Nerds, we members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) call ourselves proudly, flying our freak flag high. The world has countless baseball fans—more than 110 million tickets are sold to major- and minor- league games in this country alone—but SABR membership is steady, year after year counting up to this 50th anniversary, at around six thousand.

Who are we few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters? Just ordinary folks in the pursuit of our daily bread, yet different in our approach to what has long been at the core of the American experience: baseball. We are a sort of Nonconformists Club: mild-mannered sorts by day, superheroes by night on our computers or, on our off days, at archives.

To deflect suspicion that he is Superman, Clark Kent adopts a largely passive and introverted personality with odd mannerisms, a higher-pitched voice, and a slight slouch. SABR members wear this disguise, too, sometimes from the inside out. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound—that’s us. To best be in position to use our amazing powers in a never-ending quest for fresh baseball data and insight, SABR members tend to adopt a bland wardrobe, unfashionable eyeglasses, often a briefcase and, at gatherings, nametags that camouflage our coolness.

What are these amazing powers cited above? Caring deeply about getting it right and about completing the journey, however improbable the prospect of home may have seemed at the outset. We endure the predictable slings and arrows on the whole cheerfully, not only because we know who we are, but also because we live in the age of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and other nerds for whom data, when shared, become life’s most rewarding currency.

Ernie Harwell once said: “SABR is the Phi Beta Kappa of baseball.” This is especially true in the Age of the Nerd, in which knowledge is, at long last, cool. For many years SABR’s board members bristled when its members were painted with a broad brush and called sabermetricians. They protested that Society members were also interested in history, and culture, and ballparks, and the Negro Leagues, and the international game.

Incubated in the pages of the Baseball Research Journal, sabermetrics soon flew the coop and soared over the entire baseball landscape. Bill James coined the term to honor the Society not so much for its statistical analysis but for its conviction that significant aspects of the game are invisible to the naked eye, and that received wisdom about the game warranted distrust. All these years later, I think it is a good thing that we no longer protest quite so much about being known as analytics pioneers.

*****

First convened in Cooperstown in August 1971 by L. Robert Davids and fifteen other avid researchers and history buffs, SABR grew slowly but steadily before settling in a bit north of six thousand members in 1987 (I joined in 1981). “Baseball’s best-kept secret,” Ted Williams once declared. As some of its early members slipped away into the sunset, new nerds would have to be located. Fortunately, that has happened, and the analytics movement has been SABR’s fountain of youth. SABR has become a bridge between the game’s journalists and its front offices, on the one hand and, on the other, its fans, who consume and argue over SABR research without even knowing the source.

The Society does good works—lobbying for historical markers, providing headstones to baseball luminaries who were buried without them, holding conferences at which speeches and swag are delivered. Through research committees and regional chapters, SABR members share their finds and their expertise, providing a rich experience that links the generations of advanced fans.

SABR is not a secret society with initiation rites—anyone may join and do nothing at all beyond paying annual dues; writers need readers, after all. And boy, do we write! SABR publishes, in print and online, the Baseball Research Journal (fifteen hundred articles since 1972), The National Pastime (one thousand since 1982), and online stories. Add in SABR’s digital library, notably the Baseball Biography Project (more than five thousand profiles since 2002) and the Games Project (two thousand game accounts since 2014). And chalk up another four thousand articles in research committee newsletters, plus six hundred in one-off publications, and the number of articles totals more than fifteen thousand, all written by SABR volunteers.

From these, SABR has, though an arduous process in which I was involved, somehow selected its fifty best to mark its 50th birthday, spanning the half century of its existence while restricting even our most notable authors to a single representative story. The selection committee sought to create a chronological portrait of the Society while balancing the genres represented by its thirty-one research committees: for example, biographical, nineteenth century, deadball, ballparks, records, women in baseball, and, yes, statistical analysis.

In the early days of SABR, many of its most skilled researchers concerned themselves not only with the relative merits of men who played in different eras but with determining who the players were. Hundreds of players were absolute ciphers, about whom nothing but a last name was known—a box score entry, that was all. Lee Allen and Bill Haber hunted for headstones; Vern Luse and Bill Carle scoured the squibs in Sporting Life. Today the number of major leaguers about whom absolutely nothing is known has been reduced to a relative handful. For this fortunate state of affairs we thank SABR’s Biographical Research Committee. This sort of digging seldom yields a full-fledged article but is vital to those who may write another sort of story even a decade later. The recently deceased Richard Malatzky offers a case in point.

I knew Richard by his work, and we spoke excitedly about his progress with new finds when we met at SABR conventions. He was just the sort of guy I like, one who cares deeply, even obsessively, about getting things right. His delights may well have seemed strange to the world at large, but in shunning the noise of that larger world to visit an alternative one in the past, he and I and so many SABR members were brothers under the skin.

Others, especially those in the Biographical Research Committee, knew Richard far better and far longer. Not only did he dispel mysteries of very long standing that had stumped others for decades, he corrected some of the “compromise” errors made in earlier record books whereby, for example, two fairly inconsequential players with the same common last name (Smith, Jones, Miller, etc.) had their records mistakenly grouped under one individual.

Each of the fifty writers whose articles are offered herein will have a capsule biography beginning their piece, but those SABR stars like Malatzky who may have helped in the research will go unidentified; probably that is just the way they would have liked it.

Every SABR writer relies upon the efforts of a colleague or predecessor. Fred Lieb, whose career in baseball began as a writer for Baseball Magazine in 1909, is this book’s leadoff hitter, with a profile of Ernie Lanigan, another SABR icon whose career began with The Sporting News in 1898 (when Henry Chadwick was still writing baseball). The pair grew up and grew old in baseball, with Lanigan creating the game’s first encyclopedia in 1922. Counting the uncounted, in his case RBIs and Caught Stealing before they became official statistics, was Lanigan’s specialty . . . a very SABR thing to do. Lieb lived long enough to join SABR and write for the first number of the Baseball Research Journal.

The last entry in this volume is by David Firstman, whose first book will be published in the same season as this one. In between are luminaries past and present, all accounted as SABR heroes and all worthy of your attention. I won’t list them or their contributions here, as a tease—that’s what the table of contents is for—but you will recognize their names or their discoveries.

Finally, you may wonder why I have been asked to write the foreword to this book. In 2011, within days of my appointment by Commissioner Selig as Major League Baseball’s official historian, I spoke before the New York City regional chapter of SABR. I said then that, gratifying as this post might be to me, it was also a bouquet toss to SABR, without which I could not have come to understand and serve the game. Several of those in the audience had collaborated with me in Total Baseball and other sabermetric efforts, in historical research, and in SABR publications. Truly, I said then and reiterate now, if I occupy a high standing in baseball it is in good measure because I stand on your shoulders. Thank you, SABR.

JOHN THORN is the Official Historian for Major League Baseball.

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.”

“When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” — Lord Kelvin

“One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It might be that a reporter, seeing every game that the team plays, could sense that difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt it.” — Bill James, as quoted in “Moneyball”

Today, statistics have become a fundamental component of the fabric of baseball analysis and have gained appreciation at the major-league level.1 As Ron Von Burg and Paul E. Johnson note, “For many, statistics are the main way of understanding and relating to the game of baseball.”2 Broadcasters employ color commentators whose job entails unpacking the nuances of the game, including explicating various statistics and in-game strategies. Fans and media can go to websites like Baseball-Reference.com to see era-by-era comparisons of teams or players and new statistics like WAR (“wins above replacement”) and wRC+ (“weighted runs created plus”).

These newer statistics and data analyses fall under the label “sabermetrics,” defined by Bill James as “the mathematical and statistical study of baseball records” and later broadened to “search for objective knowledge about baseball.”3 Fundamentally, sabermetrics is a search for new ideas in an old game. Nathaniel Stoltz points out, “… as time has progressed and media have diversified, the sabermetric movement has made an increasingly sizeable impact on baseball discourse.”4 Being relatively new, sabermetrics is not steeped in baseball tradition, and this makes it a potential threat to more traditional ways of thinking about the game. Although Michael Lewis’s Moneyball put these advanced analytics into the public’s mind and teams have come to depend on these advanced analytics, sports journalists have been slower to appreciate or incorporate them, generally favoring traditional evaluation methods with which they are comfortable.5,6 Detractors see sabermetrics as a threat to baseball’s past because traditional statistics supposedly embody “intangibles” like heart, grit, and character in celebrating player achievement.7 With the growth of sabermetrics, the traditional terminology employed when using those statistics is undergoing some transformation and causing a bit of upheaval in the process. One of these terms under scrutiny is “valuable” as used in the award for the “most valuable” player.

In Major League Baseball, the “Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Baseball Award” is given by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) to the “most valuable” player (or “MVP”) in each league, as voted by two organization members from each city. The vote follows consideration by and discourse among member and non-member journalists, bloggers, and fans in and outside the press. In their memo to voters, the BBWAA notes that there is no formal definition of “most valuable” and the meaning is left to the discretion of the voter.8 Because the definition of “value” is the result of discourse and a majority consensus, it is fundamentally determined rhetorically, and as such it is not without debate or controversy.

Statistics are among the key criteria the writers use to determine for whom they should vote and around which the debate revolves in defining the value of the “most valuable” player; consequently, discourse around MVP races tends to focus on performance seen through a statistical lens. For example, in 1941, Joe DiMaggio beat out Ted Williams for MVP largely because of his notable 56-game hit streak despite Williams having a solidly better season.9 In 1999, catcher Pudge Rodriguez beat out pitcher Pedro Martinez in part because some writers felt that a pitcher does not contribute enough to their team to merit “most valuable” because they are not everyday players.10 In 2001, Ichiro Suzuki won the MVP award over Jason Giambi, whose supporters pointed out he led the league in on-base percentage and slugging and beat Ichiro in walks, home runs, and RBIs with 170 fewer at bats.11

One of the more significantly controversial MVP debates in recent years occurred during the summer and autumn of 2012 on the merits of Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers and Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, both of whom were having notable seasons (see Table 1). Cabrera’s supporters pointed out that he was on pace to win the Triple Crown, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in, a historic feat that had not happened since 1967. Mike Trout was a rookie sensation; his supporters argued that not only was he running neck-and-neck with Cabrera for batting average and hitting for power, sabermetric analysis showed he was scoring runs and stealing bases at a historic pace, as well as being an exemplary defender.

(Click image to enlarge.)

This noteworthy public crisis between “traditional” and “sabermetric” player evaluation methods formed an important transition point in baseball discourse by the press regarding the use of sabermetrics to evaluate players. “Claims to know are claims of power,”13 and in the case of the 2012 American League Most Valuable Player award, the debate hinged on what knowledge claims constituted the definition of “valuable.” For Joe Posnanski, “… the argument seemed to split baseball fans between those who embrace the new baseball metrics and those who do not.”14 This race served as an important representative anecdote in the ways that sports journalists talked about sabermetrics.15

In this paper, to examine the rhetorical strategies used by reporters to define “valuable,” I apply Edward Schiappa’s methodology for exploring “definitional ruptures.”16 I unpack the factions’ stated purpose or intent of defining, the interests advanced by the definitions, and the consequences of the definition. This three-layer approach reveals that the heart of this tension revolves around the power to define “valuable” as an institutional norm among baseball journalists, with mainstream journalists relying on older statistics and baseball history and newer journalists using sabermetric measures to define “valuable.” I then discuss the consequences of that tension in 2012 and beyond.

I examined published articles and analysis by sports journalists and bloggers starting from late July 2012 and continued through early November after the award was announced. I emphasized writing by BBWAA members and the responses to their articles. The articles constituted the primary discourse since they came from the BBWAA voters or in response to their analysis and argumentation.

Voters in the 2012 AL MVP race who valued the historical rarity of the Triple Crown tipped the scales overwhelmingly in Miguel Cabrera’s favor. (KEITH ALLISON)

METHODS OF ANALYZING DEFINITIONAL RUPTURES

Schiappa notes that the “rhetorical analysis of definition… investigates how people persuade other people to adopt and use certain definitions to the exclusion of others.”17 He argues that definitions are strategies to respond to situations or questions, and they “posit attitudes about situations.”18 Definitions are constituted by “rhetorically induced social knowledge.”19 This social knowledge often comes in the form of authority-based “articulation of what particular words mean and how they should be used to refer to reality.”20 While most definitions are not contested, at times the meaning of a particular word or how it ought to be used is a site of dispute or controversy. The various sides involved in the dispute take on the “natural attitude” that their usage in that specific context is correct.21 For example, a baseball fan who disagrees with an official scorer’s definition of an error has in a small way participated in a definitional dispute; when a team petitions the league for a ruling change on the play, they are arguing over a definition.

These definitional controversies “can be understood, in part, as definitional ruptures.”22 This necessitates not treating definitions as factual claims based on observations about the world and instead treating them as attempts to establish social or institutional norms based on theories of how the world ought to be. Seen in this way, a struggle among journalists to define a term like “valuable” is a struggle for “denotative conformity,” or intersubjective agreement about the meaning of a word.23 Words with high denotative conformity are usually seen as factual observation statements, resulting from their agreed-upon usage and the context of the use. Words with low denotative conformity are usually seen as theory statements about the world. For example, the strike zone has a clear definition in the MLB rulebook, but the strike zone as defined in practice by umpires varies on many different constraints, including the catcher behind the plate.24 Seen in this light, the sides in a definitional rupture in baseball journalism over the meaning of the word “value” use the same word with a different definition and thereby construct or endorse different institutional norms for how it should be used.

Definitions entitle something, giving both a label and a status to that which is defined.25 This entitling places the phenomenon in a set of beliefs or frames about the world that includes what is real and what qualities constitute the phenomenon.26 When a new definition arises in discourse, the interrelated attitudes and beliefs are brought into the debate, and they too must be negotiated. “Whole sets of normative and factual beliefs must be changed before someone may be convinced to accept a new institutional fact.”27 When advocates push for a new definition, they must persuade others to change their linguistic behavior.

Schiappa outlines three major areas for the critic to identify and analyze within a definitional rupture: purpose or intent, use of power, and definitional practice. In exploring purpose or intent, the critic should examine the shared purposes in defining the word, the interests and values advanced by the competing definitions, and the practical consequences of the definition as it affects “the needs and interests of a particular community of language users involved in a dispute.”28 In examining questions of power, the rhetorical critic should identify who has the power to define or speak as an authority and how that power is used within the social institution. “A proposed definition is a request for institutional norms: When should X count as Y in context C?”29 and “[t]he acts of framing and naming always serve preferred interests, even if those interests are not noticed or are uncontroversial.”30 As it pertains to definitional practice, the critic should identify or discover questions within the rupture involving how members do (or do not) achieve denotative conformity with a definition or whether denotative conformity is a reasonable goal.31

SEEING ‘VALUABLE’ AS DEFINITIONAL RUPTURE

The 2012 American League MVP race constituted a crisis among baseball journalists in defining “valuable” as an observation statement (with high denotative conformity) or a theory statement (with low denotative conformity) about the world. Because the BBWAA does not provide a definition for “valuable,” the onus is on the voters themselves to create theory statements to determine it. For traditionalists, value is best defined by an already-recognized significant historical achievement and the success of the team; for sabermetricians, value is defined by stats like WAR, a complex statistical aggregate accounting for the entirety of play. Both factions’ definitions of value included a sensitivity to fairness and egalitarianism. Traditional journalists’ goal was to fairly and equally treat this season’s achievements with the ways past seasons’ achievements had been treated for other players. Sabermetrically-oriented journalists’ goal was to fairly and equally represent all the achievements of players in a season and reward the player who contributed the most. Sean Hartnett contended, “You couldn’t conceive two MVP candidates that provide such conflicting cases for their candidacy… You’ll have old guard writers who will cling to the importance of the Triple Crown and new-age writers who will favor sabermetric measures such as WAR and range factor (RF)—and you’ll never get either side to agree with one another.”32 Ultimately Cabrera won the American League MVP vote, earning twenty-two first place votes over Trout’s six. “After all the debate, all the rhetoric, all the statistical and historical analysis, it wasn’t close.”33

PURPOSE AND INTENT OF DEFINING ‘VALUABLE’

The debate over the definition of “valuable” was an attempt to alter or maintain linguistic behavior. Supporters of both players had the shared purpose of wanting the award to go to the “most valuable” player. In their discourse, they frequently used “valuable” as the key term in determining their vote, and so it was “the term ‘valuable’ that appears to foster differing viewpoints.”34 Numerous other writers noted that the argument was less about statistics versus intangible qualities and more about which statistics should be counted.35 For David Roth “… this vote… was more than just the usual MVP vote. It was also a fairly impassioned contest between two different philosophies and between old-fashioned counting stats and newfangled metrics.”36

Schiappa notes that a definitional rupture “should be addressed in part by re-asking such questions as ‘How should we use the word X?’”37 For Trout supporters, the definition of valuable was driven by the need for statistical accuracy and precision and a search for fairness to other players that year. They generally attempted to quantify his contributions statistically and held a belief in statistical proof as more valid than unmeasurable contributions players might make to a team. Tim Britton suggested, “This is about recognizing Trout’s uniquely comprehensive skill set and the myriad ways he contributed to his team winning baseball games. It’s about appreciating the athletic versatility that baseball, let’s face it, isn’t always known for.”38

For the supporters of Cabrera, the definition of valuable consisted of the player making significant contributions to a team that made the playoffs and one that included historically important statistical achievements as meriting the award, regardless of other measures of value. Bill Madden summarized the position:

Here’s a guy having one of the greatest offensive seasons in history, on the cusp of being the first Triple Crown winner since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967, and yet there is this clamor from the sabermetrics gallery that Cabrera must be penalized for his slowness afoot and supposed defensive shortcomings. To hear them tell it, if Cabrera winds up leading the league in batting, homers, RBI, slugging and total bases, and being second in hits and runs, it will still pale in comparison to L.A. Angels super rookie Mike Trout leading the league in runs, stolen bases and… WAR.39

Traditional sports journalists tended to emphasize baseball history and significant achievement in their definition of “value.” Cabrera’s Triple Crown played a decisive role in their votes for him. “The MVP is the Big Dog of individual awards in sports. It often serves as a Hall of Fame deal-breaker. Yet the word ‘valuable’ restricts it to those whose brilliance made a difference, even though the electors are specifically told that it really isn’t tied to team performance. They decide their own criteria.”40 The fact that Cabrera played better in the last months of the season and the Tigers made the playoffs also contributed to his case for most valuable player. “We more ‘traditional’ baseball journalists do tend to weigh postseason appearances highly when it comes to the MVP because, really, what else is value for? Cabrera got his team to the playoffs. Trout did not.”41 Other Cabrera voters felt this was an opportunity to support Cabrera as the exemplar of valuable production. “If Cabrera wins the MVP it will repudiate nothing Trout did. It will simply be a … reaffirmation of value.”42 For Mark Feinsand, there was a distinction between best player and most valuable player. “I think Trout was the best overall player in the game this season, especially when you factor in his defense and baserunning. But that doesn’t mean I thought he was the most valuable.”43

The idea of fairness and equal treatment in a single season is partially what drove the Trout supporters to WAR as a key statistic in measuring value. “Baseball experts have spent decades trying to find a way to quantify all of a player’s contributions and boil it down into one number. The best measurement we have right now is what’s known as Wins Above Replacement (WAR).”44 Traditional baseball statistics tend to be “counting” statistics, where an event is tallied: a batted ball leaves the field of play in fair territory without hitting the ground and is counted as a home run, the batter hits the ball in fair territory and reaches base safely without a fielding error and it is counted as a hit, and so forth. More complex statistics are derived from averages: average hits per at bat yields a “batting average,” average of earned runs per nine innings equals “earned run average.” Almost all are easily seen, tallied, and understood.

Advanced baseball statistics tend to be derived from more complex formulae. In the case of WAR for position players, the final number is the product of various measures including hitting, baserunning, and defense, some of which rely on other advanced statistics, and then that statistical value is normalized against the standard performance in that season. This formula allows the player to be compared against his peers and in a manner that includes the complex ways the player contributes that may not be easily tallied and seen. For Carl Bialik, “Wins above replacement [is] an imperfect stat that still does a better job than any other of encapsulating a player’s overall on-field value,”45 and for Neil Paine WAR is “the single-number metric of choice for most sabermetricians when it comes to measuring a player’s all-around value.”46

For sabermetricians in 2012, Trout clearly created the most value as a player. “Basically WAR—and some other advanced metrics—showed that whatever advantages Cabrera had in terms of power and batting average and timely hitting were swamped by Trout’s advantages as a fielder, base runner and player who gets on base. The argument made sense to many of us who champion the advanced statistics and their power to get closer to a player’s true value.”47 Journalists supporting Trout’s case noted that not only did he lead the league in WAR, but he did so in a historically significant way. “Trout’s is the clearest case in 99 years as the majors’ MVP… That’s just how much better he’s been than his peers.”48 Writers also addressed some “intangible” or non-quantifiable factors often used by Cabrera supporters, as Mark Reynolds wrote at Bleacher Report:

As long as you think the MVP award should go the player who produced the most value, then Trout should have been the winner because Cabrera’s offense was not superior enough to make up for the difference in the other categories. Cabrera might have been great in the locker room, but there’s no evidence that Trout wasn’t a great teammate, too. Cabrera’s team made the postseason, but Trout’s team won more games.49

Many writers argued that the Triple Crown is overvalued. Zachary D. Rhymer notes that “the Triple Crown indeed is a relic. It’s a novel accomplishment, but things have changed too much over the last half century for both writers and baseball fans to still believe that the Triple Crown is the ultimate measure of value.”50 For sabermetricians each leg of the Triple Crown represents older, less helpful statistics for evaluating player performance. The RBI (or “runs batted in”) depends considerably on the quality of a hitter’s teammates, because they need to be on base for the batter to drive them in for runs. The home run shows power potential but is also dependent on factors like the depth of the outfields where the batter hits; since a team plays half its games at home, some batters are fortunate to play half their games on a field that is favorable to hitting home runs. Batting average is a fine descriptor of how often the batter reaches base safely on a hit, but does not capture the ability of the batter to reach base without getting out or to reach base with a double or triple. For many sabermetricians, the preferred statistic is either on-base percentage (OBP) or on-base plus slugging average (or “OPS”).

Mike Trout’s 2012 performance was emblematic for sabermetricians struggling for acceptance of sophisticated player valuation. (IAN D’ANDREA)

USE OF POWER

Craig Calcaterra thought that the “MVP award voting, at least in the American League, has taken on political and philosophical overtones.”51 Supporters of both players claimed to know what “valuable” meant within their individual set of criteria. Because the result comes via vote of two members from each American League city, the power to define ultimately resided in those (then) 28 members. Non-voting members and non-members could rally for particular perspectives on what they would or what members should do, but they did not actually vote. The debate over value continued the tension between traditional sports journalists and an emerging group interested in newer ways of evaluating players and making strategic choices. An overwhelming majority of established writers voted for Cabrera. “The Triple Crown winner’s main constituency was old people in old media. Twenty-four of the MVP voters work for newspapers or newspaper groups; 21 of them (88 percent) voted for Cabrera… every voter 51 and above… sided with Cabrera, the old-guard candidate.”52

Because the BBWAA nominates each season’s voters, it is feasible that the balance of power in the organization will shift as one faction or the other jostles for power over the seasons, and so the stakes for a given debate should be seen as a part of a longer-term power struggle. The tension over Trout and Cabrera for Most Valuable Player was a struggle for authority in the press. It was a question over the type of knowledge needed to be regarded as a baseball expert. “The false Trout/Cabrera debate, stripped of Tigers and Angels fans, is just the latest in the ongoing battle between two camps in the baseball media, one of which has seen its longtime primacy usurped by new writers, mostly younger, who look at the game in different ways and have more in common with successful front offices.”53 Established writers saw sabermetricians as using advanced statistics to usurp their power and prestige. Sabermetricians saw established writers using traditional tools to support Cabrera and undermine the utility of sabermetric evaluation.

One technique used by traditionally-oriented journalists to subordinate the sabermetrically-oriented writers was to resort to name-calling. “The old-school columnists often trafficked in ignorance and name-calling—relying on the cliché that the statistical community consisted entirely of geeks still living in their mothers’ basements.”54 This cliché is epitomized by Mitch Albom’s claim:

[Baseball] is simply being saturated with situational statistics. What other sport keeps coming up with new categories to watch the same game? A box score now reads like an annual report. And this WAR statistic—which measures the number of wins a player gives his team versus a replacement player of minor league/bench talent (honestly, who comes up with this stuff?)—is another way of declaring, “Nerds win!”55

Commonly the tone was aggressive and characterized sabermetricians as effete and weak, a position in alignment with Michael L. Butterworth’s findings regarding the treatment of statistical political and sports discourse.56 In addition to calling sabermetricans “geeks,” Madden worried advanced analytics is “turning baseball into an inhuman board game.”57

The pro-Cabrera writers used their definition to defer to historical tradition and significance. For them, the power to decide the meaning of “value” should rest in the hands of the people who have always decided it, not up-and-coming sabermetrician journalists. For the traditionalists, WAR is seen as a statistic “for geeks who don’t know baseball… the real argument that non-Tigers fans are making about Trout.”58 For sabermetricians, the 2012 MVP race was a way to add clarity to the ways people think about player value. In his discussion of the race, Jonah Keri argued that Cabrera won because a player’s value is perceived by its cultural and financial incentives.59 Players who hit home runs and drive in RBIs get emphasized more in the press, get more praise by their teammates, and get larger contracts, and as a result they are more likely to win the Most Valuable Player award, although Nate Silver noted that “the real progress in the statistical analysis of baseball is in the ability to evaluate the contributions that a player makes on the field in a more reliable and comprehensive way.”60

DEFINITIONAL PRACTICE

The MVP debate arose from a lack of denotative conformity and was an attempt to attain intersubjective agreement. Unlike many definitional disputes, the MVP award is the product of a vote in which scoring reflects amajority preference. The Trout-Cabrera debate represented the changes in the makeup of the BBWAA. “There is most definitely a growing divide among the BBWAA and the plethora of talented writers online who either are not members of the BBWAA or members that get drowned out by their older cohorts in the association.”61 Ultimately, the definition used is the one that serves the preferred or powerful interests, since those members have the power to entitle the word with specific meaning and weight. The preferred interests establish the social or institutional norms. The Trout-Cabrera MVP vote re-entitled “value” with the traditional definition: the player with the most value is the one who makes historically significant contributions on a playoff team.

While the vote did not necessarily stop the discourse or guarantee denotative conformity, it offers a resolution to that specific definitional rupture. Josh Levin suggested, “The BBWAA’s voting system empowers baseball’s most-conservative voices and disenfranchises those with non-prehistoric views.”62 John Shipley was more optimistic, noting “Maybe someday WAR, BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) and RC27 (Runs Created per 27 outs) will replace the old stats as the new standards. But for those who came up memorizing batting averages and RBI totals from the backs of baseball cards, they’re still relegated to the fringes of the national pastime.”63

Entitling “value” as sabermetrically-defined would give power to the individuals with the expertise, knowledge, and background to understand, analyze, and discuss it. This community is largely a newer, younger generation of writers struggling for power within sports journalism. Matthew Trueblood suggested that the 2012 MVP race was one of the last gasps of power by the old guard of baseball writers, noting that “Soon, the electorate for these awards will be overwhelmingly new-school.”64 Calcaterra argued that this struggle to determine which measures should be used to gauge the value of a player exemplify a struggle over the political economy of baseball discourse.65 The established writers defended their power to determine who should win based on the criteria they chose, and they entitled and endorsed their particular definition as best they could because their jobs were disappearing and they were losing their place as authorities in the game. The new guard of sports writers were “defensive and insecure about being taken seriously as baseball authorities”66 and treated as “second-class citizens”67 among baseball journalists, an ironic position since baseball front offices have recognized the value of advanced analytics and have their own proprietary set of sabermetric statistics, putting team management on a more similar ground with newer writers than the established sports journalists.

Baseball front offices believe in statistics as the key way to evaluate players. Team officials know the value of defense and base-running and have proprietary ways of evaluating players statistically. Traditional writers and players consequently do not have the best tools to gauge the quality of a player, and Trout would almost certainly have the support of front offices but not many writers and players.68 In recognizing the change of power in the BBWAA, Levin noted that “Eventually, reason will win out over superstition, the conventional wisdom will change, and the nerds will become the establishment. The voters of 2012 will not decide who wins the MVP in 2032, and for that we can all be thankful.”69 Two seasons later when Trout finally beat Cabrera for MVP after losing to him two seasons in a row, Paine noted, “In what’s quickly becoming an annual rite of summer, Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels once again led the American League in wins above replacement (WAR), the single-number metric of choice for most sabermetricians when it comes to measuring a player’s all-around value.”70 Perhaps the tide finally turned for sabermetrician journalists.

AFTERMATH OF THE DEFINITIONAL RUPTURE

The Trout-Cabrera debate of 2012 was an attempt to reinforce or change institutional norms within baseball journalism, addressing the question of how player value should be defined in practice: How should we use “valuable” in determining the most valuable player? However, baseball is slow to change, and “The statistical revolution that’s permeating the baseball world hasn’t won widespread acceptance just yet.”71 Looking back at the race, Carrie Kreiswirth interviewed ESPN editor Scott Burton, who noted, “In following the MVP debate between Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera, it was shocking to me to witness the backlash to the analytics argument in favor of Trout. It was like we were stuck in 1998. And the fact that Trout lost handily, despite being superior in almost every meaningful way to Cabrera—as encapsulated by WAR—represented a failure for the analytics community. We lost the fight, badly.”72

As sabermetric discourse grows in media and front offices, it will change how writers and fans talk about and understand baseball. Any substantial shift in baseball discourse is important for the sport, a game grounded in history and tradition. In the time since Trout-Cabrera, the use of sabermetric analysis by commentators, analysts, managers, and players has increased considerably. Today, we find discussions of WAR happening during broadcasts, fans are more comfortable with advanced analytics, and sabermetricians are gaining even more control in baseball front offices.73

The rise in the use of the defensive shift, more attention to things like pitch framing by catchers and batting average on balls in play, and other new approaches to player evaluation and scouting all show greater sensitivity to sabermetric reasoning and optimizing choices, and show its increased persuasiveness on people who think about and play baseball.74 Sabermetrics has a louder voice in baseball discourse, but there is also a risk in seeing statistics as the only way to “truth” in valuing (and evaluating) players. There is the possibility that a faith in traditional value is being replaced with a faith in statistical value, a shift from more qualitative and visual evaluation to more quantitative and abstract reasoning. Seeing baseball as a series of statistical events and choices that can and should be statistically optimized runs the risk of making baseball even more neo-liberal and governed by economic metaphors.

There also remains the possibility that with specialized discourse “that the manner in which we draw distinctions among the different spheres may, itself, contribute to the decline of public discourse.”75 As baseball becomes more advanced statistically, we may be seeing the shifting of the permitted “speakers” moving from practitioners and lay observers to experts in elevated theory or statistics. With that shift may come alienation between traditional fans and sabermetrically-oriented ones. For example, acronyms can function in the bureaucratization of a field, alienating the laity from the bureaucratic experts and thereby entrenching the experts’ power in the field. We see this concern expressed in Albom’s infamous tirade against sabermetricians’ support of Trout: “There is no end to the appetite for categories—from OBP to OPS to WAR. I mean, OMG! The number of triples hit while wearing a certain-colored underwear is probably being measured as we speak.”76 While it is easy to write off Albom’s ridicule as satire or sarcasm, his article also expresses a concern at the overvaluation of complex statistics and obfuscation by new acronyms over the practical or observational qualities of player evaluation and the potential alienation that results.

Baseball as an institution continues to be somewhat slower than individual teams and writers to accept the statistical revolution played out on the fields. For example, in 2015 after the heavy use of unconventional, sabermetrically-inspired defensive shifts depressed offensive statistics, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said he was open to banning particular types of those shifts because of their negative effect and their deviation from traditional defensive arrangement.77 This move received considerable pushback from the press, something that pre-2012 seemed rather unlikely in two ways: these kinds of defensive shifts were significantly less common, and the press likely would treat this as a negative instance of sabermetrics intruding on baseball in a clear, practical way that should not be permitted.

CONCLUSION

This project explores a representative anecdote of where and how definitions matter, and it shows the flexibility of Schiappa’s method in exploring definitional practice.78 It does not claim to be the last word on the matter. Since this is a single example based on a brief snapshot of time, future research in tension between sabermetrics and “traditional” baseball could look at changing definitional practice longer term, gravitating toward different crises or debates: Felix Hernandez and pitcher wins used in determining the Cy Young Award, how the RBI has been valued over time, the case for Jack Morris and the Hall of Fame. This project could also be seen as a first step in the larger fusing of rhetorical criticism and sports statistics, a move toward exploring the rhetoric of sabermetrics: the ways that baseball statisticians use words to define reality.

DR. PETER B. GREGG, PhD is an assistant professor of Communication and Journalism at the University of St. Thomas. His research interests include media history, production, and audiences. His co-authored work “The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis” won the National Communication Association’s 2017 Charles H. Woolbert Research Award. He is a lifelong Detroit Tigers fan.

Notes

Bernice Gera, center, makes a call at the Jim Finley umpire school in 1967. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

“Are you blind?” is a familiar cry for fans sitting in the stands at any baseball diamond. Fans believe it is part of their job to harass the men in blue. But what happens when that man is a woman in blue? Do the insults change? Yes. Are fans so surprised some of them do not even know how to react? Yes. But baseball has been played professionally in the United States since the 1860s. Why are people still surprised by female umpires? Because they are absolutely still a novelty. Women have had limited success breaking in to the ranks of the arbiters of the game, though the few who have been allowed to participate have proved they know the rules and how to call a game. And why have both the NBA and professional football added female referees but not baseball?

Baseball made one concession to change in 2006 when the rules committee voted to acknowledge the presence of a female umpire. “An amendment to Rule 2.00 in the Definition of Terms reads: “Any reference in these Official Baseball Rules to ‘he,’ ‘him,’ or ‘his’ shall be deemed to be a reference to ‘she,’ ‘her,’ or ‘hers,’ as the case may be, when the person is female.”

Veteran big-league umpire Larry Young, a member of the Playing Rules Committee, voted in favor of the wording.”1 Those who voted believed it needed to be done.

Where does the story begin for the seven US professional female umpires? One of the earliest women to be paid to umpire semipro games was Amanda Clement in the early 1900s. Her brother Hank helped get her started and people, while surprised, were impressed with her ability and knowledge. After Clement there was a long hiatus until Bernice Gera got her chance as the first professional. Gera was followed by Pam Postema and then there were Christine Wren and Theresa Cox. Ria Cortesio and Shanna Kook worked at the same time in 2003 and 2004. In addition to these ladies there is also Cuba’s Yanet Moreno, who has been umpiring in the National Series since 2003. In 2015 Guam added a female umpire to its ranks with Jhen Senence Bennett. She umpired her first game with her father. And as recently as early 2016 Jen Pawol became the seventh after receiving a contract from the Gulf Coast League upon successful completion of umpire school.

Bernice Mary Shiner Gera was born on June 15, 1931, in Ernest, Pennsylvania but grew up in Erath, Louisiana. Gera graduated from high school in 1949, with a graduating class of three. She married Louis Thomas Jr. and after their divorce married freelance photographer Stephen Gera. She worked as a secretary before turning her hand to umpiring. A longtime baseball fan, Gera graduated in 1967 from the Jim Finley umpire school but no one came calling to give her a job professionally. Gera’s experience came with local ballgames and semipro tournaments. Due to Organized Baseball’s lack of acceptance Gera began a six-year battle to get a chance to umpire. She stated, “I was not out there fighting anybody’s cause. I didn’t do what I did because of women’s liberation or anything like that. … I just wanted to be affiliated with baseball.”2 She received a contract in 1969 but it was invalidated by NAPBL President Philip Piton before she even got an opportunity. She finally won her lawsuit in 1972 when the New York Court of Appeals ruled in her favor. Gera signed her first and only contract on April 12, 1972. Her only officiated game took place on June 24, 1972, a Class-A game in Geneva, New York. She was supposed to ump a doubleheader between Auburn and the Geneva Senators but she left after the first game and never looked back. She retired after that one game. It was a tough game with at least three disputed calls, one of which led to her ejecting Auburn manager Nolan Campbell. Campbell said, “She should be in the kitchen, peeling potatoes.”3 After leaving the field Gera went to work for the New York Mets in community relations and promotions. When Gera died on September 23, 1992, from kidney cancer, her tombstone read, “Pro Baseball’s First Lady Umpire.”4 A historical marker was also placed at Blue Spruce Park near the ball field close to her home in Pennsylvania.5 Her uniform and equipment are on display at the Bridgeton Hall of Fame All Sports Museum.

After Gera left the game, Christine Wren had a short career in the 1970s. Wren played softball growing up in Spokane, Washington. She spent about 13 years playing fast-pitch softball, usually as the catcher. After being called out on a play at second that was clearly wrong, she decided she could be an umpire too. She attended umpire school in Mission Hills, California. When she finally got her chance to umpire, she commented, “I’m not a freak. I’m just somebody trying to do a job.”6 Wren umpired for two years in the Northwest League, in 1975 and 1976, and then in the Class-A Midwest League in 1977. In 1977 she made $250 a month plus $60 for travel expenses. Her most unusual experience came in an exhibition game when a Portland player came up to her and kissed her on the field. She gave him a warning and no one ever tried that again. Midwest League President Bill Walters was so impressed with Wren that he stated, “The girl is good and I want to convince Mr. (Bowie) Kuhn that she’s good.”7 She managed the players on the field like any good umpire and ejected players only when needed. Her first ejection came in a Seattle Rainiers game against Boise. She ejected catcher Ron Gibson in the seventh inning over a pitch call.8 Wren said she loved the work but hated the travel and the low pay. “The athlete in me, the ballplayer in me, always liked umpiring. It was something I always wanted to do.”9 After a few years Wren decided to call it quits and make her winter job a full-time one driving a delivery truck.10

After Gera and Wren left the game, Pam Postema was the next to try to break the barrier. Postema had the most success before Ria Cortesia made it to Triple A in the early 2000s.

Postema umpired for 13 years before filing a lawsuit against major-league baseball after her career stalled at the Triple-A level, following three years in the Pacific Coast League. Postema grew up in Willard, Ohio (born April 1954), playing softball and baseball with her brothers. She even played some football with her brothers growing up. Though she played the game she never thought about umpiring until she got older. She was waitressing at a Red Lobster when she read an ad about umpire school.

She started in the Gulf Coast League in 1977 after attending the Somers School in Daytona Beach, Florida, as one of 130 students. She wanted to be sure she made the cut because she was a good umpire and not because she was a woman. “And if I wasn’t good enough I didn’t want to make it then just because I was a woman.”11 Postema actually applied three times without ever getting even a reply. She decided to just show up and ask for a chance in person, which she got. After graduating 17th in her class, Postema got her first assignment in the Gulf Coast League. After her time in the Gulf Coast League Postema moved to the Class-A Florida State League and then the Double-A Texas League in 1991. By 1993 Postema found herself promoted to the Pacific Coast League, where she worked for four years before making her final move to the Triple-A American Association. Postema commented on her career saying, “I love every moment of my work.”12 No matter how much she loved her work, Postema still had to fight for everything she got. One of the more difficult things she had to deal with in many parks was the conditions in the locker rooms because they did not have accommodations for female umpires. At many parks the best that could be done was to hang a sheet to give her some privacy while she changed to go out onto the field.

Postema got the chance to umpire a spring-training game between the Cleveland Indians and San Francisco Giants in 1982. For her the game was like any other for an umpire trying to earn a chance to move up to the next level. Postema was assigned to “B”-level spring-training games to get more experience after umpiring the previous fall in the Arizona Fall League. She was working to earn her dues like any other umpire. She said she took no more abuse than any other umpire. She stated, “I get the same amount of harassment as any ump, I think, and there’s been no favoritism, no prejudice. I’ve been really lucky and worked with super umps. It’s no big deal being a woman ump.”13 Postema also commented that any umpire who was the least bit different would take flak, if they were fat, or black, or a woman. Her answer was the same as any other umpire: If you get too much flak you throw them out.14

As expected, reaction to Postema’s work was mixed. Manager Jim Fregosi said, “I hardly noticed her so I guess she did okay.” Pitcher Tim Burke commented on her calling balls and strikes, saying, “She’s just another mask behind the plate.” When she tossed batboy Sam Morris for not retrieving a chair thrown onto the field by his manager, the reaction was loud and wide. Postema believed she did the right thing and maintained that if she had been a man no one would have said anything at all.15 Red Sox superstar Wade Boggs said, “I have no objection if she can do a good job. If she’s there as a publicity stunt; I don’t agree with that.”16 The real compliment for Postema’s skills came from Louisville outfielder Jack Ayer who said, “Tell you the truth, I don’t really recognize that she’s a woman. I don’t have time for that.”17 Randy Kutcher, a utility infielder for the Boston Red Sox, commented, “She does a good job. She’s as good as anybody.” Kutcher had a unique perspective, having had the chance to see Postema umpire for five years at Double A and Triple A.18 Catcher Ozzie Virgil thought she did a good job. “I had no complaints. I was really impressed with the way she handled all the stuff people in the stands were yelling at her.”19

In contrast, Bob Knepper asserted that God did not like what she was doing in a man’s job.20 Toby Harrah, manager of the Oklahoma City 89ers, got thrown out by Postema and was not complimentary in his reactions. Harrah stated, “she just doesn’t grasp the game of baseball. If you haven’t played the game — and I’m sure she hasn’t — you miss the grasp.”21 Postema’s reaction was simply that she was trying to make the major leagues like any other umpire. Dick Butler, who scouted umpires for the American League, said she was there and so why not give her a chance.22 Postema’s best chance at making the majors was lost when Commissioner Bart Giamatti died. He had seemed receptive to the idea of a woman moving up to the highest level of baseball.

Postema also had to deal with those who only saw her as a woman and never as someone who could control a game. A reporter in Cuba simply referred to her as “un mujer muy bonita, por cierto (a very pretty woman, by the way).”23

Postema’s real trouble developed because she never got a chance to move beyond Triple A. By Organized Baseball rules there was a limit to the years one could spend in the minors without being called up to the majors. If one did not get the call then they were let go, as Postema was. She believed that she was let go because of her gender and not because she was unqualified. The interesting issue for Postema was that previously she had been ranked at the top of the list for umpires moving up and then without any indications or written concerns she dropped from the top to out of contention for an opening,

Postema filed suit in Manhattan District Court in 1991 because the league did not promote her to the majors even though she had excellent performance reviews. She sued for damages, money, and a job. US District Judge Robert Patterson ruled that her case could go forward to trial.24 Postema was able to bring suit against the National League but not the American because of the number of job openings each had and potential candidates for those jobs. After leaving baseball she went to work for Federal Express in San Clemente, California.25

After her career ended, Postema received a number of honors. In 2000 she was inducted into the Shrine of the Eternals. She also published a book about her experiences in 1992 entitled You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League. In the book she describes her view of why women have such a difficult time even getting a chance to umpire. “Almost all of the people in the baseball community don’t want anyone interrupting their little male-dominated way of life. They want big, fat male umpires. They want those macho, tobacco-chewing, sleazy sort of borderline alcoholics.”26

After attending the Wendelstedt umpire school in 1982, Perry Lee Barber began her still continuing (as of 2015) career; for her long and varied career, which included being assignor of umpires for the independent Atlantic League from 1998 to 2001, see her essay “The Stained Grass Window” in this book.

Theresa Cox of Ohio (later Cox-Fairlady) had a short career after Postema and together they paved the way for Ria Cortesio and Shanna Kook. Cox went to the Harry Wendelstedt School for umpires and graduated fifth out of a class of 180. Cox never really got a fair chance as she was told her voice was too high and she could not really wear the uniform. When she tried to change the tone she was told her voice now sounded fake. Since Cox umpired college and high-school games, her voice was simply an excuse for not wanting her on the diamond. Wendelstedt challenged that view when he claimed Cox was “…the best female candidate I’ve ever had.”27 He trained 28 women and 5,000 men so his view was certainly one to be taken seriously. In 1989 Cox worked two Double-A Southern League games before umpiring for two years, 1989-1990, in the Arizona Rookie League. She said that in her Arizona League season she walked 22 batters in her first game before the pitchers discovered her strike zone. Cox acknowledged that Postema’s work helped her in trying to break into the game. “What she went through has made it easier for me, and if it’s not me who is the first woman ump, then maybe I’ll make it easier for somebody who follows after me. But we have to keep trying. It’s like life, either you evolve or you die out.”28 In 2008 Cox-Fairlady had a chance to umpire a Mets spring-training exhibition game against the University of Michigan. The game was not that unusual but the umpiring crew was, since it included four women, one of whom was Cox-Fairlady. She was joined by Perry Barber, Ila Valcarcel, and Mona Osborne. When she was not umpiring Cox drove for UPS in Birmingham, Alabama, to supplement the money she made umpiring.29

Next in line was Ria Cortesio (real name Maria Papageorgiou), from Rock Island, Illinois, who got her start as a professional umpire in 1999. She decided to become an umpire when she was about 16, after talking with umpire Scott Higgins, who sat down with her and explained how the whole process worked.30 Growing up she never got the chance to play since girls were expected to play softball and baseball was a boy’s game. She played in her front yard with her cousins but never in organized ball. She graduated from the Jim Evans Umpire Academy in Kissimmee, Florida, after attending the five-week program in 1998 as her second try, having also attended in 1996. Cortesio was one of only two women each time she attended the school. In addition to umpire school, Cortesio was also a graduate of Rice University, graduating summa cum laude. Evans commented after her graduation from umpire school, “I don’t think sex should be a criterion for umpiring in the big leagues.”31 Her goal was to work her way up through the ranks and win one of the 68 major-league umpiring jobs. She even cut her ponytail and lowered her voice so she would not stand out as much. But Cortesio was up against a large group of men working for the same goal. By 2006 she was umpiring the Futures game and home-run derby in Pittsburgh. In 2007 she got the opportunity to umpire a spring-training game between the Cubs and the Diamondbacks. Derek Lee, first baseman for the Cubs, stated, “It’s awesome. I think it’s about time. Female eyes are as good as male eyes. Why can’t they be umpires?”32

During a 2007 Double-A game Cortesio received the ultimate compliment from a fan who said, “He might be young, but he looks like he’s consistent. So far, he’s called a good game.”33 The fan had no idea the umpire was female and therefore he judged the performance solely on the quality and not the gender. One of her fellow umpires, Jason Stein, got a chance to work with her in the Futures game and continued to be impressed. “She’s good enough to be here,” said Stein, who worked in the Double-A Texas League. “She’s just as good as we are. If she gets the opportunity to advance to the big leagues and be successful, it would be a great thing. I’m pulling hard for her.”34 “She has inconsistencies but she’s just as good as any other umpire,” said Suns pitcher Joel Hanrahan, who also saw Cortesio in the Pioneer League in 2000 and in the Florida State League in 2002.35

Not all reactions were positive to Cortesio’s work. While she seemed to get less criticism than Postema and the other early pioneers, there were still critics of her as a female umpire. One of those was George Steinbrenner who expressed displeasure over her strike zone when she called a rehab game for Roger Clemens. Told that Cortesio had once umpired Clemens’s boys in Little League in Texas, the New York Yankees owner huffed: “Is that right? Well, that’s good; I guess she’ll go back there.”36

Cortesio never really saw herself as a pioneer, just someone who wanted to umpire in the major leagues. “Until I work a regular-season major-league baseball game, I haven’t done anything,” Cortesio said. “I don’t want to be a pioneer. I just want to do my job.”37 Another time, she said, “It never crossed my mind that because I was a female, I couldn’t do this job. I was lucky to be raised by parents without barriers; that there is no difference between a male and female doing the same job. The guidelines should be equal for both as long as you can do the job.”38 At the same time Cortesio realized she could do a lot to get other women involved.

Cortesio got the call from Mike Fitzpatrick (executive director of the Professional Baseball Umpires Corporation, the umbrella organization for minor-league umpiring) telling her they were letting her go after the 2007 season. There were no openings at the Triple-A level and her ranking had fallen, making her ineligible for a promotion after nine years. Because there are few openings, senior umpires can be let go if they do not move up, to make room for new hires.39

Other major-league players and managers agreed with Derek Lee and thought Cortesio had earned her chance. Willie Randolph commented, “I hope she gets her shot, that’s important.” Felipe Alou believed a female umpire like Cortesio would be good for the game, claiming, “I believe a woman umpire would bring some good ingredients to the game and added interest.”40

When asked in 2007 why baseball and not softball, Cortesio had the following to say:

I bet you if you go to any high school or college softball team and ask any of the girls, probably most of them when they’re growing up dreamed of playing major league baseball. You know, baseball is our national pastime, but for some reason half of the nation is shut out of it. There’s this pretty ridiculous stereotype, I think, in this country that baseball is just for boys, and girls, go play with dolls or play softball or something.41

Cortesio, the last woman to rise through the minor-league ranks to the present day in 2016, helped mentor Canadian Shanna Kook; they were the only two ladies whose career overlapped.

In 2003 Torontoan Kook umpired in the Pioneer League (she spent two years there) after graduating from the Harry Wendelstedt Umpire School. Her first game she umpired behind home plate in a game between Provo and Casper. Provo manager Tom Kotchman said, “I’ll give her credit. She was not tentative. It’s tough to tell from the side but our catcher said she called a very good game.”42 Before taking up her place on the diamond, Kook attended Clinton Street Public School, where she excelled in the classroom and on the diamond. Kook joined the school baseball team and helped lead it to a championship during her senior year. Kook then enrolled at McGill University, where she majored in music and played the viola. She missed baseball and wanted to return to the game as an umpire.43

Kook’s view on umpiring was best stated when she said, “I really don’t care if people notice me. Really the more I’m anonymous, the better. If people don’t know who I am, that’s fine, because then I am doing my job.”44 She learned her craft on the diamonds in Canada starting at the age of 16 and by 2002 she was the crew chief for the Women’s World Series. She attended a clinic to get started at the community center level. After starting college and realizing she needed more money, she returned to umpiring and eventually rose to umpiring higher-level games. From there she was invited to attend a women’s umpire clinic in Canada and then she went for one week to the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring. Kook was hooked on umpiring and left school to pursue her chance. She joined the small rank of professional female umpires.45

After Cortesio was let go, Kate Sargeant tried to earn a spot, attending the Wendelstedt School in Florida in 2007 after umpiring with her dad in the Peninsula Umpires Association. She made it to the final selection process but was not picked for a position. She was the last umpire on the eligible list and she did not get a call. She also had previously attended the Jim Evans School twice. Her only shot came in the independent New York State League, where she spent two years umpiring (2007-2008).46 Those who worked with her had no qualms about being on the field with Sargeant, saying she knew all the rules. After her failed attempt, league officials were asked when they thought a woman might get an opportunity. When MLB Vice President Mike Teevan was asked if it might be at least another six years before a woman could break into the majors, he said, “Basing on the roads that most [umpires] traveled, that’s fair to say.” He added, however, that the league “would love to see” a woman officiate one day.47 Sargeant continued to umpire high-school games for a bit longer but finally gave up her dream and became a forest ranger with Canada’s National Forest Service.48

One of the most successful female umpires in recent years has been working under the radar in Cuba, Yanet Moreno. Moreno loved baseball as a child but just like other women had trouble playing because others, like her father, thought baseball was for boys and not girls.49

In 2016 one more female umpire was added to the ranks of professional baseball. Jen Pawol graduated from Minor League Baseball’s umpire camp along with Annie Monochello. While both graduated, only Pawol got an official assignment with the Gulf Coast League, making her the first female umpire at the professional level since 2007. Pawol brought a lot of umpiring experience from both baseball and softball. She played soccer and softball at West Milford High School (New Jersey) before getting a scholarship to play at Hofstra from 1995-1998. Pawol earned All-American honors as a catcher, hitting .332 with 102 RBIs. She umpired for fast-pitch softball as well as being an NCAA Division I postseason umpire. She also umpired in the Big Ten Conference from 2013 to 2015. In her first Gulf Coast League game Pawol umpired behind home plate. She worked a flawless game with the Blue Jays manager Cesar Martin saying, “She did a great job. Controlling the game, all these things. It was a nice game.”50

Pawol is also an artist. She earned her BFA from the Pratt Institute and then an MFA from Hunter College. When she was not umpiring in previous years she also worked part-time as an eighth grade art teacher. Pawol sees a lot of correlations between painting and baseball, the sounds the rhythm of the game, the artistry of the players, etc. Pawol stated, “I don’t really view umpiring as a gender job, I just view it as, if you’re good at it, and you like it, you should do it.”51

The path to becoming an umpire is a long and arduous journey for anyone but especially for a woman. After the establishment of an umpire school for the minor leagues in 2011, only one woman attended and graduated, Sarah Allerding, who then decided to become a deaconess in the Lutheran Church. She said she always felt welcome and simply made the choice to join the church. If she had made the cut and decided to pursue umpiring, it still would have been a minimum of six years before there could have been a female umpire, based on how promotions work. So there have been only six women in the professional ranks and we are still years away from possibly seeing that glass ceiling broken in the United States, even though the NBA and NFL have both employed female referees. Some make the claim that because women do not play baseball as much that is why there are fewer female umpires, but you do not have to play to know the rules.52

Writer Derek Crawford ended his article on the trials of female umpires saying, “Baseball truly is a fraternity and a brotherhood, but we live in a society in which a woman can run for President, sit on the Supreme Court, fight on the front lines in combat, but can’t put on a chest protector and call balls and strikes in a Major League ballpark for a living.”53

LESLIE HEAPHY is an associate professor of history at Kent State University and has been a SABR member since 1988. She is the chair of the Women in Baseball Committee and serves on the committee for SABR’s annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference. She is the author/editor of six books on baseball history and editor of “Blackball,” a national peer-reviewed journal on black baseball.

Notes

1 Ben Walker, “Just One of the Umpires,” Seattle Times, July 9, 2006.

2 Craig Davis, “She Never Wanted to Be a Pioneer,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1989.

3 Lisa Winston, milb.com, June 22, 2007.

4 vrml.k12.la.us/ehs/history/berniceshiner.htm.

5 Edward J. Shiner obituary, New York Times, August 14, 2014.

6 “Woman Umpire Has a Single Goal,” The Oregonian (Portland), July 1, 1976: C8.

7 Ibid.

8 “Christine Wren Uses Her Thumb,” Seattle Times, June 27, 1975: C3.

9 Howie Stalwick, “Spokane Native Paved the Way for Postema,” Spokesman Review (Spokane, Washington), March 8, 1988.

10 “Kill the Ump. If It’s Christine Wren, Kiss Her,” People Magazine, July 14, 1975.

11 Linda Lehrer, “Sporting Chance,” Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1992.

12 Mal Bernstein, “Who Is That Woman Behind the Mask,” Christian Science Monitor, July 29, 1985.

13 AP, “Female Umpire Inches Toward Major Leagues,” Dallas Morning News, March 14, 1982: 47. 1982.

14 Robin Finn, “Female Umpire Aims for Majors,” Lakeland (Florida) Ledger, July 28, 1987:16.

15 “Batboy Ejected for Disobedience,” Mobile Register, May 27, 1984.

16 Stephen Harris, “Woman Behind the Plate No Threat,” Boston Herald, March 15, 1988: 97.

17 “Umpire Pam Postema Is Fighting Tradition,” Mobile Register, July 6, 1987: 4D.

18 Stephen Harris.

19 Jayson Stark, “She Awaits a Call From the Majors,” philly.com, March 13, 1988.

20 Bernie Lincicome, “Woman Umpire Balks at Spotlight,” Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1988.

21 Mobile Register, July 6, 1987: 4D.

22 Jerome Holtzman, “Lady Ump Could Find Home in Majors,” Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1986.

23 Luis Perez Lopez, “No Maten al Umpire. Que es Una Mujer!” El Miami Herald, June 2, 1980: 9.

24 Mobile Press Register, July 14, 1992: 3C.

25 “Former Major League Umpire Pam Postema Sues Baseball,” December 1991.

26 Pam Postema, You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

27 Anna Quindlen, “I Don’t Know Why a Young Lady Would Want this Job,” Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1991.

28 Robin Finn, “Ohioan on Deck,” New York Times, December 25, 1989.

29 Perry Barber and Jean Ardell, “Women in Black,” Cooperstown Symposium, 2011-2012, State University of New York, College of Oneonta, 2013, 55; Cox Hopes Her Fate as Umpire Turns Out Better Than Postema,” Spokesman Review, December 25, 1989.

30 Michel Martin, “Baseball’s Leading Lady,” NPR, April 30, 1977.

31 Josh Robbins, “Female Umpire Hopes for Shot at Major Leagues,” Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, May 12, 2007: 16.

32 Lisa Winston.

33 Josh Robbins.

34 Lyle Spencer, “Female Ump Gets Futures Game Nod,” MLB.com, July 9, 2006.

35 Jeff Elliott, “Female Umpire Plays Out Dream,” Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), June 25, 2003.

36 Ben Walker, “Just One of the Umpires,” Seattle Times, July 9, 2006.

37 Lyle Spencer.

38 Jeff Elliott.

39 Associated Press, “Baseball’s Only Female Umpire Fired,” Houston Chronicle, November 1, 2007.

40 AP story, “RI’s Cortesio Is Hoping Not to Get Rung Up,” Quad-City Times, September 8, 2005.

41 Michel Martin.

42 Jason Franchuk, “Umpire Story,” Daily Herald (Provo, Utah), July 10, 2003.

43 Justin Skinner, “Clinton Street PS Looks for Past Grads to Celebrate 125 Years,” InsideToronto.com, October 26, 2012.

44 Fran Chuck, “Umpire Story,” Toronto Daily Herald, July 10, 2003.

45 Leslie Heaphy, ed. Women in Baseball Encyclopedia (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishing Inc., 2006), 57-58.

46 Pat Borzi, “Woman Umpires Are Striking Out in MLB,” ESPNW.com, August 9, 2011.

47 Lucy McCalmont, “MLB Probably Won’t Have a Female Umpire for at Least Six Years,” Huffington Post, April 16, 2015.

48 Terry Mosher, “Female NK Grad Sargeant Made Run at Umpiring in Pros,” Kitsap Sun (Bremerton, Washington), April 12, 2014.

49 Shasta Darlington, “In Cuba’s Male Baseball League, Female Umpire Calls ’Em Like She Sees ’Em,” CNN.com, January 6, 2010.

50 Paul Hagan, “Female Umpire Calls Game in Rookie Ball,” MLB.com, June 24, 2016.

51 David Dorsey, “Jen Pawol Travels Rare Baseball Path as an Umpire,” News-Press.com, July 10, 2016; David Wilson, “Jen Pawol Ends Female Umpire Drought on Opening Day of GCL,” Bradenton-Herald, June 24, 2016.

52 Lucy McCalmont. Of course, even fewer women play football.

53 Derek Crawford, “Behind the Mask: Where Are the Women?’ baseballessential.com, April 4, 2015.

“Under current generally accepted accounting principles, I can turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss, and I can get every national accounting firm to agree with me.”1

—Paul Beeston, President of the Toronto Blue Jays

Major professional sports are big businesses. And owners of sports teams generally run them accordingly, seeking to strike a balance between costs — including taxes — and revenues which maximizes profits. As Paul Beeston’s words show, sports franchises are even more profitable than leagues and owners like to admit. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig testified before Congress in 2001 that baseball teams were losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year.2 The Congressional committee was skeptical, as was Forbes.com, which concluded that MLB teams likely had an operating profit of around $75 million.3

But if Paul Beeston can turn profits into losses under basic accounting principles, then perhaps Selig and Forbes were both technically “right.” How can this be? One way is tax breaks. Taxing sports franchises is a challenge because the business model and profitability depend heavily upon intangible assets: things that create value but cannot be physically touched, such as television and trademark rights.4 The issues and regulations regarding valuation of franchises are so complex that sports analysts often fail to fully understand them.5 This article discusses one such tax issue: the Roster Depreciation Allowance. The topic has been discussed in simple terms in the popular press, as in this quotation from Time: “owners get to deduct player salaries twice over, as an actual expense (since they’re actually paying them) and as a depreciating asset (like GM would for a factory or FedEx a jet).”6 It has also been discussed in the academic field with in-depth mathematical and economic language and analysis.7 This article presents a middle ground, delving into the history of the Roster Depreciation Allowance and presenting an understanding of the application and consequences of the Roster Depreciation Allowance that is more nuanced than the popular press but accessible to those without a strong background in mathematics or economics.

The Roster Depreciation Allowance (RDA) is a tax law that allows a purchaser to depreciate (or, more accurately, to amortize) almost the entire purchase price of a sports franchise. Depreciation is when a company takes the decrease in value of a tangible asset over a certain period of time as an economic loss in its accounting. If a landscaping company buys a riding mower, the company will take a certain percentage of that mower’s cost each year for a certain number of years as a loss, which counts against the company’s profits. The loss is economic because the company isn’t actually losing any money on the mower, but because the mower is worth less than it was when the company bought it, companies are allowed to count that loss against their revenues for accounting purposes. By lowering the revenues and subsequently the profits of the company, depreciation lowers the company’s taxable income.

The accounting principles behind depreciation are fairly simple. For every transaction, one account must increase, and one must decrease, both by the same dollar amount. When a company spends $1,500 on a riding lawn mower, assuming they pay in cash or an equivalent rather than with a loan, the company’s bank account decreases by $1,500. But now the company owns a mower worth $1,500, so its asset account — the value of the stuff and money it owns — must go up by the same $1,500. That part is simple enough. But after the company uses the mower for several years the mower’s value will be reduced to zero.8 When the mower’s value hits zero, the company’s asset account would have essentially been reduced by $1,500 because they have $1,500 less stuff. But to keep their books balanced, there must be an equal increase somewhere else. That increase comes in the “depreciation expenses” category, which increases a company’s expenses (the money a business spends conducting its business) just as if the company had paid money to an employee. The concept of depreciation simply allows the company to make those adjustments in smaller increments, say 10% per year for 10 years, instead of all at once.

The IRS puts out several rules and regulations which determine the percentage of the purchase price of any given item that is depreciable, over how many years the depreciation is spread, and what methods of depreciation are allowed. Amortization, as used here, is simply depreciation for intangible assets.9 If a company buys an intangible asset, like a patent, it is amortized rather than depreciated, but the same basic process applies. To avoid confusion the rest of this paper will refer to the amortization that takes place under the RDA as depreciation.

The RDA is one of several “gymnastic bookkeeping techniques” businesses and sports franchises use to minimize tax liabilities.10 The RDA is a depreciation of almost the entire purchase price of a sports franchise over 15 years. This means that each year for 15 years, the purchaser (or purchasers) of a professional sports franchise can take a tax deduction based on the purchase price of the franchise. The current RDA allows sports franchise purchasers to depreciate almost 100 percent of the purchase price over the first 15 years after the purchase; a tax deduction of about 6.67 percent of the purchase price per year.11

The RDA is not exactly unique because many businesses depreciate the costs of both tangible (physical, like lawn mowers) and intangible (not physical but still profitable, like patents) assets. But it is unique in that it deals with sports franchises. Unlike riding lawn mowers or patents, which are essentially worthless at some point in time, the value of sports franchises continue to increase. While depreciation generally allows companies to count the loss of value of their assets as costs of operation, the RDA allows companies to count losses on an asset whose value continues to rise.

The current RDA is fairly straightforward, but has not always been that way. Before the first RDA became law in 1976, nobody — not owners, lawyers, accountants, courts, or the IRS — could accurately depreciate the sports franchise as an asset with any consistency.12 Because high barriers to entry meant that buying a sports franchise was and still is a relatively uncommon event, it took lawmakers a while to figure out what to do.

Before moving into the history of the RDA, it is important to understand a few key concepts. The first is the concept of franchise rights. Franchise rights refer to the full panoply of rights associated with being a franchise in a major sports league, such as rights to revenue sharing, rights to trademarks, trade names, licenses, and other intellectual property, rights to regional exclusivity, and all the other rights that come from being a member of the league. The second concept is the distinction between player contracts and player contract rights. Player contracts state how much a player will make over how many years, and will set out what the player has to do to earn that money. In short, player contracts are about a player’s salary. Player contract rights refers to the ownership of the right to enforce the contract and the duty to abide by it. So even though a player may have a $3 million per year salary, if he brings in $4 million in revenue, a person may only pay $500,000 for the contract rights, because he will pay the salary and the price of the contract rights for a total of $3.5 million in exchange for $4 million in revenue. But if the same $3 million player brings in $10 million in revenue a year, then someone may pay $5 million for his contract rights, for a total salary plus purchase price of $8 million in order to gain that $10 million in revenue. In an example that will be examined later, when Bud Selig bought the Seattle Pilots in 1970, he said that he paid $10.2 million to buy the player contract rights of the entire roster, even though the roster’s total salaries were only $607,400.13

Two key court cases came about in the late 1920s which dealt with how baseball teams treat the costs of player contracts. The case of Chicago Nat’l League Ball Club v. Commissioner14 dealt with the Chicago Cubs’ 1927 and 1928 corporate tax returns and the case Commissioner v. Pittsburgh Athletic Co.15 dealt with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 1928-1930 corporate tax returns. Until 1928, the Pirates had been taking a tax deduction for the difference between all the player contracts they bought and all the player contract they sold in a given year. But now both teams, the Cubs starting in 1927 and the Pirates starting in 1928, had begun taking the entire amount played for player contracts16 in a given year as tax deductions in a that same year.

The reserve clause played a key role in these decisions because it essentially created a perpetual team option contract. Both teams argued that since all player contracts were technically only one-year contracts, they had useful lives of one year and thus the full amount was depreciable in the year in which they were purchased. The IRS argued that the amounts paid for player contracts should be deducted over a period of at least three years because the reserve clause essentially gave the contracts a useful life equal to a player’s entire career. In both cases, the court relied on non-baseball precedent to say that even though a contract has an option to extend its duration, the life of the contract itself was not necessarily changed by the option. So in both cases, the team won.

An early version of the RDA was enacted just over a decade later. When sports entrepreneur Bill Veeck bought the Cleveland Indians in 1946, he persuaded Congress and the IRS to act. Veeck argued that the amount of the purchase price that went towards buying the rights to the player contracts should be treated as a depreciable asset.17 Sports teams could then “double dip” by taking the RDA depreciation for the purchase price of the contracts, how much the new owners paid to old owners for the ability to enforce the contracts, and then deducting the salaries actually paid each year to players as labor costs. Moreover, unlike most assets which can only be depreciated once, the RDA applies anew each time a franchise is purchased.18 This new, clear version of the rules increased the value of franchises, and Veeck quickly capitalized by selling the Indians in 1949.19

With the purchase price of player contracts now a depreciable asset, team buyers began doing what the Chicago court could not: determining how much of the purchase price was for the franchise rights (league membership, regional exclusivity, revenue sharing and licensing rights, etc.) and how much was for the player contracts. The IRS’s stated position was that the price of the franchise rights was not depreciable because it did not have a determinable life (the NFL, NBA, or MLB and their franchises could potentially live on and be profitable forever), but the price of the player contracts was depreciable because they had a determinable life (the contract was only valuable for however many years the player was bound to the club).20 While the franchise rights are the more valuable part of team ownership, buyers wanted to make as much of the purchase price depreciable as possible.21 So buyers began allocating huge percentages of the purchase price to the player contracts and away from the franchise rights.

The NFL granted an expansion franchise in 1965 which became the Atlanta Falcons.22 The new owners tried to depreciate both the cost of the contracts of the 42 players acquired via the expansion draft and the cost of the Falcons’ franchise right to a share of the NFL television revenues.23 The IRS asserted deficiencies, arguing that the owners allocated too much of the purchase price to the player contracts and not enough to the franchise rights.24 The IRS also argued that the “mass asset rule” should apply to prevent the Falcons from dividing the purchase price between the franchise rights and the player contracts. The “mass asset rule” prevents depreciation of intangible assets of indeterminate life (such as rights to television revenue) if they are inseparable from intangible assets of determinable life (such as player contracts). The IRS argued that it was impossible to separate the costs of becoming an NFL franchise and the costs expended to acquire the players on its roster, and that therefore the “mass asset rule” should apply.

The court disagreed. It held that the “mass asset rule” did not apply because the player contracts 1) had their own value separate from the franchise rights, and 2) had a limited useful life which could be ascertained with reasonable accuracy.25So the court allowed the Falcons to separate and depreciate the cost of player contracts from the rest of the intangibles.26 The court also held that the television rights bundle could not be depreciated because it was of indeterminable length, running as long as the franchise is part of the NFL.27 Thus, franchise owners benefitted the most when they attributed more of the purchase price to player contracts instead of to the franchise rights, so that’s exactly what they started doing.

Former MLB commissioner Bud Selig took the practice of allocating costs towards player contracts in order to maximize depreciation deductions to new heights when he bought the Seattle Pilots in 1970. Selig bought the Pilots for $10.8 million.28 He allocated 94 percent of the purchase price (or about $10.2 million) to the purchase of player contracts, even though the contracts themselves were only for $607,400 worth of salaries, according to Baseball-Almanac.com.29,30 The remaining purchase price was allocated to the equipment and supplies ($100,000) and the value of the franchise ($500,000).31 The court upheld this allocation.32

In response to Selig’s allocation (but before the decision upholding it came down) the IRS and Congress acted to prevent such allocations in the future. Congress enacted Section 1056, which regulated the tax treatment of player contracts. Subsections (a)-(c) dealt with the “basis” of player contracts.33 “Basis” is a tax term describing the amount of money “put into” an asset — minus any depreciation deductions taken — by the owner. This determines the amount of taxable profit/loss the owner will realize on a subsequent sale of the asset.34 Subsection (d) creates a presumption that no more than 50 percent of the purchase price of a sports franchise could be allocated to player contracts, unless the purchaser establishes to the IRS that a higher percentage is proper. This amount could then be depreciated over a five-year period (rather than over the lives of the individual contracts). This law created the 50/5 rule: 50 percent of the total purchase price of the franchise could be depreciated over five years.

The 50/5 rule streamlined sports franchise bookkeeping by making all the purchased contract rights one large, depreciable asset. This may have been an attempt to get courts to stop evaluating the reasonableness of the contract rights purchase price first and allocating the remainder to franchise rights second.35 However, since it created only a presumption and not a rule, the IRS continued to struggle against franchise buyers who argued that more than 50% of the purchase price was for the player contracts.36

Around the turn of the century, Congress drastically changed the RDA. In 1993, Congress had passed a tax law called Section 197, which gave all businesses the ability to depreciate the purchase price of intangible assets, but specifically excluded sports franchises.37,38 So the 50/5 rule in Section 1056 continued to apply to professional sports franchises. Then Congress passed the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. As part of this Act, Section 1056 was repealed, and the purchase price of sports franchises became subject to the 15-year depreciation rules applicable to other intangible assets under Section 197.39 “Section 197 allows an amortized deduction for the capitalized costs of [things listed in Section 197].”40 These intangibles include “workforce in place” (player contract rights), as well as “any franchise, trademark, or trade name.”41,42 Thus, the specific exclusion of sports franchises from intangible assets was ended.43 Under this new 100/15 rule, almost the full purchase price of a franchise is depreciable over 15 years.44

The RDA is perhaps best understood through hypotheticals. An analysis of the 2004 rule gives the following example:

Buyer (B) pays Seller (S) $350 million for an MLB franchise. $40 million represents the costs of all tangible assets (uniforms, bats, balls, mascot costumes, etc.) and the intangible assets which are not the franchise itself or the player contracts (such as a stadium lease). The remaining $310 million is a depreciable asset, just as if B had bought a factory or patent.45

As this example illustrates, not all intangible assets are depreciable under the RDA, such as the stadium lease46 mentioned above. This leaves room for the old-fashioned disputes about allocation, but the amount of money in contention is much smaller.

For an example of the difference between the old and new incarnations of the RDA, consider the following: Assume that an investor, or a group of investors, purchased a sports franchise for $150 million total. Under the old 50/5 rule, the franchise would be able to depreciate $75 million (50 percent) over five years, or $15 million dollars per year. That means that $15 million worth of revenues are not taxed. Assuming a tax rate of 35 percent, that $15 million in revenue would have generated income tax of $5.25 million.47 Multiplied by five years means $26.25 millionin tax savings for the franchise.

Now, let’s use the same hypothetical for the current RDA. A purchaser or group of purchasers buys a sports franchise for $150 million, with $100 million of that being for the franchise and player contract rights.48 Under the 100/15 rule, the franchise can depreciate $100 million over fifteen years, or about $6.67 million per year. That means that $6.67 million of revenues per year are not taxed. Assuming a tax rate of 35 percent, the franchise owners gain approximately $2.33 million in taxes, which they would have had to pay the IRS without the RDA. Multiplied by fifteen years, that equals about $35 million in tax savings.

These examples have two caveats. One is that, in the examples above, if an owner buys a team for $150 million he will almost certainly allocate far more than $100 million to the franchise and player rights ($100 million is only 67 percent of $150 million, but remember Bud Selig allocated 94 percent to player rights alone). Thus, the tax advantages to the owners under the current rules would be even greater than the example illustrates. The last ten times a major sports franchise (NHL, NFL, NBA, or MLB) was sold, the prices ranged from $170 million to $2.15 billion, with five of those ten between $200 and $600 million.49 So, if a team were purchased for $400 million and the owners allocated $376 million to player rights and other depreciable intangibles ($376 million is 94% of the purchase price, which Bud Selig got away with), they could depreciate just under $25.1 million per year, which at a 35 percent tax rate would be savings of $8.77 million per year to the owners.

The second caveat is that nothing in this paper discusses changes to the depreciable amount. Theoretically, a franchise would acquire and sell the rights of individual players and would thus have to realize gains or losses on each sale, and likely apply the RDA to each new player contract it acquires, depending on how it does its accounting. Since these examples are illustrative only, we are only dealing with the initial purchase of the all player contracts the franchise owns at the time of the sale.

This is a good point to provide greater context for the numbers we’ve been discussing to see the real impact of the RDA and the 2004 changes. As discussed earlier, the RDA creates tax savings for owners. But these breaks are only temporary. We have to remember the concepts of depreciation and basis discussed above. When you depreciate an asset, your basis in that asset decreases. If you sell that asset, you are taxed on the portion of that income which exceeds your basis. Remember that lawn mower from our landscaping company from before? Let’s say the company buys a lawn mower for $1,500. Its basis in the lawn mower is $1,500. The company then depreciates $150 (10%) per year for six years, for a total depreciation of $900. The company’s basis in the lawn mower is decreased by that $900 of depreciation, so that the company’s basis is now $600. So after owning the lawn mower for six years, the company now sells it to someone else for $750. The company will have to pay tax on the difference between the $750 it received for the lawn mower and its $600 basis in the lawn mower, which is $150 of taxable income.

The same is true of sports franchises under the RDA. For every dollar a franchise takes as depreciation, they will have to pay taxes on another dollar of profit from the sale of the franchise. So the RDA itself does not really affect the dollar amount of taxes paid by a franchise. But it does do two other things. First, because the amount of the depreciation allowed was increased from 50% of the purchase price to almost 100% of the purchase price, it allows more revenue to go untaxed (see Table 1). Second, by using the RDA and other perfectly legitimate accounting methods, franchises make revenue disappear from the profit line. As stated, this untaxed revenue will eventually be paid back.

(Click image to enlarge.)

These tax breaks create a type of deferred-tax situation – a situation where companies can use accounting to delay paying current taxes due until a later date – because they allow the franchise owners to keep more money now and make up for taxes due later. Because every $1 of depreciation decreases basis by $1, at a 35% tax rate the owners are saving $.35 now, but will have to pay that $.35 back later if they sell the franchise. Of course, these savings the owners get are going to be generating more income for them while the total they owe the IRS will stay the same, effectively acting as an interest-free loan from the government to the owners.50 This article is not trying to decry some perceived injustice in the existence of the RDA – but it is something sports fans should be aware of when they are considering financial numbers put out by both the media and the teams themselves.

Congress placed sports franchises under the general law for intangible asset depreciation in 2004 for several reasons. First, it made the rules more uniform across industries. Second, the clearer rules were meant to minimize disputes regarding proper allocation, and in turn to reduce the IRS’s administrative and enforcement costs.51 Finally, supporters argued that it would increase tax payments by about $381 million over ten years.52 While the deductible amount doubled, the amortization time period tripled, which would increase tax bills in the short term. As the above hypotheticals show, while the amortizable amount increased from 50 to almost 100 percent, the dollar amount amortized each year decreased; meaning that in the early years the teams would have more taxable income. While the 50/5 example above allowed an annual deduction of $5.25 million, the 100/15 example only allowed an annual deduction of $2.33 million, increasing the team’s taxable income for the first five years. Of course, after those five years, as the depreciation continued to apply, the increased percentage meant that even more money was safe from taxation than before.

By doubling the amount of tax deductions a team could take — provided, of course, that the new owners hang on to the team for the full 15 years — the new RDA increased franchise values. Higher depreciation totals meant more tax deductions and more untaxed profits for owners in the long run. Experts in the field theorized that the average values of sports franchises would increase by five percent.53 One economic report argued that average value would in fact increase by 11.6 percent.54

Further, for many teams, even the lower depreciation amounts exceed taxable income for each of the 15 years, allowing the owners to pass the paper losses on to their personal income tax liability.55 For example, a Los Angeles group of investors bought the Dodgers for $2.15 billion in 2012.56 Thus, it can take over $143 million per year as a deduction, which is a tax savings of just over $50 million per year for the owners, again assuming a 35 percent tax rate.57 The elongated time frame means that the Dodgers’ new owners can extend the tax benefits to their private income taxes as business losses for ten years longer than under the old rules, but more importantly the extended coverage of the new RDA , from 50% to almost 100% of purchase price, allows them to almost double the total deductible about.58 If Paul Beeston could turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss, just imagine how much profit the Dodgers’ owners could turn into losses with $143 million in deductions.

There have been several examples in recent sports history that illustrate the effects of the RDA on the business of sports. In 1974, before the modern rules, only 5 of 27 professional basketball teams reported a profit.59 This history of paper losses has continued under the new rules. In 2011, with the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the league and players expiring, the NBA stated that 22 of its 30 teams were losing money.60 As a lockout loomed, NBA players argued that the “losses” suffered by teams were paper rather than real.61 As a former director of the MLB Players Association once said, if “[y]ou go through The Sporting News of the last 100 years, and you will find two things are always true. You never have enough pitchers, and nobody ever made money.”62

Forbes reported in August 2013 that the Houston Astros, who had finished with the worst record in Major League Baseball each year from 2011 through 2013, were on pace to make $99 million in profit in 2013 — the most of any team in baseball history.63 The Astros responded that their numbers were not near that amount. The difference is because the Astros, unlike Forbes, included non-cash losses, such as the RDA, in its calculation.64 Current Astros owner Jim Crane bought the team in 2011. Between then and 2013, he cut player salaries from $77 million to $13 million.65 According to the Sports Business Journal, Crane paid about $700 million for the team.66 This means that the Astros would get about $46.7 million per year in paper losses associated with acquiring player contracts, despite paying actual salary amounts as low as $13 million. If you multiply the $46.7 million per year deduction by 35 percent, the RDA allows the team to keep about $16.3 million dollars per year which it would have had to pay in taxes. That’s more than enough to double the salary of the entire 2013 roster. So, with the help of the RDA, the Astros are taking a large paper loss as well as decreasing labor expenses, greately increasing their profit margin. If you subtract the $46.7 million in depreciation losses from the Forbes projection of $99 million in profits, it’s easy to see why the Astros claimed the numbers were so far off. It’s also easy to see how such vastly profitable businesses as sports franchises can say they are not making money with a straight face.

If you were to get on the public address system at any ballpark in America during a baseball game and ask for a show of hands on how many people are interested in how their teams account for depreciation of intangible assets, among the sea of boos you would probably find no hands up. But the people who run the teams are very interested in limiting their tax liability. It allows them to either pocket more money in profits or to pay better players to win more games. And as fans and society continue to take an increasingly academic look at professional sports, the Roster Depreciation Allowance is a crucial consideration to pay attention to in the economics of professional sports. The next time you see an article about the financial condition of your favorite team, you’ll know that there is much more going on in the books than meets the eye.

STEPHEN R. KEENEY is a lifelong Reds fan and a new SABR member. He graduated from Miami University in 2010 with degrees in History and International Studies, and from Northern Kentucky University’s Chase College of Law in 2013. After passing the bar exam he moved from Cincinnati to Dayton, where he works as a union staff representative and lives with his wife, Christine.

Notes

The war against the forces of fascism in Nazi Germany and Japan mirrored another war fought in the trenches of American life – that between the entrenched forces of racism and its ugly operating system of segregation, and a black populace straining to achieve equal treatment in a land ostensibly promising “liberty and justice for all.”

Coincidentally, the tenure of Adolf Hitler as the head of the National Socialist government in Germany –1933-1945 —mirrored the time frame of an informal campaign to integrate major-league baseball. In 1933 several sportswriters began to publicly question why major-league baseball should not have black performers. Several of these writers wrote in the mainstream press – Heywood Broun of the New York World-Telegram and Jimmy Powers of the Daily News both came out against baseball’s color line early that year, with other notable sportswriters such as Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror and Shirley Povich of the Washington Post weighing in later on during this period. The Daily Worker, the most prominent Communist newspaper, also produced hundreds of columns, starting in 1933, castigating major-league baseball for excluding black players. But not surprisingly, the prime participants in the battle to integrate baseball were the members of the black press, especially Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith. During his lengthy career (extending into the twenty-first century), Lacy wrote for several important black newspapers and was sports editor of the Baltimore Afro-American. Smith plied his trade during this time frame for the Pittsburgh Courier.1 The Courier was the leading black newspaper of the time, reaching a high of 350,000 in circulation in 1945 – in part because of the bold stands it took on the issues of the day.2

The Courier, with Smith as its sports editor, stepped up its campaign to integrate baseball in 1942, while at the same time championing a cause expressed in a letter it published on January 31, 1942, written by 26-year-old cafeteria worker James G. Thompson. He asked: “Is the kind of America I know worth defending?” His answer to this question stressed that dedication to victory abroad must be paired with a fight for victory against similar forces at home: “The first V for victory over our enemies without, the second V for victory over our enemies within. For surely those who perpetrate those ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”3 This crusade came to be known as the Double Victory campaign.

Thompson’s letter squarely addressed the “American Dilemma” examined by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in his landmark study of America’s race problem, to be published in 1944. Myrdal’s study explicated what he deemed a failure of the United States to exemplify its “creed” – that of a country dedicated to equality and liberty for all – by the relegation of the black population to second-class status.4 Thompson’s letter presaged Myrdal’s work by asking how America could fight a war abroad against prejudice and blind hatred while failing to address its racial issues at home.

One of those racial issues was the continuing segregation of the national pastime. As the Double V campaign swept black (and to a limited degree, even elements of white) America, especially in 1942 but to a lesser degree until V-J day in 1945, wartime Negro League baseball and some of its prominent figures championed the cause. One such champion, Cumberland “Cum” Posey, owner of the legendary Negro League powerhouse Homestead Grays, suggested in his weekly Courier column, called “Posey’s Points,” that every team in organized Negro baseball wear a Double V symbol on its uniform, stating his belief that the cause of “victory abroad and at home is more vital than any athletic victory any of us may attain.”5 Posey was prominent among those who worried about the future of the Negro Leagues if the white major leagues were integrated, so his eloquent dedication to the cause of Double Victory is noteworthy, as “victory at home” clearly would include ending employment discrimination such as the color line in baseball.

Another Negro League owner, Effa Manley, engaged in many activities supporting the war effort, including an active promotion of the Double V campaign.6 Similarly, Satchel Paige biographer Donald Spivey indicated that Paige was a supporter of the Double V.7 Paige was not shy in expressing his opinions, as he proved in the run-up to the 1942 East-West All-Star game, Negro League baseball’s preeminent showcase.

During the heat of the summer and the heyday of the Double V campaign, Paige felt compelled to speak over the public-address system to a throng of over 48,000 attendees before he came on in relief in the seventh inning. The reason: to deny reports that he questioned whether integration of major-league baseball was possible at that time. Paige claimed he was misquoted: He merely said that he doubted that a major-league team would pay him a salary commensurate with the $37,000 he earned in 1941 and that it would be better for a team of black players to integrate baseball rather than an individual who would face Jim Crow alone.8

Fans watched Satchel as he “gummed up the program with a three-minute pointless statement”9 in trying to defuse the controversy he created, and subsequently lost the All-Star game for the West, his first such loss after three earlier All-Star game wins. Meanwhile, the large crowd also saw symbols of the Double V displayed and distributed. The front page of the August 22 edition of the Courier carried a photograph of a woman wearing a Double V logo on her back selling “VV” buttons at the game. Inside the edition, a picture of a woman flashing “VV” with her fingers was captioned “At Chicago East-West All-Star Game.”10

By the time of the East-West All-Star game, the Double V campaign as covered by the Courier was slowing down, although it was by no means at an end. Starting with its February 7, 1942, edition through the end of 1942, the Courier printed 970 Double V items, peaking with 50 such items in its April 11 issue. The campaign spread throughout black America – “there were Double V dances and parades, Double V flag-raising ceremonies, Double V baseball games between professional black teams, Double V beauty contests, Double V poems, and a double V song, ‘Yankee Doodle Tan…’”11 In the June 13, 1942, issue the Courier reported on a Double V game in St. Louis. The thousands who attended watched as the New York Black Yankees defeated the Birmingham Black Barons, 8-4. They also saw a drum and bugle corps form a Double V on the mound, and a $50 Double V certificate being presented to the winner of a Miss Mid-West contest.12

The Double V campaign was also supported by other black newspapers. In another instance where black baseball was involved, the Atlanta Daily World reported on what it called a “true double-V victory” by the Birmingham Black Barons winning an opening day Negro American League doubleheader over the Memphis Red Sox in late May1943. The article mentioned as well that a high-school band formed a “V” before the game – the first victory of the day.13 All the prominent black newspapers of the day – the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Cleveland Call and Post, the New York Amsterdam News, the World, and many others – reported on the progress of the Double V campaign even if it was not with the sustained attention of the Courier.

During 1942 especially but also throughout the war, sportswriters Smith and Ches Washington of the Courier, Fay Young of the Defender, Mabray “Doc” Kountze of the Call and Post, Dan Burley of the Amsterdam News, and Lacy and Art Carter of the Afro-American were promoting the breaking of the color line, often invoking the theme, if not the explicit terminology, of the Double V. Washington told the story of a victorious boxer who invoked the themes of Double V. He also trumpeted the triumphs of black track stars and boxers over the “enemy abroad” while wishing that baseball stars like Josh Gibson be given a chance at home.14 Smith used military terminology as he suggested that Negro fans organize and fight the battle for baseball integration with a “concentrated, nationwide action” much like that of the Double V campaign.15 And on the same day, April 11, 1942, that the Courier provided its peak coverage of the Double V campaign, Kountze echoed the words of the American Negro Press’s Claude Barnett that “if a colored man is good enough to fight for his own country, he certainly ought to be good enough to work here” as Kountze made the case that “something ought to be done. This very year. I mean, Yeah, 1942” to integrate major-league baseball.16

While the Double V campaign’s momentum slowed down throughout the war, it did not disappear entirely from the pages of the Courier until victory was declared over Japan in September 1945. Until then, the Courier continued the practice started at the commencement of the Double V campaign of putting a “vv” at the end of each article to separate it from the article appearing beneath it. Meanwhile, the calls for baseball integration continued to build to a crescendo in the Courier and the other black newspapers from 1942 through the end of the war. In the summer of 1942, the black press reported that Bill Benswanger, owner of the Pirates, would be trying out Negro League stars Leon Day, Willie Wells, Josh Gibson, and Sam Bankhead. It never came to pass. At the end of 1943, the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association met with the American and National Leagues. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis, an ardent segregationist, went on record as not being against the move to place Negro players in the major leagues. Everyone knew otherwise. Yet Courier president Ira Lewis spoke at this meeting, and invoked the concept of national unity in suggesting that baseball integration would bring joy to 15 million black Americans and millions of white Americans as well.17 Even though the Courier was no longer actively promoting the Double V by then, it was certainly continuing the “campaign for the integration of Negro players into the major leagues,”18 as described by Wendell Smith in late 1943. As history would later prove, a partial victory against racism at home – the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers – would virtually coincide with the victory against fascism abroad in the fall of 1945.

Jackie Robinson had his own indirect connection to Double V. According to essayist and cultural critic Gerald Early, Jackie likely would not have become an officer in the Army without the publicity created by the Double V, along with a behind-the-scenes campaign started in 1937 by Pittsburgh Courier owner Robert Vann to start the process of getting black officers in the military.19 Joe Louis also applied pressure on the military to commission black officers; Jackie said that without Louis “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.”20 Louis was another supporter of the Double V campaign,21 and his wife, Marva, was the Double V girl of the week in the Courier of April 11, 1942.22

In the end, there is a consensus among historians who have researched the Double V, the black press, and African American history. The successful campaign to integrate baseball naturally fit within the larger themes of Double Victory. As Henry Louis Gates put it, one of the two most important legacies of the Double Victory campaign is that “through the columns of its sportswriter, Wendell Smith … it doggedly fought against segregation in professional sports, contributing without a doubt to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ decision to sign Jackie Robinson. …”23 The other legacy was the ultimate desegregation of the US Army by Harry Truman in 1948. A double victory – integrating baseball and one year later, the military – had now been accomplished. But the larger struggle for racial justice had just begun.

DORON “DUKE” GOLDMAN is a longtime SABR member who is specializing in research on baseball integration and the Negro Leagues. In addition to expanding his research on the Double Victory campaign, he is currently researching various aspects of the career of Monte Irvin.

Notes

1 On sportswriters supporting baseball integration, see Brian Carroll, When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball (New York: Routledge, 2007), 69-87; Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters And The Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 3-21; Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 120-121.

2 Patrick S. Washburn, The African-American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 180.

3 Pittsburgh Courier, January 31, 1942.

4 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma Volume 1: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1996 reprint of original 1944 edition), 8.

5 Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1942.

6 Sarah L. Trembanis, The Set-Up Men: Race, Culture and Resistance in Black Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland& Company, Inc. 2014), 118.

7 Donald Spivey, If Only You Were White: The Life of Leroy “Satchel” Paige, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012), 186.

8 Associated Press, August 6, 1942, reprinted in Chicago Defender, August 15, 1942; New York Amsterdam News, August 15, 1942; Baltimore Afro-American, August 22, 1942; Pittsburgh Courier, August 22, 1942.

9 Art Carter, “From The Bench,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 22, 1942.

10 Pittsburgh Courier, August 22, 1942, 1, 13.

11 Patrick S. Washburn, “The Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V Campaign in 1942,” American Journalism (Vol. 74, No. 2 1986), 73, 74.

12 Pittsburgh Courier, June 13, 1942.

13 Atlanta Daily World, June 1 1943.

14 Ches Washington, “Sez Ches,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 21, 1942.

15 Pittsburgh Courier, July 25, 1942.

16 Cleveland Call and Post, April 11, 1942.

17 Pittsburgh Courier, December 11, 1943.

18 Pittsburgh Courier, December 25, 1943.

19 Author conversation with Gerald Early, October 11, 2012.

20 Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 92.

21 Spivey, If Only You Were White, 186.

22 Pittsburgh Courier, April 11 1942.

23 Henry Louis Gates, What Was Black America’s Double War? the root.com/articles/history/2013/05/double_v_campaign_during_work

Over the decades, major-league baseball has produced a host of memorable teams, but only one infamous one — the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Almost a century after the fact, the exact details of the affair known in sports lore as the Black Sox Scandal remain murky and subject to debate. But one central and indisputable truth endures: Talented members of that White Sox club conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the 1919 World Series.

Another certainty attends the punishment imposed in the matter. The permanent banishment from the game of those players implicated in the conspiracy, while perhaps an excessive sanction in certain cases, achieved an overarching objective. Game-fixing virtually disappeared from the major-league landscape after that penalty was imposed on the Black Sox.

Something else is equally indisputable. The finality of the expulsion edict rendered by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis has not quelled the controversy surrounding the corruption of the 1919 Series. Nor has public fascination abated. To the contrary, interest in the scandal has only grown over the years, in time even spawning a publishing subgenre known as Black Sox literature. No essay-length narrative can hope to capture the entirety of events explored in the present Black Sox canon, or to address all the beliefs of individual Black Sox aficionados. The following, therefore, is no more than one man’s rendition of the scandal.

*****

The plot to transform the 1919 World Series into a gambling insiders’ windfall did not occur in a vacuum. The long-standing, often toxic relationship between baseball and gambling dates from the sport’s infancy, with game-fixing having been exposed as early as 1865. Postseason championship play was not immune to such corruption. The first modern World Series of 1903 was jeopardized by gambler attempts to bribe Boston Americans catcher Lou Criger into throwing games. Never-substantiated rumors about the integrity of play dogged a number of ensuing fall classics.

The architects of the Black Sox Scandal have never been conclusively identified. Many subscribe to the notion that the plot was originally concocted by White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil and Boston bookmaker Joseph “Sport” Sullivan. Surviving grand-jury testimony portrays Gandil and White Sox pitching staff ace Eddie Cicotte as the primary instigators of the fix. In any event, the fix plot soon embraced many other actors, both in uniform and out. Indeed, dissection of the scandal has long been complicated by its scope, for there was not a lone plot to rig the Series, but actually two or more, each with its own peculiar cast of characters.

Since it was first deployed as a trial stratagem by Black Sox defense lawyers in June 1921, motivation for the Series fix has been ascribed to the miserliness of Chicago club owner Charles A. Comiskey. The assertion is specious. Comiskey paid his charges the going rate and then some. In fact, salary data recently made available establish that the 1919 Chicago White Sox had the second highest player payroll in the major leagues, with stalwarts like second baseman Eddie Collins, catcher Ray Schalk, third baseman Buck Weaver, and pitcher Cicotte being at or near the top of the pay scale for their positions.

But the White Sox clubhouse was an unhealthy place, with the team long riven by faction. One clique was headed by team captain Eddie Collins, Ivy League-educated and self-assured to the point of arrogance. Aligned with Cocky Collins were Schalk, spitballer Red Faber, and outfielders Shano Collins and Nemo Leibold. The other, a more hardscrabble group united in envy, if not outright hatred, of the socially superior Collins, was headed by tough guy Gandil and the more amiable Cicotte. Also in their corner were Weaver, shortstop/fix enforcer Swede Risberg, outfielder Happy Felsch, and utilityman Fred McMullin.

According to the grand-jury testimony of Eddie Cicotte, his faction first began to discuss the feasibility of throwing the upcoming World Series during a train trip late in the regular season. Even before the White Sox clinched the 1919 pennant, Cicotte started to feel out Bill Burns, a former American League pitcher turned gambler, about financing a Series fix. Again according to Cicotte, the Sox were envious of the $10,000 payoffs rumored to have been paid certain members of the Chicago Cubs for dumping the 1918 Series against the Boston Red Sox. The lure of a similar score was enhanced by the low prospect of discovery or punishment.

Although they surfaced periodically, reports of player malfeasance were not taken seriously, routinely dismissed by the game’s establishment and denigrated in the sporting press. And the imposition of sanctions arising from gambling-related activity seemed to have been all but abandoned. Even charges of player corruption lodged by as revered a figure as Christy Mathewson and corroborated by affidavit were deemed insufficient grounds for disciplinary action, as attested by the National League’s recent exoneration of long-suspected game-fixer Hal Chase. By the fall of 1919, therefore, the fix of the World Series could reasonably be viewed from a player standpoint as a low risk/high reward proposition.

In mid-September the Gandil-Cicotte crew committed to the Series fix during a meeting at the Ansonia Hotel in New York. Likelihood of the scheme’s success was bolstered by the recruitment of the White Sox’ No. 2 starter, Lefty Williams, and the club’s batting star, outfielder Joe Jackson. In follow-up conversation with Burns, the parties agreed that the World Series would be lost to the National League champion Cincinnati Reds in exchange for a $100,000 payoff.

Financing a payoff of that magnitude was beyond Burns’s means, and efforts to secure backing from gambling elements in Philadelphia came up empty. Thereafter, Burns and sidekick Billy Maharg approached a potential fix underwriter of vast resource, New York City underworld financier Arnold Rothstein, known as the “Big Bankroll.” In all probability, word of the Series plot had reached Rothstein well before Burns and Maharg made their play. According to all concerned (Burns, Maharg, and Rothstein), Rothstein flatly turned down the proposal that he finance the Series fix. And from there, the plot to corrupt the 1919 World Series thickened.

The prospect of fix financing was revived by Hal Chase who, by means unknown, had also gotten wind of the scheme. Chase put Burns in touch with one of sportdom’s shadiest characters, former world featherweight boxing champ Abe Attell. A part-time Rothstein bodyguard and a full-time hustler, the Little Champ was constantly on the lookout for a score. Accompanied by an associate named “Bennett” (later identified as Des Moines gambler David Zelcer), Attell met with Burns and informed him that Rothstein had reconsidered the fix proposition and was now willing to finance it. The credulous Burns thereupon hastened to Cincinnati to rendezvous with the players on the eve of Game One.

In the meantime, the campaign to fix the Series had opened a second front. Shortly before the White Sox were scheduled to leave for Cincinnati, Gandil, Cicotte, Weaver, and other fix enlistees met privately at the Warner Hotel in Chicago. A mistrustful Cicotte demanded that his $10,000 fix share be paid in full before the team departed for Cincinnati. He then left the gathering to socialize elsewhere. The others remained to hear two men identified as “Sullivan” and “Brown” from New York. A confused Lefty Williams later testified that he was unsure if these men were the gamblers financing the fix or their representatives.

The first Warner Hotel fixer has always been identified as Gandil’s Boston pal, Sport Sullivan, but the true identity of “Brown” would remain a mystery to fix investigators. Decades later, first Rothstein biographer Leo Katcher and thereafter Abe Attell asserted that “Brown” was actually Nat Evans, a capable Rothstein subordinate and Rothstein’s junior partner in several gambling casino ventures. Whoever “Brown” was, $10,000 in cash had been placed under the bed pillow in Cicotte’s hotel room before the evening was over. The Series fix was now on, in earnest.

The Warner Hotel conclave was unknown to Burns, then trying to finalize his own fix arrangement with the players. He, Attell, and Bennett/Zelcer met with all the corrupted players, save Joe Jackson, at the Sinton Hotel in Cincinnati sometime prior to the Series opener. After considerable wrangling, it was agreed that the players would be paid off in $20,000 installments following each White Sox loss in the best-five-of-nine Series.

Later that evening, Burns encountered an old acquaintance, Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton. Like most experts, Fullerton had confidently predicted a White Sox triumph. But something in the tone of Burns’s assurance that the Reds were a “sure thing” unsettled Fullerton. Burns made it sound as though the Series had already been decided. Almost simultaneously, betting odds on the Series shifted dramatically, with a last-minute surge of money transforming the once-underdog Reds into a slight Series favorite. To Fullerton and other baseball insiders, something ominous seemed to be afoot.

*****

To those unaware of these developments, the Game One matchup typified the inequity between the two sides. On the mound for the White Sox was 29-game-winner Eddie Cicotte, a veteran member of Chicago’s 1917 World Series champions and one of the game’s finest pitchers. Starting for Cincinnati was left-hander Dutch Ruether, who, prior to his 1919 season’s 19-win breakout, had won exactly three major-league games.

Aside from control master Cicotte plunking Reds leadoff batter Morrie Rath with his second pitch, the match proceeded unremarkably in the early going. Then Cicotte suddenly fell apart in the fourth. By the time stunned Chicago manager Kid Gleason had taken him out, the White Sox were behind 6-1. The final score was a lopsided Cincinnati 9, Chicago 1. Following their delivery of the promised loss, the players were stiffed, fix paymaster Attell reneging on the $20,000 payment due.

The White Sox fulfilled their side of the fix agreement in Game Two, in which Lefty Williams’s sudden bout of wildness in the fourth inning spelled the difference in a 4-2 Cincinnati victory. With the corrupted players now owed $40,000, Burns was hard-pressed to get even a fraction of that from Attell. Accusations of a double-cross greeted Burns’s delivery of only $10,000 to the players after the Game Two defeat. Still, he and Maharg accepted Gandil’s assurance that the Sox would lose Game Three. The two fix middlemen were then wiped out, losing their entire wagering stake when the White Sox posted a 3-0 victory behind the pitching of Dickey Kerr.

Whether the Series fix continued after Game Two is a matter of dispute. Joe Jackson would later inform the press that the Black Sox had tried to throw Game Three, only to be thwarted by Kerr’s superb pitching performance. Those maintaining that the White Sox were now playing to win often cite the decisive two-RBI single of erstwhile fix ringleader Chick Gandil.

With the Series now standing two games to one in Cincinnati’s favor, Cicotte retook the mound for Game Four, the most controversial of the Series. Locked in a pitching duel with Reds fireballer Jimmy Ring, Cicotte exhibited the pitching artistry that had been expected from him at the outset. His fielding, however, was another matter, with the game turning on two egregious defensive misplays by Cicotte in the Cincinnati fifth. Those miscues provided the margin in a 2-0 Cincinnati victory.

Cicotte later maintained that he had tried his utmost to win Game Four, but whether true or not, Eddie had received little offensive help from his teammates. The White Sox, both Clean and Black variety, were mired in a horrendous batting slump that would see the American League’s most potent lineup go an astonishing 26 consecutive innings without scoring. Chicago bats were silent again in Game Five, managing but three hits in a 5-0 setback that pushed the Sox to the brink of Series elimination.

Meanwhile, uncertainty reigned in gambling quarters. After the unscripted White Sox victory in Game Three, Burns, reportedly acting at the behest of Abe Attell, approached Gandil about resuming the fix. Gandil spurned him. But whether that brought the curtain down on the debasement of the 1919 World Series is far from clear. The Burns/Attell/Zelcer combine was not the only gambler group that the White Sox had taken money from. Admissions later made by the corrupted players make it clear that far more than the $10,000 post-Game Two payoff was disbursed during the Series. But who made these payoffs; when/where/how they were made; how much fix money in total was paid out by gambler interests, and how much of that money Gandil kept for himself, remain matters of conjecture.

More well-settled is the fact that awareness of the corruption of the World Series was fairly widespread in professional gambling circles. After the post-Game Two player/gambler falling-out, a group of Midwestern gamblers convened in a Chicago hotel to discuss a fix revival. Spearheading this effort were St. Louis clothing manufacturer/gambler Carl Zork and an Omaha bookmaker improbably named Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were heavily invested in a Reds Series triumph. The action, if any, taken by these Midwesterners is another uncertain element in the fix saga.

Back on the diamond, the White Sox teetered on the brink of elimination, having won only one of the first five World Series games. Their outlook turned bleaker in Game Six when the Reds rushed to an early 4-0 lead behind Dutch Ruether. At that late moment, slumbering White Sox bats finally awoke. Capitalizing on timely base hits from the previously dormant middle of the batting order (Buck Weaver, Joe Jackson, and Happy Felsch), the White Sox rallied for a 5-4 triumph in 10 innings. The ensuing Game Seven was the type of affair that sporting pundits had anticipated at the Series outset: a comfortable 4-1 Chicago victory behind masterly pitching by Eddie Cicotte and RBI-base hits by Jackson and Felsch.

Now only one win away from evening up the Series, the hopes of the White Sox faithful were pinned on regular-season stalwart Lefty Williams. Williams had pitched decently in his two previous Series outings, only to see his starts come undone by a lone big inning in each game. In Game Eight, disaster struck early. Lefty did not make it out of the first inning, leaving the White Sox an insurmountable 4-0 deficit. The Reds continued to pour it on against second-line Chicago relievers. Only a forlorn White Sox rally late in the contest made the final score somewhat respectable: Cincinnati 10, Chicago 5.

*****

The next morning, the sporting world’s approbation of the Reds’ World Series triumph was widespread, tempered only by a discordant note sounded by Hugh Fullerton. In a widely circulated column, Fullerton questioned the integrity of the White Sox’ Series performance. He also made the startling assertion that at least seven White Sox players would not be wearing a Chicago uniform the next season. More explicit but little-noticed charges of player corruption quickly followed in Collyer’s Eye, a horse-racing trade paper.

Although a few other intrepid baseball writers would later voice their own reservations about the Series bona fides, Fullerton’s commentary was not well-received by most in the profession. A number of fellow sportswriters characterized the Fullerton assertions as no more than the sour grapes of an “expert” embarrassed by the misfire of his World Series prediction. In a prominent New York Times article, special World Series correspondent Christy Mathewson also dismissed the Fullerton suspicions, informing readers that a fix of the Series was virtually impossible.

For its part, Organized Baseball mostly ignored Fullerton’s charges, leaving denigration of Fullerton and his allies to friendly organs like Baseball Magazine and The Sporting News. In the short run, the strategy worked. Despite reiteration in follow-up columns, Fullerton’s concerns gained little traction with baseball fans. By the start of the new season, the notion that the 1919 World Series had not been on the level was mostly forgotten — except at White Sox headquarters.

Unbeknownst to the sporting press or public, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey had not dismissed the allegations made against his team. While the 1919 Series was in progress, Comiskey had been disturbed by privately received reports that his team was going to throw the championship series. Shortly after the Series was over, club officials were dispatched to St. Louis to make discreet inquiry into fix rumors. Much to Comiskey’s chagrin, disgruntled local gambling informants endorsed the charge that members of his team had thrown the Series in exchange for a promised $100,000 payoff. Lingering doubt on that score was subsequently erased when in-the-know gamblers Harry Redmon and Joe Pesch repeated the fix details to Comiskey and other club brass during a late December meeting in Chicago.

Of the courses available to him, Comiskey opted to pursue the one of self-interest. Rather than expose the perfidy of his players and precipitate the breakup of a championship team, Comiskey kept his fix information quiet. Early in the new year, the corrupted players were re-signed for the 1920 season, with Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Lefty Williams receiving substantial pay raises, to boot. Only fix ringleader Chick Gandil experienced any degree of Comiskey wrath; Gandil was tendered a contract for no more than his previous season’s salary. When, as expected, Gandil rejected the pact, Comiskey took pleasure in placing him on the club’s ineligible list. That suspension continued in force all season and effectively ended Chick Gandil’s playing career. He never appeared in a major-league game after the 1919 World Series.

From a financial standpoint, Comiskey’s silence paid off. Fueled by a return to pre-World War I “normalcy” and the unprecedented slugging exploits of a pitcher-turned-outfielder named Babe Ruth, major-league baseball underwent an explosion in popularity. With its defending AL champion team intact except for Gandil, the White Sox spent the 1920 season in the midst of an exciting three-way pennant battle with New York and Cleveland. With attendance at Comiskey Park soaring to new heights, club coffers overflowed with revenue. Then late in the 1920 season, it all began to unravel. The immediate cause was an unlikely one: the suspected fix of a meaningless late August game between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies.

At first the matter seemed no more than a distraction, the latest of the minor annoyances that bedeviled the game that season. That spring, baseball had been mildly discomforted by exposure of the game-fixing proclivities of Hal Chase, revealed during the trial of a breach-of-contract lawsuit instituted by black-sheep teammate Lee Magee. Then in early August, West Coast baseball followers were shaken by allegations that cast serious doubt upon the legitimacy of the 1919 Pacific Coast League crown won by the Vernon Tigers. In time, the PCL scandal would have momentous consequences, providing Commissioner Landis with instructive precedent for dealing with courtroom-acquitted Black Sox defendants. In the near term, however, the significance of these matters resided mainly in their effect upon Cubs president William L. Veeck Sr. Unhappy connection to both the Magee affair and the PCL scandal — Veeck’s boss, Cubs owner William Wrigley, was livid over the prospect that his Los Angeles Angels might have been cheated out of the PCL pennant — prompted Veeck to make public disclosure of the Cubs-Phillies fix reports and to pledge club cooperation with any investigative body wishing to delve into the matter.

Revelation that the outcome of the Cubs-Phillies game might have been rigged engaged the attention of two of the Black Sox Scandal’s most formidable actors: Cook County Judge Charles A. McDonald and American League President Ban Johnson. Only recently installed as chief justice of Chicago’s criminal courts and an avid baseball fan, McDonald promptly empaneled a grand jury to investigate the game fix reports.

But within days, influential sportswriter Joe Vila of the New York Sun, prominent Chicago businessman-baseball fan Fred Loomis, and others were pressing a more substantial target upon the grand jury: the 1919 World Series. Privately, Johnson, a longtime acquaintance of Judge McDonald, urged a similar course upon the jurist. Like Comiskey, Johnson had conducted his own confidential investigation into the outcome of the 1919 Series. And he too had uncovered evidence that the Series had been corrupted. McDonald was amenable to expansion of the grand jury’s probe, and by the time the grand jury conducted its first substantive session on September 22, 1920, inquiry into the Cubs-Phillies game had been relegated to secondary status. The panel’s attention would be focused on the 1919 World Series.

The ensuing proceedings were remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which was the wholesale disregard of the mandate of grand-jury secrecy. Violation of this black-letter precept of law was justified on the dubious premise that baseball would benefit from the airing of its dirty laundry, and soon newspapers nationwide were reporting the details, often verbatim, of grand-jury testimony.

This breach of law was accompanied by another extra-legal phenomenon: almost daily public commentary on the proceedings by the grand-jury foreman, the prosecuting attorney, and, on occasion, Judge McDonald himself. In a matter of days, the transparency of the proceedings permitted the Chicago Tribune to announce the impending indictment of eight White Sox players: Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gandil, Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Fred McMullin — the men soon branded the Black Sox. For the time being, the charge against them was the generic conspiracy to commit an illegal act. The scandal spotlight then shifted briefly to Philadelphia, where a fix insider was giving the interview that would blow the scandal wide open.

In the September 27, 1920, edition of the Philadelphia North American, Billy Maharg declared that Games One, Two, and Eight of the 1919 World Series had been rigged. According to Maharg, the outcome of the first two games had been procured by the bribery of the White Sox players by the Burns/Attell/Bennett combine. The abysmal pitching performance that cost Chicago any chance of winning Game Eight was the product of intimidation of Lefty Williams by the Zork-Franklin forces, Maharg implied.

Wire service republication of the Maharg expose produced swift and stunning reaction. A day later, first Eddie Cicotte and then Joe Jackson admitted agreeing to accept a payoff to lose the Series when interviewed in the office of White Sox legal counsel Alfred Austrian. The two then repeated this admission under oath before the grand jury. Interestingly, neither Cicotte nor Jackson confessed to making a deliberate misplay during the Series. Press accounts that had Cicotte describing how he lobbed hittable pitches to the plate and/or had Jackson admitting to deliberate failure in the field or at bat were entirely bogus. According to the transcriptions of their testimony, the two had told the grand jury no such thing. While each had taken the gamblers’ money, Cicotte and Jackson both insisted that they had played to win at all times against the Reds. The other player participants in the Series fix were identified by Cicotte and Jackson, but apart from laying blame on Gandil, neither man disclosed much knowledge of how the fix had been instigated or who had financed it.

This exercise repeated itself when Lefty Williams spoke the following day. Like Cicotte and Jackson, Lefty admitted joining the fix conspiracy and accepting gamblers’ money, first confessing in the Austrian law office, and thereafter in testimony before the grand jury. But Williams also denied that he had done anything corrupt on the field to earn his payment. He said he had tried his best at all times, even during his dismal Game Eight start. For the grand-jury record, Lefty officially identified the fix participants as “Cicotte, Gandil, Weaver, Felsch, Risberg, McMullin, Jackson, and myself.” Williams also put names on some of the gambler co-conspirators. At the Warner Hotel in Chicago, they had been named “Sullivan” and “Brown.” At the Sinton Hotel in Cincinnati, the fix proponents had been Bill Burns, Abe Attell, and a third man named “Bennett.”

A similar tack was taken by Happy Felsch when interviewed by a reporter for the Chicago Evening American. Like the others, Felsch admitted his complicity in the fix plot and his acceptance of gamblers’ money. But his subpar Series performance, particularly in center field, had not been deliberate, he said. Lest the underworld get the wrong idea, Felsch hastened to add that he had been prepared to make a game-decisive misplay, but the opportunity to do so had not presented itself during the Series. Unlike the others, Happy confined admission of wrongdoing to himself, although he had come to admire the way that Cicotte had demanded his payoff money up-front. Felsch did not know who had financed the fix, but he was willing to subscribe to press reports that it had been Abe Attell.

A far different public stance was adopted by the other Black Sox. Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin, and Buck Weaver all protested their innocence, with Weaver in particular adamant about his intention to obtain legal counsel and fight any charges preferred against him in court. Those charges would not be long in coming. On October 29, 1920, five counts of conspiracy to obtain money by false pretenses and/or via a confidence game were returned against the Black Sox by the grand jury. Gamblers Bill Burns, Hal Chase, Abe Attell, Sport Sullivan, and Rachael Brown were also charged in the indictments.

*****

The stage thereupon shifted to the criminal courts for a whirl of legal events, few of which are accurately described or well understood in latter-day Black Sox literature.

The return of criminal charges in the Black Sox case coincided with the Republican Party’s political landslide in the November 1920 elections. An entirely different administration soon took charge of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the prosecuting agency in the baseball scandal. When the regime of new State’s Attorney Robert E. Crowe assumed office, it found the high-profile Black Sox case in disarray. The investigation underlying the indictments was incomplete. Evidence was missing from the prosecutors’ vault, including transcriptions of the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand-jury testimony.

Worse yet, it appeared that their predecessors in office had premised prosecution of the Black Sox case on cooperation anticipated from Cicotte, Jackson, and/or Williams, each of whom had admitted fix complicity before the grand jury. But now, the trio was standing firm with the other accused players, and seeking to have their grand-jury confessions suppressed by the court on legal grounds. This placed the new prosecuting attorneys in desperate need of time to rethink and then rebuild their case.

In March 1921, prosecutors’ hopes for an adjournment were dashed by Judge William E. Dever, who set a quick peremptory trial date. This prompted a drastic response from prosecutor Crowe. Rather than try to pull the Black Sox case together on short notice, he administratively dismissed the charges. Crowe coupled public announcement of this stunning development with the promise that the Black Sox case would be presented to the grand jury again for new indictments.

Before the month was out, that promise was fulfilled. Expedited grand-jury proceedings yielded new indictments that essentially replicated the dismissed ones. All those previously charged were re-indicted, while the roster of gambler defendants was enlarged to include Carl Zork, Benjamin Franklin, David (Bennett) Zelcer, and brothers Ben and Lou Levi, reputedly related to Zelcer by marriage and long targeted for prosecution by AL President Ban Johnson.

With the legal proceedings now reverting to courtroom stage one, prosecutors had acquired the time necessary to get their case in better shape. That extra time was needed, as the prosecution remained besieged on many fronts. The State was deluged by defense motions to dismiss the charges, suppress evidence, limit testimony, and the like. Prosecutors were also having trouble getting the gambler defendants into court. Sport Sullivan and Rachael Brown remained somewhere at large. Hal Chase and Abe Attell successfully resisted extradition to Chicago, and Ben Franklin was excused from the proceedings on grounds of illness.

Former major-league pitcher Bill Burns was the prosecution’s star witness in the Black Sox criminal trial in 1921. It took quite an adventure — and a lot of money from the American League treasury — to get him on the stand. (BaseballHall.org)

In the run-up to trial, however, prosecution prospects received one major boost. Retrieved from the Mexican border by his pal Billy Maharg (via a trip financed by Ban Johnson), Bill Burns had agreed to turn State’s evidence in return for immunity. Now, prosecutors had the crucial fix insider that their case had been lacking.

Jury selection began on June 16, 1921, and dragged on for several weeks. Appearing as counsel on behalf of the accused were some of the Midwest’s finest criminal defense lawyers: Thomas Nash and Michael Ahern (representing Weaver, Felsch, Risberg, and McMullin; McMullin did not arrive in Chicago until after jury selection had begun, and for this reason, the trial went on without him and the charges against him were later dismissed); Benedict Short and George Guenther (Jackson and Williams); James O’Brien and John Prystalski (Gandil); A. Morgan Frumberg and Henry Berger (Zork), and Max Luster and J.J. Cooke (Zelcer and the Levi brothers). Cicotte, meanwhile, was represented by his friend and personal attorney Daniel Cassidy, a civil lawyer from Detroit.

Although outnumbered, the prosecution was hardly outgunned, with its chairs filled by experienced trial lawyers: Assistant State’s Attorneys George Gorman and John Tyrrell, and Special Prosecutor Edward Prindiville, with assistance from former Judge George Barrett representing the interests of the American League in court, and a cadre of attorneys in the employ of AL President Johnson working behind the scenes.

About the only unproven commodity in the courtroom was the newly assigned trial judge, Hugo Friend. Judge Friend would later go on to a distinguished 46-year career on Illinois trial and appellate benches. But at the time of the Black Sox trial, he was a judicial novice, presiding over his first significant case. Although his mettle would often be tested by a battalion of fractious barristers, Friend’s intelligence and sense of fairness would stand him in good stead. The Black Sox case would be generally well tried, if not error-free.

In a sweltering midsummer courtroom, the prosecution commenced its case with the witnesses needed to establish factual minutiae — the scores of 1919 World Series games, the employment of the accused players by the Chicago White Sox, the winning and losing Series shares, etc. — that the defense, for tactical reasons, declined to stipulate. Then, chief prosecution witness Bill Burns assumed the stand. For the better part of three days, Burns recounted the events that had precipitated the corruption of the 1919 World Series. Those who had equated Burns with his “Sleepy Bill” nickname were in for a shock. Quick-witted and unflappable, Burns was more than a match for sneering defense lawyers, much to the astonishment, then delight, of the jaded Black Sox trial press corps. Newspaper reviews of Burns’s testimony glowed and, by the time their star witness stepped down, prosecutors were near-jubilant. Thereafter, prosecution focus temporarily shifted to incriminating Zork and the other Midwestern gambler defendants.

Halfway through the State’s case, the jury was excused while the court conducted an evidentiary hearing into the admissibility of the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand-jury testimony. Modern accounts of the Black Sox saga often relate that the prosecution was grievously injured by the loss of grand-jury documents. That was hardly the case. When prosecutors discovered that the original grand-jury transcripts were missing, they merely had the grand-jury stenographers create new ones from their shorthand notes. These second-generation transcripts were available throughout the proceedings, and Black Sox defense lawyers did not contest their accuracy.

What was contested was whether, and to what extent, the trial jury should be made privy to what Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams had told the grand jurors. According to the defense, the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand-jury testimony had been induced by broken off-the-record promises of immunity from prosecution. If this were true, the testimony would be deemed involuntary in the legal sense and inadmissible against the accused.

With testimony restricted exclusively to what had happened in and around the grand-jury room, the proceedings devolved into a swearing contest. Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams testified that they had been promised immunity. Lead grand-jury prosecutor Hartley Replogle and Judge McDonald denied it. During the hearing, grand-jury excerpts were read into the record at length. After hearing both sides, Judge Friend determined that the defendants had confessed freely, without any promise of leniency. Their grand-jury testimony would be admissible in evidence — but not before each grand-jury transcript had been edited to delete all reference to Chick Gandil, Buck Weaver, or anyone else mentioned in it, other than the speaker himself. Once this tedious task was accomplished, the redacted grand-jury testimony of Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, and Lefty Williams was read to the jury, a prolonged and dry exercise that seemed to anesthetize most panel members.

The numbing effect that the transcript readings had on the jury was not lost on prosecutors. Wishing to close their case while it still enjoyed the momentum of the Burns testimony, prosecutors made a fateful strategic decision. They jettisoned the remainder of their scheduled witnesses (Ban Johnson, Joe Pesch, St. Louis Browns second baseman Joe Gedeon, et al.) and wrapped up the State’s case with another fix insider: unindicted co-conspirator Billy Maharg. The affable Maharg provided an account of the fix developments that he was witness to, providing firm and consistent corroboration of many fix details supplied by Bill Burns earlier.

Pleased with Maharg’s performance, prosecutors rested their case. Now they would be obliged to accept the cost of short-circuiting their proofs. In response to defense motions, Judge Friend dismissed the charges against the Levi brothers for lack of evidence. He also signaled that he would be disposed to overturn any guilty verdict returned by the jury against Carl Zork, Buck Weaver, or Happy Felsch, given the thinness of the incriminating evidence presented against them. These rulings, however, did not visibly trouble the prosecutors, for they had plainly decided to concentrate their efforts on convicting defendants Gandil, Cicotte, Jackson, Williams, and the gambler David Zelcer.

The defense had long advertised that the Black Sox would be testifying in their own defense. But that would have to wait, as the gambler defendants would be going first. Once the Zelcer and Zork defenses had presented their cases, the Gandil defense took the floor, calling a series of witnesses mainly intended to make a liar out of Bill Burns.

Also presented was White Sox club secretary Harry Grabiner, whose testimony about soaring 1920 club revenues undermined the contention that team owner Comiskey or the White Sox corporation had been injured by the fix of the 1919 World Series. (Years later, jury foreman William Barry would tell Judge Friend that the Grabiner testimony had had more influence on the jury than that of any other witness.)

Then, with the stage finally set for Chick to take the stand, the Gandil defense abruptly rested. So did the other Black Sox. Little explanation for this change in defense plan was offered, apart from the comment that there was no need for the accused players to testify because the State had made no case against them. Caught off-guard by defense maneuvers, the prosecution scrambled to present rebuttal witnesses, most of whom were excluded from the testifying by Judge Friend. As little in the way of a defense had been mounted by the player defendants, there was no legal justification for admitting rebuttal.

The remainder of the trial was devoted to closing stemwinders by opposing counsel and the court’s instructions on the law. Then the jury retired to deliberate. Less than three hours later, it reached a verdict. With the parties reassembled in a courtroom packed with defense partisans, the court clerk announced the outcome: Not Guilty, as to all defendants on all charges. A smiling Judge Friend concurred, pronouncing the jury’s verdict a fair one.

Minutes after the Black Sox were acquitted on August 2, 1921, the players, their attorneys, and members of the jury (in shirt sleeves) celebrated the verdict by posing for a photo on the courthouse steps. (Chicago Tribune)

With that, pandemonium erupted. Jurors shook hands and congratulated the men whom they had just acquitted. Some in the crowd even hoisted defendants onto their shoulders and paraded them around. Thereafter, defendants, defense lawyers, jurors, and defense followers gathered on the courthouse steps, where their mutual joy was captured in a photo published by the Chicago Tribune. Later, a post-verdict celebration brought the defendants and the jurors together once again at a nearby Italian restaurant. There, the revelry continued into the wee hours of the morning, closing with jurors and Black Sox singing “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here.”

This extraordinary exhibition of camaraderie suggests that the verdict may have been a product of that courthouse phenomenon that all prosecutors dread: jury nullification. In a criminal case, jurors are carefully instructed to abjure passion, prejudice, sympathy, and other emotion in rendering judgment. They are to base their verdict entirely on the evidence presented and the law. But during deliberations in highly charged cases, this instruction is susceptible to being overridden by the jury’s identification with the accused. Or by dislike of the victim. Or by the urge to send some sort of message to the community at large.

In the Black Sox case, defense counsel, notably Benedict Short and Henry Berger, worked assiduously to cultivate a bond between the working-class men on the jury and the blue-collar defendants. The defense’s closing arguments to the jury, particularly those of Short, Thomas Nash, A. Morgan Frumberg, and James O’Brien, stridently denounced the wealthy victim Comiskey and his corporation. The defense lawyers also raised the specter of another menace: AL President Ban Johnson, portrayed as a malevolent force working outside of jury view to ensure the unfair condemnation of the accused.

In the end, of course, the underlying basis for the jury’s acquittal of the Black Sox is unknowable all these years later. Significantly, the fair-minded Judge Friend concurred in the outcome. Still, jury nullification remains a plausible explanation for the verdict, particularly when it came to jurors’ resolution of the charges against defendants Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams, against whom the State had presented a facially strong case.

Few others shared the jurors’ satisfaction in their verdict, with many baseball officials vowing never to grant employment to the acquitted players. That sentiment was quickly rendered academic. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had taken note of the minor leagues’ prompt expulsion of the Pacific Coast League players who had had their indictments dismissed by the judge in that game-fixing case. Landis, who had been hired as commissioner in November 1920, now utilized that action as precedent.

With a famous edict that began “Regardless of the verdict of juries …,” Landis permanently barred the eight Black Sox players from participation in Organized Baseball. And with that, Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, and the rest were consigned to the sporting wilderness. None would ever appear in another major-league game. The Black Sox saga, however, was not quite over.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned the eight Black Sox players for life from Organized Baseball in 1921. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

*****

In the aftermath of their official banishment from the game, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Joe Jackson instituted civil litigation against the White Sox, pursuing grievances grounded in breach of contract, defamation, and restraint on their professional livelihoods.

Outside of Milwaukee, where the Felsch/Risberg/Jackson suits were filed, little attention was paid to their complaints. Jackson’s breach-of-contract suit was the only one that ever went to trial. It was founded on the three-year contract that Jackson had signed with the White Sox in late February 1920, months after the World Series. The club had unilaterally voided the pact when it released Jackson in March 1921, and he had gone unpaid for the 1921 and 1922 baseball seasons.

In a pretrial deposition, plaintiff Jackson disputed that his termination by the White Sox had been justified by his involvement in the Series fix. On that point, Jackson swore to a set of fix-related events dramatically at odds with his earlier grand-jury testimony. Jackson now maintained that he had had no connection to the conspiracy to rig the 1919 Series. He had not even known about it until after the Series was over, when a drunken Lefty Williams foisted a $5,000 fix share on Jackson, telling him that the Black Sox had used Jackson’s name while trying to persuade gamblers to finance the fix scheme.

When the suit was tried in early 1924, its highlight was Jackson’s cross-examination by White Sox attorney George Hudnall. Confronted with his grand-jury testimony of September 28, 1920, Jackson did not attempt to explain away the contradiction between his civil deposition assertions and his grand-jury testimony. Nor did he attempt to harmonize the two. Rather, Jackson maintained — more than 100 times — that he had never made the statements contained in the transcript of his grand-jury testimony.

An outraged Judge John J. Gregory subsequently cited Jackson for perjury and had him jailed overnight. The court vacated the jury’s $16,711.04 award in Jackson favor, ruling that it was grounded in false testimony and jury nonfeasance. After the proceedings were over, civil jury foreman John E. Sanderson shed light on the jury’s thinking. Sanderson informed the press that the jury had entirely disregarded Jackson’s testimony about disputed events. The foreman also rejected the notion that the panel had exonerated Jackson of participation in the 1919 World Series fix.

Rather, the jury had premised its judgment for Jackson on the legal principle of condonation. As far as the jury was concerned, White Sox team brass had known of Jackson’s World Series fix involvement well before the new three-year contract was tendered to him in February 1920. Having thus effectively condoned (or forgiven) Jackson’s Series misconduct by re-signing him, the club was in no position to void that contract once the public found out what club management had known about Jackson all along. Jackson was, according to the Milwaukee jury, therefore entitled to his 1921 and 1922 pay.

In time, the four civil lawsuits, including that of Jackson, were settled out of court for modest sums. Little notice was taken, as the baseball press and public had long since moved on. In the ensuing years, the Black Sox Scandal receded in memory, recalled only in the random sports column, magazine article, or, starting with the death of Joe Jackson in December 1951, the obituary of a Black Sox player.

Revival of interest in the scandal commenced in the late 1950s, but did not attract widespread attention until the publication of Eliot Asinof’s classic Eight Men Out in 1963. Regrettably, this spellbinding account of the scandal was marred by historically inaccurate detail, attributable presumably to the fact that much of the criminal case record had been unavailable to Asinof, having disappeared from court archives over the years. This had compelled Asinof to rely upon scandal survivors, particularly Abe Attell, an engaging but unreliable informant.

Asinof also exercised artistic license in his work, creating, apparently for copyright protection purposes, a fictitious villain named “Harry F.” to intimidate Lefty Williams into his dreadful Game Eight pitching performance. Asinof likewise embellished his tale of the Jackson civil case, inserting melodramatic events, such as White Sox lawyer Hudnall pulling a supposedly lost Jackson grand-jury transcript out of his briefcase in midtrial, into Eight Men Out that are nowhere memorialized in the fully extant record of the civil proceedings.

Over the years, the embrace of such Asinof inventions, as well as the repetition of more ancient canards — the miserly wage that Comiskey supposedly paid the corrupted players, the notion that disappearing grand-jury testimony hamstrung the prosecution, and other fictions – has become a recurring feature of much Black Sox literature.

In 2002 scandal enthusiast Gene Carney commenced a near-obsessive re-examination of the Black Sox affair. First in weekly blog posts and later in his important book Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (Potomac Books, 2006), Carney circulated his findings, which were often at variance with long-accepted scandal wisdom. Sadly, this work was cut short by Carney’s untimely passing in July 2009. But the mission endures, carried on by others, including the membership of the SABR committee inspired by Carney’s zeal.

That scandal revelations are still to be made is clear, manifested by events like the surfacing of a treasure trove of lost Black Sox documents acquired by the Chicago History Museum several years ago. As the playing of the 1919 World Series approaches its 100th anniversary, the investigation continues. And the final word on the Black Sox Scandal remains to be written.

WILLIAM F. LAMB is the author of “Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation” (McFarland & Co., 2013). He spent more than 30 years as a state/county prosecutor in New Jersey. In retirement, he lives in Meredith, New Hampshire, and serves as the editor of “The Inside Game,” the quarterly newsletter of SABR’s Deadball Era Research Committee. He has contributed more than 50 bios to the SABR BioProject.

Sources

This essay is drawn from a more comprehensive account of the Black Sox legal proceedings provided in the writer’s Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial, and Civil Litigation (McFarland & Co., 2013). Underlying sources include surviving fragments of the judicial record; the Black Sox Scandal collections maintained at the Chicago History Museum and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Giamatti Research Center; the transcript of Joe Jackson’s 1924 lawsuit against the Chicago White Sox held by the Chicago Baseball Museum; newspaper archives in Chicago and elsewhere; and contemporary Black Sox scholarship, particularly the work of Gene Carney, Bob Hoie, and Bruce Allardice.

Twelve managers have won more games than Bill McKechnie. None has won more respect.

Deacon Bill McKechnie was the first to lead three different teams to the World Series and the first to win championships with two different teams. In 25 seasons as a manager, between 1915 and 1946, he earned respect as a baseball strategist and even more respect as a human being. “He is the sort of man that other decent men would want their sons to play for,” baseball historian and Cincinnati Reds fan Lee Allen wrote.1

McKechnie achieved the stature of a baseball saint only late in his career. His bosses didn’t always treat him with respect. His first two National League managing jobs ended in humiliation.

McKechnie was a gifted team builder. Even when he took over sorry clubs, he never had more than two losing seasons in a row. He built teams that were more than the sum of their parts by getting the most out of each individual. “McKechnie was a master handler of men,” Allen wrote. “Some managers will never learn to handle personalities as long as they live. McKechnie in that department was without a peer.”2

His secret was no secret, McKechnie said: “Just treat them the way you’d like to be treated.”3 He thought managers who delivered rah-rah speeches or clubhouse rants were showboats or fools. “A manager tries to pick his men carefully, keeping out the bad actors. But the average ballplayer plays [for] himself. He isn’t hustling for the manager or the club owner. He’s hustling for his own contract – his family and his future.”4

Sounds simple. But in a time when most managers were tyrants like John McGraw or ironfisted disciplinarians like Joe McCarthy, McKechnie’s fatherly approach was rare. In many ways he anticipated today’s manager, who must persuade young multimillionaires to be team players.

McKechnie was also a throwback, a relic of the deadball game in the longball era. He emphasized defense and pitching above all else. Most managers give lip-service to the virtues of stingy defense. To McKechnie, that was not just a cliché but a religion. He played the percentages faithfully because he believed the percentages would always win in the long run. He pleaded guilty to managing by the book: “Show me a manager who isn’t and I’ll show you a manager who loses a lot of games he ought to win.”5

William Boyd McKechnie was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, on August 7, 1886, one of 10 children of Scottish immigrants Archibald McKechnie and the former Mary Murray.6 The household also included three adopted children. Bill remembered marching to church with his brothers, all wearing kilts. His parents were Presbyterian, but Bill became a pillar of the Mifflin Avenue Methodist Church. Although he was never a deacon, he sang baritone in the choir for much of his adult life. He married his high school girlfriend, Beryl Bien, who said, “He told me the first time he saw me, he got so excited, he swallowed his chewing tobacco.”7

McKechnie’s playing career was forgettable, but his eagerness and intelligence impressed some of the game’s biggest names. A switch-hitting and seldom-hitting infielder, he dropped out of high school to play semipro ball, then graduated to the low minors. The Pittsburgh Pirates acquired his contract in 1907. When he made the big league club three years later, the Pirates’ superstar, Honus Wagner, took a liking to the hometown boy. McKechnie said Wagner taught him more about baseball than anyone else.

Landing with the New York Yankees in 1913, he became a favorite of the crusty manager, Frank Chance. Asked why he spent so much time with a benchwarmer, Chance replied, “Because he’s the only man on this club who knows what baseball is all about.”8

McKechnie’s career was going nowhere, so he jumped to the outlaw Federal League in 1914. He batted .304 as the regular third baseman for the pennant-winning Indianapolis Hoosiers. After the franchise moved to Newark the next year, the 28-year-old McKechnie took over as manager in June and led the club to a 54-45 record and a fifth-place finish.

When the Federal League folded after the 1915 season, John McGraw of the New York Giants picked up McKechnie’s contract along with that of his Newark teammate and friend, outfielder Edd Roush. In August 1916 McGraw traded his washed-up pitching ace, Christy Mathewson, to Cincinnati so Matty could become the Reds’ manager. McGraw told Matty he could take two players with him; Matty picked Roush and McKechnie.

Roush became the Reds’ star center fielder. McKechnie took up residence on the bench. He was sold back to Pittsburgh and finished his playing career in the minors in 1921.

The next year the Pirates hired him as a coach for manager George Gibson. Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss had already identified McKechnie as a future manager. The club was one game under .500 on June 30, 1922, when Gibson resigned and the 35-year-old McKechnie replaced him.

Despite their problems, the Pirates were a team on the rise. The lineup featured three future Hall of Famers: shortstop Rabbit Maranville, third baseman Pie Traynor, and center fielder Max Carey, the league’s perennial stolen base leader. Lefty Wilbur Cooper and curveball specialist Johnny Morrison anchored the pitching staff. McKechnie brought the club home in third place with an 85-69 record.

Over the next two years, McKechnie and Dreyfuss methodically improved the team. Outfielder Kiki Cuyler cracked the lineup in 1924 and batted .354/.402/.539. McKechnie picked up a 31-year-old rookie pitcher, Remy Kremer, from the Pacific Coast League, and he won 18 games. Dreyfuss bought minor league shortstop Glenn Wright. McKechnie took one look at Wright’s powerful arm and moved Maranville to second base.

The tiny Maranville was one of the game’s most popular players and one of its premier hell-raisers. In an effort to curb his night prowling, McKechnie roomed with him and his running mate, pitcher Moses Yellow Horse. One night the pair lured a flock of pigeons into the manager’s hotel room and locked them in the closet for him to find. For some reason, the soused Rabbit became a favorite of the teetotaler McKechnie.

The Pirates won 90 games in 1924, but finished third for the third straight year. After the season Dreyfuss and McKechnie traded three players reported to be discipline problems – Maranville, Cooper, and first baseman Charlie Grimm – to the Chicago Cubs for second baseman George Grantham, pitcher Vic Aldridge, and rookie first baseman Al Niehaus.

Some writers thought the Cubs had locked up the pennant, but McKechnie had a plan. He shifted Grantham to first base and installed young Eddie Moore at second. With Wright and Traynor, all four Pirates infielders had started out as shortstops. An infield full of shortstops would become a McKechnie trademark as he sought to construct the strongest possible defense.

The refurbished 1925 team stood barely above .500 in June when Barney Dreyfuss, one of baseball’s smartest and most successful owners, made a move so stupid it defies explanation. Fred Clarke, the Pirates’ player-manager in the glory days of Honus Wagner, had bought stock in the team and was appointed vice president, chief scout, and assistant manager. Dreyfuss sent him to sit on the bench with McKechnie. Although Clarke had been out of the game for a decade, Dreyfuss evidently thought he would bring old-school fire to an underachieving club. It was an insulting vote of no-confidence in the young manager, but Clarke was a local hero and Dreyfuss was the boss. McKechnie had to take it or quit.

Clarke, who had struck oil on his Kansas ranch, didn’t need the job and didn’t covet McKechnie’s; he hoped to buy the team from the aging Dreyfuss. The sportswriters dutifully reported that Clarke and McKechnie worked together in blissful harmony, but Clarke’s hard-driving personality could not have been more different from the manager’s, and he was never shy about voicing his opinion, whether the players wanted to hear it or not.

The Pirates charged into a tight pennant race with the Giants until Pittsburgh took command with a 16-3 run in August and September. The Pirates bludgeoned the rest of the league. They were the first National League club in the 20th century to score more than 900 runs, almost six per game, and led in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. Pittsburgh’s 95-58 record was 8½ games better than the Giants’.

The Pirates faced the defending champion Washington Senators in the World Series. The Senators took three of the first four games, with their saint, Walter Johnson, claiming two of the victories. Pittsburgh fought back to win the next two, forcing a Game Seven.

The deciding game played out in an unrelenting downpour. McKechnie’s starter, Vic Aldridge, lasted only one-third of an inning as the Senators scored four times in the first. The Pirates hit Johnson hard and trailed by just 7-6 when they came to bat in the bottom of the eighth. Forbes Field was a swamp of mud sprinkled with sawdust, but Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was determined to complete nine innings.

With two out, Earl Smith and Carson Bigbee hit back-to-back doubles to tie the score. After a walk, Max Carey’s grounder should have ended the inning, but Senators shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh threw the ball away – his record-setting eighth error of the Series. Bases loaded.

Washington manager Bucky Harris stuck with his weary ace. As the rain streamed down Johnson’s face, writer Dan Daniel said, “He looked like he was crying his head off.”9 Kiki Cuyler sliced a line drive that bounded into the temporary bleachers in right field, bringing home the two winning runs.

It was Pittsburgh’s first championship since 1909, when guess-who was the manager. Some sportswriters gave Clarke as much credit as McKechnie. Critics in the press believed McKechnie was too soft to be a leader. “Players behind his back laughed at him, kidded about his judgment,” Regis M. Welsh of the Pittsburgh Post wrote later. “The general consensus was that the club won in spite of him.”10

Dreyfuss added to the Pirates’ powerful lineup for 1926 when he bought Paul Waner, a little left-handed batter who had hit .401 in the Pacific Coast League. Slashing line drives all over the field, Waner batted .336/.413/.528 in his rookie year. Pittsburgh had climbed into first place in August when it all fell apart.

Team captain Carey, slumping and sick of Clarke’s carping, wanted the shadow manager removed from the dugout. Two other elders, pitcher Babe Adams and outfielder Carson Bigbee, agreed, but their teammates voted down the motion by a reported 18-6 landslide. Carey thought Clarke had intimidated the other players.

News of the vote inevitably leaked to the press. One headline screeched, “MUTINY.”11 The rebellious players were likened to anarchists and communists. At this critical moment, Barney Dreyfuss was on vacation in Europe, leaving his son, Sam, and Clarke in charge. Clarke decreed that the mutineers had to go, and Sam Dreyfuss swung the axe. Adams and Bigbee were released. Carey was suspended, then sold to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The newspapermen agreed that the popular Clarke was an innocent victim of a sinister plot, but they couldn’t agree on who was the greater villain, the mutinous players or the manager who had failed to quash the rebellion. The Pirates fell under .500 for the rest of the season and wound up in third place.

When Barney Dreyfuss returned home, he had little choice but to back his son’s decision. And he claimed he had no choice but to fire the manager because the fans demanded it. One year after winning the World Series, McKechnie was unemployed.

Reflecting on the upheaval, the Post’s Regis Welsh gave the departing manager a kick on his way out of town: “McKechnie showed, more than ever, the weakness that had been typical of him.”12 The Pittsburgh mutiny could have ended McKechnie’s career. He had been found guilty of a manager’s unforgivable sin: He had lost control of the clubhouse. His failure was underscored the following year, when new manager Donie Bush, without Clarke’s advice, led the Pirates to another pennant.

McKechnie found work as a coach for the St. Louis Cardinals under first-year manager Bob O’Farrell. The Cardinals had won their first pennant and World Series in 1926, but player-manager Rogers Hornsby was traded after the season because he couldn’t get along with the owner, Sam Breadon (or practically anybody else). O’Farrell, a 30-year-old catcher who had been named NL Most Valuable Player in 1926, didn’t want the job. He leaned heavily on McKechnie, occasionally calling time in mid-inning to go to the bench and consult his assistant.

The 1927 Cardinals won 92 games, three more than in their pennant year, and stayed in the race until the final weekend before finishing second. That wasn’t good enough for Breadon, who panicked easily and often. He made McKechnie the Cardinals’ fourth manager in four years.

As in Pittsburgh, McKechnie took over a strong team. Second baseman Frankie Frisch, acquired in a trade with the Giants for Hornsby, was the sparkplug. First baseman Jim Bottomley had his career year in 1928, and left fielder Chick Hafey wasn’t far behind. McKechnie brought back Rabbit Maranville, who had dropped to the minors and quit drinking, to put a fourth future Hall of Famer in the lineup. A veteran trio—Bill Sherdel, Jesse Haines, and 41-year-old Grover Cleveland Alexander—led the pitching staff. The Cardinals moved into first place in June and won 11 of their last 15 games to outrun the Giants.

That set up a World Series rematch with the Yankees, the team St. Louis had defeated in seven games in 1926. The 1928 Series lasted only four. The Cardinals lost the first three, then took a 2-1 lead in Game Four. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig hit back-to-back home runs to finish them off. McKechnie’s club was not only beaten, but swept; not only beaten and swept, but stomped. The Yankees outscored the Cardinals 27-10 and never even needed a relief pitcher.

Sam Breadon was not happy with the outcome, and when the owner was not happy the manager took the fall. Breadon had dumped Hornsby after he won a World Series. McKechnie could expect no better after losing one. The New York Times’s John Kieran wrote, “The charge against McKechnie is that ‘he is one of the finest fellows in the world, but —.’”13

Breadon didn’t just fire the manager; he demoted him to the minors. McKechnie swapped jobs with Billy Southworth, who had led the Cards’ top farm club at Rochester to the International League pennant. Again, McKechnie had to swallow the humiliation to keep his paycheck.

Southworth had managed only one year in the minors. At 36, he was now managing major leaguers who had been his teammates two seasons before. Southworth decided he had to get tough to show the players who was in charge. He only succeeded in alienating most of the team.

The Cardinals lost a doubleheader on July 21 to fall 13½ games behind the first-place Pirates. Breadon, back in panic mode, spun his revolving door: Southworth and McKechnie swapped jobs again. Breadon admitted he had made a mistake when he sent McKechnie down.

The Cardinals played better under their new-old manager, but not particularly well. They went 34-29 and stayed in fourth place, finishing 20 games back. Even before the season ended, McKechnie signaled that he had had enough of Sam Breadon. He announced his candidacy for tax collector in his hometown, Wilkinsburg. “If elected, I’m through with baseball,” he said. “If not, well, I guess I’ll have to return to the old game.”14 Beryl McKechnie campaigned hard for her absent husband, and Cardinals vice-president Branch Rickey came to town to endorse him, but the voters rejected him in the September Republican primary.

McKechnie returned to the old game in a new spot. Breadon offered him a one-year contract to stay in St. Louis. Instead, he accepted a four-year deal to manage the Boston Braves in 1930. Security was all the new job had going for it. The Braves were a last-place team and had had one winning season in the past 13. The principal owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, managed the club in 1929 to save a salary. The Braves were usually near the bottom in attendance as well as in the standings.

The team’s best players were on the downside of the hill. First baseman George Sisler was a husk of the .400 hitter he had been. Shortstop Rabbit Maranville (him again) was 38. The rest of the roster was what you’d expect from a team that lost 98 games.

For the first time, McKechnie had full authority over player personnel. What he didn’t have was money. Fuchs and McKechnie employed creative financing to acquire a new foundation player. They sold third baseman Les Bell to the Chicago Cubs and used the cash, reported to be at least $35,000, to buy center fielder Wally Berger from the Cubs’ Los Angeles farm club. Berger had hit 40 home runs in the Pacific Coast League. In 1930 his 38 homers for Boston set a major league rookie record that stood for more than half a century.

In three years McKechnie turned over the roster almost completely. The Braves reached .500 in 1932. The next year they made an unlikely run at the pennant.

On August 20 the Braves won a doubleheader from Pittsburgh and climbed into a virtual tie for second place, 7½ games behind the New York Giants. They went on to win eight in a row. McKechnie said his men thought they couldn’t lose: “They’re singing that song about being in the money and they mean every word of it.”15

The season reached its high tide on August 31, when a victory over the Giants boosted the club within five games of first place. The next day a crowd estimated at 50,000 overflowed Braves Field for a Friday doubleheader, said to be the largest weekday turnout in Boston history. The Giants swept both games, then won the next two to pop McKechnie’s pennant bubble.

In the season finale, Wally Berger, benched by the flu, came on as a pinch-hitter and powered a grand slam into the left-field stands to beat Philadelphia. The blow clinched fourth place with an 83-71 record, the Braves’ first finish in the first division in a dozen years. The players were “in the money”; each man collected about $400 as a World Series share.

McKechnie had built a tight defense – second in the league in defensive efficiency – that transformed a staff of no-name pitchers into winners.16 Left-hander Ed Brandt, who had developed under McKechnie, was fourth in the NL in ERA. Two others, Ben Cantwell and Huck Betts, were in the top 10. With just about the same team in 1934, the Braves finished fourth again, winning 78 games.

The club had been on shaky financial ground for years. Now the ground collapsed under Judge Fuchs. When he fell behind on the rent, his Braves Field landlord threatened to void the lease and turn the ballpark into a dog-racing track. The National League assumed the lease, permitting Fuchs to remain in charge, and Boston civic leaders launched a campaign to sell tickets so the Braves could afford to go to spring training.

Fuchs took a desperate step to save the franchise. He signed the game’s biggest drawing card and embarrassed his manager in the process.

Babe Ruth wanted to manage the Yankees. The Yankees wanted to be rid of him, but they needed to ease him out the door without alienating his fans. Fuchs offered Ruth a contract to join the Braves as a player, vice president, and assistant manager, with a wink that the Babe could become manager in a year. Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert agreed to release Ruth so he could take advantage of this wonderful opportunity in the city where his major league career began.

When Fuchs put the offer in writing, he composed a masterpiece of lawyerly evasion, filled with half-promises, or maybe quarter-promises, that Ruth might manage the team if this and if that and if the other. The Bambino was being bamboozled.17

McKechnie was not consulted. In Florida preparing for spring training, he read in the papers that he might be kicked upstairs to the front office. He asked a reporter, “What would I do in an office?”18

Ruth was fat and 40, but Fuchs didn’t care whether he could play as long as he sold tickets. On Opening Day 1935 everybody’s dreams came true. Ruth slammed a homer off the league’s best pitcher, Carl Hubbell, and accounted for all of Boston’s scoring in a 4-2 victory over the Giants.

It went downhill from there. Opening Day was the only day the team was above .500. Ruth struck out 15 times in his first 15 games and was a statue in left field. He was ready to quit, but Fuchs persuaded him to make a road trip to the western cities, where his appearance had already been advertised. He summoned memories of his former self in Pittsburgh when he hit three home runs in one game, the last one clearing Forbes Field’s roof and bouncing off a house an estimated 600 feet from the plate.

The sad end came on June 2. Ruth, batting .181, told the writers he was going on the voluntarily retired list, but Fuchs said he couldn’t quit because the club had already released him.

The Braves’ record stood at 9-24 when Ruth played for the last time. Their season was ruined, but not by him; they got worse after he left. McKechnie had no decent players to trade and no cash to buy new ones. The Braves’ 115 losses were the most by a National League team in the 20th century until the expansion Mets were born.

Judge Fuchs had run out of money, credit, and hope. Before the 1936 season the National League took over the franchise and engineered a recapitalization with the longtime baseball executive Bob Quinn as principal owner. The 65-year-old Quinn had a knack for picking lost causes. He had owned the Red Sox after Harry Frazee plundered the team and then served as president of the debt-ridden Brooklyn Dodgers.

Quinn changed the team nickname to Bees but kept the manager. McKechnie started rebuilding again. He acquired a few useful players, including Al Lopez and Tony Cuccinello, possibly as an act of charity by the rest of the league, and improved the club’s record by 33 wins in 1936, good enough for sixth place.

McKechnie overhauled his pitching staff for 1937. Still short of money, he tried out several veteran minor leaguers who came cheap because they were too old to be prospects. He molded two of them into the biggest surprises of the year. Jim Turner, an offseason milkman in Nashville, Tennessee, was 33 and had rattled around the minors for 14 seasons. Lou Fette turned 30 during spring training. Both were breaking-ball pitchers who induced ground balls, and McKechnie put the league’s best defense behind them.

The 1937 Braves allowed the fewest runs and the fewest walks while leading the league with 16 shutouts. But they also scored the fewest runs. In the season’s next-to-last game, the aged rookie Turner beat Philadelphia for his 20th victory and lowered his ERA to a league-best 2.38. The next day Fette won his 20th, a seven-hit shutout.

Boston closed with a rush, winning eight of the last 10 to finish fifth with a 79-73 record. The Sporting News named McKechnie Manager of the Year because “he has been able to make much out of little.”19 Gray-haired, wearing rimless bifocals on his sun-creased face, he was the National League’s senior manager at age 51.

McKechnie had endured eight years of turmoil and poverty in Boston. Now he found himself in demand; four teams reportedly wanted him. The Cincinnati Reds bid highest. Their wealthy owner, Powel Crosley Jr., gave him a two-year contract at a reported $25,000, plus an attendance bonus. The salary was said to be third highest for any manager, behind Bill Terry and Joe McCarthy of the pennant-winning New York clubs.

The Reds were a last-place team, but for McKechnie they had an additional attraction beyond money. The general manager, Warren Giles, was a friend and admirer. He had been business manager at Rochester when McKechnie was in exile there. New to his job, Giles followed the manager’s lead in decisions on playing personnel.

McKechnie’s first three years in Cincinnati secured his place in baseball history. Taking on a habitual loser once more, he retooled the club to win two consecutive pennants and iced the cake with a World Series championship. That success earned him national recognition as the game’s finest Christian gentleman since Christy Mathewson. And four decades later, when oral histories became popular, many of his Reds players were still alive to pump up his legacy.

Giles and McKechnie embarked on an extreme makeover. They kept Ernie Lombardi, the NL’s best-hitting catcher, but dumped two faded stars, Kiki Cuyler and Chick Hafey, and handed center field to rookie Harry Craft, a light-hitting glove man. First base was awarded to Frank McCormick, who was big and slow but hit smoking line drives. McKechnie turned Lonny Frey, a poor shortstop, into an excellent second baseman.

Midway through the 1938 season the Reds traded for Wally Berger, another power bat to go with Lombardi and right fielder Ival Goodman, and acquired Bucky Walters, a converted third baseman who had had little success on the mound. He perked up when he got away from the weak Philadelphia Phillies.

Johnny Vander Meer’s back-to-back no-hitters were the highlight of the season. Lombardi won the batting title and the MVP award, McCormick led the league in hits, and Goodman belted a team-record 30 home runs (Giles had shortened Crosley Field’s fences). Cincinnati scored the most runs per game in the league. In late June the Reds surged to within 1½ games of first place. They slipped back to finish fourth with an 82-68 record, only six games behind the pennant-winning Cubs.

The Reds completed their lineup makeover when they acquired third baseman Bill Werber from the Philadelphia Athletics during spring training in 1939. A three-time American League stolen base leader, he gave the team a speedy leadoff man, though he didn’t steal many in McKechnie’s conservative offense.

Werber, a confident and intense Duke University graduate, became the leader of the infield. He nicknamed the quartet “the Jungle Cats,” calling himself “Tiger,” shortstop Billy Myers “Jaguar,” and second baseman Frey “Leopard.” First baseman McCormick objected to Werber’s teasing choice, “Hippopotamus,” so he became “Wildcat.” Bucky Walters and the veteran workhorse Paul Derringer, both sinkerballers, turned into aces with the Jungle Cats pouncing on ground balls behind them. McKechnie made sure the infield grass at Crosley Field stayed high and damp to slow down those grounders.

McKechnie liked durable pitchers who threw strikes and finished what they started. Walters and Derringer filled the bill. They topped 300 innings apiece in 1939 and were first and second in the league in complete games. They started nearly half the Reds’ games and recorded more than half of the club’s 97 wins. Walters won the pitcher’s triple crown, leading the league in victories (27, against 11 losses), ERA (2.29), and strikeouts (137, tied with Claude Passeau), and was named NL Most Valuable Player. Derringer was 25-7, 2.93, with five shutouts and barely more than one base on balls per nine innings. Derringer, who was prone to drinking and fighting, often in that order, said, “If a pitcher can’t win for Bill McKechnie, he can’t win for anybody.”20

The Reds won 12 straight in May and climbed to the top of the standings, holding off the Cardinals to fly Cincinnati’s first pennant in 20 years. Their home attendance of almost one million led both leagues, even though Cincinnati was the smallest market in the majors.

The World Series matched the Reds against the Yankees, winners of their fourth consecutive American League pennant. It was no contest. New York won in four straight. The memorable moment was “Lombardi’s snooze,” when two Yankees crossed the plate in the 10th inning of Game Four while the Cincinnati catcher lay helpless on the ground after baserunner Charlie Keller kicked him in the testicles. (Those were not the winning runs; the tie-breaker scored before Keller ran over Lombardi.)

In the offseason McKechnie acquired his antiquated Boston ace, Jim Turner, to add a third reliable starter. Second-year right-hander Junior Thompson made four. The Reds started strong in 1940 and gathered steam as the season wore on. In July they won 18 of 20 to open a comfortable lead.

But getting there wasn’t easy. Injuries and batting slumps created holes in the outfield. Shortstop Myers left the club for several days in September, enraging his teammates. Worst of all, backup catcher Willard Hershberger killed himself on August 3.

Hershberger, filling in for the injured Lombardi, blamed himself for some lost games and became despondent. He was found dead in his hotel room with his throat slashed. “He told me what his problems were,” McKechnie said. “It has nothing to do with anybody on the team. It was something personal. He told it to me in confidence, and I will not utter it to anyone. I will take it with me to my grave.” He did.21

McKechnie’s club weathered the shock. Beginning August 31 the Reds went on a 19-2 run to finish with 100 victories, 12 games ahead of second-place Brooklyn. At least they wouldn’t have to face the Yankees in the World Series. The Detroit Tigers ended New York’s string of four straight pennants.

This time the Series went the distance before Cincinnati won behind the pitching of Walters and Derringer, and contributions from a pair of unexpected heroes. Jimmy Ripple, a waiver pickup who plugged the hole in left field, slammed a homer and drove in six runs. Forty-year-old coach Jimmie Wilson went on the active list after Hershberger’s suicide to replace Lombardi. Wilson caught six of the seven games and batted .353 while hobbling with charley horses in both legs.

The 1939 and 1940 Reds gave McKechnie his greatest triumphs. The teams not only won, they won his way: with pitching and defense. In both years Cincinnati allowed the fewest runs in the majors while recording the best defensive efficiency and the lowest opponents’ batting average on balls in play. The 1940 club’s 117 errors were the fewest in history to that point. The defensive efficiency rate – 73 percent of batters retired on balls in play – tied for the all-time best. Sportswriter Edwin Pope commented that Cincinnati “guarded home plate like it was the last penny in Fort Knox.”22

McKechnie won with a collection of mostly forgotten players. The Reds were the only team to win two straight pennants without a single Hall of Famer on the roster, until Lombardi was inducted nearly 50 years later. No other player came close to election.

When the club dropped to third place in 1941 and fourth in 1942, some of the players thought McKechnie showed too much loyalty to his slumping former stars. During the war years, as the military draft gutted the roster, McKechnie filled in with more over-the-hill veterans. In 1945 the depleted Reds fell to seventh place with their first losing record on McKechnie’s watch.

The return of real major leaguers in 1946 brought little improvement. McKechnie’s defense-first dogma produced a lineup that finished last in runs scored and sixth in the standings. While other teams basked in a postwar attendance bonanza, the Reds drew the smallest crowds in the league. Before the season was over, McKechnie resigned under pressure. “Those fans don’t know what’s good for them,” general manager Giles lamented. “They’ve just forced me to fire the best manager in baseball.”23

The 60-year-old McKechnie’s unemployment may have been the shortest in history. Even before he got out of town, Cleveland owner Bill Veeck tracked him down to hire him as a coach. Veeck didn’t think much of his manager, Lou Boudreau, who was also his star shortstop, but McKechnie insisted he would not manage again. Veeck made him the highest-paid coach in the game; his $25,000 salary was three or four times that of most coaches. The contract included a bonus based on attendance. When the Indians drew a record 2.6 million in 1948, McKechnie made around $47,000, more than any Cleveland player except Bob Feller.24

The arrangement was uncomfortable at first, bringing back echoes of Fred Clarke in Pittsburgh’s dugout, but Boudreau came to rely on the man he called “Pops.” McKechnie took primary responsibility for the pitching staff, which was the American League’s best when Cleveland won the ’48 pennant and World Series.

After Veeck sold the Indians in 1949, the new owners got rid of the high-priced coaches. McKechnie retired to his farm in Bradenton, Florida, where he grew tomatoes and citrus fruit. He had bought the land in partnership with his former catcher Jimmie Wilson and also owned a produce-shipping business. An investment in Texas oil wells with another of his former players, Randy Moore, paid off with comfortable incomes for McKechnie and several other baseball men, including Casey Stengel and Al Lopez. Edd and Essie Roush also retired to Bradenton; they lived just two blocks from the McKechnies, and the two wives were close friends.

When Boudreau became manager of the Red Sox in 1952, he wanted McKechnie as his pitching coach. At first McKechnie said he would only work with the team in spring training, but he agreed to a full-time job with his wife’s encouragement. “I know he misses his friends in baseball,” Beryl said. “I can tell every spring.”25

The same week that McKechnie joined the Red Sox, his son Bill Jr. was named Cincinnati’s farm director. Bill Jr. later served as president of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. A grandson, also named Bill, was a minor league executive.

The Boston job lasted two years, until the team decided to go with younger and cheaper coaches. McKechnie retired for good. Beryl died in 1957. They had been married for 46 years and had two daughters and two sons.

In 1962 the Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee voted McKechnie into Cooperstown. He was the fifth man to be elected as a manager, following Connie Mack, John McGraw, Wilbert Robinson, and Joe McCarthy. McKechnie was inducted with Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller, and his friend Edd Roush. At the ceremony he said, “Anything I’ve contributed to baseball I’ve been repaid seven times seven.”26 That’s how the newspapers reported it. McKechnie’s daughter Carol heard him say “seventy times seven,” a quotation from the Biblical book of Matthew.27

That summer two men barged into McKechnie’s home wearing bags over their heads. One waved a gun, the other an iron pipe. They demanded cash. The 75-year-old tried to talk them out of it, but when that didn’t work he grabbed a floor lamp and began swinging it like a Louisville Slugger. The thugs retreated as McKechnie hustled into his bedroom to get his shotgun. The frustrated pair got away without injury and without money.

In a fitting tribute, the city of Bradenton renamed its ballpark McKechnie Field. It is the spring home of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the home of their Class-A affiliate in the Gulf Coast League.

McKechnie contracted leukemia, which weakened his immune system, and died of pneumonia on October 29, 1965. His record shows 1,896 games won, 1,723 lost, with four pennants and two World Series championships, but his former players remembered his patience and decency. Pitcher Junior Thompson, who joined the Reds as a 22-year-old, said, “He and his wife were like parents to me.”28 Paul Waner recalled, “He could be a father to you when he felt he had to be and a taskmaster when that was needed.”29 Paul Derringer said, “In a sentence I’d say he was the greatest manager I ever played for, the greatest manager I ever played against, and the greatest man I ever knew.”30

Notes

Each season, baseball fans and journalists alike identify which players are in the final years of their contracts because a lot rides on how the players produce in their “contract year.” Will a player boost his effort and performance in an effort to improve his value and bargaining power? Or will he crumble under the pressure? Or are players’ performances uncorrelated with where they stand in their contract cycles? Legendary manager Sparky Anderson believed players rose to the occasion in their contract years declaring, “Just give me 25 guys on the last year of their contract; I’ll win a pennant every year.”1 Although anecdotal evidence abounds, this paper uses a robust data set and appropriate player-specific econometric modeling highlighted in O’Neill to show that Anderson was right—players’ performances improve during their contract years.2 To find the answer requires following players throughout their careers to tease out changes predicated on contract status, rather than comparing players to one another given their contract status.

For example, in the last year of a three-year contract with the Mariners in 2006, Raul Ibañez sported an .869 OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage), up from .792 OPS the previous year.3 He subsequently signed an $11 million, two-year contract with the Mariners. In his next contract year, 2008, his OPS of .837 slightly exceeded his 2007 OPS of .831. Ibañez then signed a $31.5 million, three-year contract with the Phillies. At the end of that deal, in 2011, Ibañez’s .707 OPS dipped lower than his previous year’s OPS of .793 and the Yankees signed him to a one-year deal at $1.1 million. Two of Ibañez’s three contract years show boosts in performance, while the third demonstrates a significant drop. He was also 39 years old in 2011, suggesting age must be accounted for while searching for the answer.

The parties in contract negotiations—players, agents, and team owners—understand that incentives affect performance and that performance impacts pay and contract length. Players seek job security, income, and championships, while profit-seeking owners want players to perform well to win games and championships and secure fan enthusiasm. In contract negotiations, how a player has performed over his career serves as an imperfect predictor of his future performance. If players believe that team owners weigh a player’s most recent season more heavily than preceding years, it sets the stage for the contract year phenomenon. The attraction of a lucrative future contract provides ample incentive for a player to put in additional time and effort to boost performance in his contract year. After signing a new guaranteed contract, both pay and contract length are set regardless of actual performance, which removes the previous incentive.4 For longer-term contracts, this may lead to shirking. Eventually, a new contract year arrives and the incentive to boost performance reappears.

Difficulty arises in separating the individual performance of a baseball player from his team’s capabilities. This proves especially true for pitchers since decisions made about their pitch selection, pitch location, and strategy may depend on their team’s fielding proficiency and the strength of the bullpen. For a hitter, the type of pitch he sees may depend in part on the hitters adjacent to him in the lineup and the situation. This paper analyzes individual data on hitters (position players), rather than pitchers, while cognizant of the potential measurement errors. Adjusted OPS (OPS100) serves as the measure of the hitter’s performance. Although random variations in OPS100 from one year to the next can occur, it is unlikely for a large group of players that above average performances would randomly occur during contract years. I contend that effort and performance change from one year to the next depending upon where the player sits in his contract cycle.

Major League Baseball’s use of salary arbitration, contract extensions, and free agency provides avenues for enhanced contract conditions for players. This paper focuses on free agents with six or more years of MLB service for the following four reasons:

(1) free agency is associated with the greatest financial gains for players as teams bid for players’ services;

(2) at least six years of service enable more observations per player to capture more robust results;

(3) free agents with fewer than six years are those who have been demoted to the minors or released; and

(4) there will be a sufficient number of players who may retire at the end of their contract year, an intention that is expected to impact contract year performance.

Previous Research Findings

Previous research on MLB contract year performance shows mixed results. As detailed in O’Neill, the choice of performance measure and statistical technique employed often create contradictory results.5 Researchers generally analyze hitters, believing hitting statistics are less contaminated by team play than pitching statistics. The use of slugging percentage (SLG), at-bats (ABs), days on the disabled list (DL), wins above replacement player, OPS, and runs created per 27 outs (R27), show the range of offensive performance measures investigated. Given differences in players’ abilities, changes in a player’s output should be relative to his ability, indicating why several studies use the deviation between current and three-year moving average of a player’s offensive statistics to capture changes in a player’s output. A deviation-based model by Maxcy et al. finds no significant change in SLG for players in their contract year.6 Maxcy et al. does find that players seeking new contracts spend fewer days on the DL and have more ABs, contending they do so to make themselves more attractive to team owners. Birnbaum does not find a boost in R27 during contract years, whereas Perry does using WARP.7,8

Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression enables one to predict changes in output during the contract year while controlling for observable player traits, such as age, years of MLB experience, team success, etc. However, compiling data on many players (cross sectional data) over several years played (time series data) creates a “panel” dataset. OLS estimation leads to biased results with panel data. Previous studies show robust statistical evidence of the contract year boost when using appropriate panel data estimation techniques, whereas those applying OLS models do not, as discussed in O’Neill.9 Analyzing data on hitters between 2001 and 2004, Dinerstein uses seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) and finds statistically significant increases in a hitter’s SLG during his contract year.10 Interestingly, from the team owners’ perspectives, Dinerstein finds that consistency of a player’s performance mattered more than the most recent performance. If teams are seeking consistency, they will pay for it, and players will begin to aim for steady hitting performances. If Dinerstein is correct, we should see a reduction toward zero in the magnitude of the contract year boost. Hummel and O’Neill employ fixed effects estimation with data on free agents playing 2004–08 and find 4.2–5.5 percent boosts in OPS during contract years.11 They note that players intending to retire no longer have financial incentive to boost effort, although they may desire to go out on top. Their results suggest the former effect dominates, shown by an 11.2 – 13.2 percent decrease in OPS for retiring players in the last year of their contracts, after controlling the diminishment of performance due to age and age-related injury.

Ability, Effort, and Performance

Team owners and general managers observe differences in players’ performances through easily available statistics. The difference between innate ability and effort, however, which together account for the differences in players’ performances, proves difficult to discern. In a given year, a player’s ability generally remains relatively constant, but his effort can change and lead to differences in performance levels. While unlikely that effort changes much during a game, offseason effort and effort between games in-season can vary. Players can exert effort to enhance their productivity by engaging in more intense workouts, restricted leisure activities, and eating healthier diets.

Players alter their effort when their interest dictates. If players believe team owners place greater weights on more recent performances, this motivates players to increase their effort and (ideally) performance during their contract year. But if players perceive that owners value consistent performance, then boosting performance in the contract year remains unlikely. When a player intends to retire at the end of the contract cycle, the incentive to perform and acquire another contract disappears, which is expected to reduce effort and performance during all years of the final contract, including the last year.

Multiple Regression Model to Estimate Adjusted On Base Plus Slugging Percentage

The dependent variable for this study is OPS100, preferred over OPS because it accounts for league play and the player’s home baseball park. This offensive measure accounts for power and reaching base frequently, two events contributing to scoring runs. OPS100 does not depend upon playing time and captures offensive prowess better than RBIs, batting average, HRs, etc.12 Albert and Bennett find OPS a better predictor of scoring runs than its two components separately.13 Barry Bonds holds the single-season record for unadjusted OPS at 1.4217 in 2004 when his SLG was .812 and his OBA was .609.14 During that season he typically walked or hit a home run during a plate appearance.

The suggested regression model for OPS100 for player i in season t is

where: GAMES represents the number of games played; PLAYOFF is a binary variable equal to 1 when the player’s team makes the playoffs and 0 otherwise; PROBRET is the estimated probability of retirement; and CONTRACTYR is a dummy variable denoting whether season t is a contract year (=1) or not (=0). The sign above each β coefficient denotes the expected impact on OPS100 given an increase in the independent variable, holding all else constant. The stochastic error comprises two terms impacting a player’s performance: a_i is the unobserved player effect representing all time-invariant factors that cannot be measured or observed, such as innate ability, work ethic, drive, etc.; and µ_i,t represents random errors, due to accidents, weather, etc.15

The GAMES and PLAYOFF variables serve as control variables to mitigate potential bias. Playing more games helps a player gain confidence at the plate, likely raising his OPS100. Similarly, players with higher OPS100 statistics likely play in more games. The expected positive association between OPS100 and GAMES implies β₁ > 0. Several reasons suggest β₂ > 0. If a player’s team is in the playoff hunt, he is expected to boost his performance to help his team make the playoffs and potentially win a championship. Teams in a playoff race may trade for high performing hitters at the trade deadline, suggesting another reason for the positive association. A financial incentive to perform better also exists, since team members earn playoff revenues. Lastly, higher OPS100 figures may lead to teams making the playoffs.16

At the end of a player’s contract, he may or may not sign a new contract. He may willingly choose to retire, retire reluctantly due to advanced age or injuries, or be forced to retire because no team is willing to hire him despite his desire to keep playing. Unfortunately, it is not feasible to know which case prevails for all players. The variable NOPLAY=1 denotes a player is not on a MLB team the year after a contract year and NOPLAY=0 indicates he is on a roster. If NOPLAY switches from 0 to 1 because a player willingly chooses to retire, the expected impact is a decrease in OPS100 due to the lack of incentive to sign another contract. If NOPLAY switches for one of the other reasons for retirement, it may be due to a low OPS100, in which case the impact of NOPLAY on OPS100 is biased. To mitigate the bias and introduce the potential reasons behind retirement – advanced age, injuries, and poor performance, – a new variable that predicts the likelihood of retirement is created, PROBRET, following work by Krautmann and Solow.17 The estimated probability of retirement, discussed and shown later, is used to predict the retirement intention for each player for each year. Using PROBRET instead of NOPLAY as an independent variable reduces bias. Players who choose to retire do not seek another contract, therefore are expected to have a lower OPS100. Additionally, a player with a low OPS100 is more likely to have a higher probability of retirement as he goes unsigned or reluctantly hangs up his cleats. These suggest β₃ < 0.

MLB hitters are expected to engage in opportunistic behavior and increase their performance during the contract year, thus β₄ > 0. This presumes team owners value the most recent performance as a solid indicator of future performance, making way for the contract year boost. CONTRACTYR is the only independent variable in (1) that satisfies causal inference, rather than simply correlation, since a player’s contract status is known a priori.

Data

Data are collected on all free agent hitters playing during the most recently completed 2006-2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) who had six or more years of MLB experience, a minimum of two years of observation, and played in at least seven games in a year. Choosing players under the same CBA helps reduce potential impacts due to changes in CBAs, since all players and team owners are subject to the same contract and free agency guidelines, and revenue-sharing rules.18 Signing new local and national TV contracts also affect revenue-sharing streams and hence salaries, but these are not captured in the data set.

Hitters with one-year and longer-term contracts are used. Players with longer term contracts generally represent those with higher ability; eliminating those with one-year contracts would potentially bias the results.19 Ultimately, 256 MLB free agent hitters meet the data selection criteria. The panel dataset is unbalanced, meaning the number of observations per player need not be the same.

ESPN.com’s Major League Baseball Free Agent Tracker lists the positions played, age, current team and new team unless re-signed, for all free agents in each year. Players who do not receive another contract are listed as retired or free agent again. Baseball-Reference.com provides OPS100 statistics, the number of games played each season, and the year in which a player debuted in the major leagues. Josh Hermsmeyer unselfishly provided me with the number of days on the disabled list (DL) for all players in 2006-2009 from his MLB Injury Report. Backseat Fan (2010) and FanGraphs (2011) provide the days on the disabled list for players in 2010 and 2011, respectively. For players who change teams via an in-season trade, the playoff status of the final team is used.

Table 1 presents the format of the unbalanced data set for two players. The first player is outfielder (POSITION=9) Bobby Abreu, given an identification code of 2, who was 32 years old in 2006. Abreu appears on MLB rosters in all six years of the 2006-2011 CBA and with the Dodgers in 2012, thus NOPLAY = 0 for all of his years. In his 2008 contract year and prior year, he played with the Yankees, having been traded from the Phillies in 2006. The Yankees made the playoffs in 2006 and 2007 but not in 2008, shown by PLAYOFF=1 and 0, respectively. In 2007, Abreu shows an OPS100 of 113 playing in 158 games, compared to his OPS100 of 120 in 156 games in his 2008 contract year. Abreu debuted in the majors in 1996, implying 11 years of experience (EXP) by 2006. With no days on the DL over the six years, DL=0.

Table 1. Unbalanced Dataset Example
(click image to enlarge)

The second player, outfielder Moises Alou, shows two contract years, in 2006 with the San Francisco Giants and in 2008 with the New York Mets. He had 15 years of MLB experience by 2006 at age 39. Alou did not play on a MLB team in 2009, thus NOPLAY = 1 for 2008. His teams did not make the playoffs in any of the three years. Injuries led to increasing numbers of days on the DL and fewer games played between 2006 and 2007, and by 2008 two major injuries limit Alou’s playing time to only 15 games with 163 days on the DL. Three observations for Alou and six for Abreu indicate an unbalanced dataset.

Sorting the descriptive statistics by contract year status, interesting results appear in Table 2. The differences in means for all variables, except playoffs and days on the DL, are statistically significantly different at p<.001. There are 546 player-year observations for contract years and 470 for non-contract years. The average OPS100 for the contract year is 85.9 compared to 97.2 for the non-contract year, which appears contrary to the contract year boost hypothesis. This contrary result arises chiefly from the ex-post retirements (NOPLAY=1) of 23.1 percent in the contract year observations swamping the 3.2 percent in the non-contract year that may be due to poorer hitters receiving only one-year contracts. Ten fewer average games played in the contract year observations also suggests that less capable hitters have shorter contracts. Comparing the two means proves misleading and too simplistic. Predicting OPS100 via appropriate regression analysis can account for the influence of retirement and other factors to offer a more robust test of the contract year phenomenon.

Table 2. Descriptive Statistics for Contract Year versus Non-Contract Year
(click image to enlarge)

Ordinary Least Squares versus Fixed Effects Estimation

Given panel data, estimation of the model via ordinary least squares (OLS) may be inappropriate due to omitted variable bias that occurs when immeasurable player characteristics in the error term a_i are correlated with some independent variables. For example, a player’s ability, captured in a_i, is expected to be positively correlated with the number of games he plays, GAMES, since higher ability players are likely to play in more games. Suppose higher ability players do have higher OPS100s and that playing in more games does increase OPS100. Ignoring the influence of ability, as in the case of OLS, means that GAMES receives more credit than warranted as the cause of the high OPS100. Consequently, the estimated coefficient of β₁ will be positively biased. Similarly, if a player has an exceptional (albeit non-measurable) work ethic, he will likely contribute more to his team success and increase his team’s chances of making the playoffs. This implies an expected positive correlation between a_i and PLAYOFF. If high OPS100s are attributable to both strong work ethics and playing on a playoff team, then the estimated coefficient of β₂ will also be positively biased in OLS.20 Eliminating bias requires a different technique, namely fixed effects (FE) estimation.

Studying a player’s motivation to perform across the contract cycle suggests concentrating on the within-player behavior. Estimating how each player alters his effort and performance over his contract cycle must be measured against his metrics, not against those of others. FE estimation calculates the mean of each variable over time for each player and subtracts it from the actual observation for each year to demean the data. For example, Bobby Abreu’s average OPS100 over his six years of playing is 116.5, which is subtracted from his actual OPS100 for each of his six years to yield six deviations or demeaned observations for his OPS100. After doing so for all players, the demeaned dependent variable of OPS100 is regressed on the demeaned independent variables via OLS producing the fixed effects within-player coefficients. Time-invariant unobserved traits in a_i, such as ability, have demeaned values of zero, eliminating them from affecting outcomes. Dropping out the unobserved traits via demeaning eliminates correlations and associated biases between unobserved traits and independent variables.21

While FE estimation addresses bias and focuses on changes in players’ behaviors, it comes with a cost. Finding statistical significance for estimated coefficients may be compromised. The variation in OPS100 across 256 players is expected to be much greater than the variation in OPS100 for individual players over their free agency careers. For example, the dataset shows a range in OPS100 from -39 to 192 with a standard deviation of 30.67, while Bobby Abreu’s only vary between 105 and 126 with a 7.09 standard deviation. Other players generally have smaller OPS100 deviations too. Since FE estimation concentrates on the within-player variation and dismisses the between-player differences in OPS100, it reduces the sample variation in OPS100 and lessens the likelihood of statistical significance for the estimated β coefficients. Demeaning the data also reduces the degrees of freedom by 255, further diminishing chances of statistical significance. Therefore, finding a statistically significant FE result for β₄, in spite of these perils, occurs because evidence from the dataset is compelling.

Estimating the Probability of Retiring

Players generally retire at the end of a contract. However, the predicted probability of retiring can change over time until actual retirement occurs and it should be considered by the team owner during negotiations. A player’s likelihood of retiring depends on how many years he has played, how many days have been spent on the DL, and his offensive performance per Krautmann and Solow.22 Equation (2) denotes the regression equation for the probability of retirement for player i in season t as

Players with more years of experience are expected to have increasingly greater likelihoods of retiring since they have signed several contracts and amassed income. Additionally, the aging process that accompanies years of experience takes its toll on bodies often coinciding with familial demands to be home more often. With EXP2 representing years of experience squared, α₁ > 0 and α₂ >0 are expected. More days on the DL are expected to increase PROBRET, i.e., α₃ > 0, since injuries inhibit playing ability and reduce interest by team owners. If a decline in OPS100 portends reduced future performance, it increases retirement likelihood, α₄ < 0. The stochastic error comprises both the unobserved time-invariant player traits a_i and unmeasured time-variant traits v_t such as family issues.

Using NOPLAY as the dependent variable, estimating (2) via FE leads to the linear probability model (3) below. Since NOPLAY is determined after the season, all of the independent variables yield causal inference. The p-values for one-tailed hypotheses tests for the estimated slope coefficients are in parentheses below the estimates.

Days on the disabled list do not statistically predict likelihood of retiring, but remaining variables do. Each additional year of MLB experience increases the likelihood of retiring exponentially and a one point increase in OPS100 reduces it the probability of retirement by .4 percent. Since the -3.38 intercept pertains to the last player’s last year, the predicted output for all players for all years occur as changes from -3.38. For brevity, they are not provided.

For example, Bobby Abreu could have retired after his 2008 contract year, but his predicted probability was .001 (near zero) and he did not retire.23 His likelihood rose to 1.5 percent in 2009 due to his two-point decrease in OPS100 and extra year of experience. By 2010, despite no change in his OPS100 from 2009, the additional year playing leads to a probability of 12.7 percent. In 2011, his sixteenth year in the majors and drop in OPS100 to 104 increases his likelihood to 33 percent. For Moises Alou the model predicted a 60 percent chance of retirement following his 2008 season, when he did in fact retire. The predicted values of PROBRET for all 1,106 observations are calculated and ultimately used to estimate (1).

Results from Estimating OPS100

Regression model (1) derives from two improvements in the model estimated in O’Neill.24 First, traditional theory suggests that as players age, their offensive performance increases at a decreasing rate as they become more comfortable in hitting, until it peaks, and eventually declines as age depreciates hitting skills. O’Neill includes the quadratic form of age, AGE and AGE squared, as independent variables impacting OPS100.

Additionally, O’Neill’s PROBRET estimation employs performance, injury, and the quadratic form of years of experience in place of age. O’Neill finds the odd result that OPS100 increases at an increasing rate after age 33. Having age enter PROBRET through its correlation with years of experience, and then using PROBRET along with age in predicting OPS100, may have led to that usual result. Second, O’Neill segregated catchers and shortstops as defensive players, believing that they sport lower OPS100 statistics in exchange for better defensive play. However, since FE estimation demeans the data and players who are shortstops or catchers generally do not change positions, it does not seem appropriate to segregate them.

The 1,016 player-year observations yielding equation (4) presents the FE multiple regression equation for predicted OPS100 (OPS100^) with one-tailed p-values in parenthesis.25 The Buse-R2 indicates that 78 percent of the variation in adjusted OPS is explained by the model with these independent variables.26 Games played and being on a playoff team indicate the expected positive sign, but they are not statistically significant at 5 percent.

The highly significant PROBRET coefficient says that a one percentage point increase in the likelihood of retiring reduces expected adjusted OPS by 1.0034 points or 1.1 percent decline relative to the mean OPS100 of 91.12. A 10-percentage point increase in the likelihood of retiring, about one half standard deviation in PROBRET, reduces predicted adjusted OPS by 10.034 points.

The estimated model provides evidence of the contract year phenomenon, but the phenomenon depends upon the likelihood of retirement. If a player is in a contract year, holding all else constant, the expected increase in his adjusted OPS is 6.11 points or 6.7 percent increase relative to the mean. But for two otherwise identical players, one in his contract year and the other not, the expected OPS100 for the former is 6.11 points higher. Using the Grossman heuristic that every .100 increase in OPS raises salary by $2,000,000 and converting OPS to OPS100 enables monetizing the 6.11 bump. 27 The contract year boost is expected to increase annual salary by $470,000, about 15.2 percent of the average salary of $3.1 million in 2011.

The impact from the likelihood of retiring offsets the contract year boost. Each additional percentage point increase in a contract year player’s retirement probability reduces the 6.11 boost by 1.0034. A complete offset of no expected change in OPS100 during the contract year occurs with a jump in retirement likelihood of about 6.1 (6.11/1.0034) points. With years of experience driving retirement likelihood exponentially, a decline in expected OPS100 reasonably appears at the end of contracts for players with many years of experience. For instance, a 10-point increase in the probability of retirement leads to a 3.9 (6.11-10.034) decline in expected OPS100 during a contract year.

Conclusions

By using FE estimation to account for changes in each player’s behavior and reducing bias due to unobserved player traits pervasive with OLS estimation, the data show strong support for the contract year boost. From FE estimation, two important contract year findings follow. First, the adjusted OPS of a free agent hitter in his contract year is expected to be 6.7 percent greater than in non-contract year periods—higher than previously noted studies. Second, “retiring” players show a decline in their contract year performance and any models which ignore retirement will be misspecified. OLS estimation of the same dataset (not shown) yields a negative impact on OPS100 during the contract year, albeit not statistically significant. This biased result coincides with the contrary findings in Table 2 that show lower average OPS100 for contract year observations than non-contract year observations.

The model may prove helpful during contract negotiations as one can compare a hitter’s actual performance relative to expectations. Take Albert Pujols as an example. In 2008 and 2009, his OPS100 statistics of 192 and 189 greatly exceeded his predicted statistics of 175 and 176, respectively. In 2010, his OPS100 dropped to 173 to his expected value. In 2011—his contract year—the model predicts an OPS100 of 155, yet he hit only 148. Despite two years of declining OPS100 values that failed to meet the model’s expectations, the Angels still signed Pujols to a 10-year, $240 million contract. His OPS100 has continued to decline, dropping to 138 in 2012 and 117 in 2013. This type of post-contract performance leads me to the next related research project: whether players shirk after getting a new long-term contract.

HEATHER M. O’NEILL is a Professor of Economics at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Entering her 28th year at Ursinus, all of her students know she is an active athlete and a survivor of the 1964 Phillies collapse. While still an avid Phillies fan with a place in her heart for Johnny Callison, she serves as the “Cookie Rojas” in her department by teaching a variety of applied microeconomics courses, including the Economics of Sports. Joining SABR in 2011 opened her eyes to the trove of available data that will engage and excite her for years to come.

Notes

1 John Lowe & John Erardi, “Baseball Hall of Fame Manager Sparky Anderson Dies at 76,” USA Today, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2010-11-04-sparky-anderson-obit_N.htm (accessed July 20, 2014.)

2 Heather O’Neill, “Do Major League Baseball Hitters Engage in Opportunistic Behavior?” International Advances in Economic Research, 19(3), (2013), 215-232.

3 Baseball-Reference.com. “Major League Baseball Statistics and History,” Sports Reference LLC. http://www.baseball-reference.com/players (accessed September 28, 2012).

4 Players with year options or incentive clauses written into contracts maintain motivation to boost performance.

5 Heather O’Neill, “Do Major League Baseball Hitters Engage in Opportunistic Behavior?”

6 Joel Maxcy, Rodney Fort, and Anthony Krautmann, “The effectiveness of incentive mechanisms in Major League Baseball,” Journal of Sports Economics, 3(3), (2002), 246-55.

7 Phil Birnbaum, “Do Players Outperform in Their Free-agent Year?” http://philbirnbaum.com (accessed April 27, 2009).

8 Dayn Perry, “Do Players Perform Better in Contract Years?” Baseball Between the Numbers (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 199-206.

9 See Heather O’Neill, “Do Major League Baseball Hitters Engage in Opportunistic Behavior?” for differences in outcomes due to OLS versus FE estimation.

10 Michael Dinerstein, “Free Agency and Contract Options: How Major League Baseball Teams Value Players,” PhD. Dissertation, Stanford University. May 11, 2007.

11 Matthew Hummel and Heather O’Neill, “Do Major League Baseball Hitters Come Up Big in Their Contract Year?” Virginia Economics Journal, 16, (2011), 13-25.

12 Jonah Keri, “What’s the Matter with RBI? .and Other Traditional Statistics,” Baseball Between the Numbers. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 1-13.

13 Jim Albert and Jay Bennett, “Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game” (New York: Copernicus Books, 2001).

14 Baseball-Reference.com. “Major League Baseball Statistics and History” Sports Reference LLC. http://www.baseball-reference.com/players (accessed September 28, 2012).

15 One could include vt in the error term to denote time-variant, unobserved or measured traits such as changes in family structure. The effects were tested econometrically, found to be insignificant, and excluded in (1). Lawrence Kahn, “Free Agency, Long-Term Contracts and Compensation in Major League Baseball: Estimates from Panel Data,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 75(1), (1993), 157-164.

16 Playoff teams generally have better players and their surrounding presence can enhance a hitter’s performance, which introduces the aforementioned measurement error associated with seeking an individual’s performance.

17 Anthony Krautmann & John Solow, “The Dynamics of Performance over the Duration of Major League Baseball Long-term Contracts,” Journal of Sports Economics, 10(1), (2009), 6-22.

18 Although the CBA was signed at the end of the 2006 season, I include player observations from 2006. As noted at the time, the negotiations taking place during the 2006 season proceeded without much acrimony, in fact yielding ratification prior to expiration of the previous CBA. I am assuming the players were aware and in agreement of what the new agreement would bring, thus working with shared expectations and incentives. See “MLB players, owners announce five year playing deal” http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2637615 October 25, 2006.

19 Lawrence Kahn, “Free Agency, Long-Term Contracts and Compensation in Major League Baseball: Estimates from Panel Data,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 75(1), (1993), 157-164.

20 See Heather O’Neill, “Do Major League Baseball Hitters Engage in Opportunistic Behavior?” for in-depth analysis of bias mitigated by FE estimation.

21 Unfortunately, the impact of time-invariant observable traits, such as race, height, etc. cannot be estimated since they too would drop out of the demeaned variables.

22 Anthony Krautmann & John Solow, “The Dynamics of Performance over the Duration of Major League Baseball Long-term Contracts,” Journal of Sports Economics, 10(1), (2009), 6-22.

23 To preclude predicted linear probabilities below zero, all negative predictions are assigned a probability of .001, essentially zero.

24 Heather O’Neill, “Do Major League Baseball Hitters Engage in Opportunistic Behavior?”

25 The Hausman test with p<.0001 rejected random effects in favor of fixed effects. Random effects assumes no correlation between traits in a_i and any independent variables.

26 When ex-post retirement, NOPLAY, is used instead of the predicted probability of retirement, the Buse-R2 falls to .68, suggesting less predictive power.

27 Mitchell Grossman, Timothy Kimsey, Joshua Moreen & Matthew Owings, “Steroids in Major League Baseball” (2007), http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/rjmorgan/mba211/steroids%20and%20major%20league%20baseball.pdf (accessed October 23, 2012).

In the 2011 postseason, David Freese made a name for himself with his spectacular and timely hitting and won both the National League Championship Series and World Series MVP awards. It cannot be denied: Freese hit well in the clutch that October. But would it have been reasonable to expect the same from him in the future? Is he in fact a “clutch hitter”? Do clutch hitters even exist?

Sabermetricians have been arguing about the reality of clutch hitting for quite some time now (see, for example, the special section of the 2008 issue of Baseball Research Journal). At this point, an impressive group of sophisticated researchers has carefully analyzed large data sets using a variety of statistical methods to test the hypothesis that some players consistently outperform others in high-pressure situations. For example, Phil Birnbaum analyzed batting data from the years 1974 through 1990 to test for the consistency of players’ clutch hitting from one season to the next.¹ A clutch hit was defined as one occurring in the “seventh inning or later, tied or down by three runs or less, unless the bases are loaded, in which case down by four runs.” For all players with at least 50 at-bats in clutch situations, batting averages in clutch situations (corrected for batting averages in non-clutch situations) were calculated, and consistency across consecutive seasons was assessed with a simple linear regression analysis.

Needless to say, however one defines and measures clutch hitting, for any given season, some players will have higher scores than others. Those players can without argument be said to have hit better in the clutch during that baseball season. But if clutch hitting is not just subject to random variation, and if some individual players are truly more “clutch” than others, then those players should consistently perform well in the clutch relative to other players—just as extroverted people are consistently more extroverted than introverts, and honest people are consistently more honest than dishonest people. But Birnbaum found no evidence for that sort of consistency.

Although there is some disagreement about the correct interpretation of these and related findings, the following would arguably be a consensus statement: Clutch hitting either does not exist or is a marginal, difficult-to-detect phenomenon that accounts for only a tiny amount of the variance in batting performance.² Birnbaum’s samples, for example, were large enough so that even correlations as low as approximately .17 would have reached conventional levels of statistical significance. Relationships of that magnitude are not very impressive, and are typically not “perceptible on the basis of casual observation.”³

Note that even if compelling evidence were presented for the existence of clutch hitting, that would not necessarily mean that what observers perceive to be clutch hitting is real, and not an illusion. The effects of being “clutch” on performance could be so tiny that they would not necessarily even correlate with people’s subjective assessments of individual players’ clutch hitting abilities. People’s intuitions about both the presence and meaning of patterns in athletic performance are often flawed. For example, ample research has demonstrated that the “hot hand” in basketball—the increased likelihood of players making a successful shot if their previous shot was successful—is more illusory than real.⁴

However, two aspects of the debate over the existence of clutch hitting, while they might seem to go without saying, arguably have important ramifications for the question “does clutch hitting exist?”—

1. The question “does clutch hitting exist?” can essentially be rephrased as “do some hitters have psychological characteristics that enhance their performance in high pressure situations?”
2. Published research on the topic has actually addressed the question “does clutch hitting exist at the major-league level?” That might in fact be the question of most interest to researchers, but SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research) is not SAMLBR (the Society for American Major League Baseball Research)

In tandem, those two observations highlight the fact that existing research has, for all intents and purposes, been based on the assumption that major-league ballplayers vary significantly in the psychological characteristics associated with clutch hitting. What might those characteristics be? And is it reasonable to expect major leaguers to represent different levels of those characteristics? If not, what are the implications for the search to find convincing and replicable evidence for clutch hitting?

The psychological characteristics of clutch performers

What traits (that is, stable dispositions) might be especially pronounced in players who perform exceptionally well in the clutch? The following is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all possible personal characteristics, but the three I focus on here represent three general ways in which clutch hitters might stand out from others specifically, in terms of their affective, cognitive, and/or motivational qualities.

Trait anxiety. Anxiety, of course, is a state that certain experiences trigger in people. Everyone has encountered situations that that are threatening, challenging, and unpredictable enough to at least temporarily trigger somatic effects like increased heart rate and perspiration, trembling, or even, in extreme cases, nausea. Situations in which a person’s social reputation and self-esteem are at stake are especially potent sources of anxiety—situations like those involving publicly observable athletic performances taking place when the outcome of a contest is at stake.

Some people, though, are less prone to experiencing anxiety than others; such people are said to be low in trait anxiety.⁵ These individuals have been found to be less susceptible than others to stress-induced deterioration of performance. Relative to athletes high in trait anxiety, those low in trait anxiety should thus consistently perform better in clutch situations. Although direct evidence involving baseball players is lacking, this hypothesis has been supported in the context of other sports, such as basketball.^6,7

Self-consciousness. In high-pressure athletic situations, your attention should of course be focused on the task at hand (e.g., hitting the pitched ball). You could, though, attend to other things, such as whether or not other people are observing you, and what they might be thinking about you. In addition, you could carefully monitor your own internal states to determine how confident you are feeling or how you are reacting physiologically to the situation. You might also pay careful attention to the positions of your limbs (for example, focusing on your batting stance and how you are gripping the bat).

People high in self-consciousness are those who are most prone to let their attention drift to those other things and to become acutely self-aware in high-pressure situations. Unfortunately, becoming preoccupied with one’s physical, psychological, and/or social self can undermine one’s performance. Indeed, dispositional self-consciousness has been found be negatively correlated with performance under pressure.8 Relative to baseball players high in self-consciousness, those low in self-consciousness should consistently perform better in clutch situations.

Achievement motivation. Coming through in the clutch and playing a central role in your team’s victory is a major accomplishment, and ballplayers who hit walk-off home runs are more respected and celebrated than those who hit home runs in the ninth inning of a 13-1 blowout. When Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner tagged Dave Winfield “Mister May” the nature of the criticism—by comparing him to “Mister October” Reggie Jackson—was clear to everyone. Similarly, most baseball fans remember Francisco Cabrera’s two-out pinch hit in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Seven of the 1992 National League Championship Series; the two runs he knocked in won the game, the series, and the pennant. Fewer fans, it can be assumed, remember that that was his only hit of the series, and it is unlikely that many could identify the Braves’ leading hitter for the series: Mark Lemke, with a .333 batting average. He knocked in two runs also—but one was in the Braves’ 5-1 victory in Game One and the other in their 13-5 victory in Game Two.

But people differ in terms of how strongly they desire to overcome challenges, outperform others, and stand out from their peers. In other words, there are individual differences in achievement motivation.9 According to an influential definition of this personal characteristic, it is associated with “intense, prolonged and repeated efforts to accomplish something difficult,” having “the determination to win,” enjoying competition, and being “stimulated to excel by the presence of others.”¹⁰ Relative to baseball players low in achievement motivation, those high in achievement motivation should consistently perform better in clutch situations.

Major-league baseball players: An extreme population

If clutch hitting is related to the personality traits described above (and related ones), and if major league ballplayers vary in terms of their consistent ability to hit in the clutch, then it follows that major league ballplayers must also vary in terms of those traits. Is that a reasonable expectation? Data from a battery of personality tests administered to major leaguers would answer that question. Such data, alas, do not exist. But an educated guess is still possible.

Consider, for example, what one can learn from SABR’s Biography Project (BioProject) website (http://bioproj.sabr.org/). There is, of course, no shortage of sources of information about Hall of Fame-caliber ballplayers or other perennial All-Stars. But the BioProject is notable for its exhaustively researched stories about players who might be memorable to passionate baseball fans, but who are far from household names. Consider, if you will, the following quartet: Ken Frailing, Duffy Dyer, Dalton Jones, and Jerry Adair (selected for, among other things, being prominent in the baseball card collections of my youth). Collectively, they represent 41 years of major-league service—and also, a grand total of zero All-Star Game appearances. None ever led the league in a significant batting or pitching category (although Adair grounded into the most double plays in the American League in 1965). With the exception of Adair, none ever received a single MVP award vote.

Of course, all had one other distinguishing characteristic: they were extraordinarily talented athletes. Frailing, for example, had an eye-popping 13-0 record with an ERA of 0.17 during his senior year in high school. That same school later selected him as their “Athlete of the Century.” Dyer, when he was in high school in Arizona, was recognized “as one of the state’s top ballplayers,” and he led his team to a state championship in 1963. Dalton Jones also led his high school team to the state championship game (in Louisiana)—but scouts had already started “flocking around” him when he was 14 years old. As for Adair, “no athlete from Oklahoma had a more storied pre-professional career than Adair, not even Mickey Mantle.” A sportswriter in Oklahoma describes him as “the best athlete to come out of the Tulsa area in his lifetime.”¹¹

In short, even unremarkable major-league baseball players are elite performers. To reach the major leagues, players undergo an extremely rigorous selection process. In fact, given the number of people who would find a career in professional sports to be appealing, the reference group used to evaluate their aptitude for the game is essentially most of the male population of the United States (and increasingly, a number of other countries as well).

It could conceivably be the case that once a player reaches the majors, the level of pressure and the stakes involved rise to levels that players have not previously experienced, and so the threshold at which different psychological limitations and vulnerabilities might matter are reached for the first time. Nonetheless, anyone with characteristics that inhibit top-flight performance—either physical or psychological ones—will be weeded out well before the call-up to the majors. Although no direct evidence is available, high levels of trait anxiety and low levels of achievement motivation are unlikely to be found among men on major-league rosters. The same is true of high levels of self-consciousness; indeed, the rare exceptions to that rule are notable enough to have become legendary, as in the “Steve Blass Disease,” or the “Steve Sax Syndrome.” Professional ballplayers who suddenly become incapable of completing routine plays report that their problems are associated with excruciating self-awareness. As Dale Murphy put it, “Your mind interferes, and you start thinking, Where am I throwing? What am I doing? instead of just throwing. Your mind starts working against you.”¹²

Statistical implications

To ask “Do some hitters have psychological characteristics that enhance their performance in high pressure situations?” is to ask the question “Is the relationship between game situation (high stakes, low stakes) and batting performance (hitting safely, knocking in runs) moderated by psychological variables?” Moderator variables are variables that affect the relationship between two other variables (in this case, game situation and performance); in other words, moderation is in evidence when the relationship between two variables depends on a third variable. But if that third variable hardly varies, it is not much of a variable, and it cannot be a moderator.

That point can probably be understood intuitively, but it can also be formalized in statistical terms. Moderation is typically assessed with a multiple regression analysis. Essentially, one tries to predict or estimate a dependent variable, Y (e.g., performance), on the basis of an independent variable or variables, X (e.g., game situation), a moderating variable, M (e.g., trait anxiety, self-consciousness, achievement motivation), and most crucially, the interaction of X and M (XM). One or more of the predictor variables might account for statistically significant variance in the dependent variable.

However, a variable that itself has little or no variance cannot account for variance in another one. Thus, if M does not vary across observations, it (and the interaction term, XM) drops out of the equation, and there can be no moderation effect. All that would be left in the statistical model would be a general estimate of how well batters in general perform in clutch versus non-clutch situations.

Looking for clutch hitting in the right places: A challenge and prediction

An implication of this analysis is that clutch hitting is unlikely to be detected in data from the major leagues; major league batters simply do not vary enough in terms of the personal qualities that would lead some to perform better and some to perform worse in the clutch. Unmotivated, highly self-conscious men with trouble controlling anxiety are unlikely to be found on the rosters of teams in the American and National Leagues.

There is, however, no reason clutch hitting should not exist in populations of baseball players for whom the relevant moderating variables are associated with a significant amount of variance. In other words, clutch hitting should be detectable at lower levels of competition, among players who have not undergone the rigorous selection process experienced by major leaguers. Among such players one could reasonably expect to find people with relatively high levels of anxiety and self-consciousness and low levels of achievement motivation.

Assembling an appropriate data set, however, could be quite a challenge. To assess consistency in clutch hitting at a particular level of competition in a manner consistent with past investigations of the phenomenon, one must find a reasonably large group of batters who (1) stay at that level for more than one year, and (2) accrue enough plate appearances during each of those years to provide a reliable and valid performance measure. Minor-league rosters, however, are quite unstable from year to year. In addition, those players who stay mired at a particular level might differ in systematic ways from those who do not, and thus might not be a representative sample of ballplayers. Another possible source of data might be high school baseball, but high school teams do not play enough games in a given year to satisfy the second criterion.

More promising would be college baseball. Players in college have multi-year careers, and their teams play dozens of games—enough so that players end seasons with hundreds of at-bats. In addition, although most people would not have a realistic chance of making the cut for a college team, it is still the case that the physical skills and psychological attributes required at this level are not what they have to be at the major-league level.

As a result, with a fair amount of confidence, I end this essay with the following prediction: if anyone can construct a data set involving a large number of college players who had substantial amounts of playing time across multiple seasons, and conducts a “Cramer test ” of the kind conducted by Birnbaum, evidence for stable levels of clutch hitting will be detected.¹³ A failure to find such evidence would not, of course, provide definitive evidence that the phenomenon of clutch hitting is nonexistent. It could instead suggest that the standard criteria for distinguishing between high-pressure batting situations and less pressured ones do not correspond closely enough to how batters directly experience those situations. In other words, faced with null data (that is, a failure to detect the existence of consistent clutch hitting), one might choose to re-examine standard definitions of clutch hitting. But the odds of finding straightforward, unambiguous evidence for clutch hitting would seem to be much more favorable for almost any other sample of batters other than major leaguers.

LEONARD S. NEWMAN is Associate Professor of Psychology at Syracuse University, where he is the director of the social psychology program. He is also the editor of the journal “Basic and Applied Social Psychology.” His father grew up in Manhattan rooting for the Giants, and his mother is from Brooklyn—so needless to say, he’s a Mets fan.

Notes

1 Phil Birnbaum, “Clutch Hitting and the Cramer Test,” Baseball Research Journal 37 (2008): 71-75.

2 Bill James (2008), “Mapping the fog,” Baseball Research Journal 37, 76-81; P. Birnbaum, “Response to ‘Mapping the fog,’” Baseball Research Journal 37, 82-84.

3 Jacob Cohen, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 79.

4 Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,” Cognitive Psychology 3 (1985), 295–314; Alan Reifman, Hot Hand: The Statistics Behind Sports Greatest Streaks (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012).

5 Michael W. Eysenck, Anxiety and Cognition: A Unified Theory (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 1997).

6 Sian L. Beilock & Rob Gray, “Why Do Athletes Choke Under Pressure?” in Gershon Tenenbaum & Robert C. Eklund (eds.), Handbook of Sport Psychology (3rd Ed.) (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2007), 425-444.

7 Guiying Hu, Baihua Xu, & QI Xu, “An experimental study on the ‘choking’ psychological mechanism of adolescent basketball players,” Psychological Science 31 (China ,2008): 528-531; J. Wang, D. Marchant, T. Morris, & P. Gibbs, “Self–consciousness and Trait Anxiety as Predictors of Choking in Sport,” Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 7 (2004): 174-185.

8 Sian L. Beilock & Rob Gray, “Why Do Athletes Choke Under Pressure?” in Gershon Tenenbaum & Robert C. Eklund, 425-444; Georgia Panayiotou, “Chronic Self-Consciousness and Its Effects on Cognitive Performance, Physiology, and Self-Reported Anxiety,” Representative Research In Social Psychology 28 (2005): 21-34; J. Wang, D. Marchant, T. Morris, & P. Gibbs, 174-185.

9 Joan L. Duda, “Motivation in Sport: The Relevance of Competence and Achievement Goals,” in Andrew J. Elliot, & Carol S. Dweck (eds.), Handbook of Competence and Motivation (New York: Guilford Publications, 2005), 318-335; Andrew J. Elliot & Holly A. McGregor, ”A 2×2 Achievement Goal Framework,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (2001): 501-519.

10 Henry A. Murray, Explorations in Personality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 164.

11 All quotations and information about the players discussed in this paragraph were retrieved from the SABR Baseball Biography Project at http://sabr.org/bioproject

12 Richard Demak, “Mysterious Malady,” Sports Illustrated, April 8, 1991.

13 Richard D. Cramer, “Do Clutch Hitters Exist?,” Baseball Research Journal, 6 (1977), 74-79.