Thorn: ‘All the record books are wrong’ by Frank J. Williams
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on January 5, 2015:
In the 1982 launch of The National Pastime, reissued by SABR last month, a previously unpublished writer named Frank J. Williams wrote a groundbreaking article. “A breakthrough,” I called it then: “the ‘Rosetta Stone’ for deciphering won-lost decisions of the dead-ball era.” In the years since, every record-keeping book, website, and organization has been guided by the principles Williams deduced from his awe-inspiring coverage of games from 1876 to 1919. Self-described as a bank accounting officer whose special interests were the Boston Braves, Red Sox, and Joe Wood, Williams carved out an enduring place in baseball literature with this one. For more about Frank, who remains an active researcher, see this, from 1999: (http://sabr.org/content/sabr-salute-frank-williams).
Pitchers were winning games long before 1876, but were not awarded victories because in an era of nearly universal complete games and restricted substitution, there was rarely a question about which pitcher to credit or debit. In 1885, as Frank Vaccaro wrote in “Origin of the Modern Pitching Win”, Henry Chadwick “published National League individual totals in the 1885 Spalding Guide. The practice did not catch on. The loss came later. On July 7, 1888, The Sporting News for the first time published win-loss records, and only then after the following disclaimer: ‘It seems to place the whole game upon the shoulders of the pitcher and I don’t believe it will ever become popular even with so learned a gentleman as Mr. Chadwick to father it. Certain it is that many an execrable pitcher game is won by heavy hitting at the right moment after the pitcher has done his best to lose it.’”
I heartily recommend Vaccaro’s article, published in the Baseball Research Journal in 2013. But Williams’ monumental work came thirty years earlier and should be read first. Here it is, online for the first time.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2015/01/05/all-the-record-books-are-wrong/
Read part 2 here and part 3 here.
- Related link: Download your free e-book copy of The National Pastime’s Premiere Issue, edited by John Thorn
Originally published: January 9, 2015. Last Updated: January 9, 2015.