User:Woodshed/The Baseball Encyclopedia/draft

The Baseball Encyclopedia, known popularly as Big Mac, was a landmark baseball statistics reference first published in 1969. Developed and released by Macmillan Publishers under the editorship of David Neft, 10 editions were published through 1996. It was the first American trade book to be typeset entirely by computer. The encyclopedia was called "a mammoth ledger book of the major leagues more thorough than any that had ever appeared before", according to its successor encyclopedia, Total Baseball.

Development

Previous baseball reference works were incomplete, presenting fragmentary records. As researcher Frank J. Phelps noted: "Gaps and obvious errors in official averages, the lack of many early records, difficulty in securing the records of players who appeared in only a few games, and frustrating discrepancies among existing guides and registers had long since created a desire for an ultimate, complete, correct set of major league records," Big Mac editor David Neft, who founded the company Information Concepts, Inc. (ICI) in 1965, directed a team of researchers that traveled across the country to compile statistics from primary sources such as newspaper box scores, game sheets, and play-by-play accounts. Using this new data, plus the official records of Major League Baseball, the reconstructed statistical record was placed into a computer database, resulting in many discrepancies with previous baseball encyclopedias.

The new information uncovered by ICI were met with skepticism from baseball traditionalists, who formed a Special Baseball Records Committee in 1968. The committee ruled on various issues such as the "major league" status of older leagues like the National Association, Federal League, Union Association, and Players League, plus weighed in on the retroactive application of rules and statistical oddities from the early years of baseball which were "either incomplete or inconsistent with the rest of baseball history".

Publication

The data was sent to Israel to be encoded onto IBM punch cards, and the output was then formatted for the Macmillan design. Other than volumes like telephone directories, Big Mac was the first American book to be typeset entirely by computer.. Of the undertaking, Neft commented: "It took just seven hours to print ... the book, but a year and a half to tell the computer what to do." The first edition was over 2,300 pages and weighed 6½ pounds.

Effects

The new research retroactively calculated statistics for players whose achievements had never been so measured. Big Mac was credited with "launching" players like Sam Thompson, Addie Joss, Roger Connor, and Amos Rusie into the Baseball Hall of Fame, thanks to new totals for statistics like RBI or saves. These discoveries in existing data make Big Mac was a pioneering sabermetric work.

http://research.sabr.org/journals/files/SABR-National_Pastime-06.pdf

Demise

After the first edition, the Macmillian-ICI partnership was severed.

Subsequent editions "alter[ed] figures for star players in a misguided homage to tradition ... making a shambles of individual/team balance in the totals".

An eighth edition in 1990 corrected many of the work's glaring errors, but retained others and changed some statistics "with a rationale that remains unclear"..

After the ninth edition was published, Major League Baseball officially severed ties with The Baseball Encyclopedia.

Big Mac became "instantly obsolete" when succeeded by Total Baseball in 1989. MLB adopted it as its official encyclopedia with the fourth edition in 1995.

Editions

• 1969 - 1
• 1974 - 2
• 1976 - 3
• 1979 - 4
• 1982 - 5

• 1985 - 6
• 1988 - 7
• 1990 - 8
• 1992 - 9
• 1996 - 10

Total Baseball (7th edition, 2001)

pg. 519 "For Total Baseball we have placed much reliance upon the source material donated by Information Concepts, Inc. (ICI) to the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown following publication of The Baseball Encyclopedia, which it developed for publication by Macmillan in 1969."

pg. 520

• 1912 - Who's Who in Baseball, John Lawres (ed. of Baseball Magazine)
• 1914 - Balldom, The Britannica of Baseball, George Moreland
• 1922 - Baseball Cyclopedia, Ernest J. Lanigan
• 1934 - Daguerreotypes, ed. Paul MacFarland (of The Sporting News)
• 1951 - The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, Hy Turkin and S.C. Thompson
  • A.S. Barnes Co., 620 pages
  • 10 editions through 1979
• 1969 - The Baseball Encyclopedia, Macmillan, David Neft/ICI
• 1989 - Total Baseball, Pete Palmer and John Thorn

pp. 521-522

• Frank J. Phelps in The National Pastime (1987): "Gaps and obvious errors in official averages, the lack of many early records, difficulty in securing the records of players who appeared in only a few games, and frustrating discrepancies among existing guides and registers had long since created a desire for an ultimate, complete, correct set of major league records. But it wasn't until the mid-1960s that the development of sophisticated computers which could absorb, retain, order and output huge amounts of data finally made a project feasible."
• 1967: David Neft and researchers combed "the official records and newspaper box scores"
  • old-fashioned scrapbooks of Lee Allen and John Tattersall
• first book to be typeset entirely by computer, now a common practice
• "a milestone of computer technology"
• "mammoth ledger book of the major leagues more thorough than any that had ever appeared before"
• "launched" Sam Thompson, Addie Joss, Roger Connor and Amos Rusie into the HOF by applying then-unextant stats like RBI or save
• "The Baseball Encyclopedia was a monument in the course of sabermetrics"
• subsequent editions declined, "dropping valuable data"; "altering figures for star players in a misguided homage to tradition"; "making shambles of individual/team balance in the totals"
• 8th edition (1990) correct many of the errors of the 2nd-7th but retained "many once-contested errors that historians had long since expunged from the record, while changing other statistics in a manner at variance with MLB's standards and with a rationale that remains unclear. For the ninth edition, MLB distanced itself from the both the product and its database."
• ICI findings "raised the hackles of traditionalists," prompting the formation of a Special Baseball Records Committee by MLB:
  • ruled on whether BBs should be counted as hits (as in 1887), outs (as in 1876) or neither
  • "sudden-death" home runs (bottom of 9th or later innings) credited as homers or (as before 1920) only the requisite number of bases to necessitate the win
    • decided first to count as homers, but it would've made 714->715, so reversed
  • decided that the NA (1871-1875) was not a ML, while the FL, UA and PL.
  • published in the Appendix to The Baseball Encyclopedia

pg. 523

• G1: Turkin/Thompson; G2: TBE; G3: TB
• Six major sources for TB:
  • MLB records kept by the leagues, kept on microfilm at the HOF in Cooperstown
  • ICI computer printouts, obtained from newspaper box scores, for NL 1891-1902, AL 1901-1905, FL 1914-15, 19thC leagues (1882-91 AA, 1884 UA, 1890 PL); given to the HOF and make public by agreement with HOF historian Lee Allen
  • John Tattersall newspaper boxscore research for NL 1876-90; now owned by SABR
  • Michael Stagno newspaper boxscore research for NA 1871-75; now owend by SABR

The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia [1]

vii

"essential to the needs of the era"

ix

"...the first edition of the Macmillan encyclopedia showed Ty Cobb with 4,192 official career hits, though that was changed without explanation to 4,191 in subsequent editions."

x

BE became "instantly obsolete" when succeeded by Total Baseball (1989)

originally compiled by Information Concepts, Incorporated (ICI)

"The primary source for 1876-90 NL statistics are the records compiled by historian John Tattersall and held by SABR. For the National Association (1871-75), records compiled from box scores by Bob Tiemann and Bob Richardson are the primary sources."

xii

Cap Anson's hits

xiii

John Tattersall's summary records from 1876-90, which are the foundation of most nineteenth-century stats included in the ... defunct Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia

82

"Macmillan published the first edition of its ground-breaking Baseball Encyclopedia, setting the standard for sports reference for 20 years"

The art of the stat [2]

Mark Lamster / March 30, 2008

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/sports/baseball/31records.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0

Further reading

Schwarz, Alan (2004). The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-32223-2.

Category:Baseball books Category:Baseball statistics