The headline read: “DOUG ALLISON THE FIRST; Went Up Close Behind Bat Before Nat Hicks Did.” This may resolve a longtime point of dispute among historians of the old ball game. From that 1907 interview:

“Nat Hicks was a great catcher for the short period that he stood in the limelight of public opinion, but the press of the country is away off in giving him credit as the ‘original’ up-behind-the-bat man,” said the veteran catcher Douglas Allison to a Star representative yesterday.

“Not that I wish to claim any such record,” said Allison, “for after all it does not carry any great weight or glory, but just the same I think figures will prove that I was among the first, if not the first, of any of the backstops to attempt that trick that was the mystery of the game.

“I was a young mechanic at the time, following the stonecutter’s trade in that sport-loving section of Philadelphia known as Manayunk, and while catching with the ‘Mechanics’ of that place I began to believe it possible to get close up to the bat, so as to catch the ball, and thereby prevent so many runners from stealing second and third bases. I put my theory in action, and that was way back in 1866. I first tried it, going up on the side in order to allow the pitcher to throw them wide, but gradually worked over behind the batter, so as to fool him as well as the base runner.

“My success in this style of play was remarkable, and naturally the talk of the place, until our games began to draw crowds simply because ‘Allison was behind the bat.’ This is not egotism, but the fact, and my method soon had lots of imitators in and around Philadelphia, but, strange to say, few made success of it.

“In 1867 I played with the Gearys, the leading amateur team of Philadelphia, and there attracted the attention of that greatest of all base ball generals — Harry Wright. He induced me to go with him to become a member of the most famous American base ball team since the game began, the Red Stockings of Cincinnati, where I continued up under the bat with plenty of success.

“Now my friend Nat Hicks did not break into the game at all until 1870, and could not have started that play for which so many newspapers have been giving him credit, and while disliking to cloud their stories, it seems right to correct the popular impression on this important epoch in the history of base ball.”

Allison talks amusingly of the many mishaps that came his way while up under the bat — how often he had been “put to sleep” by catching foul tips in the face by mistake, or winded by Asa Brainard’s in-shoots landing in his solar plexus. His hands give testimony, for, as he says, “they are monuments for work well done.” They are but a mass of knotted and twisted joints, showing what a torture the catcher of those days had to endure without any protection whatever.

Allison also said that Charley Snyder was another who had made a success of catching behind the bat before the advent of Hicks into the game, and two others, who graduated from the local Creightons. Allison is now a clerk in the Post Office Department, still in good health, and is never so happy as when out with the youngsters of the Post Office Department nine. He is a close follower of the Nationals’ chances [in the new American League, aka the Senators], and is one of the few who are hopeful, minus the knocking.

Has the dispute among historians thus been settled? Maybe not. Peter Morris, in his magisterial Game of Inches, addresses the question: “An 1891 article claims that early catchers stood 20 to 25 feet behind plate and this seems consistent with other evidence. But how much closer did the catcher have to move before he would be considered ‘near’? Two feet? Five feet? Ten feet? Fifteen feet? There is obviously no way to answer this question.”

The Clipper of October 2, 1869 says that Allison is “a marble-cutter by trade, twenty-two years old, five feet ten and a half inches in height, and playing weight or 165 pounds. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The first club with which he was connected was the Masonic, of Manayunk, Pennsylvania, where he played left field for two seasons. He then joined the Geary Club, of Philadelphia [with brother Art], and played at catcher with them in eight matches. It was here that he gained his reputation for being a fine player behind the bat, and, strange to say, his old friends at Philadelphia next heard of his being at Cincinnati.”

Jonathan Fraser Light, in The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball, cited an undated account that said of Hicks: “Player after player went down before his unfaltering nerve, and although struck four times during the game — once squarely on the mouth by the ball and once on the chest and twice with the bat — he could not be driven away from his position.”

Doug Allison: Catching Behind the Bat was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Clipper writer, Will Rankin, with a longer experience in the game, differed.

Manager McGraw, of the New York Nationals, is given the credit of selecting what he styles an all-time American baseball team: Mike Kelly, Buck Ewing, Wilbert Robinson and Roger Bresnahan, catchers; John Clarkson, Amos Rusie, Christy Mathewson, Nat Rucker and Mordecai Brown, pitchers; Fred Merkle, Napoleon Lajoie and Jimmie Collins, on the bases; Hans Wagner, short, with Hugh Jennings as utility infielder; Ed Delahanty, Ty Cobb and Willie Keeler, outfielders, with Billy Hamilton as utility outfielder. With probably one exception — we think Chase should have been selected for first base — it would make a wonderful team, but there were other ball players whom McGraw never saw in action, from whom just as great a team might have been named.

During the earlier days of the game a team could have been named from the following players: Jos. B. Leggett, Chas. Mills, David Birdsall and Douglas Allison, catchers; James Creighton, B. Hannigan, Jos. B. Sprague, Tommy Watts and J.D. McBride, pitchers; Joseph Start, A.J. Reach and Chas. J. Smith, on the bases; George Wright, short, with Robert Ferguson as utility infielder, and John C . Chapman, Andrew Leonard and John Galvin, in the outfield, with John V.B. Hatfield as utility outfielder.

Few first basemen will ever serve as long and faithfully as did Joe Start, who began as first baseman for the Enterprise Club, of Brooklyn, in the Summer of 1859, and ended his baseball career with the Washington National League team in the season of 1886, or twenty-eight years, all told. He was not all in when forced to retire through the caustic remarks of a few brilliant but novice baseball writers. No better selections could be made for third base and short field than Charles J. Smith and George Wright, respectively. Charley Smith began playing ball with the Enterprise Club, of Brooklyn, in 1856, and on Sept. 18, 1858, he joined the then famous Atlantics, of Brooklyn, and continued with them until they disbanded in the Fall of 1870. He joined the Mutuals in 1871, but retired from the game in the Summer of that year while still at the height of his renown. He never witnessed a professional game of ball after his retirement. He died a few years ago.

George Wright began his baseball career with the Old Gotham Club of New York, in 1864, playing behind the bat in a majority of the games that year. He continued in the game until the end of the season of 1879 and then retired to go into business he still conducts in Boston. He was the only short stop we have any record of that opposing players who batted right handed, were advised to bat left handed to draw the ball away from Wright, and we have yet to see the man since Wright’s day, who could play short with ungloved hands, when a ball of the Harvey Ross brand, or the bounding rock variety, was being used, and play the position as Wright did. Wright’s remarkable performance at short for the Nationals, of Washington, during the Summer of 1867, brought him before the public as one of the greatest short stops of the day, and that was merely the forerunner of the renown he gained thereafter.

There are still many people in this vicinity, as well as Philadelphia, who remember Jack Chapman and the sensational one-handed catches he was famous for making. Andy Leonard is too well remembered to need thc mentioning of his deeds on the ball field. Johnny Galvin will be remembered by the old timers hereabouts as a wonderfully clever all around player and a terrific hitter.

There were many brilliant second basemen in ye olden times, including Jimmy [Johnny] Oliver, Jimmy Wood, Freddy Crane, Robert Ferguson, A. Martin and Chas. Sweasy, but we selected Mr. Reach on account of being the better batter than any of them. And then a team composed of Bennett, Flint, Bushong and Clements, catchers; Radbourne, Keefe, Welch, Ferguson, Caruthers and Foutz, pitchers; Comiskey, Dunlap and Denny, infielders; Ward, short, with Williamson, utility infielder, and O’Neill, Lange and Thompson, outfielders, with Tiernan as utility outfielder, might have been able to win a game or two in any 154 schedule of games if pushed.

The baseball writers of to-day have vague ideas of the old Elysian Fields, at Hoboken, N.J., the place made memorable by the pioneers of the game. A local historian, in writing about Harry Wright and his father, Samuel, said: “Sam Wright, a professional English cricketer, was induced to come to this country to take charge of the old Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, around the late ’40s, as groundkeeper and coach.” Mr. Wright was a professional bowler with the old St . George Cricket Club, which had a beautifully laid out and velvety covered grass plot on Fox Hill, some little distance from the ball grounds at Elysian Fields. There was as much difference between the two as could be seen in a handsome, well kept lawn and a pasture lot.

Harry Wright was a professional bowler for the St. George Cricket Club from 1850 until August, 1865, when be was engaged in the same capacity for the Union Cricket Club, of Cincinnati, which position he held until Nov. 22, 1867, when he was engaged as the pitcher of the Cincinnati ball club, which had been organised at a meeting held on July 23, 1866. In speaking of the Cincinnati Red Stockings the “historian” said: “And they all wore whiskers. Brainard wore Burnsides and a mustache. Both Harry Wright and Gould sported a mustache and goatee. Waterman and Leonard each had a mustache, while George Wright, Sweasy, Allison and McVey had smooth faces.” [George Wright was the only Red Stocking to be clean shaven; see below.]

There were two grounds laid out on the Elysian Fields: one was called the North Ground and the other the South Ground. From 1857 to 1868, at least, there never was a day in the ball playing season — unless it rained — that a game of some kind was not played over there. From 1855 until some time in the late sixties, when the members became too aged for active duty, the Knickerbocker Club practised on Monday and Thursday of each week; the ground being shared by the Eagle and Empire clubs, the former using it on Tuesday and Friday, and the Empires on Wednesday and Saturday. The Gothams had the other ground to themselves until the Mutuals were organised, in 1857, and from then until 1868 occupied the ground on Monday and Thursday; the Gothams on Tuesday and Friday, and the St. Nicholas on Wednesday and Saturday, or as long as either was in existence.

John McGraw’s All-Time Team was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story first appeared in the World Series Media Guide for 2026.

Until Babe Ruth came to town, the New York Yankees had not won an American League pennant. Then they won three straight, in 1921–1923. Each time, they faced the Giants, their landlords at the Polo Grounds until 1923 when, in “The House That Ruth Built,” they won the World Series.

The Yanks trailed the Washington Senators in 1924 and in the next season shockingly fell to seventh place, as an insubordinate Ruth missed time with his “Big Bellyache.” But a contrite Bambino came back strong for 1926. Aided by young infielders Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri, the Yankees edged Cleveland by three games.

Their opponents for the championship, the St. Louis Cardinals, had been in the wilderness even longer. In fact, no Mound City franchise had won a flag since 1885–1888, when the Browns of the old American Association had captured four straight.

The Cards’ star was skipper and second baseman Rogers Hornsby who had, in the five-year span before 1926, batted .400. But a key addition to the “Hornsboys” was 39-year-old Grover Cleveland Alexander, waived by the Cubs in June. Now known as “Old Pete,” he had been a sensation with the Phillies, winning 30 or more in three straight seasons; in 1915–1916 he had tossed an astounding 28 shutouts.

The aging Alex went 9–7 for the Cards, but in the World Series he won Games 2 and 6, going all the way each time. He famously saved Game 7 the very next day, highlighted by his strikeout of Lazzeri with the bases loaded in the seventh, upon shambling in from the bullpen of Yankee Stadium.

Let Alex tell the tale of Sunday, October 11:

Some people say I celebrated the night before and had a hangover when manager Rogers Hornsby called me from the bullpen to pitch to Lazzeri. That isn’t the truth. On Saturday I’d beaten the Yankees 10–2 to make the Series all even…. In the clubhouse after that game, Hornsby came over to me and said, “Alex, if you want to celebrate tonight, I wouldn’t blame you. But go easy, for I may need you tomorrow.”

Game 7 pitted the Yankees’ Waite Hoyt, who had won Game 4 as Ruth hit three home runs, ostensibly to delight a sick boy, Johnny Sylvester. He was matched against knuckleballer Jess Haines, who had shut the Yankees out in Game 3. Despite the Cards’ attempts to pitch around him (four walks in Game 7, eleven in the Series), the Babe hit another four-bagger in Game 7,

St. Louis scored three unearned runs in the fourth inning, and Haines held the lead until there were two outs in the bottom of the seventh. The Yankees rally started with a single by Earle Combs, a sacrifice bunt by Mark Koenig, and a four-pitch walk to Ruth. Bob Meusel then bounced to the third baseman, who got the force at second. Clearly struggling with a bloody fingernail, Haines walked Gehrig and could go no further — even though the next batter, Lazzeri, had fanned twice against him.

Early in the game Hornsby had said to Alex, “Go down to the bullpen and keep your eye on [Bill] Sherdel and [Herman] Bell. Keep ’em warmed up, and if I need help, I’ll depend on you to tell me which one looks best.” But in the seventh, with the bases loaded, Hornsby knew exactly who he wanted … even though Alex had not yet thrown a pitch in the pen. Upon entering the game, he threw five warmup pitches from the slab.

Again, let Alex tell the tale:

I said okay to [catcher Bob] O’Farrell. We’ll curve him. My first pitch was a curve [for a ball, and then Tony took the next curve for a strike]. Holding the ball in his hand, O’Farrell came out to the box again. “Look, Alex,” he began. “This guy will be looking for that curve next time. We curved him all the time yesterday. Let’s give him a fast one.” I agreed and poured one in, right under his chin.

There was a crack, and I knew the ball was hit hard. A pitcher can usually tell pretty well from the sound. I spun around to watch the ball, and all the Yankees on the bases were on their way. But the drive had a tail-end fade and landed foul by eight, ten feet in the left-field bleachers.

So I said to myself, “No more of that for you, my lad.” Bob gave me the sign for another curve and I gave him one. Lazzeri swung where that curve started, but not where it finished. The ball got a hunk of the corner and then finished outside. Well, we were out of that jam, but there still were two innings to go.

Herb Pennock, who had replaced Hoyt an inning earlier, gave up two hits in the eighth but the Cardinals were unable to score. In the bottom half of the inning Alexander set down the side in order. Pennock did the same in the top of the ninth.

As he took the mound in the bottom of the ninth, Alex knew that Babe Ruth was the third scheduled Yankee hitter. Two quick outs later, he came to the plate. Alexander started the Bambino with the first strike Ruth had seen since his third-inning home run. But Ruth walked to first.

Let Alex conclude the tale of October 11, 1926:

If Meusel got hold of one, it could mean two runs and the Series, so I forgot all about Ruth and got ready to work on Meusel. I’ll never know why the guy did it, but on my first pitch to Meusel, the Babe broke for second. He (or Miller Huggins) probably figured that it would catch us by surprise. I caught the blur of Ruth starting for second as I pitched, and then came the whistle of the ball as O’Farrell rifled it to second. I wheeled around, and there was one of the grandest sights of my life. Hornsby, his foot anchored on the bag and his gloved hand outstretched, was waiting for Ruth to come in. There was the Series and my second big thrill of the day. The third came when Judge Landis mailed out the winners’ checks for $5,584.51.

There must be a hundred versions of what happened in Yankee Stadium that dark, chilly afternoon. It used to be that everywhere I went, I’d hear a new one, and some were pretty far fetched. So much so that two, three years ago I ran across Lazzeri in San Francisco and said, “Tony, I’m getting tired of fanning you.” And Tony answered, “Maybe you think I’m not.”

One epileptic had fanned another.

In a further aftermath, when Alexander retired from the big leagues in 1930, he held the record for most wins by a National League pitcher, with 373. However, in 1940 The Sporting News gave Christy Mathewson, who had been dead for 15 years, an additional win in 1902, giving him 14 instead of the 13 for which he had been credited. This pulled Matty into a tie with Alexander the Great.

In the years before his death in 1950, he pitched for the semipro House of David and regaled patrons at Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus in New York.

World Series Centennial Review: 1926 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have written often about this game, in which Hoss Radbourn, in his debut for Boston, lost to Mickey Welch and the Giants, 5–4 in eleven innings. It was familiar to me from the New-York Historical Society (NYHS) photos by Richard Hoe Lawrence, taken from the stands. It had prompted a painting by Dick Perez which I used for the National Pastime cover of 1984 and again, in excerpted form, for Baseball in the Garden of Eden, my book published in 2011. The Police Gazette sketch (above) from the issue of May 15, 1886, however, was one I had not seen, so I hastened to acquire it this weekend, from the splendid site Periodyssey.com.

Dick and I go back four decades. He and I reconstructed the complete vista of Opening Day at the Polo Grounds in 1886. with Scotch tape, from photocopies of snapshots taken from the stands by a fan with a brand-new “detective camera.” The moment depicted is the bottom of the fourth inning of a game between Boston and New York: Hoss Radbourn is on the mound, making his debut as a Red Stocking; opposing pitcher Mickey Welch is at bat; John M. Ward is on deck. Later issued as a limited-edition print, “The National Pastime” began life as a magic-marker rendering!

Dick’s specialty to this point had been portraiture, especially of every Hall of Fame inductee, as commissioned by the Hall itself. He offered a limited edition of 200 prints which were snapped up quickly. I spoke for #1, which has graced a wall in my home ever since.

That taped-up set of photocopies resides in my file folders, along with Perez’s magic-marker composite, but I will not search for them now. Instead, let me recreate the several depictions of that game. Below is a scene from the bottom of the fourth inning: Dude Esterbrook leading off first, Hoss Radbourn pitching, Con Daily catching, Mickey Welch at bat, and John M. Ward on deck. Wes Curry is the lone umpire.

This NYHS image, also shot by from the stands by Richard Hoe Lawrence — an early member of the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York as well as a noted bibliophile and iconophile — depicts the Giants in pregame warmup.

Below, Cappa’s Seventh Regiment Band accompanies the marching Giants from the clubhouse to home plate; I believe that umpire Curry looks on.

Below, New York and Boston, pregame, with Hoss Radbourn, standing at left, flipping the bird. These first Polo Grounds were located between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 110th and 112th Streets.

Each team scored in the tenth, preserving the tie gained by Boston in the ninth, when Radbourn tripled. In the bottom of the eleventh inning, Ward led off with a hit and was sent to third on second baseman Joe Gerhardt’s double. Jim O’Rourke hit the sacrifice fly to center field that won the game.

Ward “flew from third homeward, the Herald reported, but the ball, thrown by Dick Johnston, “was following him with the speed of a bullet. Within ten yards of the goal and victory he threw himself upon his face and with outstretched hand touched the bag. That made 5 to 4 in favor of New York…. The field in an instant was black with people, and Gerhardt and Ward were taken upon willing shoulders and carried triumphantly to their quarters.” Cappa’s band played on but the sound was drowned out.

Opening Day at the Polo Grounds was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In writing the foreword to another fellow’s book I had cause to read again the first chapter of this book, written with Pete Palmer so long ago (by now, 42 years). Pretty good, I thought … but we were so much younger then; we have learned so much since. The book was reissued without update, as a marker to an irretrievable time and place, by the University of Chicago Press in 2015.

The hidden game is played with statistics (and, it could be said, by them), but it extends beyond the record books. One enters the game whenever one attempts to evaluate performance, which is possible only through comparison, implied or explicit. How good a hitter is Eddie Murray? How would Rogers Hornsby do if he were active today? Why can’t the Red Sox get themselves some decent starting pitchers? What value does Oakland receive from Rickey Henderson’s stolen bases? When is an intentional base on balls advisable? The answers to these and countless other questions are of concern to those who play the hidden game, for which this book serves as a guide.

In the eternal Hot Stove League, statistics stand in for their creators, and the better the statistics, the more “real” (Le., reasonable) the results. In recent years baseball’s already copious traditional stats have been supplemented, though not supplanted, by a variety of new formulations-some of them official, like the save and the game winning RBI, most of them outlaws, like Runs Created or Total Average [or WAR], though not without adherents. And with the explosion of new stats has come an outspoken antistatistical camp, with the two sides aligning themselves along battle lines that were drawn almost at the dawn of baseball.

The antis might argue that baseball is an elementally simple game: pitch, hit, run, throw, catch — what else is there that matters? Playing it or watching it is deeply satisfying without examination of any sort, let alone rigorous statistical analysis. So why do we need new stats? Don’t we have enough ways to measure performance? Don’t we have too many? Why subject every incident on the field to such maniacal ledger-book accounting?

How can baseball’s beauty fail to wither under the glare of intense mathematical scrutiny? For those of an anti-statistical bent, baseball, like a butterfly, is poetry in motion and a cold, dead thing when pinned to the page. If we subject the game to ever more intricate analysis, in hope that it will yield up its mysteries, are we not breaking the butterfly upon a wheel, in Pope’s phrase?

For the statistician, too, baseball is indeed like a butterfly, whose grace can be glimpsed while it is in flight ... but then it is gone, having scarcely registered upon the memory. One doesn’t truly know any longer what it looked like, where it came from, how it vanished in an instant. The butterfly’s coloring, its detail, cannot be absorbed while it is in flight; it must be examined to appreciate its complexity. One may love its simplicity in flight as one may love the simplicity of baseball while standing in the outfield or sitting in the grandstand. But the complex texture of the game, which for many is its real delight-the thing that pleases the mind as well as the eye-cannot be fully grasped while the game is in progress.

And that’s what statistical analysis allows us to do. Statistics are not the instruments of vivisection, taking the life out of a thing in order to examine it; rather, statistics are themselves the vital part of baseball, the only tangible and imperishable remains of games played yesterday or a hundred years ago.

Baseball may be loved without statistics, but it cannot be understood without them. Statistics are what make baseball a sport rather than a spectacle, what make its past worthy of our interest as well as its present.

For those who view baseball statistics in this way — that as they increase our understanding of the game, they deepen our enjoyment — the numbers of the hidden game take on reality and, sometimes, beauty, in the way that the circumference of a circle may be described arithmetically or aesthetically. The Pythagoreans and Cabalists may have had it right in believing that numbers are at the core of creation.

Without sinking into a morass of Philosophy 101 disputation about whether statistics reside in the things we observe or whether we impose them, let’s look at the “reality” of the thing itself, which for our purposes is the game of baseball. The form in which it comes to most of us is a telecast, which flattens the game into two dimensions, transforming baseball into ambulatory chess or Pac-Man; to restore contours to the game we have to imagine it even as we watch it. The televised game offers signposts of what baseball is like for those on the field or at the park; to recreate that feeling, the viewer relies upon his experience of playing the game or of seeing it in the open. This act of imagination, this restructuring of the video image, progresses from what is seen to what is unseen. Disorientingly, in this instance the game that is seen is the abstraction while the unseen game is concrete, or “real.”

This movement from the seen to the unseen describes the impulse and the activity of the game’s statisticians, too. For them, plumbing the meaning of numbers is not mere accounting; to bring the hidden game of baseball into the open is an act of imagination, an apprehension and approximation of truth, and perhaps even a pursuit of beauty and justice.

Baseball offers a model of perfection, a utopian, zero-sum system in which every action by the offense has a corresponding and inverse act by the defense, and everything balances in the end. The box score reads like the Book of Life held by St. Peter at the pearly gates; no action is left unaccounted. Although it has been written that baseball is a microcosm of American life, in no place in society at large can the harmony of the ball field be matched.

Many people who find “real life” too much for them, or at least a source of turmoil and anxiety, derive immense satisfaction from the order, regularity, justice, and essential stability of baseball, and this goes a long way toward explaining its continuing appeal to adults. We’re all pursuing something that we can’t quite identify; we all would like to think there is a simple answer to a multitude of complex problems. And a good many of us who may, by the world’s standards, be entirely sane take great pains to investigate the clockwork mechanism, the mathematical construct that is baseball, because of its seeming offer of such an answer. The lure, the tease, for baseball statisticians is that the mathematical universe in which the game is played can be fully comprehended. And if this game can be fathomed, might not others? Those who analyze baseball by its numbers may, sometimes, hear the music of the spheres.

Even those who profess to abominate statistics — among whom are included several baseball managers, general managers, league officials, ballplayers — are statisticians despite themselves, for we are all, all of us humans, intuitive statisticians. We base our actions upon a quick assimilation of similar experiences, weigh the results, and decide what to do. An example: With men on first and second bases and one out, a ground ball is hit into the hole; the shortstop stabs the ball and makes the play at third base. This move was a product not of sudden inspiration (except for the shortstop who made the play for the first time in baseball history) but of calculated risk. While he is racing to the hole, the shortstop is figuring: Based upon the speed of the runners and how hard the ball is hit, he probably has no chance of a double play; he may have little chance of a play at second; and he almost certainly has no play at first. He throws to third because the distance from the hole to the bag is short, and his calculation of the various probabilities led him to conclude that this was his “percentage play.”

Now, not so much as a glimmer of any number entered the shortstop’s head in this time, yet he was thinking statistically. In much the same way, a manager who pinch-hits with a righthanded batter when the opposing pilot brings in a lefty reliever is said to be playing the percentages. Surely he never calculated them, nor did he perform any empirical study of the question, but based upon his thirty or forty years of observation and upon folk wisdom handed down to him, he assumes that statistically the righthanded batter has a better chance of reaching base against the lefthanded pitcher. We are all statisticians whenever we generalize from a group of specific, similar experiences; those of us who work with the numbers, though, get more accurate results.

Most players and managers feel that they can do just fine without relying upon statisticians. Haven’t they always done splendid, as Casey Stengel used to say? Well, no. Stable as it is by society’s standards, the game does change. The rug was pulled out from under the managers’ feet some time ago yet they don’t know it: Dead ball era strategies continue to be employed sixty years beyond the point at which they outlived their usefulness. Front- office decisions are made on the basis of player-performance measures which tell next to nothing of a man’s value to his team. Teams tailor their personnel to their home-park peculiarities in such a way that they are left vulnerable at home and impotent on the road. The Hall of Fame becomes stuffed with players from between the wars simply because their stats are misunderstood.

This book was written not in a spirit of crusade, to right wrongs across the board, but in an attempt to see the old ball game in some new ways which both illuminate and entertain. Even if they (baseball management, players, Hall of Fame electors) don’t want to know the score, you can. And baseball is, after all, a game, not real life, about which a tirade might be more apt.

Moreover, this book was written not only for those already converted to the statistical persuasion. If you have found the analysis of baseball through its statistics confusing or off-putting, give us a chance to show how powerful and elegant it can be at its best — which is what this book delivers. The hidden game will be out in the open, revealing the true stars, the honored impostors, the real percentages behind “percentage plays,” what makes teams win, the statistical effect of every home park and more — and all this in a historical context that goes back to Alexander Cartwright, with revolutionary statistics applied from the beginning of major-league play in 1876 through the 1983 season.

Playing the hidden game of baseball — the interior stadium peopled with memories and images and numbers — you can position Nap Lajoie at second base for the 1983 Yankees and figure what difference he might have made in the team’s won-lost record. Or if manipulating history is not irresistible, you can trade Andre Dawson to the Braves, just for fun, and see if Atlanta would have won the National League West. This book will give you the tools to evaluate such a move, or to see who would benefit more from a trade of, say, Jesse Orosco for Terry Kennedy.

Were players better in 1930? Or 1960? Or 1975? We’ll take a stab at answering that statistically, too. Does clutch play exist or is it, as the curveball was once thought to be, an optical illusion? Why don’t they steal home anymore?

And more ... though we ask that you read the chapters in order, not because there are shocking revelations at the end (there are) nor because we are vain enough to wish each word appreciated (we are), but because the later chapters and the data in the tables which conclude the book build upon principles set forth in sequence, principally in the next five chapters. This book will not settle all the arguments that rage in the Hot Stove League, but it will elevate the discussion and provide some new understanding of baseball truisms that are no longer true, or never were. We may even move the powers that be to adopt some of our new statistics as official, or prompt newspapers to carry them on a daily basis; but baseball is an institution heartily resistant to change, and we are not optimistic. The RBI, for example, was introduced in 1879 yet did not become an officially recorded stat until 1920; the ERA and slugging percentage were both in use before 1876, yet not accepted for forty to fifty years; and the On Base Average, familiar through twenty-five to thirty years of mention in the press, is still not official. We will wait our turn.

We believe player performance can be measured in a better fashion than it is today, even by those in the vanguard of statistical analysis. We view performance — batting, pitching, fielding, baserunning — in terms of its runs contributed or saved and within a context formed by the average level of performance prevailing at the time and the effect of the home park upon run scoring.

These statistics are marvelous tools for cross-era comparisons, enabling us to determine if baseball’s history is truly a seamless web or if its seams are real enough, only camouflaged by traditional statistics. These stats, like the batting average, were designed to identify individual accomplishments divorced from their effects on or by the team, and thus can promote values contrary to those of the team. With the aid of a computer simulation of the 130,000 major-league games played in this century, we have been able to break the won-lost record of a team into its individual components. Did a team finish 90–72? Then we can take the nine games above average (81–81) that the team won and attribute them: .7 wins to the third baseman, 2.4 wins to the top starting pitcher; 1.2 losses to the weak-hitting first baseman, and so on. These individuals’ wins are predicated upon the run values of their every action on the ball field. How can a batter with a .250 average be better than another who bats .320? See Chapter 4. Why is Dave Winfield one of the top fifty batters in the history of the game? See Chapter 5. Who was the better pitcher, Bert Blyleven or Juan Marichal? See Chapter 6. Who is the best player of all time? The best player today? See Chapter 15 (last, please).

In identifying the very best performances of all time by our new, more accurate measures, we will inevitably confront the Cooperstown question. We will not agitate to rip Roger Bresnahan’s plaque off the wall, nor to enshrine Dick Allen, although both actions are defensible. We will simply present our roster of the 140 top players and pitchers in history (corresponding to the number of major-league players selected for the Hall, excluding executives, umpires, etc.) as revealed by their run contributions, and leave the creation of a rival Hall of Fame to those so inclined. We’ll provide as well lists of the top 100 lifetime and single-season performances in each of our new measures, plus a season-by-season record of the top three in each category and a full statistical profile of each team, indicating why it finished where it did (or why it should have done much better or worse). We’ll even supply the tools for you to work up your own variations of our stats, or to develop new ones altogether. Promises, promises. Onward!

The Music of the Sphere and Ash was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article was published in SABR’s 1980 Baseball Research Journal. I have edited it very slightly. I knew John; we corresponded.

On September 29, 1880 the first baseball game was played in the original Polo Grounds. This was not a major league game as New York City did not have a National League club at that time.

In early September 1880, the New York Herald had reported the organization of a new independent professional team to be known as the Metropolitan Base Ball Club of New York under the management of James Mutrie. The playing field, located between 6th and 7th Avenues and extending from 110th to 112th Street, was secured under the auspices of the Manhattan Polo Club.

While a grandstand was being constructed and other changes and repairs were made to prepare the grounds for opening day, the management announced the signing of the team’s players — mostly from the lately dissolved Rochester Flour City franchise of the minor-league National Association. They included:

Oscar Walker……….1st Base … Ed Kennedy…..….Left Field

Steve Brady………...2nd Base … Lip Pike.………Center Field

Joe Farrell…….……3rd Base … Bill Hawes….…..Right Field

Jack Nelson………Shortstop … Pat Deasley………….Catcher

Hugh Daily……..…Pitcher

All this was an amazing change in fortune for Mutrie. A nine in Brockton, Mass., which he had organized and managed went out of existence by the end of July. On September 11, pitching for an amateur club known as the New York nine at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, he was driven from the mound in the first inning as Brooklyn scored six runs and went on to defeat New York by 19 to 0.

That was the final game for the amateur New York club. It is doubtful if New Yorkers regretted its absence. Against the Unions, it had undergone losses by 7 to 4, 9 to 2 and 19 to 0 scores.

The new team played its first game at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn on September 15 against the amateur Union club. With Hugh Daily, their remarkable one-armed pitcher on the mound, the Metropolitans triumphed 13 to 0 as Daily limited the Unions to three hits.

The Metropolitans played ten more games in the next two weeks against amateur clubs in Brooklyn and Jersey City, winning all but one.

New York would play only one more game that year against amateur opposition. That took place on October 2 at the Union Grounds as the Metropolitans crushed the Manhattanville College nine by a 12 to 3 score. Daily was given the day off as New York business manager John B. Day took the mound. Seven bases on balls given the Metropolitans made his task an easy one.

The complete record of New York against amateur teams follows:

A crowd of about 2,000 passed through the gates of the Polo Grounds on September 29 to witness the opening of the first professional ball field within the limits of what was then New York City [for a contrary note, see: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/new-yorks-first-ballpark-90bddf50910a]. The New York NL entry of 1876 had played its home games at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, which was a separate political entity until 1898. The Washington Nationals, of that same minor-league National Association, were delayed in arriving at the grounds with the result that the game, originally scheduled for 3:30, actually started at 4:20.

With the Mets batting first, Steve Brady reached third on a long hit to left center and scored on an error. In the second inning, New York added a run on a series of errors and wild pitches. Washington tied the score in the second on a hit, a dropped fly ball and throwing errors. New York put the game away in the fifth as Ed Kennedy tripled and scored on Daily’s hit. Daily himself scored shortly thereafter on Brady’s sacrifice hit. The score was 4 to 2 for New York at the end of five innings. Darkness prevented the sixth inning from being completed and the score reverted to the fifth. The ragged fielding — each team made seven errors — could not obscure the strong performance of Hugh Daily, who allowed only two hits in the game.

Washington was guilty of 18 errors in the games of September 30 and October 1 as New York and Daily made a sweep of its three-game series against the Nationals.

New York played an additional 16 games in its inaugural season of 1880 — all against National League opposition. In those games, it would face some of the greatest pitchers of the day including Mickey Welch of Troy (six times), Jim McCormick of Cleveland (twice) and Larry Corcoran of Chicago (three times).

The five-game series against Worcester between October 4 and 9 was a disaster for New York. The Metropolitans won one, lost three and tied one, though Oscar Walker of New York hit the first homer at the Polo Grounds. The Mets led or tied in earned runs scored in four of those games but fielding errors proved the difference in the final results. New York could at least take pride in its hitting: it scored 23 runs against John Lee Richmond of perfect-game fame that season, who was on the mound for Worcester in four of the games.

The series with Worcester also saw two new names added to the Metropolitan roster. With the regular National League season ended, Jim Mutrie signed the Providence battery — catcher Emil Gross and pitcher John Montgomery Ward — for the few games remaining in New York’s 1880 schedule. They made their debut in the October 7 game, in which New York outscored Worcester 12 to 6.

The six-game series against Troy — billed by the New York Clipper as deciding the state championship of New York — must rank as the high point of the Metropolitans’ 1880 season. Troy’s lineup in those games included the future 300-game winning pitcher Mickey Welch on the mound and fellow Hall of Famers Roger Connor and Buck Ewing in the infield; the last named had begun that season with Rochester, alongside future Mets Daily, Deasley, Farrell, Kennedy, Nelson, Pike, and Hawes.

The contest of October 11 was Hugh Daily’s final appearance of the year. With Troy ahead 2 to 0 at the end of two innings, he walked off the mound following a dispute. A newcomer to the New York roster named Bill Schenck took his place. Schenck, who had pitched for the Washington Nationals, performed creditably enough in the remaining seven innings, allowing only 7 hits and 2 runs. But that was enough for Troy to gain the victory 4 to 2.

Schenck made two more appearances on the mound for New York that year. On October 12, he limited Troy to three runs on four hits. Fielding lapses by the Metropolitans gave Troy two of those runs. That was sufficient for Welch, who held New York to one run on eight hits. On October 13, both clubs made the experiment of testing the merits of a new ball in the game. The results were farcical. As the New York Clipper reported, there was no chance afforded the fielders for skill. The ball once hit could not be stopped in the infield without the risk of broken fingers. In the game won by Troy 14 to 12, only five runs — all scored by New York — were earned. The teams made 25 errors between them. Such was Schenck’s farewell appearance of the year.

The first five innings of the October 14 game, which were scoreless, featured a triple play by Troy. In the second inning, with two on base, Hawes hit a sharp liner to Troy shortstop Ed Caskin, who caught it, threw to Roger Connor at first who in turn threw to Bob Ferguson at second for the third out. Ward won the game 5–1.

The following day, New York again bunched its hits, as it came up with six runs in the third inning and went on to win 7 to 6, behind Curry Foley of the Boston NL club, who was making his first appearance on the mound for New York.

Ward returned to the mound on the 16th — the final game of the Troy-New York series. With the score tied 1 to 1, New York exploded with seven runs in the seventh inning to take the game 9 to 3, evening the series at three victories each.

The two-game series against Cleveland also resulted in a standoff. Cold weather on the 18th held the attendance at the Polo Grounds down to about 600 as Foley faced Jim McCormick. It was no contest as McCormick held New York to three hits, Cleveland easily winning 9 to 3. The roles were reversed on the 20th, as Foley edged McCormick 4 to 3.

An error, a passed ball, a hit and an infield grounder gave New York a run in the third inning of their first encounter with Chicago on October 19. That was the extent of their scoring as Larry Corcoran limited the Metropolitans to four hits. With New York outfielders playing far back against the hard-hitting Chicago lineup, Anson had his batters shorten up their swing, producing a series of Texas Leaguers. All told, Chicago scored ten runs on 13 hits off the offerings of Ward, with every member of the White Stockings getting at least one hit.

Corcoran took the mound again on the 21st, shutting out New York on three hits as Chicago scored nine times against Foley. The final game of the season took place on October 23. Cold winds held the attendance at the Polo Grounds down to about 300, as Chicago and Corcoran made a clean sweep against New York 5 to 2.

The complete record of the independent New York team — the Metropolitans or Mets — against professional teams follows:

Few of the names of the original Metropolitans are familiar to the average fan. Ward would return to New York in 1883 — sore-armed, but the brilliance of his play in center field and at shortstop eventually gaining him Hall of Fame status. Daily struck out 483 men in 1884 — a record for righthanders that prevails to this day.

Just over two years later, Jim Mutrie brought New York not one but two major league clubs — the Metropolitans, who entered the American Association, and a second club which joined the National League, replacing Troy. His teams would win pennants in 1884, 1888, and 1889, but he is remembered by the average fan as little more than a cheerleader, as one day in 1885, he urged on the National League club with the cry “come on, you Giants,” creating an immortal nickname.

The Mets Open in New York was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyone loves an improbable tale. For my final essay in the 2026 series, “America’s National Game,” let’s talk about comebacks, so appealing to a nation of immigrants and so alluring to the diehard baseball fan. Pulling oneself up “by the bootstraps,” no matter the odds, is the American legend, even if its origin is sarcastic.

Insanity has been defined as repeating the same thing and expecting different results — not by Einstein, to whom so many wise sayings are attributed, but by Narcotics Anonymous in 1981. And yet persistence remains a virtue, in our land and in our game. Just wait till next year, or tomorrow, or even later today.

A reversal of fortune — what today we would term a comeback — involves, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase, a “willing suspension of disbelief.” (I knew my poetic studies would be useful, some day.) When he coined that phrase in 1817, he meant it as the moment when a reader might disregard belief to accept unusual elements in an otherwise credible work.

In baseball terms, that suspension of disbelief is a mixture of blind faith and forlorn hope: with rally cap or crossed fingers, we might think back to Tug McGraw’s “Ya gotta believe” or Yogi’s “It ain’t over till it’s over.” It was such an exemplar of faith and hope, expressed over decades, that preceded the Boston Red Sox miracle of 2004. Not only did they come back from three games behind to sweep the American League Championship Series against the Yankees, but they also won the World Series for the first time since 1918. (In the next year, these two teams had created the “Curse of the Bambino” via the sale of Babe Ruth to New York.)

Enduring the dry spells is the measure of the fan, whether season after season or during a midsummer drubbing, when one must stay till the end … in case something happens. Attending Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, I confess that I thought to exit after the top of the tenth.

With fandom, faith and fortitude are linked. Staying until the game is over may win you points in heaven. The players are important, but the outcome of the game depends upon you. Remember that.

Generations of Red Sox fans did. In the long history of Major League Baseball, no team had ever come back from a three-game deficit in a best-of-seven series, until Boston in 2004. No team has done it since. By now that story has been well trod, so I’ll spare you the details (if interested, see: https://bit.ly/46VjeyG). A team coming back from down 3–0 has happened only five times in major North American professional sports: four times in the NHL and never in the NBA. (The NFL has a different playoff structure.)

Even postseason comebacks from 3–1 are rare: as a boy, I thought the 1958 comeback by the Yanks against the Milwaukee Braves was so great that it had no precedent; later I learned that this scenario had obtained in 1925, when the Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Washington Senators. (In each instance the trailing team defeated the prior year’s champion.) That 3–1 World Series deficit has since been overcome by Detroit in 1968, Pittsburgh in 1979, Kansas City in 1985, and the Chicago Cubs in 2016, breaking a century-long curse of their own.

Writing this essay, spurred by the events of 2004, has set me to wondering about the greatest single-game comebacks, when late-inning fans were few. The largest single-game comeback in MLB history is from a 12-run deficit, which has been overcome three times, most recently on August 5, 2001. Cleveland fell behind 12–0 early and trailed 14–2 after five innings against the Seattle Mariners, who would go on to win 116 games if not this one. Cleveland chipped away with seven runs in the seventh, four in the ninth (tying the game at 14–14), and won 15–14 in 11 innings. (Rallies from 12-run deficits also occurred in 1911 and 1925.)

Baseball-Reference has calculated that the greatest comeback in regular-season play, as measured by win expectancy, was the 0.01% that the Chicago Cubs faced in the game of June 29, 1952. They trailed Cincinnati 8–2 with two outs in the top of the ninth, yet rallied for seven runs to win. The postseason comeback with the greatest run deficit and lowest win expectancy was the Cubs’ reversal of an 8–0 deficit versus the Philadelphia Athletics with one out in the seventh inning on October 12, 1929.

But the game that piques my interest is when a team is compelled to score ten in the final inning. One such has been known to me for half a century: the very first major-league game of the Detroit Tigers, at home against the Milwaukee Brewers on April 25, 1901. This game is excluded from the Baseball-Reference study because play-by-play (and thus win expectancy) is not yet complete for seasons before 1910.

Ban Johnson was head of the minor-circuit American League of 1900, renamed from the Western League of 1899. By 1901 the AL withdrew from the National Agreement, which enabled his clubs to sign players under contract to National League teams. He also transferred clubs to NL sites Boston and Philadelphia, as well as establishing franchises in the former cities of Baltimore and Washington, after the NL had contracted from twelve teams to eight. By the time the AL started its 1901 campaign, the only two cities left in the circuit from the Western League of only two years earlier were the Detroit Tigers and Milwaukee Brewers.

The Brewers — who would relocate to St. Louis after this season, becoming the Browns — led 13–4 when the Tigers came to bat in the final inning of Detroit’s home opener. Bennett Park had welcomed so many fans that some had to stand, ringing the outfield. As the innings wore on, folks left … but there were enough in the outfield for the bottom of the ninth to start with Doc Casey’s ground-rule double into the crowd. Jimmy Barrett and Kid Gleason (later the manager of the 1919 Black Sox) singled, then the next three batters doubled. The score was now 13–9.

A new Milwaukee pitcher, Bert Husting, was summoned to register the first out. The standees had by this time encroached further and had to be moved back, a time-consuming maneuver. The Tigers scored their tenth run before Husting retired another batter.

With two outs and the score 13–12, first baseman Pop Dillon was up again. He already had three ground-rule doubles on the day, and struck a fourth as Casey and Gleason came home with the tying and winning runs.

Don’t stop believing.

With this essay I conclude the 24-part series, “America’s National Game,” which reflected the intersection of America, in its 250th year, with Baseball. The essays began here, on April 6: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/americas-national-game-67206d27ed52.

America’s National Game: 2004 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week’s post on rival leagues — the National League may be understood as one such — took us up to the founding of the American League in 1901. Today’s essay focuses on Commissioner Rob Manfred’s ruling by which seven Negro Leagues were recategorized as major leagues.

This action had a telling effect upon not only the official record but also reflected, more profoundly, MLB’s belated intent to set the racial matter straight. Those who played in the Negro Leagues from 1920 through 1948 knew they were major leaguers if not for exclusion.

The Commissioner’s move followed upon a Special Baseball Records Committee (SBRC) ruling of 1969 that established the major leagues as the National, American, Federal, and Players’ leagues, plus the Union and American Associations. I promised last week to address the Federal League (FL) of 1914–1915; entire books have been devoted to this failed attempt to establish a third major league, but it will receive scant attention herein. The bigger story, for Baseball and for America, is that of 2020.

The FL is of consequence not only for its challenge but also for a legal case brought by the Baltimore Terrapins, unresolved for seven years after the other Federal clubs settled with the National and American Leagues. A 1922 Supreme Court ruling quashed the Baltimore suit, reaffirming not only Organized Baseball’s reserve clause, since reversed, but also its exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In another odd remnant of MLB’s primordial past, the Cubs’ Wrigley Field was built in 1914 as Weeghman Park, home of the Feds’ Chicago Whales.

In 1969 the SBRC defined the onset of MLB as the founding of the National League in 1876. A prior professional circuit, the National Association of 1871–1875, long considered a major league, was demoted due to its “erratic schedule and procedures” — features that might have doomed the prospects of the Negro Leagues for consideration. However, David Neft who, as principal editor of the forthcoming Baseball Encyclopedia, sat in on both of the SBRC meetings, recalls that the Negro Leagues never came up for discussion. Its players were invisible men.

Three years before MLB thus defined its component parts, Ted Williams had said in his Hall of Fame induction speech:

The other day Willie Mays hit his 522nd home run. [Williams retired with 521.] He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, “Go get ’em, Willie.” Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.

Paige was inducted in 1971 and Gibson in 1972, and other Negro Leagues stars followed, culminating in the 2006 induction of 17 African American worthies. Not among them was Buck O’Neil, a cofounder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum who died that year but had attended the induction of his peers. (He was inducted posthumously in 2022.) Other early heroes of inclusion included authors Robert Peterson, John Holway, Larry Lester, and Sol White — though long dead, a Hall of Famer himself in the Class of 2006.

However, for the thousands of Negro Leaguers, even those with bronze plaques, there was still a “separate but equal” cast to their status. The Hall of Fame and Major League Baseball were separate institutions: one was defined as exclusive and the other, after 1947, inclusive.

The 2020 season was marked by a challenge of historic dimension, in the name of Covid-19. Leaving to one side the death and destruction wrought on ordinary American life, in baseball both players and spectators were idled for months at a time, necessitating a 60-game season.

MLB had suffered precisely such a shortened season in 1877 and in 1878, for economic and structural reasons. Yet no one had ever argued that those seasons, or their statistics, be eliminated from the historical record.

The challenge presented by Covid-19 was matched by an opportunity. Not only was 2020 a shortened season, it was also the centennial of Rube Foster’s Negro National League; its champion, the Chicago American Giants, had played precisely 60 games to a decision.

The Commissioner and his advisers knew that African Americans had been compelled to create a league of their own in 1920 … and that subsequently they were denied recognition again, in 1969, when defunct white leagues had been admitted into MLB’s record books.

On December 16, 2020, the Commissioner recategorized seven Negro Leagues from 1920 through 1948 as major leagues, fully equivalent to today’s National and American Leagues. He said: “It is MLB’s view that the [Special Baseball Records] Committee’s 1969 omission of the Negro Leagues from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation.” In the press release that announced his decision, I added:

The perceived deficiencies of the Negro Leagues’ structure and scheduling were born of MLB’s exclusionary practices, and denying them Major League status has been a double penalty, much like that exacted of Hall of Fame candidates prior to Satchel Paige’s induction in 1971.

The seven leagues that comprised the Negro Leagues of 1920–1948 were the Negro National League (I) (1920–1931); the Eastern Colored League (1923–1928); the American Negro League (1929); the EastWest League (1932); the Negro Southern League (1932); the Negro National League (II) (1933–1948); and the Negro American League (1937–1948).

In the years following the 2020 edict, a team of statisticians and historians worked to include Negro Leagues stats into the historical record. As Anthony Castrovince wrote, at mlb.com:

… shoehorning “new” data into the well-worn pages of the record book … is an admittedly tricky exercise. But it’s one that serves an important role in bringing great Black players the recognition they were denied by the sin of segregation, and it’s also one that is in keeping with the malleability of MLB history.

Adjustments to the records of Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig and other luminaries were common and are ongoing. Negro Leaguers won’t be found on the leaderboards for counting stats, including career home runs and pitcher wins, because teams didn’t play as many official games as in MLB; like the NLers of 1877–1878, they were compelled to supplement their income with exhibitions against nonleague nines.

But Negro Leaguers have taken their place on leaderboards for rate stats, like batting average, slugging percentage, on base percentage, OPS, and ERA. Gibson and Paige rise to the top, while Oscar Charleston, Mule Suttles, and Turkey Stearnes also leap from the display.

MLB can only offer data for games in which box scores exist, so as to preserve its unique double accounting of offense and defense. So, for the moment, Willie Mays’ home run in a game with the Birmingham Black Barons on August 11, 1948 — attested to in game accounts but not yet confirmed in a box score — will go unaccounted. Likewise for Josh Gibson’s four home-run game on July 28, 1938, in a game between his Homestead Grays and the Memphis Red Sox. These mysteries may yet be solved, but that is not the point of the larger endeavor, which has been to honor the experience of Negro Leagues players, their families, and their descendants.

Quoting the SBRC document of 1969: “Major League Baseball shall have one set of records, starting in 1876, without any arbitrary division into nineteenth- and twentieth-century data.” To this may now be added: “or that of skin color.”

America’s National Game: 2020 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In What, then, is a major league? Which teams and players are by this selection included in MLB’s historical record? That question has bedeviled baseball at least since 1969, when a Special Baseball Records Committee (SBRC) issued, among 17 decisions, this as its first ruling:

The following leagues are defined as “major”:

National League, 1876 to the present

American League, 1901 to the present

American Association, 1882–91

Union Association, 1884

Players’ League, 1890

Federal League, 1914–15

Yet the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs supplanted a prior circuit of paid players: the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players [emphasis mine — jt]. So the NL, whose model of capital over labor has been followed by all professional sports, itself arose as a rival, although it instantly acquired a taste for monopoly.

The SBRC of 1969 demoted the National Association (NA), which some historians still regard as the first pro-baseball league, “due to its erratic schedule and procedures,” but the greater problem for the NA may have been Boston’s domination. Those Red Stockings won the pennant in each of the NA’s last four years, finishing with a record of 71–8.

The problems associated with scheduling and unequal opposition made the stronger clubs seek a better way of doing business. The NL was born as an eight-team league (the NA of 1876, with easier standards of admission, had been slated for 19) and viewed its rivals as an existential threat, beginning with the fifty or so professional clubs outside the league at its founding.

A rival pro league commenced in 1877 as the International Association (IA). Via its successor organization, it survived four years of existence independent of the National League. (The International Association changed its name to the National Base-Ball Association for 1879, when no Canadian clubs signed up.) Today regarded as a minor circuit, the IA was arguably a rival professional league.

Clearly hoping to subvert a strong organization of outside clubs, the NL in 1877 set up its own organization of independent clubs that came to be called the League Alliance. To its thirty clubs, it offered mutual respect for contracts plus other blandishments, such as exhibition games with the NL.

For that year William Hulbert, founder of the NL, expelled the franchises in New York and Philadelphia for failing to play the final road trips of their schedule. A year’s end, he had to expel four players for game fixing, the “Louisville Four,” which triggered the demise of both Louisville and St. Louis as League clubs for 1878. In 1880, Hulbert expelled the Cincinnati franchise for selling “spirituous and malt liquors” on the grounds, which in truth violated neither his sensibilities nor league statute.

Thus, the firebrand who founded the NL as a rival league may have sparked an insurrection of his own: the American Association (AA) of 1882, centered in the fun-loving, hard-drinking, and now deeply resentful city of Cincinnati. The Association may also have sprung into being because its organizers saw that the League had at last stopped bleeding money.

The AA became known as the Beer-and-Whisky League, and by charging only twenty-five cents admission while occupying some of the very population centers the league had abandoned, it gave the NL a good run for its money for a decade. The AA’s expansion from six clubs to eight for 1883 gave pause to the NL, which sued for peace — the “Harmony Conference” also involved the Northwestern League, a minor circuit — and mutual recognition of the reserve clause.

The tremendous success of the AA club in Philly in 1882, which cleared a profit of $22,000, more than any club in either league, prompted the NL to ditch its smallest cities. In 1883, the Philadelphia Athletics (AA champions) drew more customers than the entire National League of only two years before. As a whole in 1883, the Association outdrew the League by some 70 percent. Something was happening here, and another entrepreneur had to take notice.

That fellow was Henry V. Lucas, a St. Louis magnate who believed that the reserve clause, binding a player to a single club for life, was un-American, unethical and, besides, a dandy reason to form a third major league without it. In 1884 he and other hopeful capitalists formed the Union Association. The entire baseball pie, in 1879 not large enough to sustain six National League clubs in such outposts as Syracuse and Troy, suddenly seemed so large that it was worth the fight to see who might get even a piece.

The baseball boom of 1884, coinciding with national economic prosperity, yielded three major leagues and 33 clubs. The UA lasted only one year, with its players at first blacklisted from a resumption of play in the other two leagues. But NL and AA interest in the banned players grew intense and those surviving circuits relented. Among the most celebrated “double jumpers” were leading batsman Fred Dunlap and star pitchers Larry Corcoran and Tony Mullane.

The UA story is tangled and worth telling, perhaps in an offseason post. Let’s move on to that that other one-season league recognized by MLB, the Players’ League (PL) of 1890. Formed over three days in November 1889, the PL was the product of the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, founded four years earlier as a fraternal organization but increasingly resistant to salary classification and reserve-clause predations. Its 1889 manifesto, penned by John Ward, shortstop of the Giants, read in part:

Players have been bought, sold, and exchanged as though they were sheep instead of American citizens. “Reservation” became for them another name for property right in the player. By a combination among themselves, stronger than the strongest trust, they were able to enforce the most arbitrary measures, and the player had either to submit or get out of the profession in which he had spent years in attaining a proficiency.

Harold Dellinger wrote, in an essay for Total Baseball decades ago: “The plan was never for labor to completely manage its own affairs and reap all the benefits thereof. Instead the plan was to withhold labor from the capitalists of the National League but join labor with … other capitalists for the greater benefit of labor.”

So, Ward was not entirely the captain of this ship. And PL backers soon tired of the attempt, as all three major leagues lost money. Ward attributed the defeat of his league to “stupidity, avarice, and treachery.” Al Spalding speculated that the defeat “settled forever the theory that professional ballplayers can at the same time direct both the business and playing ends of the game.” Both were right.

With the collapse of the AA in 1891, the NL found itself the only league in town. It took in four of the AA’s more prosperous clubs, making for an unwieldy league of twelve-teams. Before it reduced its size to eight teams for 1900, it had struggled to maintain the fan fervor of the 1880s.

The NL’s excised cities gave Ban Johnson reason to recast his Western League as the American League, potentially a rival circuit. However, while St. Paul had relocated to Chicago for 1900, and Grand Rapids to Cleveland, he had no representation in the great cities of the Northeast: Philadelphia, Boston, New York. Dellinger wrote: “The existence of only one major league limited the number of cities who could offer major league baseball, and it also limited the number of would-be magnates.”

By 1901 Johnson had secured a new Athletics club in Philadelphia, under Connie Mack, and a new Boston entry, later to be known as the Red Sox. Ignoring the reserve clause, he plucked NL stars from their homes, including Cy Young, Nap Lajoie, Willie Keeler, and Rube Waddell. The NL sued, notably regarding Lajoie, who in 1902 was enjoined from playing for the Athletics in Philadelphia, and had to sign with Cleveland.

Johnson longed for a club in New York but ran afoul of city planners aligned with the Giants; AL backers could not buy a ballpark before streets were run through the lot. Then in mid-1902, aided by the machinations of John McGraw and John Brush, he engineered the forfeit of the Baltimore franchise to the AL. With that in hand, Johnson planned for the former Orioles to move to New York.

By 1903 his plan was complete; peace was declared, with the AL and NL respecting each other’s enduring property rights in players. His club in Boston would revive the old NL-AA World Series, and win it.

For another day: the Federal League, the Negro Leagues, and the current claims for MLB recognition by a host of others.

America’s National Game: 1901 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

George Berkeley is said to have said, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Perhaps; even if unsaid, that would be a logical conclusion one might draw from his 1710 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Without an ear or a mind to perceive the sound, or even the vibrations, the event may be said, in the human sense, not to exist. But Berkeley was a clergyman and might have thought that because God watches all, the universe somehow remains intact. Even when a human record of the event is impossible, the tree falls; in that cosmic sense, perception and reality are not quite the same thing.

Two and a half centuries after Berkeley, empiricism had not yet entered baseball, a sport in a bell jar. Everything was judged visually, aided by counting statistics: how many errors, homers, runs scored and allowed, victories. Averages, especially of the weighted sort (era, home park, competition) were as yet in the distance. Analytic or sabermetric stats had barely gained a foothold when Bill James turned the baseball world on its ear by requiring evidence for intangibles or uncalculated probabilities. Baseball heroes were replaceable if one could replicate their run value; that was the principle of Moneyball, both the book and the film.

An analytical bent, dating from Bill James to Billy Beane and beyond, makes today’s fan skeptical — and that is a good thing. Is the shortstop who often makes backhand stops as valuable as the one who prudently alters his positioning? Is the midgame sacrifice bunt a good play, trading an out for the possibility of a run? I could go on in this vein, but then again, I have done so: in The Hidden Game of Baseball (1984) and Total Baseball (1989), both with Pete Palmer.

Like Bill, Pete counted up Berkeley’s fallen trees. So had, in their turn, Henry Chadwick, F.C. Lane, Allan Roth, George Lindsey, David Neft, Earnshaw Cook, Dick Cramer, and others mentioned in Hidden Game. Beane, so prominent in Moneyball, recently said: “The dominant thought process in the game today is basically what they were writing 25 years ago.”

Cramer wrote of moneyball that it “became a general label for an emphasis on measurable quantities over subjective opinions when making organizational decisions.” This concept bled into economic theory, particularly that of investment — including the preference of John Henry, the Red Sox owner who hired Bill James.

James has remarked that a meeting of baseball analysts at, say, a SABR convention in the early 1980s could have been — and, more or less, was — held in a hotel room. We were barely a tributary, miles from the mainstream. Today it’s hard to find a baseball professional who does not see the value of reviewing all the data available.

As general managers and managers came to understand that outs and runs are the currency of the game — as they always have been — they began to value on-base percentage, which measures not just the base that a batter reaches but the value of not using up an out. Keeping track of pitch counts was not merely a way to preserve your own pitchers’ arms, it was also a weapon: by having his batters work deep into counts, a manager might force the hand of his opposing number and sooner get the starting pitcher to withdraw.

The charm of the grand old game is that it appears to be the same as it ever was, or at least the same as in President McKinley’s day, but it has changed radically while charmingly retaining its essence. In terms of strategy the game is now hardly about baserunning and fielding at all, though recent sabermetric work in these areas may alter the balance yet again.

My personal Mt. Rushmore of baseball analysts consists of Bill James, Dick Cramer, Pete Palmer, and David Neft. All are well along in age, and younger fans might consider Sean Forman (baseball-reference.com) or Dave Smith (Retrosheet.org) or Gary Huckabay (founder of Baseball Prospectus) or Larry Lester (Negro Leagues stats). Others may play, too!

For me, first among these luminaries is Bill James, not for a particular statistical innovation but for the habits of mind — skepticism, reason, empiricism, rigor — that produced all of them. In short, he is hardly a statistician at all but, by his coinage of the term sabermetrics, he honored analysis based on evidence … of precisely the sort that George Berkeley would have admired.

James was a night watchman in the Stokely-Van Camp baked-bean plant in Lawrence, Kansas. “I’d spend five minutes an hour making sure the furnaces didn’t blow up,” he later recalled, “and 55 minutes working on my numbers.” The result was the 1977 Baseball Abstract — Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information that You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else. The 68-page pamphlet sold 70 copies via mail order for $3.50 apiece, plus 50 cents for postage. Sales rose to 780 copies of the 1978 Abstract and, after an article in Esquire, spiked to about 2,200. He continued to work on the loading dock.

Dan Okrent, impressed with the Baseball Abstracts of 1977–1981, introduced him to the nation in Sports Illustrated, then inspired a commercial publication of the Abstract, by Ballantine Books, in 1982. It became a New York Times bestseller, inspiring a flood of analytical works that followed, including Hidden Game (underway at the time).

Teens who read James grew up to work in baseball, including Theo Epstein, whom the Boston Red Sox hired before the 2003 season. During their tenure the Bosox of James and Epstein won four World Series (after none since 1918).

More than forty years ago I observed that James had “revolutionized the way fans think about the game and the way professionals write about it.” Yet the Base Ball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), founded in 1908 — and limiting its membership to writers covering MLB for daily newspapers, wire services and web outlets — has recognized only a handful of beat writers with a stats orientation: Hugh Fullerton, Joe Reichler, Leonard Koppett, Jayson Stark, and Tom Boswell. (Have I omitted some stats-loving scribbler? Apologies in advance.)

Since 1962, when the BBWAA instituted its Spink Award (recently renamed), only one nonmember of the organization has ever won its annual prize: Roger Angell in 2014. Bill James might one day be another, although if Chadwick earned a bronze plaque in Cooperstown as “The Father of the Game,” so might James, no less influential. Each has had a half-century’s career of unparalleled influence.

In 2009 SABR instituted a Henry Chadwick Award that in some measure “fills in the gaps” between the bronze citations of the Hall of Fame and the BBWAA. SABR’s “Chaddies” have often gone to stats folk:

Pete Palmer, Bill James, Lee Allen, Sean Forman, Dave Smith, F.C. Lane, John Thorn, John Tattersall, Cory Schwartz, Ernie Lanigan, Bill Deane, Dick Cramer, John Dewan, Larry Lester, Tom Ruane, Allan Roth, Leonard Koppett, Alan Nathan, Gary Ashwill, Tom Tango, Sarah Langs, Gary Gillette, Brian Kenny.

I remember the boyhood arguments about who was the better New York center fielder. Voices would rise until one of us would declare the matter settled in favor of Willie, Mickey, or the Duke. Wielding such cudgels as home runs, batting averages, RBIs, and World Series rings, we schoolyard scientists would settle nothing at all. The debate would be put aside to rage another day, maybe to invoke clutch performance or character.

Baseball writers of that day were no better than large schoolboys, and by and large they hated stats geeks or nerds. But the “gee whiz” school of baseball writing, while not yet extinct, was on its way out. It is time to honor Bill James.

America’s National Game: 1982 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.