David Block

Block’s path to undermining these assumptions was circuitous. Born in Chicago in 1944 and with a career in Information Technology, Block had been a collector of baseball ephemera and memorabilia. At first it was cards and other standard material, but then he began to branch into things that were more difficult to find.

There were nineteenth-century prints from Harpers Magazine and then photographs. Block said he was interested in depictions of college, high school, and sandlot baseball rather than the professionals. From there, he transitioned to early books and, with retirement, set out to do an annotated bibliography of them. Of necessity, he felt, the introduction to this book would have to discuss the origins of the game. But when he went to do his research, he was surprised to find how little was available, and how vague the available was. It was mostly rounders, and when he went to research rounders, he couldn’t find anything.

He was traveling to some of the most heralded libraries in the U.S. — Berkeley, Stanford, San Francisco Public, UCLA, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress and New York Public. He worked with SABR members in the Bobby Thomson Chapter in England. He was looking in old dictionaries, booksellers catalogs and all kinds of books about sports.

His key discovery came in a 1796 German review of children’s games — Spiele zur Uebung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde Unschuldiger Jugendfreuden (“Games for the Exercise and Recreation of Body and Spirit for the Youth and His Educator and All Friends of Innocent Joys of Youth”). It included a short description of “Englische base-ball,” with one player throwing a pitch to another, who had three chances to hit it. If he did hit it, he then ran counterclockwise around the bases attempting to score a run. Further research confirmed to Block that Chadwick’s insistence on rounders as the foundation game was misplaced. Rounders was the name of base-ball when played in Devon, the western English county where Chadwick lived before emigrating to America.

The bibliography had been overtaken by the introduction. When Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game was published in 2005, it overturned the thinking about rounders and about who baseball’s father was. It was clear baseball had no father. It had evolved.

Block’s research in the wake of the book has been greatly aided by the spread of digitized databases of old newspapers and other materials. It has also been aided by the publicity his work has received, notably in England. He has made seven trips to the U.K. since the book, working at libraries in London, Oxford, and other cities, and making extensive use of the search capabilities of the British Newspaper Archive, a digitized collection of local and regional newspaper from around the island.

He calculates he has turned up about 250 references to base ball dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century, and including such notables as the Prince of Wales (1755). His next step is to turn all of these fragmentary mentions into some kind of narrative or annotated tool for future researchers.

To learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award, click here.

DICK CRAMER, recipient of a 2015 Henry Chadwick Award, has been doing sabermetrics for just about as long as anyone alive.

Cramer grew up near Wilmington, Delaware, where his father worked as a chemist for DuPont. Young Dick turned to baseball early on. “I decided that following the Phillies,” Cramer related in Alan Schwarz’s book, The Numbers Game, “would be more fun and less costly than building and crashing model airplanes.”

“In 1958,” Schwarz wrote, “when he was 16, Cramer’s parents went away for the weekend and left Dick $15 for expenses; he promptly mailed the cash to APBA for its baseball dice game. The Cramers were furious, but Dick was hooked.” He wasn’t shattered by the Phillies’ collapse in 1964, and somehow managed to remain optimistic about them for a few more years. Maybe until shortly after 1966, when, Cramer says, “I started doing ‘analytics,’ and on the basis of computer simulations had reinvented OPS (as on-base average times, not plus, slugging average) by 1969. A squib in The Sporting News in 1971 introduced me to SABR, and Bob Davids then introduced me to Pete Palmer.”

Along the way, Cramer had earned an AB in Chemistry & Physics from Harvard in 1963, and a Ph.D in Physical Organic Chemistry from MIT in 1967.

In the ’70s, Cramer served one term as SABR’s vice president and was on the Board of Directors for a spell. Cramer’s first published article appeared in the 1975 Baseball Research Journal. But it was his second article, published two years later, that established a significant baseline for future analysts. In “Do Clutch Hitters Exist?” Cramer looked at batting statistics from 1969–70, and his conclusion was easy to grasp: “[T]here is no tendency for players who were clutch hitters in 1969 to be clutch hitters in 1970. True, a few of the ‘clutch hitters’ in 1969 were also ‘clutch hitters’ in 1970; but as many became ‘unclutch’ and most became average, exactly as would be expected if ‘clutch hitting’ is really a matter of luck.”

More than 30 years later, Cramer and Palmer teamed up for yet another study of clutch hitting, this time using oodles more data and different methods. Their conclusion? “Thus the results of the original study are yet again confirmed, this time by every analysis we can devise and based mostly on 50 seasons of major league play. Over this period there is no convincing evidence that any fluctuation of any batter’s performance in tense situations had any cause beyond random variation.”

In 1980, Palmer introduced Cramer to Steve Mann, who introduced Cramer to Matt Levine; in 1981, the latter two founded STATS, Inc. Over the following decade-plus, Cramer remained heavily involved as STATS became one of the leading providers of sports information in the world (which of course it remains today).

Following a decade-long hiatus from serious baseball work, Cramer reconnected with sabermetrics in 2004. “For the last ten years,” Cramer says, “I’ve been greatly enjoying working with Retrosheet, as my interests and goals are much like Dave Smith’s and he is so extraordinarily good at making things work together.”

Outside of baseball, Cramer founded and led SmithKline’s computer-aided drug design, holding a variety of positions. In 1983, he joined Tripos (now Certara Discovery) and until recently served as Vice President for Science. In 2000, Cramer moved to Santa Fe, where he lives in the Sand River cohousing development.

To learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award, click here.

BILL DEANE

Deane’s personal research interests delve into both the game’s numbers and its history. They include an ongoing list of players who homered in their final major league at bats (which he considers his best project), statistical charts such as most homers and RBIs in a season by a leadoff hitter, most hits and most homers in a player’s first 1,000 at bats, and best performances before the All-Star break, an ongoing list of major leaguers who were murdered, committed suicide, or died accidental deaths, the documenting of successful executions of the hidden-ball trick, and the debunking and disproving of baseball myths.

Bill served as Total Baseball’s managing editor for the last edition, and compiled the Major League Baseball Calendar 1999–2006. His compilation of the voting breakdowns for every Most Valuable Player Award, Cy Young Award, and Rookie of the Year Award elections since 1911 formed the basis of his “Awards and Honors” chapter in Total Baseball. In the years before those awards were given, Bill created Hypothetical Awards, using his knowledge of voting patterns to determine who the likely winners would have been.

Deane is also considered the foremost expert on Hall of Fame voting, and baseball fans look forward to his annual HOF predictions, which have for the most part been amazingly accurate. He has been featured, acknowledged, or quoted in countless books, news-paper and magazine articles, and radio, television, and online interviews. He served on the Committee for Historical Accuracy for Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia, and is a regular contributor to SABR-L. His posts are often in multiple parts, which answer questions, correct previous responses, or add new information to a whole range of baseball-related subjects.

Bill became a baseball fan at age ten, and four years later had his first published baseball-related piece, in the nationally syndicated “Johnny Wonder” column. Since then, he has written many books and hundreds of articles in such publications as Baseball America, Baseball Digest, The Sporting News, Street & Smith’s Official Baseball Yearbook, and USA Today Baseball Weekly. He recently turned two of his major research interests into books: Baseball Myths: Debating, Debunking and Disproving Tales from the Diamond (2012), and Finding the Hidden-Ball Trick: The Colorful History of Baseball’s Oldest Ruse (2015), both published by Rowman & Littlefield. Still, he considers himself a researcher first and a writer second. Bill, who was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, has lived within ten miles of the Baseball Hall of Fame since 1986.

To learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award, click here.

His first great contribution to baseball history was “Out at Home: Baseball Draws the Color Line, 1887.” This monumentally important essay was first published in The National Pastime in 1983, then anthologized twice more within the decade—in both Warner Books’ The National Pastime and Scribners’ The Armchair Book of Baseball. It is not too much to say that this long essay transformed our understanding of black baseball.

When Jackie Robinson opened the 1947 season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, most baseball fans and writers believed that he was the first black to play in the major leagues. (Robinson himself believed that at the time.) It has turned out he was at least the fourth. William Edward White was the first, in 1879; Jerry Malloy died before this discovery. Who are the other two we know of? Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Welday Wilberforce Walker. For a few years in the 1880s, with slavery dead and Jim Crow not yet ascendant, a spirit of racial tolerance prevailed in America that permitted black and white to rub shoulders without strife. Many black players performed at all levels of Organized Baseball into the 1890s, but the color bar that Jackie Robinson broke was erected in the International League in 1887. How and why it happened was largely unknown until Malloy pried open century-old secrets.

A history major in college who worked as a retail clerk in Mundelein, Illinois, Jerry was particularly delighted that it won commendation from C. Vann Woodward, author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) and the preeminent historian of American race relations.

Malloy’s subsequent work included articles for the Baseball Research Journal and The National Pastime. For University of Nebraska Press he edited a contextual republication of Sol White’s History of Colored Baseball with Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886–1936; his commentary was superb. The late Jules Tygiel, also a Chadwick Award recipient, said of him, “His articles for SABR were pathbreaking and exceptional and rank among the very best this organization has ever published. Even more so, I doubt that the best among us have ever been as generous with their research and support as was Jerry.”

In the acknowledgment to his Seymour-Medal-winning Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart, David Zang wrote: “In an unprecedented act of generosity, Jerry shared not only his thoughts on Walker but also his entire file of documents. They arrived at a point long after I thought this manuscript was complete. Their availability added detail and insight that would have been otherwise lacking.”

Jerry Malloy died at the age of fifty-four, when he was immersed in further personal and collaborative research of the African American experience in baseball. What he left us was not voluminous, but it was choice and utterly indispensable. He had set the drawing of the color line in baseball at 1887, but then had found another instance, 20 years earlier, which he shared excitedly. With his typical modesty, Jerry emailed several colleagues about his discovery:

“Appended is a transcription of a four-page, hand-written ‘Report of a Delegate of the Pythian to the Pennsylvania State Convention,’ dated October 18, 1867. It relates the events of the attempt of the Pythians, a prominent black club from Philadelphia, to join the Pennsylvania Base Ball Association, at a meeting held at the Court House, in Harrisburg, on October 16, 1867…. I know of several researchers who would be interested in this Pythians delegate report, as it documents baseball polity’s early rejection of black ballplayers and teams. I thought I’d make it available to SABR’s online membership. I did the best I could with the transcription, and any errors are mine.”

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A college ballplayer at Ohio State before he settled in California’s Bay Area in 1983, Nemec got started writing baseball trivia books in the 1970s. He moved on to writing a history of the game’s rules before starting to deliver his signature contributions in the ’90s: The Beer and Whisky League (about the major league American Association, 1882–91; 1994) and The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball (1997), still cited as the definitive treatment of the subject even before it was expanded and republished in 2006.

In a sense, Nemec’s career as a historian was made possible not simply by a love for the game’s history, but the realization of how much had been left unwritten. Thinking back on the reference books available before the first Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia was published in 1969, Nemec was inspired to fill in the blanks.

“I was caught irrevocably by the nineteenth century almost from the first moment I opened my copy of the original edition of Turkin and Thompson,” Nemec reflected. “Since no team rosters were provided, I soon began compiling my own of every team from 1871 to what was then 1951, I believe. Long before I finished I realized that I would be left with many gaps, particularly with the National Association clubs—positions unfilled, a shortage at certain positions with regard to the number of games played, etc. It became an ambition even then to fill those gaps, find first names for the many players listed only as a last name, uncover birth and death dates, etc. From that grew a larger ambition to one day write about my discoveries. What form that would take I still had no notion, nor did I until the early 2000s, when I acquired box scores for almost every 19c major league game. But as I went through them, things gradually began clicking into place.”

The culmination of his tireless pursuit and publication of information about the nineteenth century was his recent trilogy of books comprising biographies of every major league player, manager, principal owner, regular umpire, and league president prior to 1901. (The first two volumes, mostly on players, were published by Bison in 2011; the third, which added more umps and execs to the rolls, was a McFarland title in 2012.)

“The trilogy brought dimension to hundreds of figures that heretofore had only been ghostly wisps, some much fuller than others depending of what my research yielded,” Nemec said. “I regard all these bios as works in progress; there is still much to be learned of interest and significance about each of these ghosts. Since these books were published I have continued to expand my bios as new research emerges, and some of the results now appear on the SABR BioProject site.”

Nemec is quick to observe that SABR also played a significant, albeit brief, part in his original research: “My biggest break was SABR’s acquiring the usage of ProQuest material for one full year — before ProQuest pulled the rug upon discovering how many hits the site was getting each and every day from SABR members.”

Nemec’s contributions to baseball research far transcend any single category, more regularly aiming at entertaining baseball fans of any era. His interests have also ranged far beyond baseball, as he’s a playwright who also has eight novels and true crime nonfiction titles to his credit. But that creative breadth allowed Nemec the opportunity to create singular works like his nineteenth century baseball novel, Early Dreams (2004).

“Early Dreams paints a portrait not only of what it was like to be a struggling rookie player in the tumultuous 1884 season—the most interesting one in all of baseball history in my opinion—but also to serve as a prism through which life in 1880s America could be viewed,” Nemec said. “Indeed, baseball has always been an excellent prism in that respect. It was a treat to find a vehicle in which I could combine the two. … I started as a fiction writer and will probably end as one.”

Reflecting on his Chadwick-worthy career, Nemec observed, “I take great pleasure in breathing new life into nineteenth century research and resurrecting the many individuals who played key roles in the game’s early development, both on the field and off, but have never been given their due. …I’ll always be more drawn to the Sammy Vicks than to the Babe Ruths, and not only in baseball.”

To learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award, click here.