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1. robinred"RMc: 'cuz he's nine flavours of TEH AWESOME!!!!!eleven!!!!!"
Concur. Jules was a wonderful guy.
Ernie Lanigan - "the patron saint of SABR".
What, no Allan Roth?
Actually, I think it's a first-class first class.
There were a lot of worthy candidates, and there will be again next year.
Bref launched in 2000. Clearly, he has not fully played enough seasons yet to be eligible.
Baseball: The Early Years
There's David Nemec's Encyclopedia of MLB Baseball. It's got the same stats as Neft/Cohen in the same format (team by team). It isn't as cleanly done (one league stretched out over several pages of stats, but it also has a lot more essays than Neft/Cohen.
Neft/Cohen was always my personal favorite of the 'cyclopedias.
Agreed. Until that bb-ref.com thing came along, it was my numero uno reference.
Neft's data base was then used for Neft/Cohen, simply by organizing the data by year/team/player rather than player/year. But it was the work on the Big Mac that led to all(?) future encyclopedias.
Yep. And there was a "Baseball Encyclopedia" before the Big Mac, but it was of marginal utility. Actually a better historical resource than that one before Big Mac was S.C. Thompson's "All-Time Rosters of Major League Baseball Clubs," that my brother and I wore to a dog-eared frazzle.
sorta think roger angell deserved to be in that first class, i hope he gets in eventually.
He's in my personal all-time inner circle of favorites, but to be fair, he's pretty much a pure writer, not a researcher, historian, or analyst. I'm not positive his work qualifies very well here, as I understand it.
Peter Morris's two-volume A Game of Inches will be a one-volume paperback this spring. If you haven't read it yet -- read it.
But as Mark notes, the Chadwick honors statistical research, historical analysis, and the like ... not extraordinarily erudite reportage. Roger Angell does the latter, not the former.
Oh, wait, not Chadwick Tyler ... nevermind.
Me, too. The People's Game is a hell of scholarly feat, but in the end, it's sort of like, who really cares that much. It's too much. It's not like it isn't worth doing, and it shouldn't have been done, but that had to take a lot of resources, efforts, time, and cost that could have been expended in completing his project.
Okay, well, that's infuriating.
Not necessarily -- Lee Allen died two years before SABR was even founded.
But he's very, VERY important to the study of baseball past and present, and I felt I should make note of that. That's not to take away from any of the other winners - they seem to be a very good crop (outside of James, Palmer and Tygiel I'm really not as familiar with any of them as I should be).
The only people not eligible for the award are members of the committee, which this year was David Smith, John Thorn, and myself.
One can scarcely imagine a more highly qualified committee. Nice work, guys.
And I hope the three of you get inducted as soon as you're eligible.
That explains a lot. I was wondering why none of you were on the list. A fantastic list, thank you for the effort.
Given all the great scholarship published so far by SABR members and others, what are the most promising fields of historical baseball research -- the undiscovered country, so to speak? Stuff about baseball that a scholar would say, I really should know more about this topic, but no one has written well about it to date.
I remember having this discussion about biographies about 5 years ago, and its amazing how those have started to fill in.
Such as, Branch Rickey by Loewenfish, Tris Speaker, Edd Rousch, Ed Barrow, Roberto Clemente, Bob Feller by Sickels, Robin Roberts, Bullet Rogan.
I got a new Joe Cronin biography in the mail today in fact. And I see a Travis Jackson bio is either out, or nearly out.
Some biographies I haven't seen yet,
Willie McCovey, Dazzy Vance, Hoyt Wilhelm, Home Run Baker, Kid Nichols, Zach Wheat, Rickey.. and that just a few Hall of Famers.
As far as great unexplored areas... Agents? There has been a fundamental change in the game with agents, but is there a book that describes the who, what and why?
Cuban baseball will be very fertile when the wall finally comes down, and it seems to be thinning.
Pure Plonsky for now people!
BTW...can someone post the Forman/Neft handshake photo.
Unless someone is inner circle, bios are tough to sell unless they're of someone in the news. At least that's my experience. I'd love to write one of Billy Southworth, but I also like to eat, so it will probably have to wait a while before I write it.
The agent one sounds like an interesting book.
There's a Dazzy Vance bio out from McFarland.
And Leo Hirschfeld, who was the force behind those Gorham Press "Pitching Record Books" of the early 40's should also be honored. Those annual vest pocket books provided a gold mine of information that was never really surpassed until BB-Ref came along, and even now those game logs from the 40's have never appeared anywhere else.
Really? Just a couple of weeks ago I was trolling genealogical sites & such just to figure out how (as I'd always heard) he & I were related. (Turns out he was my ... let's see ... second cousin thrice removed, or maybe third cousin twice removed. Or something. His grandmother & my great-grandfather were siblings. I think. I might be a generation off; my notes are at home. In any event, something tells me I won't show up in the book's index.)
For minor leaguers, however, the field is suddenly wide open. The publication of SABR's minor league data on bb-ref is extraordinary, and it also makes you realize how many holes there are. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of missing first names, let alone the birthe and death info. In fact, there are entire missing players, since guys who just played a few games were often not listed in the league's statistics.
The Biography Project is 7 years old, and has nearly 1300 biographies. Which means we are missing 16,000 major league players. That's a lot of work.
SABR has hundreds of oral histories. On the other hand, there are over 7,000 former major leaguers who are alive. So that's quite a bit of work.
We're not going to be running out of work any time soon.
Of course even better would be to emulate Speed Johnson's Who's Who in Major League Baseball (1933), and have those photos show the players in civilian clothes, which gives you a much better idea of what they really look like.
I would like to see a book with inside access that tells us the actual mechanics of how a trade is made. What is said on the phone calls between GM's, who discusses what with whom, what is sent to the league office, how long is the process, what happens at the physicals, when does the equipment manager find out and what does he do, who tells the players and what is that like, how are the player's travel arrangements made, what happens when they arrive at their new team, where do they stay, what does their family do, how are the agents involved or not, etc. etc.
Then as a sequel, please write a followup that is about how managers are hired and fired in similar detail.
I believe that one is not available (at least from Amazon) though I am sure a used one could be scared up. I hadn't realized there was one for Bullet Rogan. I have one for Turkey Stearnes and Rube Foster.
Someone posted on the Forum today that they co-authored the new Pie Traynor bio that is out.
I am in the middle of the Eddie Collins bio that came out last year. An excellent read.
Rogan book is apparently worth $50 used, I should have bought more than one!
This sounds tailor made for Bill James now that he has spent enough time inside the process. Combine the mechanics of the process with vignettes on historical trades and how they went down. I'd spend money on that.
And on the Neft/Cohen books, my favorite also, especially when i was making my own Strat cards. Sean, have you thought about possibly adding neft/Cohen style year by year downloadable pdf's to BBRef? That would be nice.
As long as you don't emulate Wikipedia and show John Olerud playing for the Red Sox.
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