 of World Series,” HardballTalk, October 26, 2017. Accessed October 29, 2017. http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2017/10/26/steve-garvey-blames-millennial-baseball-for-game-2-of-world-series/.

41  “2017 World Series Game 2, Astros at Dodgers, October 25,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/LAN/LAN201710250.shtml.

42  “Splits Leaderboard,” FanGraphs. Accessed November 1, 2017. https://tinyurl.com/ybrf2ya5.

43  “Major League Baseball Fielding Year-by-Year Averages.” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/field.shtml.

44  “Major League Baseball Pitching Year-by-Year Averages,” Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed October 29, 2017. https://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/share.fcgi?id=P3YyZ.

45  Baumann, “The End of Baseball As We Know It.”

While the Stanford University baseball team toured Australia in 1928, two groups of Americans met: the Ingenues jazz group and the Stanford baseball team. Photo by Sam Hood. (STATE LIBRARY OF NEW SOUTH WALES)

“HOORAY! The Yanks Are Coming,” ran one of the many enthusiastic headlines in the Australian press.1 It was 1928, and in the preceding years, baseball had grown a small but steady following in Australia. Now, baseball authorities had, for the first time, invited an American team to tour for the express purpose of playing baseball.2 Stanford University would come to Australia with its coach, Harry Wolter , to play a series of games against local teams. Australian newspapers proclaimed that it would “mark an epoch in Australian baseball history.”3 

The Stanford tour, with its inclusion of an ex-major league ballplayer in the role of touring coach, not only served to raise the popularity of baseball in Australia but also the standard of play. The tour was a significant, yet under-recognized, milestone in the history of Australian baseball. It would mark two significant events in that history: the first international match between an Australian team and a dedicated American nine, and the first international intervarsity baseball game in Australia.4 

THE EARLY HISTORY OF BASEBALL IN AUSTRALIA

By 1928, baseball had been played in Australia for more than 70 years. While American miners may have played the game in the gold fields of the Australian Gold Rush of 1851, the first recorded baseball game was played in Melbourne in 1855.5 The sporting landscape in the colony, however, favored team sports that allowed competition against the center of the empire, England.6 When Albert Goodwill Spalding’s World Baseball Tour visited Australia in 1888-89, a significant amount of the news coverage revealed a local suspicion of baseball as a threat to cricket.7 Press condescension was common enough that derisively comparing baseball to the child’s game of rounders was a media convention.8 

Australian enthusiasts of baseball had persevered, however, and over the next three decades, the sport would grow in popularity and participation. John McGraw brought the Giants and White Sox to Australia during their 1913-14 world tour, which received considerable interest Down Under. During the same period cricket solidified its position as the Australian national sport, so the perceived threat of baseball became less of a concern. In fact, cricket was instrumental in the growth of baseball in Australia: While cricket dominated in summer, the American game was played in the winter, often by cricketers. Some of Australia’s preeminent international cricketers, such as W. H. Ponsford and Vic Richardson, were also keen baseballers. It was in these circumstances that the Australian Baseball Council invited the Stanford University team to Sydney to play a series of games against local and state teams and a national side in an effort to raise the profile of the sport.

THE 1928 STANFORD TOUR

The tour by Stanford University had been announced many months before the team’s eventual arrival and was keenly anticipated in Australia. Sydney’s leading daily newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, declared as early as January that “1928 promises to go down in the annals of baseball in Australia as one of the most progressive in the sport.”9 Baseball had witnessed a relative boom in participation in Australia during the 1920s. The sport had grown rapidly, with expanding city competitions, new junior associations, and the advent of teams in rural Australia evidence of its increased popularity.10 Given the recent growth in Australian baseball, local players, followers, the press, and the general public were keen to test how far the game and its players had developed relative to the United States.11 The Sydney Morning Herald noted that Australian baseball had “had no real test as to the standard attained by our players” and speculated, rather hopefully, that sufficient talent existed in Sydney alone for several teams “which would prove more than a match for American university and semi-professional teams.”12 The value of observing and playing against a properly trained American team was widely recognized in Australia at the time. As one newspaper had noted, “Our players are practically self taught, and to meet a team fresh from the land where the ‘ball game’ is part of the national life, should prove intensely interesting and instructive.”13 

Why Stanford was selected is unclear from contemporary records. The Australian sporting community would have been familiar with the university, however, as Stanford had previously played against the Wallabies, Australia’s national Rugby Union team. Indeed, it is likely that Stanford’s profile as an educational and sporting institution was influential in its selection. Wolter, Stanford’s coach, was sufficiently well-known that Australian newspapers were aware of his professional record: He played seven seasons of major league baseball for a variety of clubs, including the Yankees and Red Sox. In the season immediately before the tour, Stanford had finished with a 7-10 record, ending tied for third in the Pacific Coast Conference at 5–7.14 It was initially hoped that a Japanese team, drawn from the ranks of naval personnel on an anticipated ship’s visit, would also compete in a triangular international series.15 Those plans, however, did not eventuate.

The media interest in the tour was high. It was covered in newspapers across the country, from Sydney to Perth and in the remote rural towns in between. It was evident at the time that despite the increased popularity of baseball in Australia, regular international contests needed to be scheduled to enhance its profile.16 Thanks to the promotional efforts of Australian baseball authorities, the Stanford tour enjoyed much fanfare. Local businesses such as the Australian divisions of Kellogg’s and Studebaker supported the tour. The latter loaned six vehicles for a motorcade procession when the Stanford team arrived.17 Regrettably, the team’s arrival coincided with particularly rough weather that delayed its ship. A large crowd had waited at Circular Quay for the ship to berth and the Westmead Boys Band entertained the onlookers, striking up The Star-Spangled Banner when the ship finally docked.18 The planned daytime motorcade through downtown Sydney instead took place at night, with significantly fewer observers on the street.19 

The touring ballplayers were received at a formal civic reception attended by representatives of the federal, state, and local governments, as well as the US consul-general and Australian baseball officials.20 The Stanford players’ sense of humor endeared them to their Australian hosts almost immediately: When the civic commissioner compared baseball to rounders in his formal welcome, a member of the Stanford entourage responded, “I am told this game of rounders is a girl’s game. Having seen your girls is there any chance of arranging a game?”21 

In its first game, Stanford met a Victorian state team in front of 10,000 spectators.22 Victoria defeated Stanford 5-3, but it was widely accepted that Stanford had not played to its capacity, having only arrived from a stormy sea voyage two days prior.23 In that first encounter, important distinctions between American and Australian styles of play were clear. The Sun observed: “The Americans impressed with their fast and accurate throwing,” which was much quicker than the long-arm Australian cricket-style throw.24 Similarly, the Americans employed a different, more efficient swing of the bat and hit harder than the Australians as a consequence.25 The infield work of the Stanford men was also considered superior to the Victorians, despite the loss.26 Other features of the game that were novel to the local audience were the “rooting” undertaken by the Stanford teammates and the placement of coaches at first and third bases.27 

Stanford’s loss to Victoria was to be its only one of the tour. In the second game, this time against a state side from South Australia, Stanford accumulated 26 runs while giving up only one. That the Stanford team had greater baseball wits was evident in the way it took advantage of South Australia’s deep outfield with short hits.28 In the fifth inning alone, Stanford scored 12 runs.29 The Americans amassed a total of 21 hits and their pitcher, Kern, struck out 11 South Australians.30 South Australia was not helped in its efforts by the nine errors the team made, six more than Stanford committed. The American habit of “rooting” for one’s teammates—or to distract the opposition—continued to be of interest to the newspapers after the second game. The Referee, a leading weekly sports publication, noted that the “chattering by the players appears to be another sideline [in addition to ‘rooting’], and when the whole bunch gets going a cage full of parrots has nothing on them.”31 

New South Wales was the next state team to play Stanford. A crowd of 5,000 eager fans had come to watch what “proved to be a fast and high-class game, brimful of clever base running, smart fielding and accurate throwing,” according to the Kalgoorlie Miner.32 Stanford scored first when a hit to left field by Maguire brought in Harder, and it added eight more runs by the seventh inning. New South Wales was shut out until the sixth before scoring four runs. The Australians managed a brief rally in the eighth when, with two outs, they scored three runs on a Texas Leaguer by Levy, which allowed Agnew and Guthrie to get home before Levy also scored on an erratic throw by Berg (Stanford’s catcher) that sailed over the head of the Stanford second baseman, Garibaldi. Highlights of the game included Busch, Stanford’s shortstop, being called out for running wide of the base path and Berg making four hits, including three doubles.33 

The three games against state teams had been a prelude to the most anticipated fixture on the schedule so far: the first game against an Australian national team. On Saturday, August 4, Australia played Stanford at the Agricultural Ground in Sydney in front of 15,000 fans.34 The game was billed as “the most important fixture in the history of baseball in Australia” by the newspapers.35 As with the previous games, the Stanford players were said to have thrilled the crowd with their big hits in batting practice.36 Warming up on the playing field had evidently been unknown to Australian baseball: It received significant commentary for its novelty during the tour, and the papers encouraged Australians to adopt the practice as a lesson from the tour.

Stanford scored four runs in the first inning following erratic pitching by the favored local pitcher, Ford. The Americans added another two runs in the second and four more in the third, three of which followed a wild throw by Ford to Emmerick at first base. Australia replied with three runs of its own and Kern was quickly replaced by Lewis as the Stanford pitcher. The tactic of readily replacing pitchers was also a new feature of the game to the Australians, who stuck with Ford on the mound for far too long.37 A readiness to replace pitchers, and always having a pitcher warm, were key lessons that the Australians would take from the series.38 As the Sydney Morning Heraldreported, “There were many in the crowd, who saw their first baseball game, and they must surely have been convinced that baseball has attained an elevated sphere in the curriculum of Australian sport by reason of its intense interest, thrilling moments, quick movements, and clean play.”39 The game had captured the imagination of the locals enough that the crowd was larger than the one at the St. George vs. University match in the popular Rugby League competition held the same day. This first international game was so successful, a leading weekly sports paper felt confident that “There is no reason why baseball, once the crowd has been educated up to its thrills, should not be one of the most popular sports in Australia.”40 

A series of lower-profile games was played before the second international game. The next was against a Sydney Metropolitans side of the best players from the local clubs. In adverse weather, the Metropolitans took an early lead, 2–0 after the second inning.41 For the remainder of the game, however, Stanford shut them out, and despite the promising start, the top players from Sydney’s clubs lost 12–2. The poor weather continued and when Stanford played Sydney University two days later, the Sunwrote, “The outfield was a quagmire, making play difficult.”42 That game, which Stanford won 5–2, is notable for being the first ever international university baseball game played in Australia. In an effort to promote the game in the areas surrounding Sydney, the tour next moved to Wollongong, a town 52 miles to the south. The team, accompanied by the Sydney Metropolitans, traveled by motorcade to Wollongong, where they were greeted with a civic reception from the mayor and aldermen of the city.43 Stanford won 7–3, with Garibaldi and Harder both hitting home runs for the victors.

So far, the tour had generated significant interest and the second meeting between Australia and Stanford was keenly anticipated. The adverts that ran in the Sydney papers offered:

Baseball—As Played by Americans—Barracking! Rooting! Brilliant Fielding! Snappy Throwing! Combination Team Work! Big Hitting! Fade-away Sliding! Excitement? Hear the Crowd Roar! Roar With the Crowd! And Become a Fan.44 

Another 15,000 spectators were eager and the second international match would not disappoint them. Among the spectators was the governor of American Samoa, Capt. S. V. Graham, who threw out the first pitch.45 The game was a close contest and only decided in extra innings. It was expected that the game would “go down in baseball history as one of the finest expositions ever produced by an Australian nine.”46 The papers blamed the loss squarely on Agnew, the Australian second baseman, who collided with Levy at shortstop in an effort to field an easy fly ball by Garibaldi. The error permitted Wilton, the Stanford center fielder and captain, to dash home. Stanford won 2–1 in 10 innings. It was perhaps a fitting victory for Wilton and Garibaldi, who between them got all of Stanford’s seven hits: Wilton went 4-for-4, including a triple.47 

The game was almost overshadowed by what Australians perceived as poor sportsmanship: warming up behind the batter when on deck. The papers were awash with criticism of what was conceived as an unsporting tactic.48 As far away as Tasmania it was complained that “the object of this was presumably to detract attention of the pitcher.”49 The Truth considered it so significant that its headline ran “These Yanks Can Play ‘Ball—The Swinging Bat Tactics Disconcert the Home Siders.”50 It was, the Truth claimed, “a practice new to Australia, and not sportsmanlike, according to our views of the game.”51 The crowds were apparently not shy in venting their disapproval. In many newspaper reports of the game, the “bat swinging” of the Stanford players received more coverage than the play on the field.

A combined Australian university side next played Stanford, losing 31–5. The final international game between Stanford and Australia was played on Saturday, August 18, in front of 10,000 fans. The game was well balanced for much of play, but a four-run fourth inning for Stanford was decisive. In the fourth, Wilton, Garibaldi, and Busch loaded the bases with singles. A series of errors then allowed each to score before Berg came in for the fourth on another error.52 Stanford was the eventual victor, 7–0. The Australian newspapers credited Stanford with a hat trick—three successive wins in the international games. In the final game Harry Wolter earned significant praise from locals for providing coaching and instruction to the Australian players in a generous effort to improve the sport locally.53 A final contest was held between Stanford and New South Wales on August 22. New South Wales was first at bat and scored three runs. Stanford leveled in the bottom of the same inning when Maguire hit the ball over the picket fence, scoring three.54 The match remained close until the sixth inning, with New South Wales leading 10–8. Stanford rallied in the late innings, however, and a series of New South Wales errors allowed the Americas to win their final game in Australia, 21–13.55 

CONCLUSION

In addition to the milestones recorded during the tour—the first invitational tour of a baseball team to Australia, first international inter-varsity baseball game in Australia, first Australian nine to play a dedicated baseball team—the tour had a noticeable impact on the game in Australia. Although baseball had already been growing in popularity in Australia, the tour significantly raised its profile. The Truth noted that Stanford’s visit had given baseball “a decided fillip,” and the Arrow wrote that the various well-attended games had “given baseball the biggest boost it has had in the history of the game in Australia.”56 These sentiments were echoed by newspapers across the country, but were particularly emphatic in Sydney, where most of the games had taken place: “Baseball in Sydney has experienced the biggest boost it has ever known by the visit of the Americans,” the Sydney Mail’s H. W. Turner wrote.57 It was, so the press claimed, a much bigger boost to the game than the White Sox-Giants tour had been in 1914.58 

An increase in the profile of baseball following the tour led to an immediate increase in participation as well. In the following Southern Hemisphere summer competitions, there was an increase in players, teams, and clubs in Australia.59 Importantly, this increased interest was sustained until the next winter season, in 1929, when participation grew again.60 Beyond that, crowds also grew, with higher attendance at local club fixtures in the wake of the tour.61 

The Stanford tour also had an immediate impact on the quality of baseball in Australia. The visitors had demonstrated numerous deficiencies in the way the locals played. Australians were reluctant to replace pitchers, more likely to protest at being relieved, and apparently less inclined to follow directions of their coaches than the visiting Americans were.62 The teamwork that Stanford displayed had impressed the Australians, and it was determined as a result that Australian baseballers lacked a sufficient level of that quality.63 Australians also learned the value of having relief pitchers warm up in preparation for taking the mound, and better batting techniques, including dropping the habit of resting the bat on one’s shoulder when awaiting the pitch.64 All these improvements were evident in the club games that followed. The Sydney Morning Herald observed just weeks after the departure of the Americans that “the tactics displayed by the Stanford University team were extensively adopted in nearly all the [local weekend] games.”65 In Adelaide, those South Australians who had been in Sydney returned with improved knowledge of the game, and Adelaide league games now featured the warming up of relief pitchers, the hook slide, and burnt cork under the eyes.66 

Harry Wolter, former major league ballplayer and Stanford’s coach, had clearly demonstrated to Australians the need for quality coaching along American lines. During the tour, Wolter had offered to coach any club or school team that requested his assistance.67 Wolter had given some coaching to juniors during his visit, but the opportunity was not seized by local clubs until the end of the tour.68 One paper lamented that “a whole month of expert tutoring was thrown away—a chance that may not come again for years.”69 In fact, Australian baseball officials had become keenly aware of the need for an American coach and Wolter was enlisted as the Australian Baseball Council’s representative in securing an American to assist local teams.70 This proved a difficult task, as suitable candidates already had lucrative jobs, and the necessary inducement to bring them to Australia was more than local baseball organizations could afford.71 That there was no money for an American coach also reflects the unfortunate situation that Australian baseball authorities lost money on the tour.72 In fact, it was later discovered that the tour had been financed, in part, by funds stolen by an Australian baseball official from his employer.73 

The Stanford tour of 1928 was a watershed moment in Australian baseball history. It was the first real opportunity that Australian teams had to play against a dedicated amateur American team. Isolated from the developments that had taken place in American baseball, Australian ballplayers had been “self taught,” and the example set by Stanford was highly educational.74 Infield play, baserunning, batting style, pitching methods, tactics, and conditioning were all elements of the game that improved in Australia following the visit by Stanford, and the game became more popular. The press, which 30 years earlier had been suspicious and disparaging of baseball, was now enthusiastic and supportive of the game in Australia.75 Following the popular success of the Stanford tour, a similar invitation would be extended to the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club of Portland, Oregon, in 1929. But financial success would not follow popular success, and the momentum built by the Stanford tour was not sustained when future tours proved financially impossible. It is open to speculation, but it is likely that had similar tours been staged beyond the 1920s, baseball’s popularity in Australia would have been greater. The interest generated in baseball by international games against Stanford demonstrated the value of such events.

RAY W. NICKSON is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Criminal Justice at Fresno Pacific University. He has been a keen baseball enthusiast from a young age and most recently played for the Armidale Outlaws Baseball Club, Australia, in their inaugural season. He can be contacted at ray.nickson@fresno.edu.

Notes

1  “Hooray! The Yanks Are Coming—Big Baseball,” Truth, June 24, 1928.

2  “Hooray! The Yanks Are Coming.”

3  “Baseball—American Visit—Prospects for the Season,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 26, 1928. Writing as far away as Perth, the West Australianclaimed that the first match between Stanford and Australia “will go down in the history of Australian baseball as an epoch marking the most important advancement of the sport.” (“Baseball—International Contest,” West Australian, August 6, 1928.)

4  “An Early Start? Record Baseball Season—First Draw Out,” Sun, April 10, 1928;“International Baseball—American Team’s Visit,” Register, May 15, 1928.

5  Bruce Mitchell, “Baseball in Australia: Two Tours and the Beginnings of Baseball in Australia,” Sporting Traditions 7, no. 1 (1990): 2-24.; Joe Clark, A History of Australian Baseball(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 5.

6  Australia was a colony until 1901, when the separate colonial authorities federated to become states in the Commonwealth of Australia.

7  Bruce Mitchell, “Baseball in Australia.”

8  Mitchell.

9  “Baseball—American Visit—Prospects for the Season.”

10  “New Clubs Form—Season’s Outlook—Meetings Arranged,” Evening News, February 9, 1928; “Baseball—American Visit Assured,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 14, 1928; “Baseball Team from U.S.A.—Stanford Coming: Record Season Ahead,” Referee, February 15, 1928; “Baseballers—Prospects of Brilliant Season Opening—Californians Expected,” Arrow, March 2, 1928;“Baseball—Record Season Ahead—To Start April 28,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 14, 1928; “At Bases—Yanks Are Coming Soon—Busy ‘Ballers,” Truth, April 15, 1928.

11  “Hitter’s Record—Baseball’s Big Season—Pitchers are Scarce,” Sun, May 22, 1928; “Baseballers Activities—American Visit: Sydney Premiers Defeated,” Referee, June 6, 1928;“Baseball—American Amateur Team,” Age, June 15, 1928; “American Baseballers—Reach Sydney July 26^thFor Mammoth Carnival Fixtures,” Referee, June 20, 1928.

12  “Baseball. American Visit.”

13  “Hooray! The Yanks Are Coming.”

14  “Year-by-year Records,” Stanford University, http://gostanford.com/sports/2014/7/22/209600609.aspx , Accessed January 31, 2018.

15  “’Ball Booming—Japanese Team—Americans, Too,” Sun, February 29, 1928; “Triangular International Games—Japanese Team Invited,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 29, 1928.

16  “Baseball: American Team Coming,” Sydney Mail, July 4, 1928.

17  “Baseball—Stanford University Team—Warmly Welcomed in Sydney,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 27, 1928.

18  “Stanford—Baseballers Here—A Sturdy Bunch,” Sun, July 27, 1928.

19  “Baseball—Stanford University Team—Warmly Welcomed in Sydney.”

20  “’Varsity Baseballers—Visit From U.S.A.” Evening News, July 27, 1928.

21  “Rounders? ‘Lead Us to the Girls’—Baseball Men,” Sun, July 27, 1928.

22  “Americans Impress—Great Baseball Struggle—Stanford University—Crowd of 10,000 Watch the Play,” Sun, July 28, 1928.

23  Clark, in his A History of Australian Baseball, states that Stanford lost 3–1 (51), but this is clearly refuted by contemporary media coverage of the game, which scored the contest at 5-3: “Attaboy Victoria! Lads From Land of Swat Fail to Get Round First Australian Diamond,” Truth, July 29, 1928; “Five to Three—Victoria’s Baseball Win,” Sun, July 29, 1928; “Big Baseball—Stanford University Defeated—Crowd of 10,000 Watch Game,” Sunday Times,July 29, 1928.

24  “Five to Three—Victoria’s Baseball Win.”

25  “Five to Three—Victoria’s Baseball Win.”

26  “Good Sports—Stanford Players Lack of Practice,” Sun, July 31, 1928.

27  “Vocal Aid to Baseball—The Science of Rooting,” Sun, July 29, 1928.

28  “Big Baseball—Rep. Teams in Action—To-day’s Games,” Sun, July 30, 1928.

29  “Baseball—Win for America,” Register, July 31, 1928.

30  Contemporary coverage was inconsistent in providing first names or even first initials for the various players. For consistency, only last names are used here.

31  “Biggest Baseball Carnival in History of Australia—Victorians Deliver the Goods—American Students Fall Down in Pinches—South Australians Chicagoed,” Referee, August 1, 1928.

32  “Baseball Match—U.S.A. Defeats N.S.W.” Kalgoorlie Miner, August 2, 1928.

33  “Baseball—Stanford Wins—N.S.W. Beaten 9-4,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 2, 1928.

34  “First Test—Stanford Leads Australia—Baseball Attracts—15,000 People Watch International Game,” Sun, August 4, 1928.

35  “First Test.”

36  “First Test.”

37  “Baseball—Americans Win First Test—Stanford’s Brilliant Play,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 1928.

38  “Pitchers Wanted—Baseball Needs Them—Record Season,” Sun, September 12, 1928; “Baseball—Notes,” Australasian, September 8, 1928.

39  “Baseball—Americans Win First Test.”

40  “Baseball Stars—Australians Beaten in Baseball Test: Thrilling Display,” Referee, August 8, 1928.

41  “Big Baseball—Stanford v. Metrop.—International Carnival,” Sun, August 6, 1928.

42  “By 5 to 2—Stanford Beats Sydney—’VarsityBaseball,” Sun, August 8, 1928.

43  “Three Teams—Baseball in South,” Sun, August 9, 1928.

44  “Slide! Kelly! Slide!” (advertisement) Referee, August 8, 1828.

45  “One Continual Roar at Second Baseball Test—Baseball Thrills—15,000 Cheer and Cheer—Australia Again Beaten—Graham Pitches Game of Career,” Sunday Times, August 12, 1928.

46  “One Continual Roar.”

47  “One Continual Roar.”

48  “Stanford Wins—Baseball Test—Australia’s Great Game—15,000 Spectators,” Sun, August 11, 1928; “These Yanks Can Play Ball—The Swinging Bat Tactics Disconcert The Home Siders—Stanford Settles Aussies’ Hash,” Truth, August 12, 1928; “Baseball—Second Test Match—Stanford Win Sensationally,” Mercury, August 13, 1928, 8; “Lessons—Stanford Teaches—Third Test Saturday,” Sun, August 14, 1928, 5.

49  “Baseball—Second Test Match—Stanford Win Sensationally,” Mercury, August 13, 1928, 8.

50  “These Yanks Can Play Ball.”

51  “These Yanks Can Play Ball.”

52  “Baseball—Australia ‘Whitewashed’—Stanford Wins Third Test,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 20, 1928.

53  “Hat Trick To Yanks—Australia ‘Chicagoed’ in the Third Baseball Test—Walters [sic] Coaches Our Boys,” Truth, August 19, 1928.

54  “Final Game—International Baseball—Stanford v N.S.W.” Sun, August 22, 1928.

55  “Baseball—N.S.W. Defeated—Stanford’s Last Game,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 23, 1928.

56  “Stanford Left a Lesson Behind Them—Gave Baseball a Big Local Boost—Visiting Manager to Negotiate for Coach for Australian Council,” Arrow, August 24, 1928.

57  H. W. Turner, “Stanford’s Visit: An Appreciation,” Sydney Mail, August 29, 1928.

58  Turner.

59  “Stanford’s Visit Leaves Baseballers Happy,” Sporting Globe, August 29, 1928, 3; “Pitchers Wanted”; “More Clubs—Summer Baseball Season—Rapid Progress—Close Matches Expected,” Sun, October 10, 1928.

60  “Baseballers Expect a Flourishing Season,” Sporting Globe, March 13, 1929; “Baseball—Opening of Season—Record Number of Teams,” Argus, April 29, 1929; “Baseball—Season Opens—University’s Fine Form,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 6, 1929; “Baseball’s Opening—Attractive Fixtures: Teams’ Prospects,” Arrow, May 3, 1929.

61  “Baseball—Close of Season—Keen Competitions,” Arrow, September 7, 1928.

62  “Coaching—Baseball Needs—Imported Trainer?” Sun, August 28, 1928, 10.

63  “Stanford Left a Lesson Behind Them”; “Pitchers Wanted.”

64  “Pitchers Wanted – Baseball Needs Them”; “Stanford’s Visit Leaves Baseballers Happy.”

65  “Baseball—Leichardt Beaten—Last Round Club Games,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 27, 1928.

66  “Baseball—Notes.”

67  Turner, “Stanford’s Visit: An Appreciation.”

68  “Stanford’s Visit Leaves Baseballers Happy.”

69  Turner, “Stanford’s Visit: An Appreciation.”

70  “Coaching—Baseball Needs—Imported Trainer?”

71  “Is It Necessary? Australian Council—Americans May Come,”Sun, November 14, 1928; “Baseball—Americans May Come,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 16, 1928.

72  “‘Nick’ Winter With Marrickville—Club Activities,” Evening News, March 21, 1929; “Interstate Baseball Carnival—S.A. Assn. Has No Say In Change of Venue,” Register News, May 17, 1929; “Baseball—American Visit a Loss,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 30, 1929; “Baseball—Notes.”

73  Ray Nickson, “Multnomah at the Bat: The impact on Baseball in Australia of the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club’s 1929 Tour,” Pacific Journal (forthcoming).

74  “Hooray! The Yanks Are Coming.”

75  Mitchell, “Baseball in Australia.”

It is not unusual to hear a sports fan or announcer say something like, “The window for this team is closing.” But what exactly does this expression mean? The general notion is that a team has a limited number of years when it can contend for a championship. Saying the window is closing implies that the team in question has already utilized some of those few years, and will only contend for a year or two more. Unstated, but also implied, is that if the team doesn’t win soon it will have to rebuild, and will therefore not contend for a substantial amount of time.

For example, in a blog post following the 2014 season, Andy Martino of the New York Daily News wrote, “In Los Angeles, they are already gossiping about changes, and in Washington, they probably should be. This is what happens when the two best teams in the league lose in the first round, reiterate old disappointments, and creep closer to the end of their championship windows.”1 

Similarly, writing about the Royals in August 2016, Rustin Dodd of the Kansas City Star wrote, “The Royals’ core will remain intact for one more season, and club officials appear focused on maximizing the opportunities for another run in 2017. The window, they say, is still open.”2 These two quotations exemplify the widespread belief that championship windows are temporary, and teams that do not win before the window closes will not contend for many years.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the idea of championship windows analytically. Is the typical window a couple of years, five to six years, or longer than that? If we make a few assumptions, we can look at what baseball history says about how long teams have contended for championships.

WHY ARE THERE WINDOWS?

The concept of a championship window is based on the idea that a team needs a core of talented veteran players to contend. These players form the nucleus around which other less talented and/or experienced players are arrayed. But the core players, as a group, can only be in their collective prime for a limited period before age takes its toll. Conventional wisdom says this will put a natural limit on how long any given group of players can compete for a championship. In addition, talented core players whose contracts expire during a team’s window may be lured away by generous offers from other teams. Martino says this explicitly in his blog post: “The Nats’ run is almost finished, with Jayson Werth nearly 36, Ryan Zimmerman breaking down, and the following core players set to be free agents after next season: Clippard, Zimmermann, Ian Desmond and Doug Fister.”

Martino’s argument is speculation about the future, but the Philadelphia Phillies provide a relatively recent example of the process in hindsight. The Phillies finished 12 games behind the Mets in 2006 before making five consecutive playoff appearances from 2007 to 2011. The team won the championship in 2008 but lost the World Series in 2009. They’d lost in the divisional round in 2007, they lost in the NLCS in 2010, and they lost in the divisional round again in 2011. The Phillies have failed to make the playoffs since then.

In hindsight, the team clearly had a five-year window to compete for a championship. Why did this window close? Because the core position players on the championship team, Jimmy Rollins (MVP in 2007), Ryan Howard (MVP in 2006), Chase Utley, and Pat Burrell, were past their primes or gone by 2012. This also happened with the key components of the pitching staff: Cole Hamels (2008 World Series MVP), Jamie Moyer, and Brad Lidge. This example seems to confirm the traditional wisdom. The window closed when core players got old or left. But is this typical? Is it reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic will result in a five-year window for most teams? This question is investigated by looking at championship windows throughout baseball history.

METHODOLOGY

The basic methodology employed is to examine how long championship windows have lasted historically. This study begins in 1903 and ends with 2016. Analysis is done at the franchise level. This means, for example, that the results for the Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Oakland versions of the Athletics franchise are treated as one data set. All other teams that have relocated are treated similarly. Teams are referred to by their current name even if that name has a shorter history than another name. This means the data for the Nationals, for example, include the 36 years the team played as the Montreal Expos, and only 12 years as the Washington Nationals. Expansion franchises will obviously have far fewer years of data than franchises that have been extant since 1903.

But in order to look at championship windows historically, it is necessary to define what is meant (in hindsight) by a window. This is problematic, as there is no formal definition of a championship window. The specific rules used in this study are described in detail below, but the underlying philosophy is straightforward. A given year counts as part of a window if the team contends that year. The team doesn’t have to win the World Series; it just has to be in contention.

The difficulty, of course, lies in specifying what it means to be in contention. The problem of defining contention is compounded by structural changes in baseball since 1903. Major League Baseball has evolved from a pair of single-division, eight-team leagues with only one playoff team from each league to one thirty-team association with two conferences (which still bear the historical designations of AL and NL). Each league has three five-team divisions with two wild-card teams that also make the playoffs. These changes in structure are dealt with in this article by having two slightly different definitions of contention for the periods 1903–68 and 1969–2016. The year 1969 is chosen as the dividing line because that is when baseball switched to two divisions within each league.

With this in mind, the specific rules used to decide if a given year is included in a championship window for the 1903–68 period are shown below. A year counts as part of a window (or starts a window) if the year meets any of the following conditions:

• The team finishes in first or second place in its league.
• The team finishes in third (or worse) place and five (or fewer) games behind.
• The team wins 90 (or more) games.
• Once established, a window stays open if there is a single down year that fails to qualify under any of the previous three rules, but two consecutive non-competitive years closes an open window.

These rules require some elaboration. Teams are allowed to finish second, regardless of games behind during this period, because a second-place finish means the team was better than six (1903–60) or more (1961–68) other teams. Using only games behind to define contention might be misleading because some very good teams finished second, many games behind, when another team had an extraordinary season. For example, the Yankees appeared in every World Series between 1949 and 1958 except for 1954. That year, they finished eight games out of first place, so it would appear they were not in contention by that standard. However, the Yanks won 103 games in 1954, but they finished in second place because the Indians won an extraordinary 111 games. It would not be accurate to say that 1954 should not be included in a championship window under these circumstances.

Rule number two says the window stays open with a third-place finish if the team finishes five or fewer games out of first place. Using five games as the cutoff is somewhat arbitrary, but a team that finishes five games behind could have been two or three games behind going into the last week of the season and then lost a few games to finish five games back. That team was clearly in contention even if it finished in third place. The 90-win rule is included because it is possible for a team to not qualify under the first three rules while winning 90 or more games. For example, the 1963 Twins won 91 games and finished third, 13 games behind the Yankees. Even with the third-place finish, that’s still a very good season and should count as a window year.

Finally, rule four is included because even good teams can have a bad year due to injury or uncharacteristic poor play. The window stays open if this happens for a single year, but the window is assumed to have closed if this happens in two consecutive years. An example of a single year not closing a window is the 1964 Dodgers, who finished in sixth place, 13 games out of first place. That poor year does not close the window between the team’s championships in 1963 and 1965. An example of two consecutive years closing a window is the Cardinals’ two down years in 1965 and ’66, when they finished seventh, 16½ games back; and sixth, 12 games back, respectively. These two down years closed a window between the championships they won in 1964 and ’67.

The rules defining a year that qualifies as part of a window after 1968 have to be modified because there are fewer teams in each division starting in 1969. A second-place finish out of four, five, or six teams is not necessarily good enough to count as a contending year. The specific rules used to decide if a given year is included in a championship window for the 1969–2016 period are given below. As with the earlier period, any year that qualifies under any of the following rules counts as part of (or starts) a window.

• The team finishes in first place or gets in the playoffs as a wild-card team.
• The team finishes in second or third place and five (or fewer) games behind.
• The team wins 87 (or more) games.
• Once established, a window stays open if there is a single down year that fails to qualify under any of the previous three rules, but two consecutive non-competitive years closes an open window.

In this time period, 87 wins is used as a qualifying standard because, both before and after the switch to two wild-card teams in 2012, teams that won 87 games consistently finished within five games of playoff contention. The introduction of a second wild-card team in 2012 does raise an additional question: Should all teams that are within five games in the wild-card race be considered in contention? The problem is that some of the teams in that category have roughly .500 records. For example, in 2015, Houston was the second wild-card team in the AL with 86 wins. A team within five games of that mark would have finished at exactly .500 for the season. Is that good enough to be considered contending? Although this is another judgment call, these teams are not considered contending for purposes of this analysis. The general notion of in contention implies being an above average team. Being within five games of the last wild-card qualifier does not really meet that standard.

Using these rules, all major-league franchises were examined to see when each franchise had an open championship window historically. Any two consecutive years of being in contention opens a championship window and any two consecutive years of being out of contention closes a window.

It is important to remember that having an open championship window and being in contention are not exactly the same thing because one down year does not close a window. For example, the 2013 Giants were a sub-.500 team (and therefore not in contention) but their championship window remained open that year because they won the World Series in 2012 and 2014. All data were obtained from Baseball-Reference.com. The full win-loss records and other raw data used in this research are interesting in themselves, but are too voluminous to be included in this article. Just a small subset of the data for the National League from 1903 to 1920 is shown in Appendix 1 to exemplify the raw data used.

RESULTS

The complete data set in the form shown in Appendix 1 is aggregated in order to determine how long championship windows have been open historically. The results are shown in Tables 1 and 2. The window lengths in these two tables are listed chronologically without specifying the years that window was open. For example, Appendix 1 shows that the Braves franchise’s first window was three years long, from 1914 to 1916. The Cubs’ first window lasted eight years, from 1904 until 1911. The first three in the Braves row and the first eight in the Cubs row of Table 1 show these window lengths without specifying when they occurred. Table 1 shows the complete results for the National League. Table 2 shows the results for the American League.

Table 1: National League Historic Championship Windows

(Click image to enlarge.)

Table 1 reveals that every NL team has had at least one single-year contention event. This phrase means that there was a single year where the team contended, sandwiched between two (or more) years of non-contention. But for purposes of this analysis, the question is: Should a single-year contention event be considered a window? Although this is debatable, single-year contention events will not be considered a window in this analysis, because the concept of a window closing implies an already open window. Therefore, a single-year contention event cannot be considered a true window. In terms of this paper, this means that single-year contention events (all of the 1s in Tables 1 and 2) are not included in the calculation of the average length of windows or the number of windows for each team in both tables.

So what can we learn from the data? In terms of number of windows, it’s not surprising that the expansion franchises have had fewer windows historically than the franchises that have been around since 1903. Among the latter, the Cardinals have had the most separate windows with 10, while the Phillies have had the fewest with three. The three longest windows are 22 years by the Giants (1917–38), 17 years by the Braves (1991–2007), and 16 years by the Dodgers (1970–85). The Giants have the longest average window duration at 8.75 years, while the average window duration of the 1903 teams as a group is just over six years. The average window duration for the expansion teams is 3.7 years, and the overall NL average window duration is 5.5 years. Seven of the NL franchises had windows that were still open after the 2016 season.

Table 2: American League Historic Championship Windows

(Click image to enlarge.)

Four AL franchises (Red Sox, Tigers, Twins, and White Sox) are tied at seven for the most individual windows. It’s not too much of a surprise that the Yankees own the longest window at 24 years (1920–43). The Yankees and the Orioles are tied for the second-longest AL window at 20 years (1993–2012 and 1964–83 respectively). The Royals and the Blue Jays have the longest windows among expansion teams at 17 years (1973–89) and 11 years (1983–93) respectively. This is in stark contrast to the NL, where none of the expansion teams even has a single double-digit window. In terms of average window duration, the five windows that the Yankees have constructed have an impressive average duration of 16 years. The expansion Royals are second in the AL with an average window duration of 10 years. The overall average window duration for the AL is 6.8 years, compared with 5.5 years in the NL. Nine of the AL franchises had a window that was still open after the 2016 season. The overall average window length for the two leagues combined is 6.14 years. The overall median window length is exactly five years.

DISCUSSION

The overall average of 6.14 years can be considered the answer to the original question of how long championship windows stay open historically. This number conforms to conventional wisdom and appears to be a reasonable answer. However, further consideration casts some doubt on this comfortable conclusion. Even though this average window length seems plausible, there is considerable dispersion of the data. At the low end, there are 25 two-year windows, while the longest window lasted an astounding 24 years. Therefore, the overall distribution of the data is examined in order to better understand the dispersion of window lengths. The results are shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Distribution of Window Lengths

Table 3 shows that almost 20 percent of windows last just two years, and one-third of all windows exist for just two or three years. Just under half of all windows last two, three, or four years. This means (given a median to average window length of five to six years) that almost half of all windows are shorter than average. So it’s very common for windows to close sooner than five to six years. Just over 20 percent of windows exist for roughly the average of five, six, or seven years. However, in spite of the data being skewed toward window lengths of four or fewer years, there are also a lot of longer windows. Over 30 percent of all windows exist for eight years or more, and about one-sixth of all windows last for 10 or more years.

What do these dispersion data tell us? They tell us that the average window length of six years could be a misleading statistic. For example, after the 2016 season, the Cleveland Indians had a window that had been open for four years. Utilizing the data in this paper, a baseball writer or commentator might argue that the window for the Indians would be closing soon since the average window length is just six years. Although this sounds like a reasonable argument, the data show that many windows exceed the average and that it is entirely possible that the Indians’ window will last beyond the average length.

It should be noted that even though single-year contention events are not included in the data in Table 3, there are more of them than any other length of window. There are a total of 79 single-year contention events in Tables 1 and 2 and they make up about 37 percent of the 212 points in those two tables. This means that a previously non-contending team that suddenly has a season where it contends will only contend for a single year more than one-third of the time.

This is a sobering statistic for fans of formerly poorly performing teams that have a surprisingly strong season. There’s a good chance it won’t last more than that one year. And, for informational purposes, even though single-year contending events have not been included in the previous discussion, the average championship-window length when single-year contention events are included in the data is 4.23 years, with a median length of exactly three years. These numbers are compared to an average of 6.14 years and median of five years when single-year contention events are excluded.

THE IMPACT OF HIGH PAYROLLS

The overall championship window length of 6.14 years includes all major league teams. However, high-payroll teams have an advantage over low-payroll teams in terms of construction and maintenance of competitive rosters. Therefore, we can hypothesize that high-payroll teams will have longer championship windows than low-payroll teams. The data set used in the previous analysis allows this hypothesis to be tested. But before the results of that analysis are presented, the high-payroll elephant in the room (the Yankees) must be discussed. The Yankees’ average championship window length of 16 years is more than twice the average window length. Clearly, they are an outlier.

If the Yankees are removed from the data set, the overall average championship-window length for the rest of baseball is 5.76 years. This is a 0.38-year or 6.2 percent reduction by the removal of just one team. Which number, 6.14 years or 5.76 years, is a better reflection of reality, given that a good argument can be made that the Yanks are now, and have historically been, a special case? This is a tough call because it is always dangerous to arbitrarily remove data from any data set. Therefore, the data will be presented with and without the Yankees to show both cases.

In order to determine if high-payroll teams have longer window lengths than low-payroll teams, it is necessary to define what is meant by high payroll. Since payroll data for one year are not necessarily indicative of longer-term spending trends, the average of the last 15 years of payroll data is used to determine the top ten teams in terms of payroll.3 Not surprisingly, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers have the three highest average payrolls over the last 15 years. The average championship window length for the top ten payroll teams is 6.81 years. Removing the Yankees, the average window length for the nine remaining teams is exactly six years.

Although both of these numbers are higher than the similar number for all major league teams (6.14 years and 5.76 years respectively), the differences (especially without the Yankees) are not large enough to conclude that higher payroll teams have been able to consistently stay in contention better than low-payroll teams. Admittedly, this is a fairly simplistic way to look at this issue. An in-depth look at the question could be the subject of future research.

Given that the average championship window lasts five to six years, the question then becomes: How does a team keep a window open for 10 or more years? It’s clearly not easy to do, but there is one common feature in all of the teams that have accomplished it. That feature is superior management. One early example of superior baseball management was John McGraw, who managed the New York Giants from 1902–32. According to Leonard Koppett, “McGraw was exceptional in both his approach to the job, and the breadth of his influence.”4

According to the championship window rules in this paper, the Giants’ championship window was open for all but two of his 31 years managing the club. How were the Giants able to do that? Koppett argues that McGraw had a fierce will to win and instilled that ethos in his ballclubs. This, combined with his excellent judgment regarding a player’s capabilities, kept the Giants’ window open for most of McGraw’s tenure as manager.

All of the very long windows shown in Tables 1 and 2 were ultimately a product of excellent management. An entire paper could be written on each of those teams. And in fact, this is exactly what Mark Armour and Daniel Levitt do in their insightful book, In Pursuit of Pennants. Armour and Levitt argue, “Looking carefully, one can often identify differences between teams that consistently succeed and teams that struggle. Between evolving organizational frameworks and expanded or better sources of information, some teams have performed demonstrably better than others.”5

Each chapter of their book is focused on an example of an owner, general manager, or field manager (or some combination of those three people and the people who worked with them) who constructed a team that had sustained success over many seasons. Interestingly, the source of competitive advantage for the teams with extended success has varied over time.

A few brief examples from the book suffice to make the point. Jacob Ruppert created the first truly professionally run baseball organization and filled it with quality personnel. The great Yankees teams of the 1920s and ’30s were the result. Of course, Ruppert’s deep pockets and willingness to spend money also contributed. Branch Rickey was the first person to develop and take advantage of an extensive farm system for both the St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey also expertly exploited the formerly untapped pool of talented black players after Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947.

The Big Red Machine was put together by Bob Howsam. Howsam’s trading expertise brought many of the great players on those teams aboard. How did he make all those great trades? He (and his full staff) studied not only what the Reds needed, but the needs of every other team also. More recently, Billy Beane and Theo Epstein have been able to successfully exploit baseball analytics. Although the details vary, these are all examples of how superior management utilized improved organization and/or informational advantages that ultimately resulted in sustained success on the playing field.

CONCLUSION

The results of this analysis show that the average length of a championship window is about six years, with a median length of five years. These figures conform to what is often anecdotally considered to be a team’s championship window. However, the average masks a wide variation in window lengths. About half of all windows last two, three, or four years, while about one-sixth of all windows are 10 years or longer.

The substantial number of long windows shows that championship windows don’t have to close just because a core of star players is aging. It is usually a lack of adroit management, primarily a failure to consistently find and integrate younger talent into an established team, that causes windows to close. The authors of In Pursuit of Pennants summarize the issue very well when they write, “But to create a long-term successful organization, management must also discover and institutionalize a competitive advantage, either by creating or by responding to an inflection point in the way the business operates.”6

DOUGLAS JORDAN is a professor at Sonoma State University in Northern California where he teaches corporate finance and investments. He’s been a SABR member since 2012. He runs marathons when not watching or writing about baseball. You can contact him at douglas.jordan@sonoma.edu.

Appendix 1: National League Results for Franchises Extant in 1903

(Click image to enlarge.)

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments. Their suggestions have improved the paper substantially.

Notes

1 Martino, Andy, “How will Los Angeles Dodgers and Washington Nationals seize what is left of their championship windows?” New York Daily News, October 8, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/baseballinsider/los-angeles-dodgers-washington-nationals-seize-left-championship-windows-blog-entry-1.1967785.

2 Dodd, Rustin, “Royals hope for fresh start in 2017, but championship window may be difficult to keep open,” Kansas City Star, August 6, 2016. http://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article94176677.html.

3 Baseball Cube, “Payrolls and Salaries,” http://www.thebaseballcube.com/extra/payrolls/. The top 10 teams in order of average payroll over the last 15 years, 2002–16, are: Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Angels, Tigers, Phillies, Mets, Cubs, Giants, Cardinals.

4 Koppett, Leonard, The Man in the Dugout: Baseball’s Top Managers and How They Got That Way (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), 43.

5 Armour, Mark L. and Levitt, Daniel R., In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations From Deadball to Moneyball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), xiv.

6 Armour and Levitt, 399.

Eckersley was one of only 12 pitchers who had at least five years of 20 starts and five of 40 relief appearances. With 12 of each, Eck leads the list. Second was Rick Honeycutt (10 and 9), who would join Oakland later in the year and work in the same bullpen with Eckersley for seven years. Looking at their success and that of others, maybe more pitchers would have been able to do the same if given the chance. The list includes Gerry Staley, Ron Kline, Moe Drabowsky, Turk Farrell, and Ron Reed from the old days, Greg Swindell, Tom Gordon, Darren Oliver, Jeff Fassero, and Jamey Wright more recently. Only four pitchers have more seasons than Eckersley—Nolan Ryan with 27, Tommy John with 26, and Charlie Hough and Jim Kaat with 25.

WIN PROBABILITIES

I developed a stat called a true save opportunity. That is when the pitcher comes in with his team ahead, but their win probability is below 50 percent because of the opponent base-out situation. There have been 2,673 such situations since 1971. From 1971 through 1980, the team save leader was brought in 36 percent of the time. This number has been plummeting ever since: 23 percent in 1981–90, only 10 percent in 1991–2000, and 4.7 percent for 2001–17. So when the game is really on the line, the closer is hardly ever called on. In the last 17 years, there have been 934 of these. Only 31 were in the ninth inning. Most came in the sixth (258), seventh (284), and eighth (214). The first five innings only had 147. It is very difficult for a closer to get a true save when he nearly always comes in with the bases empty. This is not meant to redefine the save, just a way to look at a subset of them.

Table 1 below shows average yearly performance for the team leaders in saves, showing inning and score entering the game and how often the bases were empty.

Table 1. Average Yearly Performance for Team Leaders in Saves

(Click on any table image below to enlarge.)

As you can see, the change in closer use happened very quickly. By 1991 it was virtually complete. It used to be common for a relief pitcher to throw 100 innings. From 1971 through 1989, the number was equal to about one for every two teams. From 1991 to 2000 there were 30. After that only five. Scott Proctor was the last, in 2006.

In the 1970s, several pitchers managed 100 or so innings a year without any problems, averaging about five days a year on the disabled list, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Pitchers With 100+ Innings, 1966–89

The fireman strategy of bringing in your best reliever when the game was on the line, often before the ninth inning—and not only when winning—would be changed. Now your best reliever would be brought in primarily to start the ninth inning with a lead of one to three runs, reducing his innings pitched by about a third.

But is it a good strategy? Dave Smith showed in his wonderful paper “The Myth of the Closer” a startling fact: The probability of a team winning the game with a lead going into the ninth inning has not changed in a hundred years! This fact certainly suggests that the strategy is not working. I looked at data from 1911 to the present, separated by top and bottom of the ninth (See Table 3).

Table 3. Probability of Winning with a Lead Entering the 9th Inning

In Table 4, I split the data depending on whether the team leader in saves or someone else was pitching. The top line is for the closer, the second line for another pitcher, then the difference. With a one-run lead in the ninth, the visitor closer has about a 6 percent advantage over other pitchers, while the home closer has about a 4 percent advantage. With a two- or three-run lead, it is only about 2 percent. Each of these six situations happens about five times a year for a total of 30, meaning the closer might add about one win a year compared to other pitchers. The closer is in there about 70 percent of the time.

Table 4. Probability of Winning, Closer versus Non-Closer

TOO MANY PITCHERS

Another effect of the modern closer strategy is the sheer number of pitchers on a team. According to Cliff Blau’s excellent article found at ballstat.com, the 25-player limit has been in effect more or less since 1910. The number of pitchers, however, has grown. The data on the World Series rosters in the Elias Book of Baseball Records show a team carried about eight pitchers in the teens and nine through 1940, then leveled off at 10. Snapshots of rosters since then have shown that by 2000 teams were pushing 11 pitchers on average, in 2010 it was up to 12, and in 2017 it was almost 13. The percent of debut players who were pitchers was around 45 percent into the ’90s but has increased rapidly so that it’s now almost 60 percent. So you could make an argument that there are about three pitchers on every team who wouldn’t have been in the majors 20 years ago.

This increase in pitchers reduces the number of bench players by an equal amount. So in the ’90s, 10 pitchers on a team would mean seven subs in the NL and six in the AL. Carrying 13 pitchers reduces those numbers to four and three. This cuts down on the number of moves a manager can make during the game in terms of pinch-hitters, pinch-runners, defensive replacements at other positions, and platooning.

The data for substitutions over the past four decades show a reduction in all categories, as shown in Table 5. The value of these substitutions could be the subject of another paper. However, the data show the average number of subs per team per year. The pinch-hit number is a hybrid because the NL has about three times as many since NL teams pinch-hit often for the pitcher. Numbers are adjusted for various work stoppages.

Table 5. Average Substitutions Per Team Per Year

For platooning, thanks to Retrosheet box scores and event files, I tabulated the number of right-handed, left-handed, and switch-hitters vs. right- and left-handed starters by position for 1911 to the present. I measured the degree of platooning by taking the percentage of left-handed batters for all positions against right-handed pitchers minus the percentage of left-handed batters vs. left-handed pitchers. Switch-hitters were ignored. Pitchers were not included. The measure started out slowly at 3 percent in 1911 but was up to 6 percent by 1920 and 8 percent for 1921–45. The period 1958–90 saw the peak of about 20 percent, which has declined to 14 percent today. The top team mark was 46 percent by the 1972 and ’73 Tigers. The 1972 team platooned at six positions, with a 100 percent mark at second base (Dick McAuliffe and Tony Taylor), 90 percent at first base (Norm Cash and others), 70 percent in left field (Gates Brown and Willie Horton). Only Aurelio Rodriguez and Ed Brinkman escaped, batting right-handed in all games where they appeared as starters. George Stallings, manager of the 1914 Braves, often thought to be the father of platooning, had a high team mark for that era of 20 percent, but that figure has been surpassed many times since.

I identified a platooning situation if a left-handed batter had over 70 starts against right-handed pitching and a right-handed batter had over 30 starts against left-handed pitching. The first pair to meet this requirement was left-handed Dick Hoblitzell and right-handed Del Gainer at first base for the Red Sox in 1915–17. Strangely enough, the first NL pair was Casey Stengel and Jimmy Johnston, Dodgers right fielders in 1916. Casey remembered that well when he became Yankee manager in 1949. In 1981–90 there were eight pairs a year that met that criterion, while in 2011–17, there were only three.

The number of pitchers per game has skyrocketed. The first nine-inning game with 15 or more pitchers was in 1993. There were two more in the 1990s and about one a year through 2014. There have been 21 in 2015–17. The number of innings pitched by the starter has only gone down by about one since the 1930s, but the number of relievers per game has more than tripled, while individual relievers’ innings per game have been cut in half. The number of starters going five or more innings really hasn’t changed, but longer outings have been reduced dramatically. See Table 6.

Table 6. Starter Innings Per Decade

LEFT/RIGHT FACTORS

Part of the current reliever strategy, besides saving the closer for the ninth inning, is to have a left- and right-handed set-up man to pitch the eighth, depending on who is coming to bat. Switching pitchers to get a platoon advantage is one of the reasons for the relief pitcher explosion. However, the platoon advantage is rather small and this strategy is probably overdone. A lefty batter’s average is about 20 points lower vs. a lefty pitcher. Righty batters hit about 12 points higher vs. lefty pitchers. For OPS, it is 85 and 53. So in order to break even, a lefty pitcher has to face 38 percent left-handed batters, not including switch-hitters. Switch-batters have an OPS about six points higher vs. right-handed pitchers, so they are considered the same against either and not included. Most lefty non-closer relief pitchers face between 36 and 50 percent left-handed batters (not counting switch-hitters), which results in an edge of -1 to 17 OPS points. Righty pitchers need to face 62 percent righty batters to break even. Ten points of OPS is about 1.5 percent, which means a change in runs of about 3 percent. This would amount to one run for a typical 60-game reliever, or .15 on his earned run average. Righty relievers usually face between 69 and 72 percent righty batters. That means they have a platoon advantage of 50 points on average, so their overall platoon advantage is higher than lefties.

“Leverage” is a term Tom Tango and I invented independently. It is the average percent change in win probability expected given the inning, score, and runners on base. The average value is around 3.6 percent. The lefty relievers above had a leverage value of 3.9 vs. left-handed batters and 3.3 vs. right-handed batters. This indicates the situations vs. left were slightly more crucial than those against right. Whatever advantage there is to switching pitchers because of handedness is greatly reduced by the fact that the new pitcher will end up facing quite a few opposite-side batters.

Going back to 1946, the batting splits were a little bit bigger, about 60 OPS points for righties and 110 for lefties, randomness and real differences between batters attach a plus or minus value to those figures of 50 points for righties and 60 for lefties. Of the 1,121 players since 1946 with 3,000 or more at-bats, you would expect three batters to be beyond three standard deviations of the average split. There were actually six (see Table 7).

Table 7. Batters Beyond Three Standard Deviations of the Average L/R Split

Backman just could not hit lefty pitchers batting right-handed. He actually tried batting lefty too late near the end of his career. Berkman, who was a lefty thrower, might have been better off not switching in the first place. Howard and Thome did much worse against same-side pitchers but they were still above average. They would be the two examples (in over 70 years) of a major advantage for a pitching change. Ichiro actually does better against lefties, which is rare. Valentin tried batting lefty against left-handers for a couple of years.

RELIEF USAGE

I found 180 pitchers since 1960 with at least 180 games, fewer than two innings per game, fewer than 25 percent finishes, and fewer than 25 percent saves for those finished. The split variation was 110 OPS points, plus or minus 60, for lefties and 60 OPS points, plus or minus 60, for righties. I found three beyond three standard deviations from the average split, where only one would be expected.

Table 8. Pitchers Beyond Three Standard Deviations from the Average Split

LOOGys (Lefty One-Out Guys) did not have enough appearances to generate a three-standard-deviation split but did generate a high difference. Randy Choate was the only pitcher to face over 60 percent lefties.

Table 9. LOOGy Splits

Closers seem to do pretty well when they pitch two days in a row. The table below shows earned-run average with zero to three days’ rest and ERA in the third of three consecutive games. The OPS figures are for the first and second inning in a game. Closers pitched a third inning about 30 percent of the time through 1990. In the next three decades, the chances of pitching a third inning (p3) after already pitching two fell to 10, then 5 and now 2 percent. Second-inning percentages (p2) also went down.

Table 10. ERA of Closers Relative to Days of Rest

A NEW STRATEGY

I developed a simulation between two identical teams, the only difference being the closer strategy. Rules for bringing in the closer for the first team, which mirror current practices, are:

• 60 percent in the ninth if ahead by 1 to 3 runs
• 30 percent in the ninth if ahead by 4 runs or tied in the top of the ninth

For the second:

• 60 percent of the time in the seventh or later if the leverage is 15 percent or higher
• 45 percent of the time in the eighth if tied or ahead by one run
• 30 percent of the time in the ninth if ahead by two runs
• 60 percent of the time if the ninth if tied or ahead by one run

Of course, a reliever can’t come in without warming up, so there is some guesswork involved in when to get him ready, which could result in the situation getting better or worse in the meantime.

This resulted in about 72 closer innings for the first team and 120 for the second team, a big increase. However, in 1971–80 there were 50 relievers who pitched that much or more, so it is not a huge amount. But the strategy also added three wins for the second team. In the past three years, only 13 players have been better than three wins a year over average using my linear-weight method described in Total Baseball and The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. They are Mike Trout and Joey Votto (7), Nolan Arenado and Clayton Kershaw (5), Jose Altuve, Jake Arrieta, Kris Bryant, John Donaldson, Paul Goldschmidt, Zack Greinke, Bryce Harper, Andrew Miller, Buster Posey, and Anthony Rizzo.

RELIEF METRICS

Player win average, invented by the Mills brothers in 1969, is a good way of measuring relief pitchers. You get charged with the change in team win probability before and after each event. Table 11 is a list of best seasons. Today’s closers don’t have much of a chance of getting an all-time ranking because they don’t pitch enough innings. Zach Britton and Kenley Jansen had fine years, but few innings.

Table 11. Best Seasons in Player Win Average: Relief Pitchers

The same method for lifetime leaders, in Table 12, shows Mariano Rivera in a class by himself.

Table 12. Lifetime Leaders in Player Win Average: Relief Pitchers

The Hall of Fame currently has six relievers: Hoffman, Gossage, Wilhelm, Fingers, Eckersley, and Bruce Sutter, who appears a bit below this list at 14.5. He was elected in his 13th year of eligibility, with the invention of the split-fingered fastball being his major achievement. Smith had a 15-year run at the Hall, with a peak of about 50 percent of the vote. He was the career leader in saves when he retired, but with the new inflated totals, his star has diminished. He lost one third of his support in the final four years. Rivera, of course, is a shoo-in. Papelbon retired in 2016. Nathan did not play in 2017 and officially retired after the season. Both will probably suffer the fate of the others, who were all dropped their first year with less than 5 percent of the vote, except Wagner. He had a career ERA of 2.31, compared to Hoffman’s 2.87, but he did not play quite as long. He is getting support at the 10 percent level in three elections, so his chances are slim. Wagner‘s last year, 2010, was his best, but he decided to retire anyway.

Gossage made a strong case that you couldn’t compare relievers in his day with the current bunch because they hardly ever come in with runners on base or before the ninth inning, which of course was correct. He was able to convince some of the voters. His votes had maxed out at 44 percent after five years, but he made significant progress the next four years and went well over the limit to be elected in 2008. You can get a blown save by allowing a runner already on base when you enter the game to score, which of course is impossible if the bases are empty. The rules hadn’t changed, but the usage had. Table 13 is a chart for Gossage and Hoffman, showing the percent by inning entering, score, and bases empty.

Table 13. Gossage/Hoffman Comparison

You cannot compare save percentage for pitchers before 1990 to pitchers today. Most closers now are at around 90 percent, while before the ’90s it was 75 percent. The highest ranking pitcher in save percentage for those with 50 or more saves who pitched mostly before 1990 is Smith, who ranks 61st. However, he had 43 percent of his games in the later period. Mudcat Grant, at number 78, is next. Gossage ranks 190th out of 225 pitchers at 73 percent, but not only did he have to worry about allowing runners already on base to score, he finished games less frequently since he was often brought in early. Hoffman finished 83 percent of his games, Gossage only 71 percent, which might have reduced his saves by 100. Middle relievers have lousy save percentages, not because they blow a lot of saves, but because they seldom get a chance at a successful one, so you have to put closers in a different category from other relievers. In 2017, team save leaders had an 87save percentage, while the save percentage for all other relievers was only 44.

Most statistical measures of relief pitching are flawed. Saves are much too easy. Holds only count if you start out ahead. You don’t have to finish the inning to get an inherited runner saved. So if you enter with two runners on base, walk a guy and leave, you get two inherited runners prevented from scoring. Looking at the best relief games in 2017 (0.2 wins or more using player win averages, 552 games), there were 232 saves, 98 wins, 89 holds, 1 loss, and 132 with nothing. Most of the unrewarded games were long stints with the score tied. Chris Devenski of the Astros had the best. He came on in the eighth inning on April 5 in a tie game against the Mariners and pitched four scoreless innings, through the 11th, worth .57 wins. The Astros won the game in the 13th.

Another flawed stat that applies to relievers and starters is outs per balls in play (OPBIP). There are five things a pitcher can do to lower the batter in the hitting spectrum. If you turn a homer into an extra-base hit, your OPBIP goes up. If you turn an extra-base hit into a single, there is no effect. If you turn a single into an out, it goes down. If you turn an out into a strikeout, it goes up again. If you eliminate a walk, there is no effect again. We have good data on hard, medium, and easy batted balls back to 2003. Hard% is the percentage of hard-hit balls. A 17 percent increase in hard-hit balls led to a doubling of ERA in these data for starters from 2016, while OPBIP only went down 7 percent.

Table 14. OBPIP and Hard % Relative to ERA

A hard-hit grounder is turned into an out only 48 percent of the time, a medium grounder 77 percent of the time. For fly balls, it’s 51 percent for hard, 92 for medium. So the idea that a pitcher has no control over outs for balls in play is wrong. What is right is that OPBIP is not a good measure of pitching skill.

Relievers get an unfair break on ERA since the starter gets charged with runners he leaves on base, even though the reliever is partly responsible. In 2017, starters had an era of 4.49 and relievers had 4.15. Transferring 400 earned runs from start to relief would make them both 4.36. Starters left 2,752 baserunners to the relievers, of which 921 scored, all charged to the starters. However, the relievers were responsible for over half the runs, which would give them 513 more, making their ERA slightly higher than that of the starters. The scoring probabilities vary a bit from year to year. For 2017 the percentages were 38, 60, and 85 from first, second, and third with none out; 25, 40, and 65 with one out; and 12, 22, and 26 with 2 outs. Garry Gillette and I wrote a paper on what we called quality reliefs in which we recommended fractional runs be awarded. The first pitcher would be charged with the scoring potential when he left and the reliever would get what actually happened minus what was charged to the starter. This meant the reliever could actually get negative runs allowed. If he came in with the bases loaded and none out and did not allow a run, the starter would be charged 1.83 runs and the reliever would get minus 1.83. A quality relief was when your innings pitched were double your runs allowed using the fractional method.

I have a little aside that applies to Hoyt Wilhelm, one of the early great relievers. I noticed years ago that he had a high number of unearned runs charged to him. My hypothesis was that he benefited from passed balls, which led to unearned runs. I always thought that the knuckler should be charged with a wild pitch most of the time, since it is really his fault. Thanks to Retrosheet, we now have play by play of every game back into the 1940s, so I was able to calculate the passed-ball rate for nine career knuckleball pitchers. The overall average for passed balls is two-tenths of one percent per plate appearance. Most knuckleballers are about six times that, but Wilhelm was 15 times higher. If you wanted to find out what team Hoyt was on, all you had to do was look at the team with the most passed balls. The nine pitchers as a unit average about 87 percent of runs earned, compared to the normal 91 percent. This resulted in a lowering of ERA by about .18. Wilhelm had only 82 percent of his runs earned, amounting to a double benefit. Wild pitch rates for knucklers were about 25 percent higher than average.

MAKING THE MAJORS

If you want to make the major leagues, being a left-handed pitcher is a big advantage. Although only 10 percent of the population is left-handed, 28 percent of pitchers are lefties. Thus your odds are three and a half times better if you are lefty. So what you do is line up two lefties to be your parents. Two lefties have about 26 percent lefty kids, so you have gained another factor of 2.6. Then arrange to be born on September 1. Greg Spira discovered years ago that more players were born in certain months than others. It turns out that there is a straight line relationship, with August being the highest, then around the calendar to July, which is the lowest. If you look at players born since 1960 in the USA, 572 were born in August and only 349 in July. I attributed that to being the oldest player on your Little League team. Little League used to determine players’ age as of July 31. It changed that date to April 30 in 2006 and now it is August 31, so you have to keep that in mind. This gives you another factor of 1.4, making the total 12.7 times more likely if you play your cards right.

CONCLUSIONS

So, what do we conclude from all this? Was the revolution started by Eckersley and LaRussa in 1988 an effective one? I believe the current relief strategy is not productive because the closer is used too little and at the wrong times. There are too many pitchers per team, limiting the moves a manager can make in other areas. There is too much emphasis on left-right matchups, which give only a small advantage. It seems that getting the closer a lot of easy saves is more important than winning games, so a statistic is actually driving strategy. The manager makes many decisions that can be disputed. If everybody handles his closer the same way, then that is one fewer decision to be made that can be second-guessed. Perhaps that is the reason we are where we are today. I wonder if anyone will try to buck the trend. I hope they do.

PETE PALMER is the co-author with John Thorn of “The Hidden Game of Baseball” and co-editor with Gary Gillette of “The Barnes and Noble ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia” (five editions). Pete worked as a consultant to Sports Information Center, the official statisticians for the American League 1976–87. Pete introduced on-base average as an official statistic for the American League in 1979 and invented on-base plus slugging (OPS), now universally used as a good measure of batting strength. Among his many accolades, he won the SABR Bob Davids Award in 1989 and was selected as a charter member of the Henry Chadwick Award.

Sources

Gillette, Gary. Pete Palmer. The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition. New York: Sterling, 2008.

Blau, Cliff, “Roster Limits,” Original Baseball Research, http://cliffordblau.000webhostapp.com/rosters.htm

Mills, Eldon. Harlan Mills. “Player Win Averages.” Self-published pamphlet, 1970.

Milsom, Keith “What is the chance of having a left handed child?” Anything Left Handed. http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/lefty-probability.html.

Posnanski, Joe. “Gossage states case against modern closers.” MLB.com. February 19, 2017. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/216442236/goose-gossage-states-case-vs-modern-closers/.

Smith, David W. “The Myth of the Closer.” Presentation at SABR 46, 2016. http://retrosheet.org/Research/SmithD/MythOfTheCloser.pdf.

Thorn, John. Pete Palmer. Michael Gershman. Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball. New York: Total Sports Publishing, 2001.

This article reports on MLB “played-with” relationships for the time period 1930 through 2016. We define player A as having played-with player B if the two appeared in the same major league game for the same team. This doesn’t necessarily mean both players stood on the field at the same time. We also include cases where one player had already left the game when the other player entered.

This analysis uses event files as provided by Retrosheet.1 These contain information on starting players as well as in-game substitutions. For most years prior to 1930, only starting players are available, so the analysis only goes back to the 1930 season. By processing the event files, a graph was built containing 13,298 players as nodes (vertices) and 831,835 played-with relationships as edges. We are then able to extend the played-with relationships by including paths from player A to player B via intermediate players.

To quantify this, we define the distance between players A and B as follows:

• distance(A, B) = 0: A player has distance 0 only to himself (A=B)
• distance(A, B) = 1: Players A and B played-with each other as defined above
• distance(A, B) = 2: Player A didn’t play-with player B, but there exists (at least one) player C who played-with A and played-with B (in different games)
• And so on. For example, for distance(A, B) = 3: Player A didn’t play-with player B, and there is no single player C who played-with both players A and B (in different games), but there exists (at least one) pair of players C and D, who played-with each other and one of whom played-with player A, the other with player B. In other words, there is a chain of three played-with steps to get from player A to player B.

In the next step, distances for each pair of players were calculated using a standard algorithm from graph theory known as the Floyd-Warshall algorithm.2 The purpose of this algorithm is to find the shortest path for each pair of nodes (vertices) in a graph. The length of the shortest path then gives the distance measure for each pair of players as defined above. The running time of the algorithm is proportional to the third power of the number of nodes (number of players in our case). There are faster algorithms for finding the shortest path between a specific pair of players or for one specific player to all others, but for this analysis, we need the distance measure for every pair of players, so Floyd-Warshall is the appropriate algorithm.

After running the algorithm on the data set, a number of interesting results can be extracted from the graph and its associated distances.

MAXIMUM DISTANCE

As a first result, we report the distribution of player-player distances for the complete data set as Figure 1.

Figure 1: Histogram of the distance between any two players in the data set. The x-axis represents the distance while the y-axis shows the respective relative frequency. Distance is as defined in the main text.

(Click on any figure image to enlarge.)

The histogram shows a value of three as the most common distance (i.e. as mode of the distribution). The maximum distance is seven. It’s a remarkable result: For any pair of major league players in the time period 1930-2016, we are able to construct a played-with path of no more than seven. There is no pair of players that isn’t connected via a played-with path!

Typically, a maximum-length path includes as one endpoint a player with very few major league appearances, a Moonlight Graham-type career. For example, one such path is:

• Owen Kahn played-with Rabbit Maranville for the Boston Braves vs. the Brooklyn Dodgers on May 24, 1930.
• Rabbit Maranville played-with Danny MacFayden for the Boston Braves vs. the Cincinnati Reds on June 17, 1935 (second game of doubleheader).
• Danny MacFayden played-with Mickey Vernon for the Washington Nationals vs. the Philadelphia Athletics on May 11, 1941.
• Mickey Vernon played-with Harmon Killebrew for the Washington Nationals vs. the New York Yankees on September 20, 1955 (second game of doubleheader).
• Harmon Killebrew played-with Jamie Quirk for the Kansas City Royals at the Texas Rangers on September 26, 1975.
• Jamie Quirk played-with Steve Finley for the Baltimore Orioles at the Toronto Blue Jays on September 29, 1989.
• Steve Finley played-with Robb Quinlan for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at the New York Mets on June 12, 2005.

So the path from Owen Kahn to Robb Quinlan includes six intermediate players, two of whom (Killebrew and Maranville) are in the Hall of Fame. Of course, typically there are several or even many other paths of the same length between two endpoints, in this case, Kahn and Quinlan. Also, it should be noted that Hall of Famers typically have long careers (22 and 23 years for Killebrew and Maranville, respectively), so they play with a lot of other players and therefore act as “hubs” in the network of played-with connections. This is especially the case if they switched teams repeatedly. Maranville, as a case in point, played for five different teams in his career—including the Boston Braves, whom he left after the 1920 season and returned to in 1929.

To further illustrate the difference between Hall of Famers and the bulk of other players, we show as Figure 2 a modified version of Figure 1. This time the data of Figure 1—all player pairs—are shown as black bars while pairs of players who are both in the Hall are shown as dark gray bars. Pairs in which at least one player is in the Hall are represented by light gray bars.

We clearly see that the distribution of pairs of players who were both Hall of Famers (“Both HoF”) is leaning to the left, toward lower distances, compared to the “All players” distribution. The weighted average distance between all players is 3.38, while for pairs of Hall of Famers it’s 2.67. Hall of Famers have smaller average distances than the mean of all players.

Figure 2: Distribution of the distance between any two players in the data set. The x-axis represents the distance while the y-axis shows the respective relative frequency. Distance is as defined in the main text. Black bars represent all player pairs, dark gray bars represent pairs where both players are in the Hall of Fame (inducted as “Players” as defined at Baseball-Reference.com) and light gray bars represent pairs where at least one player is in the Hall.

Returning to the length-7-path shown above, Robb Quinlan appeared in a fair number of major league games (458). Owen Kahn, on the other hand, appeared in only one. He entered the game on May 24, 1930, as a pinch-runner, scored his run, and never played in the major leagues again.

DIRECT CO-PLAYERS

We define a direct co-player for player A as any player who has a distance of one to player A, i.e. who played-withplayer A. First, we’ll have a look at the overall distribution of the number of co-players per player. We restrict ourselves to players who debuted between 1930 and 2006 (instead of 2016)  to eliminate noise from the partial-career data of the many players active in 2016 who debuted in the last decade.

Figure 3 shows a histogram of the number of co-players for each player.

We see a large peak for numbers of co-players below 100. The reason for that is the large number of players who only had a “cup of coffee” in the major leagues and therefore only had a relatively small number of co-players.

Figure 3: Histogram of the total number of co-players in a career for each player in the data set. The x-axis gives the number of direct co-players (i.e. players with distance = 1) while the y-axis shows the count of how often that number of co-players occurs in the data set.

The highest entry is at 671 co-players (equivalent to about 27 full 25-man rosters). This entry belongs to Rickey Henderson, an inner-circle Hall of Famer who played in the majors for 25 seasons for nine different teams—including four separate stints with one of them, the Oakland A’s. A few other players in the data set have in excess of 600 co-players: Matt Stairs, Terry Mulholland, Carlos Beltran, David Weathers, and LaTroy Hawkins. None of these players is active anymore (Beltran retired following the 2017 season), so none of them will match Rickey-being-Rickey.

At the low end of the distribution is a single player with only eight direct co-players in his career—eight being the minimum possible number. He is Whitey Ock, who played only one game. Owen Kahn, who was mentioned in the previous section for having a distance of seven from Robb Quinlan, has 11 direct co-players from his lone big-league game. A relatively modern player near the low end is Bob Davidson, who played in one game in 1989, with 12 co-players.

Because of the expansion of the major leagues starting in the 1960s and greater mobility of players in the wake of free agency, there is reason to expect a trend of an increasing number of co-players with time. To make that explicit, we look at the mean number of co-players as a function of the debut season of the player in question. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: Mean number of direct co-players for a player who debuted in a specific year. The x-axis shows the debut year while the y-axis gives the mean (average) value of direct co-players, i.e. players with distance equal to one, for each player with that debut year. A regression line is shown that is fitted to the data points. The arrow indicates the uncorrected data point for the 2007 debut year while the asterisk shows the corresponding corrected data point. See main text for more information.

We see a clear upward trend, though with some season-to-season fluctuations. This is to be expected as the number of teams has grown via expansion. In addition, a sharp increase is seen in the 1980s with free agency coming into full effect, and therefore much greater mobility of players across teams. Also, a pronounced decline is visible during World War II, when rosters were much more stable than usual. Whether a stabilization takes place in the 2000s is not yet clear because many players from that period haven’t finished their careers.

In order to get a handle on this, an analysis was done taking into account all Hall of Famers (inducted as “Players” as defined at Baseball-Reference.com) who debuted between 1930 and 1989 (so their complete careers are covered by the available data).3 It was then calculated how the number of their direct co-players evolved with the Hall of Famers’ respective age. Figure 5 shows some results for Hall of Famers debuting in four different decades.

Figure 5: Time evolution of the fraction of direct co-players as a function of the player’s age for Hall of Famers (elected as “Players”) who debuted in a given decade: 1930s (upper left panel), 1950s (upper right), 1970s (lower left) and 1980s (lower right). The x-axis shows the players’ age in years, the y-axis represents the fraction of direct co-players the player ended up with at the time of his retirement who had already directly played with him at that age.

Figure 5 shows evolutions that are close to linear for the age bracket between about 20 and 40 years, i.e. the main part of a player’s career (few players play beyond age 40). It’s therefore, as a first approximation, possible to extrapolate the number of direct co-players for a given player age for an active player. A caveat applies here because the analysis represented in figure 5 was restricted to Hall of Famers (because of technical limitations, Retrosheet does not provide player birth year data, so the analysis software had to be extended to automatically fetch birth years from Baseball-Reference.com) and, of course, not all current players will end up in the Hall.

Keeping this in mind, an exemplary correction was done for players who debuted in 2007. For them, 10 years of major league playing time was represented by the available data set. If they didn’t play in 2016, they were assumed to be retired (introducing a possible small error for players who weren’t retired but missed 2016 because of injury). If they were still active in 2016 and at most 40 years old, their number of direct-co players accumulated by then was corrected by an age-dependent factor that was taken from the lower right panel of figure 5. For example, if the player was 37 years old in 2016, his number of direct co-players was divided by 0.785, because that’s the fraction taken from the Hall of Famer analysis shown in figure 5.

Without this correction, the mean number of direct co-players for players debuting in 2007 was about 131 (see figure 4, data point indicated by arrow). With the correction, the number is about 178, which is closer to the regression line in figure 4 (see data point accompanied by an asterisk). This indicates, taking the rough correction into account, that the trend of an increasing number of co-players is still unbroken in recent years. Because the correction was done based on Hall of Famers’ careers, a certain overcorrection was to be expected because Hall of Famers typically have long careers.

HUBS AND OUTSIDERS

For every player, we took the mean value (average) of the distances to all other players in the data set. Let’s then define players with a large mean distance as outsidersand players with an especially small mean distance as hubs. So outsiders are players who are relatively isolated on the outskirts of the player connection graphs, while hubs are players who are central to the graph, with many other players “close by.”

The top 10 outsiders are:

These players all are situated at the early end of the data set, which automatically generates a relatively large distance to the (many) modern players. We’ve encountered Owen Kahn, who has the largest mean distance, already as one endpoint of a path with a distance of seven.

Now let’s look at the top 10 hubs:

This table shows players with debut years between 1964 and 1982, during a period when major league baseball was expanding and free agency was coming into being. Even if we look at the 50 smallest mean distances, the most recent debut year is 1983 (Otis Nixon). For more modern players, the distance to the 1930-era players gets too large, bringing up the mean. In a sense, Harold Baines (22 years of service, five teams, including three separate stints with two of them) is the “best-connected” player in the data set.

VISUALIZATION

Once a player-connection graph is built, it is possible to visualize it by using a tool like Gephi.4 Of course, visualizing a graph with more than 13,000 nodes and more than 800,000 edges is a hopeless task. To make this tractable we created graphs for two particular seasons, 1951 and 2004. See Figure 6.

Figure 6: Player connection graphs considering only games played in the 1951 (left panel) or 2004 (right panel) season. Players are shown as small dots while edges of the connection graph are shown as curve segments connecting the dots. The closer that players are clustered together, the smaller the distance between them. Teams are indicated, and their players are, of course, clustered together. A player switching teams midseason (player names in a paler font), like Larry Walker in the 2004 graph, will connect two team clusters.

To create the visualization, the graph was loaded into the Gephi tool. The tool uses a “force atlas” method to create node-to-node distances.5 Also, a modularity analysis was done and nodes were shadedaccordingly. We annotated the generated image with team names.

In a paler font we annotated a few individual player’s names. These are players who switched teams during the season and therefore connect the clusters of nodes (players) for different teams. These examples are, for the 1951 season:

• Barney McCosky was purchased by the Cincinnati Reds from the Philadelphia Athletics on May 4, 1951.
• Hank Edwards was selected off waivers by the Cincinnati Reds from the Brooklyn Dodgers on July 21, 1951.
• Tommy Brown was traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers to the Philadelphia Phillies on June 8, 1951.

Two (or more) teams get clustered close together by the tool if there are strong, i.e. multiple, connections between them. One example is the Dodgers and Cubs, who exchanged multiple players via trade during the 1951 season. Another example is the 1951 Browns, who were involved in multiple player exchanges with several teams and so are right in the middle of the clustering.

The graph for the 2004 season looks more complex than the 1951 graph because there were more major league teams and players in the later season.

In the 2004 graph, we clearly see three teams that are only connected via one player to the bulk of the other teams:

• St. Louis Cardinals (acquired Larry Walker from the Rockies)
• Detroit Tigers (traded Mike Difelice to the Cubs)
• Anaheim Angels (signed Raul Mondesi as a free agent after he was released by the Pirates)

In general, the 2004 player connection graph is more “crowded” than the 1951 graph because of the higher mobility of players, i.e. more player exchanges between teams. This leads to relatively small played-with distances between numerous pairs of teams. In the end, more than half of the teams from the 2004 season are clustered so close together that it’s barely possible to resolve them in the visualization.

So the visualization tool gives us a lot of insight into who played with whom and which teams were connected via in-season player exchanges.

As a further example, we show the connection graph for Hall of Fame players.

Figure 7: Player connection graph for Hall of Famers, i.e. players who were inducted as “Players” into the Hall of Fame.

We see some clustering, which stems from teams with multiple Hall of Famers. For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers of the 1960s at bottom center, with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Duke Snider et al. Also, there is a timeline-like component to the graph, with modern players such as Greg Maddux, Jeff Bagwell, and Tim Raines on the right and old-timers on the left.

The graph, even restricted only to Hall of Famers, is still quite crowded. So as a final illustration, the graph for Hall of Fame pitchers only is presented as Figure 8.

Figure 8: Player connection graph for Hall of Fame pitchers. Please note that Gephi draws connecting lines only for a certain threshold of “closeness,” meaning that, for example, Ted Lyons and Red Faber were not really isolated from the rest of the Hall of Fame pitchers.

SUMMARY

We presented a novel approach to analyzing major league player connections as defined in the played-with sense. In this way, we were able to track historical developments that impacted the structure of on-field personnel, such as expansion and free agency. By using appropriate tools, we presented intuitive visualizations of player connections for selected subsets of the data.

It would be interesting to extend the analysis back in time if more detailed game data (including in-game substitutions) became available for seasons prior to 1930.

PETER UELKES has been a SABR member since 2001. He’s from Germany and became an overseas member of Red Sox Nation in 1990. After receiving a Ph.D in physics, he worked in the finance and telco industries. Living with his wife and their two sons in Germany, Peter spends his time on topics like MLB, soccer, cryptography, astronomy, mathematics, and education.

Notes

1 www.retrosheet.org. The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd–Warshall_algorithm

3 www.baseball-reference.com/awards/hof.shtml

4 Bastian M., Heymann S., Jacomy M. (2009). Gephi: An open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-directed_graph_drawing

Foul balls are often portrayed as devalued events that merely slow down baseball games. However, despite its game-dragging “do-over” reputation, the foul-ball event can provide insight into the fatigue status of a pitcher while also functioning as a predictor of hitter success. This paper investigates historical Retrosheet major-league foul-ball event data from 1945 through 2015, to analyze the historical nature of foul-ball occurrence with respect to two states:

[1] foul-ball accumulation when foul ball strikes occurred “inside-the-count” (ITC); and

[2] foul-ball accumulation when foul balls occurred “outside the count” (OTC) and thus did not count as strikes.3

It is hypothesized that the foul ball as an event can predict hitting success, but that the probability of such success is dependent upon when foul balls occur with respect to the ball-strike count, and how many foul-ball events accumulate during an at-bat.

Alex Cora had a marathon 18-pitch plate appearance against Matt Clement of the Chicago Cubs that included 14 foul balls and ended with a home run. (MALINGERING/Flickr.com)

Types of Foul-ball Strikes

The role of the foul ball as a strike within the count is a logical place to start in assessing any value it might have strategically. William Juliano provides just such an analysis by assessing the role the foul ball plays as an indicator of batter success via the type of first-pitch strike that occurs in an at-bat. According to Juliano, the contrast between a swing-and-miss first strike and a looking first strike with respect to at-bat success is relatively meaningless; but not so for the foul ball when contrasted to the other types of strikes on the measure of batter OPS. Batter OPS was elevated in a meaningful way when the first two strikes resulted from foul balls.4

However, the OPS is a multivariate combinatory statistic that looks at batter on-base percentage plus batter slugging percentage rather than simple batting average.5 As per Juliano’s data, there is no significant difference in batting average between at-bats in which the first strike is a foul ball and those in which it’s a swinging or called strike.6 Thus, the act of hitting a foul ball for the first strike does not provide conclusive data when it comes to predicting hitting success via batting average. Perhaps as a single-event occurrence, the first-strike foul ball is not a large enough sample of within-at-bat events to arrive at some predictive power. However, the accumulation of foul balls within an at-bat, and whether foul balls compose the two strikes for any at-bat, is a far better candidate to make a determination of batter success.

With respect to pitcher fatigue, the traditional assessment variables for replacing a pitcher early in a game differ from that of later innings. Early on, managers consider variables such as starter effectiveness and the need for bullpen conservation. In later innings, their thinking tends toward relative effectiveness of the starter and direct consideration of his replacement.7 These traditional pitcher-replacement considerations appear to be based more on hunches than on data-driven decision making.

Perhaps the most famous foul-ball sequence in baseball history was the Dodgers’ Alex Cora’s marathon 18-pitch, 14-foul plate appearance in 2004 that ended with a home run against Matt Clement of the Chicago Cubs.8 And while Cora’s batting sequence may have provided a great deal of information on Clement’s status (e.g. fatigue, pitch-location difficulty, etc.), as earlier mentioned, sample size across multiple batters would be far more predictive with respect to foul-ball accumulation than would a single at-bat sequence of monumental foul-ball proportion. The current paper puts forth the argument that the foul ball is a ubiquitous data event that should garner more serious consideration in the pitching-change process. Foul balls are far more than simply a drag upon game flow. They are data-rich events that when assessed cumulatively and in tandem with knowledge of the historical data on hit probabilities, can provide valuable insight into pitcher fatigue and batter hit success.

Cumulative foul ball states: ITC vs OTC

In observing a foul ball in a game, there is a tendency to dismiss the occurrence as an irrelevant event—it’s a ball out of play that’s most often headed for the stands, and what reaction there is to the event is relegated to the excitement surrounding some fan acquiring a souvenir. Major league teams appear to take this “irrelevant event” perspective while failing to assess whether the event itself has some sort of informational value that might be gleaned for strategic advantage.

With respect to the game and its participants, the hidden strategic value of the foul ball is found within its role as an “indicator.” That role is revealed in the present study via data showing its cumulative occurrence and its contribution to the strike count relative to the overall existing count for the batter. There are two such “indicator” states that arise with foul balls. The first is when fouls account for the first two strikes—known as the “inside-the-count” (ITC) state. The second, known as the “outside-the-count” (OTC) state, is when the first two strikes are made up of swings and misses, called strikes, or some combination of the two, with the accumulation of foul balls occurring after these two strikes have been acquired by the batter.

Assumptions and Hypotheses

First, it is necessary to clarify two assumptions with respect to the foul ball and a comparison of its occurrence as an ITC vs OTC event. The first is the assumption that the accumulation of two ITC foul-ball strikes is related to poor pitching (e.g. fatigue) and the second is that ITC swing-and-miss/looking strike combinations are due to good pitching. In addition, the hybrid two-strike count combination comprising one foul ball and one swinging or called strike is assumed neutral—it does not imply such accumulation of strikes is due to either good or poor pitching, since it’s balanced and leans toward neither one. Due to this, these hybrid two-strike count combinations were not a focus of the investigation.

The primary research objective was to inquire about the probability that a hit will occur with respect to increasing foul-ball accumulation for [1] at-bat counts having two strikes from swing-and-miss/called-strike combinations; or [2] at-bat counts with two strikes resulting from foul balls. Modes of getting to first base such as walks, intentional walks, hit-by-pitch, or catcher interference were not of interest. Thus it was hypothesized that: [1] two-strike counts for at-bats where both strikes are foul balls would garner higher hit probabilities than would two-strike counts in at-bats where both strikes are swing-and-miss, called strikes, or some combination thereof; and [2] that hit probability would continue increasing as foul balls accumulate.

Method

Seventy-one years of Retrosheet data 1945–2015 were analyzed to assess the incidence of ITC foul-ball patterns vs. OTC foul-ball patterns with respect to hit probabilities.9 MySQL was utilized as the collective database to which Retrosheet data were imported, after which data were parsed using SQL (Structured Query Language) syntax within HeidiSQL front-end software interface to retrieve relevant Retrosheet event data.10 The range of database queries addressed two-strike counts of 0–2, 1–2, 2–2, and 3–2 for at-bats with accumulated foul ball counts from 1 to 5, for both ITC and OTC batter states.

Results

When looking at batter success as a function of accumulated foul balls across different counts, the OTC and ITC conditions demonstrate striking disparity with respect to batter success on a two-strike count. Figure 1 provides an overview of hit-success probabilities for both the OTC and ITC states. One of the most salient comparisons can be seen in Figure 1, where three non-strike foul balls have been accumulated within each of the OTC and ITC states—a contrast demonstrating a .211 hit success increase (.335 – .124 = .211) when the first two strikes of a hitter’s count are both foul balls (ITC) as opposed to when the first two strikes are both swing-and-miss or called strikes (OTC). The comparison with the greatest disparity involves at-bats in which four foul balls have been accumulated on an 0–2 count—an OTC (.079) vs ITC (.413) difference of .334.

It is also worth noting the drastic drop-off in Figure 1 with respect to the accumulation of five foul-balls in the IC condition. The reason for such a dramatic drop in the ITC condition to .066 (as seen in Table 2) is that although Figure 1 indicates five foul balls have been accumulated, there have actually been seven foul balls accumulated—the first two foul balls counted as strikes, and then five more were accumulated after the two fouls counting as strikes. This results in a dataset sample size issue; there is not enough historical data on seven foul balls accumulated over the course of an at-bat—where the at-bat results in a hit—to arrive at an adequate sample size.

Figure 1. Hit probabilities for ITC and OTC states as a function of foul-ball accumulation.

When viewing Table 2 data of the OTC and ITC conditions, one can see an obvious decrease in hit probabilities as the accumulation of foul-balls increases. For example, with zero foul balls accumulated in the 3–2 count ITC condition (.345), every subsequent probability value for foul-balls accumulated, except for one (two foul-balls accumulated = .346) is smaller than this associated zero foul-balls accumulated probability value of .345. This pattern is pervasive; it occurs across nearly all OTC and ITC conditions as foul-balls are accumulated.

One explanation for this unusual pattern is the systematic increasing “rarity” of foul-ball events. As foul balls are accumulated in any at-bat, the number of historical at-bats representing those foul ball-accumulations in the data gradually decreases. So, for example, once foul-ball accumulation in an at-bat equals four, there are fewer instances in the historical data where a hit occurred after the accumulation of four foul balls than there would be for at-bats where hits occurred after the accumulation of only one foul ball—simply because it is rarer to accumulate four foul-balls in an at-bat than it is to accumulate only one. Such occurrence in the historical data introduces distortion in the analyses due to sample size differences. These sample size distortions affect the probability calculations as sample size representations for various events decrease or increase. In addition, one has to also consider “batter fatigue” as foul balls accumulate. Such at-bats that “drag on” with ever-increasing numbers of foul-balls accumulating can mentally and physically drain a batter, and thus may readily contribute to the decrease in probability of a hit for any at-bat where “X” number of foul-balls have occurred.

With respect to all foul ball accumulation states across all counts, the three-foul-ball accumulation at-bat was of particular interest for several reasons: [1] The frequency data for all counts within both the ITC and OTC states at the point of three foul balls accumulated were both tightly “clustered” and more evenly distributed so as to reflect a tighter range of within-state data variability; [2] there was clearly observable disparity between the ITC and OTC state hit probabilities at the point of three foul balls accumulated; and, most importantly, [3] the accumulation of three foul balls is not only more achievable as a realistic in-game scenario, the frequency count data as seen in Table 1 support this three foul-ball accumulation.

Table 1 presents the frequency tabulations for hitting success on two-strike counts within both ITC and OTC states coinciding with the accumulation of three foul balls. The Table 1 data yielded a significant Chi Square analysis result χ2 (3, N=16,415)=302.51, p< .00 that subsequently rejects a null hypothesis of independence of events.

Table 1. Hit success frequency counts for all two-strike ITC vs OTC states (3 foul balls)

Table 2 provides the full range of probabilities for hit occurrences on various counts for all ITC and OTC states. The mean for all ITC counts in Table 2 is .291, and for all OTC counts is .102—the difference of which is .189. Perhaps most interesting is the hit disparity probabilities (Table 3), which demonstrate the magnitude of differences between the ITC and OTC states across the full range of two-strike counts.

Table 3. Hit probability differences for all two-strike counts (ITC state minus OTC state).

Discussion

While the ITC/OTC data display striking differences with respect to hit probability within different event states of the game, the accumulation of five or even four foul balls, outside of having already accumulated two foul-ball strikes, is a relatively rare condition. Although these data do demonstrate the outright probability of success in various situations, other plausible contributing factors and explanations toward such outcomes warrant consideration as well.

It is indeed possible that the big picture when it comes to hitter success as per ITC vs OTC states may be multivariate in nature—a synchronous occurrence of the ITC state for any two-strike count; specific inning and ball-strike count data; and known pitcher characteristics all working together. Thus, when it comes to arriving at a unique pitching fatigue indicator as an emergent property of these combinatory states, one must consider the weightings of other variables in the event sequence as plausible contributors at some level.

In addition to the revealing hit probabilities from this data for two-strike ITC states, if one were to use such data as a decision-making catalyst regarding pitcher fatigue, it may be necessary to also consider influential factors from the opposition, such as the literal ability of some batters to get themselves into such ITC foul-strike conditions, or type of pitch and unique pitching style combined with unique hitting style—all of which may be contributing factors when it comes to generating states of the ITC type. Pitchers who work hitters in certain ways might indeed be contributing in some way to a greater manifestation of the hitter ITC state.

The a priori manner in which a batter decides to approach a specific pitcher may also be important as a contributor to ITC/OTC state of success or failure. For example, the concept of batter persistence in maintaining an at-bat by consistently fouling off pitches may have greater weight as an at-bat preservation mechanism in certain situations—such as how the result of the last game of the season can carry quite a different level of importance than the result of the first game, or how a runner in scoring position during a tie game in the bottom of the ninth may elicit a far higher level of such persistence than at any other time.

Nevertheless, variables such as pitching style, type of pitch, or batter approach cannot take away from the fact that the ITC/OTC probabilities give clear indication as to what outcome one can anticipate for each state probabilistically. It simply remains to be seen how other elements of variability such as pitcher characteristics, batter characteristics, game context and situation, or environmental factors contribute with respect to their weighting toward success or failure outcome in ITC or OTC states. Investigation of such variability and its influence is the next logical step in this research paradigm.

Conclusion

Despite its ubiquitous reputation as an impediment to game flow, the foul ball is a data-rich event that can serve as a valuable predictor in prelude to both hitter success and pitcher fatigue. The extended analysis of other factors—both random and fixed—in tandem with the current study could potentially aid in deriving predictive strategic tools (analogous to charts indicating when to attempt two-point conversions in a football game) that would provide immediate assistance in game-driven decision-making processes. In addition, it remains to be seen if the foul ball itself will become some sort of victim to strategic change within the game of baseball. Ultimately, the present study reveals that the foul ball event, as a critical indicator of performance, should not be limited, pruned, or morphed under rules of the game, but rather capitalized upon strategically as a tool of foresight into human athletic performance.

JEFFREY N. HOWARD is currently an Associate Professor of psychology at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Dr. Howard received his Ph.D in Human Factors Psychology from Wichita State University. His research interests in addition to baseball include music-cognition, decision-making, and cross-sensory modality investigations. He also holds master’s degrees in clinical and experimental psychology, as well as a bachelor’s degree in radio-television journalism.

Notes

1. Jayson Stark, “MLB says new rules speeding up game times,” ESPN.com, April 13, 2015, http://espn.go.com/espn/print?id=12680681, accessed September 20, 2015.

2. Brian Costa, “Does Baseball Have to Be So Slow?” Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB10001424052702303948104579534352400123072, accessed September 25, 2015.

3. Retrosheet, http://www.retrosheet.org/game.htm, accessed March 1, 2015.

4. William Juliano, “Does Type of First Pitch Strike Influence At Bat Results?” The Captain’s Blog, September 25, 2012, http://www.captainsblog.info/2012/09/25/does-type-of-first-pitch-strike-influence-at-bat-results/17572/, accessed September 15, 2015.

5. Fangraphs, “OPS and OPS+,” http://www.fangraphs.com/library/offense/ops/, accessed September 30, 2015.

6. Juliano, “Does Type of First Pitch Strike Influence At Bat Results?”

7. Gartheeban Ganeshapillai, John Guttag, “A Data-driven Method for In-game Decision Making in MLB” Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2013): 973–79. Available online via MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/2014_SSAC_Data-driven-Method-for-In-game-.Decision-Making.pdf.

8. Jon Weisman, “18 Again! Ten years later, Alex Cora’s at-bat remains a wonder.” Dodgers Insider, May 12, 2014, https://dodgers.mlblogs.com/ 18-again-ten-years-later-alex-coras-at-bat-remains-a-wonder-360e01acc06, accessed March 18, 2018.

9. Retrosheet.

10. Ansgar Becker, “HeidiSQL MySQL server interface tool,” 2015, http://www.heidisql.com/, accessed November 20, 2015.

On May 23, 1915, something unprecedented happened in the history of major league baseball. On that day, the Chicago Daily Tribune announced a contest to find the three best amateur baseball players in Chicago. The prize for the three youngsters would be a chance to join each of Chicago’s major league teams, the American League White Sox, the National League Cubs, and the Federal League Whales. The contest’s origins, execution, and ultimate success were the result of a series of circumstances unique to Chicago in 1915, including the city’s vibrant amateur baseball scene, the Tribune’s active role as an ambassador of amateur and semipro baseball, and the heightened competition for talent and attention brought on by the team from the new Federal League.

Chicago was home to a large amateur baseball scene and the Tribune provided coverage and printed box scores from numerous semipro and amateur leagues each week. As an example, the August 10, 1914, issue included the box scores of 25 semipro and amateur games from around the city. The influence of the regular reportage on the city’s baseball scene was commented on by Joe Tinker, manager of the Whales, who stated that the “amateur scores printed in The Tribune every Monday morning are the greatest boost ever given baseball.”1

It was this commitment to covering and promoting amateur baseball that provided the impetus for the contest. On February 2, sportswriter Harvey T. Woodruff reported on a meeting organized by the Tribune that brought together Chicago’s amateur baseball leaders to discuss plans for boosting the game.2 Despite the fact that Chicago was home to countless amateur and semipro teams, Woodruff lamented that only 5,000 fans had attended the national amateur title game the previous fall, while a crowd of an estimated 90,000 had attended one of the preliminary amateur contests in Cleveland.3 The newspaper saw that something needed to be done to promote the game and increase interest in amateur baseball.

The Chicago Tribune Amateur Contest was first announced on May 23 under the headline: “Here’s Chance to Become Sox, Cub, or Whale.” Author Woodruff detailed the grand prize, in which the three winners would get the opportunity to travel on the respective teams’ final road trips and “be a real member of the team for several weeks.”4 Offering an authentic major league experience both on the field and off, Woodruff explained that the winners would be “actual players while they are with the club. They will occupy the same sleeping cars, quarreling about upper or lower berths, be assigned to rooms in hotels, eat with the players, wear a uniform in the field, and perhaps get a chance to act as substitute if any of the regulars are injured.”5Woodruff proclaimed that the contest prize is an “offer unparalleled, so far as known, either in baseball or the newspaper field.”6

Equally unparalleled was the cooperation between all three of Chicago’s major league teams. Woodruff acknowledged that the contest was only able to function through the “approval and sympathy” of President Charles H. Thomas of the Cubs, President Charles A. Comiskey of the White Sox, and President Charles Weeghman of the Whales. What would prompt three competing magnates to participate in this contest? In order to answer that question, it is worth examining the impact of the Federal League and the Chicago Whales upon baseball in 1915 in Chicago.

It is clear from looking at attendance figures for the Cubs and the White Sox that the Federal League’s presence in Chicago had a drastic impact. The White Sox saw their attendance drop from 644,501 in 1913 to 469,290 in 1914 (the Whales’ second year, and the first in which the Federal League competed as a “major” league), while the Cubs had it even worse: Their attendance was cut in half from 419,000 in 1913 to 202,516 in 1914.7The newly formed Chi-Feds—who lacked a formal nickname in their first year and were also known as the Federals—meanwhile drew the most of any Federal League team, with 200,729, though the club’s owner, Weeghman, later claimed a first-year attendance of 312,000.8

In addition to increased competition for Chicago’s fans, there was an increase in competition for baseball talent. On April 1, 1914, when the Federal League published its rosters, 59 major league players had defected to the new major league. Over the course of the 1914 and 1915 seasons, 172 players with AL or NL experience had appeared in the league. In the Federal League’s two seasons as a major league, 286 different players appeared.9 Although many of the players who appeared in the Federal League were of questionable caliber, the fight for new baseball talent was clear.

So as the 1915 season began, all three of Chicago’s major league teams were battling for fans and talent. Thus the participation of all three clubs in the Tribune Amateur Contest is not entirely surprising since the contest had the potential to be mutually beneficial to both the Tribune and the teams. The Tribune could provide a free and powerful platform for the clubs to locate new talent while giving them valuable ink. If the contest was a success, the newspaper would benefit from increased sales and notoriety, and the clubs would get new baseball talent and a possible uptick in fans.

The announcement on May 23 also provided the criteria by which players would be judged: on their baseball skill and deportment on the field, with the specific admonition that “no umpire baiters are going to chosen.”10 Only players under 21 years of age could enter. Woodruff noted that Tinker, Cubs manager Roger Bresnahan, and Ed Walsh of the White Sox all expressed interest in helping out with the contest.

As May ended, the contest had yet to take on a formal structure. The May 31 Tribune provided scouting reports for various players culled from across the city, with only the scouts’ initials provided, so as to preserve their anonymity. At this point, however, there was no indication of what the next phase of the contest would be. The initial plan seems to have been for scouts to attend games and compile a list of players who would then be scouted further, but the Tribune soon recognized the folly of this plan. On June 6, Woodruff reported that the Tribune had been “fairly swamped with ambitious youngsters, anxious to learn more of the details of the plan.”11 The response was so overwhelming that more scouts needed to be added and a cutout coupon was published, so that young players could formally enter the contest. There would be scheduled tryouts, which would include games between teams chosen from among the entrants. The three winners would come from a group of 40 finalists.

On June 8, more scouting reports were published that highlighted some of the strong play from around the city. Shortstop James Cerny of the Weisskopfs was compared by scout J. C. to Rabbit Maranville, while scout E. F. L. noted that third baseman McInerney’s strong play for the Meteors meant that “Comiskey needn’t worry about that third corner any longer.”12  In contrast to the rave reviews, scout A. G. was so disgusted by the umpire baiting and wrangling in a game between the Marines and Iolas that he left early, stating, “These fellows are out of it because of their tactics.”13 On June 13, the first list of 42 entrants was published, ranging from 12-year-old O. Jones, a shortstop for Holy Grail, to 21-year-old M. C. Miller, a strapping 6-foot-2 pitcher for East Gary. Applicants from fraternal leagues, high school teams, and the sandlots were represented.

On June 22, former Chicago Colts star Jimmy Ryan was named as chief of scouts for the contest.14 Scouting reports continued to appear for various amateur games around the city and a contest close date of July 15 was announced. On July 4, the first official tryout was announced for the following week with approximately 50 entrants. At seven o’clock in the morning on Sunday, July 11, the first tryout took place at Weeghman Park, home of the Whales. Luminaries such as Ryan, Tinker, Weeghman, American League utility umpire Clarence Eldridge, and members of the Whales were in attendance. Pants Rowland and Roger Bresnahan were unable to attend the tryout. Despite the tryouts not being open to the public, demand was so high that a crowd of 1,000 was eventually admitted by Weeghman. Heavy rains nearly canceled the tryouts, and of the 54 players scheduled to be tried out, only 30 or so were in attendance.

Of those who appeared in the initial tryouts, 10 were deemed worthy of moving on the final round. The most notable of this first wave of aspirants was a future National League MVP. Robert O’Farrell Jr. was the 18-year-old catcher for Waukegan High School. In the tryouts, he had two hits, scored two runs, and had 13 putouts and one assist. In less than two months, he would make his major league debut with the Cubs. O’Farrell was chosen as the first-string catcher and paired with another finalist, pitcher Johnny Simmons, who struck out 11 batters. O’Farrell was described as the best hitter of the lot and also impressed with his catching and throwing. Bob O’Farrell was so impressive that on July 25, he was signed by the Cubs at the behest of their manager, the legendary backstop Bresnahan.

When the final entry date for the contest passed on July 15, there were nearly 400 entrants from Chicago and its suburbs. The next tryouts took place on July 17 at the Chicago American Giants Park. Approximately 50 youngsters appeared at the tryouts and A.L. umpire Eldridge noted that the quality of player was lower than that of the first tryouts and that outfield stars were especially lacking.15 Perhaps this is the reason only five finalists were named.

Two more tryouts were scheduled for the next day, July 18, one in the morning at Comiskey Park and one in the afternoon at West Side Park, the Cubs’ home field. The morning tryouts were canceled due to rain, to be rescheduled at a later date. The afternoon tryouts took place without a hitch. Lanky fireballer Henry F. Rasmussen was one of the standouts. Engel noted that Rasmussen showed a “world of speed,” allowing only four “bingles” in nine innings of work, and also banging out a triple and a single.16 Diminutive shortstop James Cerny was described as a “second edition of Maranville,” while two outfielders were finally selected, Robert Swenie and Frank Baker. First sacker Leo Gronow and catcher George Dowling, described as a “Bresnahan type,” rounded out the six finalists from the tryout.

The next tryout was scheduled for West Side Park on July 24 but was canceled due to the tragic sinking of the SS Eastland on the Chicago River, which killed 844 passengers. The Tribune announced that the entire receipts from the final tryout scheduled on August 1 at Comiskey Park would be donated to benefit the relatives of those who lost their lives in the Eastland disaster.17 One of the eventual finalists, Charley Pechous of the Western Electric company team, narrowly missed boarding the SS Eastland after his family neglected to wake him in time to take the ship to a scheduled game in Michigan City.18  The following day saw two more tryouts, one at Weeghman Field and one at West Side Park. Over 100 players appeared that day and 14 more finalists were selected. Third baseman Julian Mee was one of the finalists, and Eldridge noted that he was one of five third-base playing brothers, including Tommy Mee, who had played in the infield (mostly at short) for the St. Louis Browns in 1910. Pechous disappointed with the bat, but demonstrated his “usual flashy game” in the field and “showed his fielding superiority over all other infield candidates.”19 Shortstop Johnny McKittrick was another standout selected for the finals.

The positive buzz generated by the tryouts and the O’Farrell signing was noted by the semipro Chicago City League. On July 29, an open letter from the 12 managers of the circuit, published in the Tribune, offered spots to the top 12 finalists who failed to land contest trips. The letter expressed the belief that the contest was “affording the amateur ball players of Chicago a great opportunity to progress in baseball” while also promoting “amateur and semi-professional baseball in Chicago.”20

That same day, the Tribune provided further details on how the winners would be selected. The four judges, Eldridge, Ryan, umpire Charles A. Reading, and Chicago semipro booster Frank McNichols, would utilize the so-called Chalmers systems, used by the American and National leagues to select their Most Valuable Player. Each judge would create a ballot awarding 12 points to the best player, 11 to the next best, and so on down the list. The top three players would be selected for contest trips and the next 12 would get recommendations for the City League.

Going into the final weekend of the contest, 34 finalists had already been selected (35 minus Bob O’Farrell, who was ineligible after having signed with the Cubs). That left a potential six additional spots remaining. On July 31, a makeup tryout was scheduled for the July 24 session canceled by the Eastland disaster. Taking place at DePaul University, the tryouts would yield seven more finalists, bringing the field to 41 players for the August 1 finals.

On the eve of the finals, the Tribune commented on the overwhelming success of the tryouts thus far, noting that over 90 percent of the 400 applicants had participated and boldly proclaiming that no “sporting event for the prairie lot players has created as much interest.”21 The attention garnered by the final contest spread to baseball’s minor leagues as well. American Association president T. M. Chivington indicated that he would attend the finals at Comiskey Park in hopes of “finding material suitable for his league.”22 He was given authorization by league managers to provide a list of prospects. Western League president Tip O’Neill, White Sox secretary Harry Grabiner, and former Cubs owner Charles W. Murphy also attended the August 1 finals.

The final tryouts took place in a doubleheader that allowed all 41 finalists ample chance to showcase their abilities. The judges selected three unanimous victors: third baseman Charley Pechous, pitcher Henry “Hans”/“Heine” Rasmussen, and shortstop John McKittrick. The 6-foot-5½-inch, 190-pound Rasmussen was picked to join the Federal League Whales amid some controversy over his age. The young giant promised to provide the appropriate documentation to show he was under 21 and joined the Whales for their road trip on August 3.23 Pechous was selected for the Cubs based on his spectacular fielding, and McKittrick was slated to join the White Sox for their final road trip in September.

Rasmussen’s major league adventure garnered the most attention of the three. Almost immediately, he was cast as an overgrown man-child, having only started pitching the previous year and never having traveled east of Chicago nor having slept in a sleeping car before. After being tricked into taking the upper berth on the Whales’ train to Brooklyn, Rasmussen showed a modicum of self-awareness, proclaiming “I’m no Ring Lardner busher” and boasting that he wouldn’t fall for any tricks.24 His naiveté was further exposed when he downed three meals in one sitting, going into debt on his per diem and complaining that he was still hungry when he went to bed that night.

Manager Tinker commented on Rasmussen’s inexperience, noting, “The kid doesn’t know anything about pitching, but he certainly has a sweet delivery. . . . He seems willing and anxious to learn.”25 Rasmussen continued to be the subject of his teammates’ jokes, but was noted to “take the attempted joking in the right spirit.”26 Young Heine stated that he was hard to fool since he had “read all Ring Lardner’s busher stories. . . . If they want to get me they’ll have to spring some new stuff.”27 Rasmussen’s exploits in New York City appeared on August 10 under the headline “Tribune Amateur sees nothing new on Gay White Way.” Heine was not impressed by Broadway, saying, “We have all this stuff in Chicago.” The proud youngster was well aware of his newfound fame and volunteered to advise the Tribune of any noteworthy material regarding himself while expressing disappointment that he had only received two letters from girls since he’d left home.28 It was later reported that Heine’s plea was met with one letter a day from a girl back in Chicago.29

On August 11, Rasmussen entered the record books officially, as Tinker brought him in to face Newark in the eighth inning with the Whales down 6–0. The nervous hurler was touched for two runs in his sole inning of work and struck out in his only at-bat. Regardless of his underwhelming results, the Tribune expressed that he showed a “dandy display of nerve” and was of the belief that he was a “real ball player.”30 Tinker was cautiously optimistic: “If the big youngster sticks to the game he may make a headliner among the hurlers.”31 Rasmussen took the mound again for the second and last time on August 13, once again facing defending champion Newark. Displaying more cool than in his debut, Heine allowed one run in his sole inning of work. Rasmussen remained with the club for the remainder of their trip, drawing more attention for his coaching antics in an August 17 game against Baltimore, which resulted in a $25 fine. He was released at the end of the road trip. Rasmussen signed on with the Cubs in mid-September but did not appear in another major league game. He played briefly with Terre Haute in the Central League the next year to end his professional career.

Infielder Pechous joined the Cubs on August 16 for an exhibition game in Toledo, where he went hitless but made several nice defensive plays. This would be Pechous’ only in-game experience with the Cubs in 1915. He finished the road trip and was offered a contract for $1,800, but did not sign with the Cubs, choosing instead to finish school. In mid-September, however, he joined the Whales and made his major league debut at third base on September 14 against Baltimore. Pechous would appear in 18 games for the Whales, batting a dismal .176 but showing a solid glove. Pechous played for the Cubs in 1916-17 as a substitute and lasted another six seasons as a “good field-no hit” infielder in the American Association.

The third winner, McKittrick, joined the White Sox for their trip east in September. McKittrick did not appear in any games with the club, perhaps owing to the strength of the eventual 93-game winner. He signed with Terre Haute of the Central League in early 1916, but his career in professional baseball appears to consist of a stint in 1916 with the Johnsonburg Johnnies of the Interstate League.

Another Tribune contestant appeared in the majors that year: first baseman Joe Weiss, who also played for the Whales in September 1915. Weiss was declared ineligible from the contest because he had appeared with Green Bay of the Wisconsin-Illinois League in 1914. He would play in the minors into the early 1920s.

Of the nearly 400 contestants who entered the 1915 Chicago Tribune Amateur Contest, four played in the major leagues in 1915. Another contestant, Doug McWeeny (entering the contest as L. D. McWeeney), later pitched for the White Sox, Brooklyn Robins, and Cincinnati Reds. In addition, more than 30 participants played minor league baseball, with many being signed as a direct result of their participation in the contest.

The contest was held again in 1916, with nearly 600 entrants taking part in the summer-long tryouts. Five winners were drawn from a field of 83 finalists, with the Cubs and White Sox getting two players each and the fifth winner awarded the special Ban B. Johnson prize, which included a trip to that year’s World Series to provide special reports for the Tribune. None of the five winners (John Simmons and Albert Hoffman joined the Cubs, Andrew Norman and Daniel F. Cunningham traveled with the White Sox, and John Berry won the Johnson prize) would appear in the majors.32 However, future major league stars Marty McManus and Johnny Mostil were among the year’s contestants.33 In addition, more than 20 of the entrants would play professional baseball in the coming years.

Just as the contest appeared set to become an institution, World War I brought the proceedings to a halt. The 1917 edition of the contest was announced, but on April 15, nine days after the United States declared war on Germany, the Tribune announced it would be canceled for the time being, so as not to interfere with the war effort. After all, the Tribune noted, the contest was targeted toward young, able-bodied men of the right age to serve in the military.34 The newspaper said the contest would resume, better than ever, at a later date.

That later date never came. The war consumed the 1918 baseball season and had effects reaching into the shortened 1919. No announcement was made for a new contest, and it would never resume—for reasons that remain a mystery, though several possibilities can be ascertained. The recent on-field success of the White Sox and Cubs, the 1917 World Series winners and 1918 National League champions, respectively, may have made both clubs leery about adding distractions to their pennant pursuits. The demise of the Federal League de-emphasized the competition both for the fan’s attention and for baseball talent. Another factor to consider is the financial struggles of the 1917 and 1918 seasons stemming from the war, which left both of Chicago’s ballclubs looking to cut any non-essential costs, including room and board for a young contest winner. Regardless of the reason, the Chicago Tribune Amateur Contest was dead.

The impact of the contest has largely been forgotten. The Milwaukee Journal, clearly inspired by the success of the Tribune contest, held a similarly structured competition in 1919. Players from the area competed in tryouts throughout the summer, with the winner getting a chance to join the American Association’s Milwaukee Panthers. That contest’s winner was Fred Klevenow, a 19-year-old catcher, who would end up playing several seasons in the minor leagues.35 Several other contestants would also play minor league baseball.

In the 21st century, the Indian reality television show Million Dollar Arm embodied the spirit of the Tribune contest. The show sought to find potential baseball pitching talent among the country’s cricket-playing population, offering a $1 million prize to any cricket bowler who could pitch three balls at over 90 miles per hour. The contest winners, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, eventually signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization and would play in the minor leagues.36

The bold and ambitious Chicago Tribune Amateur Contest had the potential to create a new avenue for player discovery, but unfortunately, world events and changes in the baseball world conspired to end the concept just as it was starting to gain traction. The legacy of the contest can be seen in the talent discovered. Four major league careers, however brief, began as a direct result of the contest, in addition to numerous minor league careers. Several other future major league players and many more future minor leaguers were contestants. As a source of talent discovery, the contest was low cost and low risk. As a means of promotion, it was ingenious and served the triple benefit of giving publicity to the newspaper while providing free advertising for Chicago’s professional teams and galvanizing and garnering attention for the city’s amateur baseball community.

JUSTIN MCKINNEY lives in Ottawa, Ontario, and writes about strange baseball history, including that time Rube Waddell got bit by a lion, at medium.com/@baseballobscura. He is an active contributor to the SABR Pictorial History Research Committee and has located images of over 80 previously missing players and counting for the Player Image Index. He is currently working on a book about the Union Association. Growing up in Calgary, he attended numerous Calgary Cannons games and became a Baltimore Orioles fan thanks to their cool logo and Cal Ripken Jr. He still laments the loss of the Montreal Expos.

Notes

1 J. J. Alcock, “Tinker Lauds ‘Tribune’ Plan; Amateurs to Help ‘Pro’ Game: Says Prairie Scores and Trip with Majors Will Boost Sport,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 27, 1915.

2 Harvey T. Woodruff, “Want All Nines to Take Park,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 2, 1915.

3 Woodruff, “Want All Nines to Take Park.”

4 Woodruff, “Here’s Chance to Become Sox, Cub, or Whale: Three Amateurs to be Re-warded for Their Skill and Deportment,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1915.

5 Woodruff, “Here’s Chance to Become Sox, Cub, or Whale.”

6 Woodruff, “Here’s Chance to Become Sox, Cub, or Whale.”

7 https://www.baseball-reference.com/

8 Robert Peyton Wiggins, The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs: The History of an Outlaw Major League (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 163-164.

9 Emil H. Rothe, “Was the Federal League a Major League?” SABR Research Journal, 1981. Accessed February 5, 2017. http://research.sabr.org/journals/federal-league-a-major-league.

10 Woodruff, “Here’s Chance to Become Sox, Cub, or Whale.”

11 Woodruff, “Coupon Out for Ball Aspirants: Entries Will Enable ‘Tribune’ Scouts to Cover the Ground Better,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 6, 1915.

12 Otto A. Engel, “Tribune Scouts Make Report on Future Greats: Visit Local Ball Parks and See Candidates for Sox-Cubs-Whales Trips Play,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 8, 1915.

13 Engel, “Tribune Scouts Make Report on Future Greats.”

14 Engel, “Ryan Locates Amateur ‘Find’ in First Try: Jimmy, Scout for ‘Tribune,’ Discovers Young Star in Ted Coutre,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 22, 1915.

15 Clarence E. Eldridge, “Five Amateurs Survive Tests For Ball Trips: ‘Tribune’ Board Holds Trials at American Giants’ Park; McNicholls Helps,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 18, 1915.

16 Engel, “Six More Boys Picked for Amateur Finals,”Chicago Daily Tribune, July 19, 1915.

17 Engel, “Boys to Play for Charity in Trip Tests: ‘Tribune’ Tryouts at Sox Park Will Help Eastland Fund,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 27, 1915.

18 Engel, “Native Sons Win Trips Amateur Stars,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 3, 1915.

19 Eldridge, “Scouts Select 14 More Stars For Last Game: Excellent Material Found in Tryouts at Cub and Feds Parks,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 26, 1915.

20 Engel, “City League Asks ‘Tribune’ For Recruits: Semi-Pro Clubs Will Take Twelve Boys Who Fail to Land Trips,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 29, 1915.

21 Engel, “‘Tribune’ Test at De Paul Field This Afternoon,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 31, 1915.

22 Woodruff, “Intercity Scouts to Watch ‘Tribune’ Amateur, Contest,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 30, 1915.

23 Eldridge, “Rasmussen, M’Kittrick and Pechous Win Trips,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 2, 1915.

24 Alcock, “Amateur Given Bit O’Real Life with Federals,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 5, 1915.

25 “Joe Tinker Says Rasmussen has Sweet Delivery,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 6, 1915.

26 “Joe Tinker Says Rasmussen has Sweet Delivery.”

27 “Joe Tinker Says Rasmussen has Sweet Delivery.”

28 “‘Tribune’ Amateur Sees Nothing New on Gay White Way,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 11, 1915.

29 Alcock, “Tinker Departs to Bait Whales from O.B. Ranks,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 16, 1915.

30 Alcock, “Rasmussen Gets First Trial; Whales Beaten by Newfeds, 8-0,”Chicago Daily Tribune, August 12, 1915.

31 Alcock, ““Rasmussen Gets First Trial.”

32 Eldridge, “Five Winners Chosen in ‘Tribune’ Tourney,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 31, 1916.

33 Tryout lists, Chicago Daily Tribune,June 4 and July 4, 1916.

34 Woodruff, “‘Trib’ Tourney Gives Way to War’s Demand,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 15, 1917.

35 “Milwaukee’s Best Amateur Ball Tossers,” Milwaukee Journal, September 2, 1919.

36 Duncan White, “Million Dollar Arm: The True Story,” The Telegraph (UK), August 29, 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11063420/Million-Dollar-Arm-the-true-story.html.

Because a baseball game “ain’t over ’til it’s over” and because there “ain’t no ‘I’ in TEAM,” a player should always strive to maximize his progress toward scoring a run—irrefutably the most important statistic in baseball. Regardless of the score or game situation, a player whose goal is to help his team win should, when confronted by the “fork in the road” described above, always “take it” and not settle for a single.

There are personal consequences for a player making that choice. He passes up being recognized for eternity in baseball’s record books as one of the rare hitters of a cycle, whereas if he takes the double (or triple), he gets a fleeting “atta-boy”—even though a double (or a triple) is always more valuable than a single.

Shouldn’t there be some kind of enduring recognition for a player who connects for four long hits—with at least one homer, at least one triple, and at least one double—in a game? In a prior Baseball Research Journal article, I termed such a performance a “quasi-cycle.”1 In the present article I focus on those players who encountered the “fork in the road.” Some chose the extra base hit while others stopped at first with an offensive-indifference single to complete the traditional cycle. This article considers cycles and quasi-cycles achieved during the post-Deadball Era, 1920 through 2017.

Research Procedure

According to Retrosheet, 255 cycles were hit 1920–2017.2 I have identified 73 quasi-cycles hit during the same period.3 The principal research procedure I followed began with generating two lists of players: (1) those players who completed their cycles with a single; and (2) those players who needed a single to complete their cycle—but instead stretched their fourth hit to a double or a triple. To compile these two lists, I examined the sequences of hits in the cycles and quasi-cycles. Most of this information can be found in the play-by-play (PBP) descriptions on Retrosheet. For the games for which the PBP information was not on Retrosheet, the requisite hit sequences were obtained from the game accounts presented in various newspaper articles. (Tables A-1 and A-2 in the Appendix, available on the SABR website, contain this hit-sequence information.) The final step was to examine the descriptions given in the pertinent newspaper accounts of the critical single, to ascertain the nature of the hit and how the hitter reacted to it. For example, was it a robust outfield gapper that could have been a double (or a triple) or was it a scratch infield hit—or something in between?

Results

According to my research, 51 players completed their cycles with a single, 1920–2017. See Table 1 for the list of them (and see Table A-3 in the online appendix for complete details for each of these 51 cycles). By contrast, 16 players achieved a quasi-cycle by hitting a double or a triple instead. See Table 2.

Table 2. 16 Batters Who Took a Quasi-Cycle Instead of a Cycle (1920–2016)

Discussion

As indicated in Note 2 in Table 1, the names of some of the players are shown in boldface. That’s because there are important and/or interesting aspects associated with their cycles which merit discussion. Let’s begin with cyclist Jeff Frye.

Jeff Frye – As shown in Table 1, fourteen of the cycle-singles were RBI singles. Only one of those cycle-singles knocked in a runner from first base—the one hit by Toronto’s Jeff Frye on August 17, 2001. Frye was the second Blue Jay to achieve the feat. (The first, Kelly Gruber, will become important to our discussion shortly.) Frye came to bat in the bottom of the seventh inning with the Blue Jays leading the Rangers, 10–2. He’d already collected a second-inning triple (“when Texas Rangers right fielder Ricky Ledee misplayed his blooper, letting it bounce over his head”), a fifth-inning double (“when Ledee flailed helplessly at his hit”), and a sixth-inning roundtripper.4 With Homer Bush on first base with two outs in the seventh, Frye battled Texas hurler Kevin Foster to the limit before lining a full-count pitch into the gap in right-center field. It looked like a sure double and Bush easily sped all the way around the bases to home. But Frye, heeding the directions of first base coach Garth Iorg, stopped with a “single” to complete his cycle. Here are some of the comments made in the press about Frye’s “fork-in-the-road” cycle:

• “With the Toronto Blue Jays’ 11th run en route to the plate in last night’s 11–3 throttling of the Texas Rangers, Frye could have, perhaps should have, gone to second with what would have been an easy double into the gap in right-centre field. Instead the 34-year old journeyman infielder held up at first and became only the second Blue Jay to hit for the cycle.”5
• “I was looking at Garth and yelling, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’—and he goes ‘Stop! Stop!,’” Frye said. “And before I went up, I asked [coach] Cito Gaston what do I do if I hit a ball like that, and he said, ‘Stay on first. Tell them I told you to.’ So, if he says it’s all right, then it’s all right.”6
• “When he hit first base he asked me what he should do,” Iorg said. “I told him, ‘Stay right here.’”7
• “As far as Iorg and Jays manager Buck Martinez are concerned, there was nothing tainted about Frye’s feat with the bat. ‘It’s a cycle, that’s got nothing to do with it,’ Iorg said. ‘It (stopping) didn’t alter the game in any way.’ Added Martinez, ‘As one-sided as it was, it wasn’t a bad idea. It was a big boost to everybody. I don’t have any problems with it and I don’t think anybody in the park did.’”8
• “After he had his double I said, ‘All you need now is a homer and a single,’ and we both kind of laughed,” Martinez said. “Then he got the home run and we were all pulling for him when he came up that fourth time.”9
• Frye also said, “Bobby Jones [the Rangers third base coach] told me after I’d homered that if the score wasn’t close, and I had a chance, I should settle for a single. So, I figured with two coaches telling me that, it must be okay.”10
• Jays closer Billy Koch had joked with Frye before he hit his [sixth-inning] homer. “He said hit a home run next time and [then] bunt for a hit,” said Frye. “But I said, ‘You can’t bunt when you’re up by five runs.’” Toronto Star reporter Geoff Baker wrote, “That kind of adherence to baseball’s ‘unwritten rules’ went out the window by the seventh inning.”11
• “I was hoping he’d cut it off,” Frye said of the despair he felt watching the ball scoot past Ledee and to the wall. Frye then added, “lt’s something I’ll never forget.”12
• Blue Jays manager, Buck Martinez, said, “He’s such a professional; he didn’t know if it was appropriate to stop at that point, but the game was pretty one-sided. It’s a pretty unique opportunity to play nine years and have a chance for a cycle.”13
• Texas first baseman Rafael Palmeiro said, “The game was pretty much at hand for them, and everybody wanted it, so I don’t see a problem with it. He hit the ball into the gap, but I’m happy for him. It’s a little bit controversial, but he did it, and nobody can take it away from him.” Palmeiro added that he “would probably do the same thing in a similar situation.”14 (In his Hall-of-Fame-numbers career, Palmeiro did not hit for a cycle nor a quasi-cycle.)
• “If purists are troubled by Frye’s shrinking of a double into a single for the sake of a small piece of fame, he has company. When Gruber performed his feat against the Kansas City Royals at Exhibition Place, he also remained at first instead of legging out a double. ‘The game’s out of hand. What’s the point?’ Gruber said of Frye’s achievement. ‘Opportunities like that don’t come around too often. What the heck.’”15

Kelly Gruber – Here’s the story on Gruber’s feat, as reported in The Sporting News:

• “Gruber started his cycle with a solo homer off Floyd Bannister in the first inning and followed that with a two-run double in the second. Against righthander Tom Gordon in the seventh, he hit a two-run triple. His sixth RBI came on his last hit, a bloop single off Jerry Don Gleaton in the eighth.”
• “In addition to the congratulatory handshakes he received from teammates upon completing the cycle, Gruber learned he faced a possible fine from the Jays’ kangaroo court. His last hit might have gone for a double under other circumstances, but Gruber stayed at first to get the single he needed [to complete the cycle]. ‘If it’s a tie game, sure I’ve got to try for it (a double),’ said Gruber. But with the Jays up by six runs at that point, he could afford to stay at first. However, reliever Tom Henke joked that Gruber’s actions could merit a fine. ‘It’s automatic,’ Henke said. ‘Stretching a double into a single was the way chief justice Mike Flanagan saw it.’”16

Here’s what Gruber had to say after his cycle-game, as reported in the Kansas City Times:

• “I put a lot of pressure on myself because I wanted that single,” Gruber said. In his game-account article, Dick Kaegel wrote, “Although Gruber might have had a chance of stretching the hit into a double, he reined in at first.” And Gruber added, “Any other time I might have tried for a double, but right then it didn’t mean much.”17
• Gruber looked back at his cycle in an article in the Toronto Sun and commented: “I have had a lot of fans tell me I should have been on second that day I hit mine,” Gruber said. “It was a hot day, the turf was spongy, really bouncy and I hit the ball up. I was so busy talking to it, telling it to get down for my single, that I just got to first when the ball hit (the turf),” Gruber said. “The outfielder jumped up and caught it on the bounce. Otherwise it’s over his head and I have to go to second. I could have gone and probably would have made it, but I didn’t. Everybody says you should have gone, but it’s such a great opportunity.”18
• With respect to Frye’s cycle, Gruber (who was at the game) was shouting out advice from just beside the Jays dugout. “I was screaming at him, ‘Stop! Don’t Go!’ And so was Garth. I wanted him to get it.”19

For 49 of the 51 players listed in Table 1, their “cycle-clinching singles” were ordinary run-of-the-mill one- base knocks—see Table A-3 in the Appendix for all the details. Here is some “rest-of-the-story” information about some of the other Table 1 cycle-achieving players.

Mike Greenwell – In contrast to Gruber and Frye, here’s what Mike Greenwell of the Boston Red Sox said about his own cycle (September 14, 1988): “Somebody asked me jokingly if I hit one in the gap would I stop at first and take the single. I said no way; I’d be running to second and third or wherever I could get.” Fortunately for Greenwell, he dumped a clean-cut single into right field. “I didn’t have to make that decision.”20 When Greenwell hit his cycle-single in the bottom of the eighth inning, the Sox were leading the Orioles by a single run, 4–3 (which turned out to be the final score).

Aubrey Huff – Aubrey Huff almost precluded himself from achieving the cycle. Moments before he smacked a bloop single into shallow center, he smashed a pitch inches foul down the third base line. If it had been fair, Huff could have easily reached second. Like Greenwell, he said he wouldn’t have stopped at first—even to complete the cycle. “In that situation, I’m going for two [bases],” Huff said. “I feel like you cheat the game if you stop at first. I wouldn’t even count that as a cycle.”21

Joe Torre – Joe Torre collected a cycle with the St. Louis Cardinals on June 27, 1973, in Pittsburgh. Torre had picked up the three extra-base hits needed in the first four innings, and he’d have at least two chances to get the simple single. But he grounded into an around-the-horn double play in the fifth and then grudgingly walked to lead off the eighth. At that point in the game, with the Cards leading the Pirates, 11–4, the likelihood of Torre getting another shot was slim. In the top of the ninth he’d only come up if two men reached base ahead of him. As described by St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Neal Russo, “Torre asked manager Red Schoendienst to give him the rest of the night off. Schoendienst refused. The first two men made out in the ninth, and Torre’s hopes looked dismally bleak. But then the next two Cardinals drew walks, which brought him to the plate … ” and “he jumped on the opportunity with a chopper single past the mound.” After the game, Torre said, “You have to give Red an assist; I’m glad he ignored me. I didn’t think I’d ever hit for the cycle because I’m not a triples hitter. I was pressing like crazy for the single.” Russo then asked, “Would you have stopped at first on a cinch double if you had hit one in the ninth?” Torre’s response: “I might have. I’ve never come this close to hitting for the cycle.”22 Some other Torre comments were reported by Charley Feeney in the game-account article he wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “It’s the first time I’ve ever hit for the cycle. I’m not exactly a triple man, you know. It would have been a kick, though, if a lousy single had kept me from getting it.”23 And, in the article by Jeff Samuels for the Pittsburgh Press, Torre was quoted: “If I would have hit that last ball off the wall, I would have stopped at first base.” Torre, who clapped his hands all the way to the bag after getting his single, added, “It was a 3–1 pitch, and I sure wasn’t going to take another walk.”24

Mike Hegan – Mike Hegan was also asked the “fork-in-the-road” question after he hit his cycle. The game was against the Detroit Tigers in the Motor City. Hegan smacked a two-run double in the first, a solo homer in the third, and a bases-loaded triple in the fourth. Mike Gonring of the Milwaukee Journal wrote: “Then in the sixth, fully aware that he needed a single to complete it, he hit a line drive to left that fell in. It looked for a moment as if he might go to second. ‘Not with my wheels,’ Hegan said later. And he stopped, the cycle completed.”25 Gonring continued: “What would he have done, somebody wondered, if he had hit what could have been an extra base hit? ‘I don’t know,’ Hegan said, laughing. ‘I guess I could have tripped or fallen down. I knew the fourth time up I had a chance to do it. I just wanted to make contact, to keep the ball in play. It wasn’t time for me to hit the ball out of the ballpark, with one out and nobody on.’” Hegan had two more plate appearances in the game—two chances to connect for another extra base hit and add a quasi-cycle to his collection. But one resulted in a walk, and in the other “he hit a fly ball to center, not too deep, not too shallow. The bases were loaded and the runners sprinted toward the plate, but the ball floated into the glove of center fielder Ron LeFlore [to end the inning].” And, here’s neat a tidbit included in the game story written by Lou Chapman of the Milwaukee Sentinel: “Hegan, who was obviously thrilled, said, ‘It was more so after I asked Henry Aaron [who did not play in the game] if he had ever done it. And he said no. So that gives me something on him.’”26

Moving on now to those 16 players who bypassed the cycle, as shown in Table 2, three of them made it all the way to third with a triple, while the other 13 doubled. Here’s some additional information on those whose “fork-in-the-road” decision was the quasi-cycle.

George Sisler – In Detroit, on August 13, 1921, in the seventh inning with nobody on and two outs, Sisler smacked his second double—a drive to right field—to complete his quasi-cycle. With the score tied (2–2), it was important to get in scoring position, even though the next batter, Ken Williams, flied out to end the inning. There was still time left for Sisler to try for the cycle. In the ninth inning, with the Browns now leading by a 3–2 score, Sisler stepped into the batter’s box with Johnny Tobin on second base with two outs. He slapped a single to right field to bring home the runner. So, Gorgeous George accomplished both a quasi-cycle and a traditional cycle in the same game.

Sammy West – With the Browns trailing the White Sox, 9–7, in the bottom of the ninth on August 5, 1933, there were two outs and the bases were empty. West was the last hope for St. Louis. And West came through in the do-or-die challenge and belted the ball to center. Rather than stopping at first with a cycle for himself, he hustled all the way to third. He scored when the next batter was safe on an error. Two more singles produced the game-tying run. The Browns went on to win the game in the twelfth inning. And while there was no mention in the various St. Louis and Chicago newspapers about West having bypassed a chance at the cycle, it was noted in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that he did tie the modern major league mark for most long hits in a game (4). West had one more chance to complete the cycle—in the eleventh inning, with a runner on first (Lin Storti) and nobody out. West laid down a sacrifice bunt instead of swinging away.

Grady Hatton – While he decided to bypass the cycle when he doubled in the sixth inning (after having homered in the first, doubled in the third, and tripled in the fourth), he had no decision to make when he reached first base safely in the eighth inning with Bucky Walters on third base and Frankie Baumholtz on second base (after each had singled and Benny Zientara had laid down a sacrifice bunt). Hatton was given an intentional base on balls. That walk was not “as good as a hit.”

Hal Breeden – Primarily a part-time player (mostly first base) with the Cubs and Expos 1971–75, Breeden had only one four-hit game in his career—his quasi-cycle game, on September 2, 1973. In that game he walloped a three-run homer in the first, struck out in the second, collected (as described in the Philadelphia Inquirer) “a looping hit which Phillies center fielder Del Unser misplayed into a triple” in the fourth, and smacked an RBI double in the sixth, thereby setting the stage for a nifty reverse-order-cycle. Then, as reported in The Sporting News, “Hal Breeden was about to leave the dugout for warmup swings prior to his fifth time at bat against the Phillies. The score was Expos 10, Phillies 0 in the top of the eighth. Breeden’s first base platoon-mate, Mike Jorgensen, called him back and whispered, ‘Listen Bo. Just hit the ball good and stop at first base. That’ll give you the cycle.’ And sure enough, he laced into a Barry Lersch serving for a tremendous drive which appeared to be headed out of the stadium. The ball hit against the fence, but Breeden didn’t stop at first. In fact, the Georgia strong boy didn’t stop until he was at third base. ‘I thought about stopping,’ Breeden said, ‘as I got to first. Then I figured I’d have to explain it to Gene (i.e., Montreal Manager Mauch). It was better to keep on running.’”27

Bob Horner – The 1978 National League Rookie of the Year, Horner spent nine years with the Braves and one with the Cardinals. He had three four-hit games that were each one hit short of the cycle (including his quasi-cycle). In the other two games, the triple and the home run were the missing hits once each. With regard to his July 13, 1985, quasi-cycle game, Chris Mortensen (a staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution) mentioned to Horner that if he had stopped at first base on his eighth-inning double, he would have been the first Brave since 1910 to hit for the cycle. “I couldn’t have done that,” Horner said, shaking his head. “The ball rolled to the fence.”28

Kevin Bass – “Bass lights up Candlestick for Astros!” That was the Sports section headline in the Houston Post on June 28, 1987. The sub-headline was, “Houston right fielder gets 4 extra-base hits in 6–5 win over Giants.” The game story by Ivy McLemore provided the following description:

Bass began his record-setting performance with with a two-run double in the first inning against Kelly Downs. In the third, Bass grounded a triple down the right field line. The Astros pulled away with three runs in the fifth on singles by Bill Doran and [Denny] Walling, a passed ball charged to catcher Bob Brenly and Bass’s two-run homer into the right-field seats. “I really started thinking about the cycle after the triple in the third,” Bass said. “And once I hit the home run, all I needed to do was dink one in for a single.” The game’s biggest mystery was solved in the seventh, when Bass went to the plate against left-hander Mark Davis, needing only a single for the cycle. For a moment it appeared as if the right pieces—and hits—would continue to fall into place for Bass. He lifted a weak fly to shallow left field, where Jeff Leonard lost a battle with the sun and had the ball drop in front of him. Bass trotted into second with his second double to cap off a four-hit performance. “You can’t stop in a situation like that” Bass said. “You have to go. It’s a neat thing to say you’ve hit for the cycle in the major leagues, but that’s a goal a lot of players never reach.”29

In the game account presented in the Houston Chronicle, Bass was quoted: “After I hit the triple (in the third inning) I was thinking about the cycle. I guess the best way to do it is get the triple and homer out of the way early. That’s the hard part. If you get them, then you might dink one in somewhere. I did, but I dinked it too good, I guess. The cycle is something that’s a neat thing for the fans and for an individual.”30

Darryl Strawberry – The 1983 NL Rookie of the Year, Strawberry played in the majors for 17 years, mostly with the New York Mets, but also with the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees. He fashioned two four-hit games and one five-hit game, each lacking just one hit for the cycle, including his quasi-cycle game. In both of the other games the triple was the missing hit. In his quasi-cycle game, August 16, 1987, Strawberry hit a double in the third inning, a home run in the fourth, and a triple in the sixth. Then, as described in The Sporting News, “With the Mets leading 20-9 in the eighth, Strawberry came to bat needing a single to complete the cycle. He hit a liner into the left field corner and [first base coach Bill] Robinson discreetly signaled for him to stop at first, but Strawberry charged on to second. ‘That was a double all the way,’ he said. ‘You can’t think about what you’ve done when you get a hit like that.’”31 Jack O’Connell has a similar account in the New York Daily News: “Strawberry hit a line drive past left fielder Brian Dayett and never hesitated rounding first, ignoring the cycle and getting another double. ‘Bill [Robinson] gave me the stop sign at first,’ Strawberry said, ‘but I was running all the way.’”32 Bob Klapisch wrote in the New York Post: “Darryl Strawberry almost hit for the cycle. All Strawberry needed was a single in his last at-bat, but he passed up the chance to stop at first when he doubled to left. ‘No, that’s not the way to play baseball,’ Strawberry said. ‘Bill [Robinson] wanted me to stop at first, but there was no way I was going to do that. That ball [hit to deep left] was a double. I didn’t even stop to think about it.’”33 So, there’s a chasmic contrast between Strawberry’s quasi-cycle and Jeff Frye’s cycle, Frye obediently followed the first base coach’s directions and stopped at the initial sack with a single to complete the cycle, while Strawberry defiantly ran through the first base coach’s stop sign. Another interesting aspect of Strawberry’s quasi-cycle is that he did, in fact, have a safe one-base plate appearance—he walked in the first inning! Another example of a walk not being “as good as a hit.”

Scott Cooper – In his seven-year career in the majors (1990–95, 1997), mostly with the Boston Red Sox, the stars aligned only once, on April 12, 1994, permitting Cooper the opportunity to achieve both the quasi-cycle and the cycle in the same game. When he came to bat in the seventh inning, he only needed a single to complete his cycle. His first crack had come in the sixth inning. With the bases loaded and two outs, he was safe on a fielding error by Kansas City Royals shortstop Dave Howard. Then came his seventh-inning “fork-in-the-road.” With the Red Sox leading, 19–2, two on and one out, Cooper belted the ball to deep right field, driving home both Scott Fletcher and Tim Naehring and taking second on a clean double, thereby passing up the cycle—but getting a quasi-cycle! However, he got another chance in the ninth. Leading off, he connected for a clean simple single to complete the cycle. Here’s what was reported in the Kansas City Star by Dick Kaegel: “Things got so bad [for Kansas City] that the Royals had shortstop Dave Howard pitch the final two innings, and it was against Howard that Cooper singled in the ninth, completing the cycle.” Cooper reportedly said, “Everybody on the bench was telling me, ‘You need a single. Lay one down.’” But with the Red Sox up, 22–8, he wasn’t about to bunt. “Howard threw me two nasty changes, but on 0–2 he came back with a fastball and I was able to hit it,” Cooper said.34 Cooper’s fifth-inning triple was also special. He was credited with a triple after he was put out at the plate trying for an inside-the-park home run. Had he been safe at home, he would have missed out on both the quasi-cycle and the traditional cycle.

Dustin Pedroia – The recipient of the 2007 AL Rookie of the Year Award and the 2008 AL Most Valuable Player Award, Pedroia has spent his entire career with the Boston Red Sox. With respect to his quasi-cycle, which he achieved on July 2, 2008, Pedroia commented (as reported by Gordon Edes and Amalie Benjamin for the Boston Globe): “I was trying to go up there and hit the ball hard the last two times I got up. When I got back after I hit the double, guys were joking, ‘You should have fallen down or something.’ But I just play the game.”35

Sam Fuld – An eight-year player in the majors (2007, 2009–15) with four teams (Cubs, Rays, Athletics, and Twins), Fuld achieved his quasi-cycle on April 11, 2011. Here’s what Michael Vega included in his game story for the Boston Globe: “Fuld stroked a pitch into left field but stretched it into a double. Asked if he considered stopping at first, Fuld replied, ‘Thought about it a little bit, but only jokingly. If lead runner Brignac had tripped and fell he would have been the goat or whatever. You can’t do that. That was a sheer double. I’ll take those any day.’”36

Concluding Remarks

In addition to the 16 players who responded with a repeat double or a duplicate triple when confronted with the “fork-in-the-road” choice of a cycle or quasi-cycle, six players earned the quasi-cycle by hitting a second home run—Lou Gehrig (July 29, 1930), Johnny Mize (July 3, 1939), Daryl Spencer (May 13, 1958), Hank Aaron (May 3, 1962), Larry Walker (May 21, 1996), and Carl Everett (August 29, 2000). Each of these second homers was an “in-the-seats” roundtripper. These batters had no choice but to run all the way around the bases. Of these six, only Gehrig and Mize were successful in hitting for the traditional cycle at some other time in their careers.

Sixty-five players have needed a single to claim the cherished cycle: the 51 listed in Table 1 plus 14 of the 16 players listed in Table 2 (excluding Sisler and Cooper who are included in Table 1). As shown in Table A-3 in the Appendix, 47 of the 65 players connected for an “ordinary one-base hit” which essentially obviated making a choice. Thus, these 47 players had to “settle” for a traditional cycle. The other 18 players belted gappers that afforded them the opportunity to choose either a long hit (double or triple) for a quasi-cycle or a “super-single” for the cycle. For 16 of these players—Cobb, Sisler, Whitney, West, Berger, Hatton, Kaline, Breeden, Stargell, Grubb, Horner, Bass, Strawberry, Cooper, Pedroia, and Fuld—the better choice was the extra-base hit and the resulting quasi-cycle. Indeed, for West, his quasi-cycle choice contributed significantly to a come-from-behind victory.

Only three of these 16 players also achieved a classic cycle at another time—Sisler (twice, including his quasi-cycle game), Stargell, and Cooper (in his quasi-cycle game). For the other two players—Gruber and Frye, choosing the cycle over the quasi-cycle was the “better” choice, because each earned everlasting fame.

As Rafael Palmeiro said about Frye’s cycle, “It’s a little bit controversial, but he did it, and nobody can take it away from him.” There is no asterisk attached to it in the lists given in the various record books or websites. Curiously, in the entire history of the Toronto Blue Jays franchise, only two players have connected for a traditional cycle—Gruber and Frye, while no Toronto player has hit for a quasi-cycle.37

HERM KRABBENHOFT, a SABR member since 1981, is a frequent contributor to the “Baseball Research Journal.” From 1986 through 1996 he published “Baseball Quarterly Reviews,” which presented his research on “Baseball’s Best Run Getters,” “Ty Cobb vs. Babe Ruth (Premier Hitter vs. Premier Pitcher),” “Ultimate Grand Slams,” “Ultimate Winning Pitchers,” “The Role of Fielding Errors in the World Series,” and many more.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are gratefully extended to Keith Carlson, Dixie Tourangeau, Dave Smith, Doug Todgham, Cliff Blau, Gary Stone, Albert Hallenberg, Misty Mayberry, Gordon Turner, Jay Buck, Jerry Nechal, Amy Welch, and Dave Newman for providing scans of newspaper game accounts for the hit sequences and/or other important information for some of the players who hit cycles and/or quasi-cycles. And, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the Retrosheet volunteers who contributed to the phenomenal Retrosheet database of play-by-play information which was vital in generating the information presented in Tables 1 and 2 (as well as Tables A-1 through A-3 in the Appendix).

Notes

1. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Quasi-Cycles—Better Than Cycles?,” Baseball Research Journal (46:2, Fall 2017) 107.

2. Retrosheet, “Games/People/Parks”>”Achievements”>”No-Hitters & Cycles.” Accessed November 17, 2017.

3. As reported in Reference 1, there were 73 quasi-cycles during the 1920–2016 period. According to the information available from the “Play Index” on the Baseball-Reference website (accessed November 17, 2017), there were no quasi-cycles achieved in 2017.

4. Geoff Baker, “Frye Cycles to Jays Record,” Toronto Star, August 18, 2001, C1.

5. Scott Burnside, “Frye Cooks Up a Night of Memories,” National Post (Canada), August 18, 2001.

6. “Frye Pulls Up For Single, Gets Cycle,” Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2001 (Web site accessed April 30, 2017).

7. Mike Rutsey, “Very Good Frye-Day!,” Toronto Sun, August 18, 2001, 56.

8. Mike Rutsey, “Very Good Frye-Day!,” Toronto Sun, August 18, 2001, 56.

9. Mike Rutsey, “Very Good Frye-Day!,” Toronto Sun, August 18, 2001, 56.

10. Jeff Blair, “Frye Recycles Memories,” Toronto Globe and Mail, August 18, 2001.

11. Geoff Baker, “Frye Cycles to Jays Record,” Toronto Star, August 18, 2001, C1.

12. Geoff Baker, “Frye Cycles to Jays Record,” Toronto Star, August 18, 2001, C1.

13. “Frye Pulls Up For Single, Gets Cycle,” Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2011 (Web site accessed April 30, 2017).

14. “Jeff Frye Hits for Cycle,” Associated Press, seattlepi.com/sports, August 17, 2001 (accessed April 30, 2017).

15. Scott Burnside, “Frye Cooks Up a Night of Memories,” National Post (Canada), August 18, 2001.

16. “Gruber Rides Out Injury, Gets Jays’ First Cycle,” The Sporting News, May 1, 1989, 22.

17. Dick Kaegel, “Blue Jays ‘Reduplicate’ Royals Script,” Kansas City Times, April 17, 1989, C1.

18. Mike Rutsey, “Very Good Frye-Day!,” Toronto Sun, August 18, 2001, 56.

19. Mike Gantner, “Gruber Thinks Back,” Toronto Sun, August 18, 2001.

20. Bob Ryan, “Greenwell Savors Cycle,” Boston Globe, September 15, 1988, 94.

21. Geremy Bass, “Huff Third Player to Hit for Cycle in 2007,” MLB.com, June 30, 2007 (accessed April 30, 2017).

22. Neal Russo, “Torre’s Cycle Powers Cards,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1973.

23. Charley Feeney, “Cardinals Stagger Pirates,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 28, 1973, 13.

24. Jeff Samuels, “Cards Wallop Pirates, 15–4,” Pittsburgh Press, June 28, 1973, 40.

25. Mike Gonring, “Hegan Hot, So ‘Bird’ Not,” Milwaukee Journal, September 4, 1976, 10.

26. Lou Chapman, “‘Bird’ Lays Egg; Hegan Scrambles It!,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 4, 1976.

27. Ian MacDonald, “Breeden, With Pounds Gone, Adds Heft to Expos’ Attack,” The Sporting News, September 22, 1973, 11.

28. Chris Mortensen, “Braves Overwhelm Phillies, 13–5,” Atlanta Constitution, July 14, 1985. Bill Collins was the Braves player who accomplished the cycle in 1910. Two years after Horner bypassed the cycle by achieving his quasi-cycle, Albert Hall did hit for a traditional cycle for the Braves, becoming the first Atlanta player to achieve the feat.

29. Ivy McLemore, “Bass Lights Up Candlestick for Astros,” Houston Post, June 28, 1987, C1.

30. Neil Hohlfeld, “Bass’ Extra-Base Binge Fuels Astros,” Houston Chronicle, June 28, 1987, Sports 1.

31. “Raines Joins the Cyclists,” The Sporting News, August 24, 1987, 26.

32. Jack O’Connell, “Strawberry Socks 29th HR, Drives Home 5 in 23–10 Runaway,” New York Daily News, August 16, 1987.

33. Bob Klapisch, “Mets Smother Cubbies,” New York Post, August 16, 1987.

34. Dick Kaegel, “U-G-L-Y,” Kansas City Star, April 13, 1994, D1.

35. Gordon Edes, “Sox Get Swept Away,” Boston Globe, July 3, 2008, C1.

36. Michael Vega, “It was a Full Day for Fuld,” Boston Globe, April 12, 2011, C2.

37. Herm Krabbenhoft, “Quasi-Cycles—Better Than Cycles?,” Baseball Research Journal (46:2, Fall 2017) 107.