Society for American Baseball Research

The 1980 BRJ, like most editions, is now available on SABR's website.

This is the strongest Baseball Research Journal edition yet. It features one of the classic works of sabermetric analysis, some excellent biographical portraits, a look at minor league umpiring practice in 1900, a glimpse at the 1880 opening of the original Polo Grounds, some analysis of why Fulton County Stadium was a launching pad, and an interview with Joe Oeschger about the longest major league game and other memories. Authors included Stew Thornley, Seymour Siwoff(!), David Smith, Ted DiTullio, and Richard Cramer. This issue has, of course, some variations in quality, but there's really nothing you could fairly characterize as filler in this edition.

The classic sabermetric piece is Dick Cramer's "Average Batting Skill Through Major League History," which uses a moving average based on Cramer's Batter Win Average (BWA) statistic (discussed in the 1977 BRJ) in an attempt to discover whether player performance has increased or decreased over time. In earlier reads of Cramer's essay I'd been concerned about his treatment of outliers and averages, but this reading has convinced me that he handled the basic question well. There is room for some quibbling, of course, but his basic point--that the talent level of major league players has increased substantially over the years, and that it continues to increase--is well argued and well supported by his data. This article is often cited as an important early analytical effort, which it is; someone should apply modern methodologies to the question and see how things hold up.

The early chapters of the 1980 edition are devoted to the post-playing careers of Billy Sunday (by Robert Muhlbach), Alfred W. Lawson (Lyell Henry), and Frank W. Olin (Tom Hufford). Henry's Lawson piece is particularly interesting.

A number of events are commemorated in this journal, including The Last Tripleheader (A.D. Suehsdorf), a 1880 night game between two department store teams (Oscar Eddleton), and the Polo Grounds opening mentioned above (John J. O'Malley). Seasons considered include Joe Bauman's 72 HR campaign (Bart Ripp) and the 1884 St. Paul Unions (Stew Thornley--I think his first SABR publication). Biographical treatments, besides those mentioned above, included Negro Leaguer Cannonball Dick Redding (John Holway) and Jim Sheckard (Gregg Dubbs). There's also a cute little piece on Rube Waddell in college by Harold Esch.

More or less sabermertic pieces, besides Cramer's effort, included Seymour Siwoff's accounting of some previously-undiscovered RBI records, David Smith on stolen bases (using Maury Wills data), and John Schwartz' look at Intentional Walks.

Robert Kingsley's look at Atlanta home run rates and Richard Burtt's similar look at Pittsburgh triple rates both seem inadequate at this time, as both explicitly discount what seem to be obvious causes (altitude in the Atlanta case, field dimensions in the Pittsburgh case). I think this is partly a case of we better understand these dynamics nowadays, and partly willful blindness on the authors' parts.

There are, of course, the usual set of lists-with explanatory paragraphs; I shan't list them here. Al Kermisch's Researchers Notebook looked, among other things, at a postponed game in the 1918 World Series, Silver King's no hitter, the 1889 Louisville player's strike, and a recording error in Harry Schafer's fielding records. Along the same lines was Arthur Ahrens attempt to pin down a story about an oft-misreported Bill Lange catch--he supposedly went through the outfield fence. Ahrens offers a credible retelling which suggests a couple incidents in a single game got garbled.






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The 1979 BRJ (which is available online) contains one fairly famous sabermetric essay, a great biography of Fred Pfeffer, a fairly long Larry Gerlach essay exploring indicators of umpire greatness, the usual handful of game accounts, a look at Cy Young's last few major league games, and maps of a couple notable rivalries. This isn't an exceptionally strong issue, but there are articles to interest most any baseball fan.

The rivalries are described in Emil Rothe's "History of the Chicago City Series," which covers nearly fifty years, and George Wiley's fairly detailed retelling of the contests between the excellent Yankee and Athletics teams from 1927 to 1932. These are necessarily quite different treatments.

There's quite a bit of minor league material. Bill Weiss presented a few pages about Jimmy Claxton, a negro who played for the Oakland PCL team in 1916. Joseph Overfield offered a commentary on Buffalo's hitter-friendly Offermann Stadium. Bob Hoie traced the brief and interesting history of the all-negro Southwest International League team that called Riverside, Ensenada, and Porterville home over the course of the 1952 season; the team (and the league) failed on August 1. Robert Cole had fun researching the now-abandoned practice of players advertising for positions in TSN, and the related practice of teams recruiting players by the same method. Harry Jebsen contributed a delightful piece on the 1888 Dallas Hams, who won titles in two less-than-stable leagues. The issue ends with Vern Luse's look at the 1903 Hudson River League.

Larry Gerlach's piece used three methods--length of career, number of post-season series (and games) worked, and number of all-star game appearances--as indicators of the abilities and reputations of big league umpires. While he didn't draw any firm conclusions, he did make some effort to put his lists into a useful context. This was a good, and necessary, preliminary project supporting Larry's later work.

This issue contains three essays which might be called sabermetric. The famous article is Barry Codell's "The Base-Out Percentage: Baseball's Newest Yardstick" which seems to have been the first published essay to argue that TB/Outs is a useful indicator of offensive effectiveness. Every history of baseball analysis mentions Codell. His calculation is enough like the stat Thomas Boswell laster popularized as Total Average that they can be used interchangeably. Two points: Although most people who care recognize that BOP (TA) has value, few use it as their primary analytical tool. And so many people have independently devised BOP-like methods that Codell's primacy claim is certainly publication, not discovery.

The other more-or-less sabermetric articles are Bill Schroeder's "Baseball's Leading Outfielders," which didn't quite discover Total Chances (or TC/Game). And John Schwartz, who helped Schroeder with his research, looked at "New Measures for Pitchers"--he normalized all the usual pitching counter statistics by Batters Faced by Pitcher. Like BOP, this method yields useful information, but baseball research practice has largely gone elsewhere.

As usual, a substantial number of essays in this BRJ can be characterized as a list with explanatory paragraphs. These include Bob McConnell on switch hitters, Ronald Liebman on hitting streaks, Stan Grosshandler on no-hit catchers, Ted DiTullio on long-service performers as players-umps-managers-coaches, Eddie Gold on Wrigley homers, Tom Joswick on players who lead their league in a "major category" while playing for a cellar dweller, Ray Gonzalez on players who homered off Walter Johnson, and Larry Amman & Bob Davids on brothers who played major league baseball.

Paul Doherty's look at Cy Young's last few games with the Boston NL team after Cleveland released him was very good, as was John Holway's look at Louis Santop and Pete Palmer's piece on Rube Waddell's rookie season. Arthur Ahrens' portrait of Fred Pfeffer (Cap Anson's second baseman) was perhaps the finest piece in this edition of the journal. Al Kermish's always-interesting Researcher's Notebook included a piece about how he and Tom Hufford identified 1912 Senator player Lefty Schegg (actually Gilbert Eugene Price), and Harold Dellinger gave his account of tracking down the identity of 1884 Kansas City UA player Matthew Porter (rather than Henry Porter, as he'd previously been mis-identified).

All in all a decent issue, but not a compelling one.





This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal.
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Bob Davids, with help from Emil Rothe, collected the usual range of serious research and lightweight work for the seventh BRJ, which the editor notes was published late in the season (September, evidently). The best work in this edition is really quite good.

The issue kicked off with a pair of Braves-related pieces--Bill Price's history of Braves Field, which is typical of the genre, and Randolph Lindthurst's relatively short note about the relatively old (and temporarily very successful) rookies on the 1937 Bees' pitching staff, Jim Turner and Lou Fette. The "lists with supporting commentary" department included a well-done Tom Hufford piece about pitching appearances by position players, Ted DiTullio's short commentary on players whose long major league careers occurred on a single team (for some reason he disqualified players whose teams shifted cities), Ron Liebman's piece about pitcher winning streaks (the table's more interesting than the discussion, methinks), Ray Gonzalez on Lou Gehrig (relatively weak, for Ray), and Paul Doherty's essay on forfeited games. Bill James contributed a disappointing (to me) piece about what he'd later call the "Approximate Value Method"--which, uncharacteristically, he doesn't fully define in the article.

Other pieces include essays about Chino Smith (John Holway), fielding feats (Rothe), nicknames (Stan Grosshandler), Fred Toney's 17 inning minor league no hitter (Jack Rudolph), and Arthur Ahrens' great exploration of the Western League's turn-of-the-century transition to the American League, with a focus on Charlie Comiskey's Chicago White Sox franchise. The Ahrens piece is worth the price of admission.

The issue featured two excellent sabermetric pieces. Pete Palmer's essay concerned park effects in the American League, and is as good an introduction to the topic as I've ever seen. Pete's later projects gained some sophistication, but this effort touches nearly all the basic issues. And Irv Matus, who apparently counted pitches for all the Mets' games in 1976, authored an excellent examination of the impact of pitch counts on pitcher performance. I doubt this was the first time such an effort had been made, but if anyone published such a well-thought-through analysis before Matus I've not seen it.

SABR's membership's interests are varied, and its audiences are many. They were well served by this issue.





This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal.
… (meer)