Basic Baseball Documents

Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908
Middle Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1900-1948
Late Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1945-1972

(All compiled and edited by Dean A. Sullivan; available from the University of Nebraska Press.)

There are a lot of people who make it their business to tell you what books about baseball are "essential reading." Such lists are all over the Internet; in fact, you can't help but stumble over them even when you're not looking for them.

Please don't misconscrue (as Marvin Milkes once said to Jim Bouton) what I mean by this. There's nothing wrong with those lists (except for their inevitable redundancy). Most of them tell you more about the person who made the list, however, than they do about "what you should know" about baseball.

Happily, however, Dean Sullivan has gone a long way toward solving this "problem of the list." No, he hasn't written an annotated bibliography of every baseball book ever published. (That would be an undertaking guaranteed to wind up, as has been the case for researchers in many fields, a posthumous proposition.)

No, he's done something far more basic, and done it in a way that is concise, entertaining and essential. He has developed three volumes that tell the documentary history of baseball from 1825 through 1972. By "documentary," I of course mean that Sullivan has assembled primary and secondary source materials that take us back to the point in time when a significant, noteworthy, or just plain interesting occurrence in baseball history took place, and has by doing so brought that moment back to us.

All in all, Sullivan's three volumes provide more than 300 articles, essays, and historic documents that any serious student of baseball history will be gratified to have easily accessible. Sullivan's headnotes to these materials are uniformly excellent, providing thoughtful and thorough context for each item.

Sullivan's bibliographies, which appear in the rear of each volume, are also extremely useful for the reader who wishes to dive into greater detail on any one of a variety of baseball topics.

Statheads will find only a few nuggets scattered here and there to add insight to what they already know, but those few forays into numbers are choice ones. One of these, from Middle Innings, chronicles a memorable 9-9 tie between the Detroit Tigers and Philadelphia A's played in the waning days of 1907's hotly contested AL pennant race. Noteworthy amongst the game accounts is a detailed examination of pitch counts, which provides us with a badly needed reference point for the issue of average pitches per batter.

Craig Wright, using anecdotal information from the longest major league game ever played (the 26-inning 1-1 tie between the Dodgers and Braves on May 1, 1920), estimated (in his classic The Diamond Appraised) that pitchers threw about 2.8 pitches per batter during the deadball era. The 1909 game shows that this estimate is clearly too low: batters saw an average of 3.3 pitches per plate appearance in this contest, and while this game is not necessarily representative, either (after all, it was a 17-inning 9-9 tie!), it's clear from the descriptions in the article that pitcher-hitter dynamics of that era are far more similar to what we are familiar with today than what is often posited as a result of Wright's estimate.

Probably the most interesting item for statheads will be the article on Allan Roth that is included in Late Innings. (In fact, the material on Roth is extracted from a fascinating book by Harold Rosenthal called Baseball Is Their Business, published in 1952). Sullivan's excerpt shows Roth describing some of the data collection efforts he engaged in, most of which are now familiar features in the statistical landscape:

Every statistician looks for a different set of figures, but generally I'm concerned with the following:

-Performance, home and away, day and night, team vs. team, individual vs. individual (pitcher vs. hitter and hitter vs. pitcher), team progress during the season
-Performance against left-handed and right-handed pitching
-Direction of hitting (degree of "pulling" the ball)
-Type of hit (ground ball, etc.)
-Power (number of bases stemming from one hit and percentage of extra bases)
-Getting-on-base ability (including number of walks)
-Batter's performance (when ahead or behind in the balls-and-strikes count)
-Bunting performances and percentages
-Individual clutch performances (hitting with runners on base, and runs-batted-in percentages)

Roth also wrote about his discussions with Branch Rickey, the man who hired him in 1946 to be the Dodgers' statistician, and their meeting of the minds on the issue of runs batted in:

-When I first approached Branch Rickey, then president of the Brooklyn club, we spoke for a while. I soon discovered that one of the things he liked best in my presentation was an opinion of the value of runs batted in. He said that he didn't think they were important and hardly ever looked at them. I told him that I didn't think they were important either unless there were other figures presented alongside them.

I emphasized the fact that runs batted in meant nothing statistically, unless the opportunity for runs batted in was presented alongside the original information. In other words, a club owner or manager certainly wouldn't be interested in how many base hits a fellow got in a season unless he knew how many times a fellow had gone to bat. So it was, ran my argument, with runs batted in-in from where, and under what circumstances? One particular player may have driven in more runs than the next fellow, but how many additional opportunities did he have?

While RBIs are still overrated, latter-day statisticians haven't tried to neutralize this matter in a way that might make the general public more aware of the argument they have inherited from Roth-that is, by creating a stat called RBI/opportunity. It's clear that simply arguing about the team-dependent nature of the stat isn't having much impact on the popular imagination.

But that's really a topic for a different article. Sullivan doesn't dwell on stats, but when he does, he gets to the root of issues that are still pertinent today. What makes his work so valuable is that his coverage of myriad events/issues in the game and its history is exceptionally broad. These three volumes are exceptionally well done, and constitute an invaluable repository of source material for baseball history. If this type of material holds even the slightest amount of interest for you, then these books need to be in your library. (Watch out, however-the paperback price for Late Innings is awfully steep,)