Today still finds me in Arizona but at another conference, this one the premier edition of the SABR Analytics Conference in Mesa. Among the several compelling presentations on this first of a three-day event was Bill Squadron’s stunning presentation of the Bloomberg Analytics program, now adopted by twenty-four of MLB’s thirty clubs, which integrates pitch-by-pitch results with batted ball locations and coordinated video. To one who had a hand in the early days of sabermetrics, it was simply amazing.

Seated next to me was my old friend Richard D. Cramer, author of the first such program for an MLB club: the EDGE system created by Stats Inc. for the Oakland A’s in 1981. Dick is a man of manifold accomplishments, but for me it is hard to overestimate the brilliance and enduring influence of his article below, which he first published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal in 1980. To celebrate SABR’s pioneering role, I offer it below as the first of three landmark essays that appeared in that publication.

It is today a commonplace wisdom that players of different eras may be compared by their relative dominance over league average performance. By this method Bill Terry’s .401 in 1930, when the NL batting average was .303, may be viewed as the same achievement as Carl Yastrzemski’s .301 in 1968, when the AL batted .230, in that each exceeded his league average by about 32 percent.

However, as Pete Palmer and I wrote in The Hidden Game of Baseball in 1984, “The trouble with this inference, reasonable though it is on its face, lies in a truth Einstein would appreciate: Everything is relative, including relativity.  The National League batting average of .266 in 1902 does not mean the same thing as the American League BA of .266 in 1977, any more than Willie Keeler’s .336 in 1902 means the same thing as Lyman Bostock’s .336 in 1977: It does violence to common sense to suppose that, while athletes in every other sport today are measurably and vastly superior to those of fifty or seventy-five years ago, in baseball alone the quality of play has been stagnant or in decline.  Keeler’s and Bostock’s Relative Batting Averages are identical, which signifies that each player exceeded his league’s performance to the same degree.  But the question that is begged is ‘How do we measure average skill: What do the .266s of 1902 and 1977 mean?’”

Here, without further preamble, is Dick Cramer’s article:

Average Batting Skill Through Major League History

Is the American or the National a tougher league in which to hit .300? How well would Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, or Cap Anson hit in 1980? What effect did World War II, league expansion, or racial integration have on the caliber of major league hitting? This article provides definitive answers to these types of questions.

The answers come from a universally accepted yardstick of batting competitiveness, comparing the performances of the same player in different seasons. For example, we all conclude that the National League is tougher than the International League because the averages of most batters drop upon promotion. Of course, factors other than the level of competition affect batting averages. Consider how low were the batting averages of the following future major leaguers in the 1971 Eastern League:

Double A seems a bit tougher than the major leagues from these data because (1) this player sample is biased: most Eastern Leaguers don’t reach the majors, and I haven’t shown all the 1971 players who did, and (2) large and poorly lighted parks made the 1971 Eastern League tough for any hitter, as shown by its .234 league average. My study tries to avoid these pitfalls, minimizing bias by using all available data for each season-to-season comparison, and avoiding most “environmental factors” such as ball resilience or rule changes that affect players equally, by subtracting league averages before making a comparison. Of course, direct comparisons cannot be made for seasons more than 20 years apart; few played much in both periods, say, 1950 and 1970. But these seasons can be compared indirectly, by comparing 1950 to 1955 to 1960, etc., and adding the results.

Measures of batting performance are many. In the quest for a single accurate measure of overall batting effectiveness, I have developed the “batter’s win average” (BWA) as a “relative to league average” version of the Palmer/Cramer “batter’s run average” (BRA). (See Baseball Research Journal 1977, pp 74-9.) Its value rests on the finding that the scoring of major league teams is predicted from the BWA’s of its individual players with an error of ±21 runs (RMS difference) when all data are available (SB, CS, HBP, and GiDP as well as AB, H, TB, and BB) and about ±30 runs otherwise.

A property useful in visualizing the BWA in terms of conventional statistics is its roughly 1:1 equivalence with batting average, provided that differences among players arise only from singles. To make this point more clearly by an example, Fred Lynn’s +. 120 BWA led the majors in 1979. His value to the Red Sox was the same as that of a hitter who obtained walks, extra bases, and all other statistical oddments at the league average, but who hit enough extra singles to have an average .120 above the league, that is, a BA of .390. The difference between .390 and Lynn’s actual .333 is an expression mostly of his robust extra-base slugging.

The first stage in this study was a labor of love, using an HP67 calculator to obtain BWA’s for every non-pitcher season batting record having at least 20 BFP (batter facing pitcher) in major league history. The second stage was merely labor, typing all those BFP’s and BWA’s into a computer and checking the entries for accuracy by comparing player BFP sums with those in the Macmillan Encyclopedia. The final stage, performing all possible season-to-season comparisons player by player, took 90 minutes on a PDP10 computer. A season/season comparison involves the sum of the difference in BWA’s for every player appearing in the two seasons, weighted by his smaller number of BFP’s. Other weighting schemes tried seemed to add nothing to the results but complexity.

Any measurement is uncertain, and if this uncertainty is unknown the measure is almost useless. The subsequent treatment of these season/season comparisons is too involved for concise description, but it allowed five completely independent assessments of the level of batting skill in any given American or National League season, relative to their respective 1979 levels. The standard deviation of any set of five measurements from their mean was ±.007, ranging from .002 to .011. This implies that the “true” average batting skill in a season has a 2 in 3 chance of being within ±.007 of the value computed, and a 19 in 20 chance of being within ±.014, provided that errors in my values arise only from random factors, such as individual player streaks and slumps that don’t cancel. However, no study can be guaranteed free of “systematic error.” To cite an example of a systematic error that was identified and corrected: If a player’s career spans only two seasons, it is likely, irrespective of the level of competition, that his second season was worse than his first. (If he had improved, he was likely to have kept his job for at least a third season!) Another possible source of error which proved unimportant was the supposed tendency for batters to weaken with age (the actual tendency appears to be fewer hits but more walks). It appears that overall systematic error is less than 20 percent of the total differences in average levels. One check is that the 1972 to 1973 American League difference is attributable entirely to the calculable effect of excluding pitchers from batting, plus a general rising trend in American League skill in the 1970s.

Assessment of the relative strength of the major leagues, as might be expected, comes from players changing leagues. Results again were consistent and showed no dependence on the direction of the change. Results from the two eras of extensive interleague player movement, 1901 to 1905 and post-1960, agreed well also.

The results of my study are easiest to visualize from the graphical presentation [below]. (Because few readers will be familiar with the BWA units, I have not tabulated the individual numbers, but later convert them to relative BA’s and slugging percentages.) Theories on the whys and wherefores of changes in average batting skill I leave to others with greater personal and historical knowledge of the game. But the major trends are clear:

(1) The average level of batting skill has improved steadily and substantially since 1876. The .120-point difference implies that a batter with 1979-average skills would in 1876 have had the value of an otherwise 1876-average batter who hit enough extra singles for a .385 batting average.

(2) The American and National Leagues were closely matched in average batting strength for the first four decades (although not in number of superstars, the AL usually having many more). About  1938 the National League began to pull ahead of the American, reaching its peak superiority in the early ’60s. A resurgence during the ’70s makes the American League somewhat the tougher today, mainly because of the DH rule.

(3) The recent and also the earliest expansions had only slight and short-lived effects on batting competitiveness. However, the blip around 1900 shows the substantial effect on competition that changing the number of teams from 12 to 8 to 16 can have!

(4) World War II greatly affected competitiveness in 1944 and 1945.

Many baseball fans, myself included, like to imagine how a Ruth or a Wagner would do today. To help in these fantasies, I have compiled a table of batting average and slugging percentage corrections, based again on forcing differences in league batting skill overall into changes in the frequency of singles only. However, league batting averages and slugging percentages have been added back in, to reflect differences in playing conditions as well as in the competition. To convert a player’s record in year A to an equivalent performance in season B, one should first add to his year A batting and slugging averages the corrections tabulated for season A and then subtract the corrections shown for season B. The frequency of such other events as walks or stolen bases then can, optionally, be corrected for any difference in league frequencies between seasons A and B.

One interesting illustration might start with Honus Wagner’s great 1908 season (BWA=+. 145). What might Wagner have done in the 1979 American League, given a livelier ball but tougher competition?  The Table yields a batting average correction of – .059-(+.003)=- .062 and a slugging correction of – .020-(- .029)=+.009, which applied to Wagner’s 1908 stats gives a 1979 BA of .292 and SPct of .551. (In 600 ABs, he would have, say 30 HRs, 10 3BHs, 35 2BHs). Wagner’s stolen base crown and tenth place tie in walks translate directly to similar positions in the 1979 stats. That’s impressive batting production for any shortstop, and a “1979 Honus Wagner” would doubtless be an All-Star Game starter!

These results are fairly typical. Any 20th century superstar would be a star today. Indeed a young Babe Ruth or Ted Williams would out bat any of today’s stars. But of course, any of today’s stars–Parker, Schmidt, Rice, Carew–would before 1955 have been a legendary superstar. Perhaps they almost deserve their heroic salaries!

Facts are often hard on legends, and many may prefer to believe veterans belittling the technical competence of today’s baseball as compared, say, to pre-World War II. Indeed, “little things” may have been executed better by the average 1939 player. However, so great is the improvement in batting that if all other aspects of play were held constant, a lineup of average 1939 hitters would finish 20 to 30 games behind a lineup of average 1979 hitters, by scoring 200 to 300 fewer runs. This should hardly surprise an objective observer. Today’s players are certainly taller and heavier, are drawn from a larger population, especially more countries and races, are more carefully taught at all levels of play. If a host of new track and field Olympic records established every four years are any indication, they can run faster and farther. Why shouldn’t they hit a lot better?

This is the fourth and final installment on the subject of how baseball’s statistics evolved. The text below is from the opening chapter of The Hidden Game of Baseball (1984), on which Pete Palmer and I collaborated.  On to the pitching statistics, the ones you commonly see. First is wins, with its correlated average of won-lost percentage. Wins are a team statistic, obviously, as are losses, but we credit a win entirely to one pitcher in each game. Why not to the shortstop? Or the left fielder? Or some combination of the three? In a 13–11 game, several players may have had more to do with the win than any pitcher. No matter. We’re not going to change this custom, though Ban Johnson gave it a good try.

To win many games a pitcher generally must play for a team which wins many games (we discount relievers from this discussion because they rarely win 15 or more) or must benefit from extraordinary support in his starts or must allow so few runs that even his team’s meager offense will be enough, as Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton did in the early 1970s. Verdict on both wins and the won-lost-record percentage: situation- dependent. Look at Red Ruffing’s W-L record with the miserable Red Sox of the 1930s, then his mark with the Yankees. Or Mike Cuellar with Houston, then with Baltimore. Conversely, look at Ron Davis with the Yanks and then the Twins. There is an endless list of good pitchers traded up in the standings by a tailender to “emerge” as stars.

The recognition of the weakness of this statistic came early. Originally it was not computed by such men as Chadwick because most teams leaned heavily, if not exclusively, on one starter, and relievers as we know them today did not exist. As the season schedules lengthened—the need for a pitching staff became evident, and separating out the team’s record on the basis of who was in the box seemed a good idea. It was not and is not a good statistic, however, for the simple reason that one may pitch poorly and win, or pitch well and lose.

The natural corrective to this deficiency of the won-lost percentage is the earned run average—which, strangely, preceded it, gave way to it in the 1880s, and then returned in 1913. Originally, the ERA was computed as earned runs per game because pitchers almost invariably went nine innings. In this century it has been calculated as ER times 9 divided by innings pitched.

The purpose of the earned run average is noble; to give a pitcher credit for doing what he can to prevent runs from scoring, aside from his own fielding lapses and those of the men around him. It succeeds to a remarkable extent in isolating the performance of the pitcher from his situation, but objections to the statistic remain. Say a pitcher retires the first two men in an inning, then has the shortstop kick a ground ball to allow the batter to reach first base. Six runs follow before the third out is secured. How many of these runs are earned? None. (Exception: If a reliever comes on in mid-inning, any men he puts on base who come in to score would be classified as earned for the relievers, though unearned for the team statistic. This peculiarity accounts for the occasional case in which a team’s unearned runs will exceed the individual totals of its staff.) Is this reasonable? Yes. Is it a fair depiction of the pitcher’s performance in that inning? No.

The prime difficulty with the ERA in the early days, say 1913, when one of every four runs scored was unearned, was that a pitcher got a lot of credit in his ERA for playing with a bad defensive club. The errors would serve to cover up in the ERA a good many runs which probably should not have scored. Those runs would hurt the team, but not the pitcher’s ERA. This situation is aggravated further by use of the newly computed ERAs for pitchers prior to 1913, the first year of its official status. Example: Bobby Mathews, sole pitcher for the New York Mutuals of 1876, allowed 7.19 runs per game, yet his ERA was only 2.86—almost a perfect illustration of the league’s 40 percent proportion of earned runs.

In modern baseball, post–1946, with 88 out of every 100 runs being earned, the problem has shifted. The pitcher with the bad defense behind him is going to be hurt less by errors than by balls that wind up recorded as base hits which a superior defense team might have stopped. Bottom line: You pitch for a bad club, you get hurt. There is no way to isolate pitching skill completely unless it is through play-by-play observation and meticulous, consistent bookkeeping.

In a column in The Sporting News on October 9, 1976, Leonard Koppett, in an overall condemnation of earned run average as a misleading statistic, suggested that total runs allowed per game would be a better measure. It is a proposition worth considering, now that the proportion of earned runs has been level for some forty years; one can reasonably assume that further improvements in fielding would be of an infinitesimal nature. [In 2012, this comment seems at least debatable.] However, when you look at the spread in fielding percentage between the worst team and the best, and then examine the number of additional unearned runs scored, pitchers on low-fielding-percentage teams probably still have a good case for continuing to have their effectiveness computed through the ERA. In 1982, for example, in the American League, only 39 of the runs scored against Baltimore were the result of errors; yet Oakland, with the most error-prone defense in the league, allowed 84 unearned runs.

What gave rise to the ERA, and what we appreciate about it, is that like batting average it is an attempt at an isolation stat, a measure of individual performance not dependent upon one’s own team. While the ERA is a far more accurate reflection of a pitcher’s value than the BA is of a hitter’s, it fails to a greater degree than BA in offering an isolated measure. For a truly unalloyed individual pitching measure we must look to the glamour statistic of strikeouts, the pitcher’s mate to the home run (though home runs are highly dependent upon home park, strikeouts to only a sight degree).

Is a strikeout artist a good pitcher? Maybe yes, maybe no, as indicated in the discussion of the Carlton-Ryan-Johnson triad [in the Introduction, not republished in this blog series]; an analogue would be to ask whether a home-run slugger was a good hitter. The two stats run together: periods of high home-run activity (as a percentage of all hits) invariably are accompanied by high strikeout totals. Strikeout totals, however, may soar even in the absence of overzealous swingers, say, as the result of a rules change such as the legalization of overhand pitching in 1884, the introduction of the foul strike (NL, 1901; AL, 1903), or the expansion of the strike zone in 1963.

Just as home-run totals are a function of the era in which one plays, so are strikeouts. The great nineteenth-century  totals—Matches Kilroy’s 513, Toad Ramsey’s 499, One Arm Dailey’s 483—were achieved under different rules and fashions. No one in the century fanned batters at the rate of one per inning; indeed, among regular pitchers (154 innings or more), only Herb Score did until 1960. In the next five years the barrier was passed by Sandy Koufax, Jim Maloney, Bob Veale, Sam McDowel, and Sonny Siebert. Walter Johnson , Rube Waddell, and Bob Feller didn’t run up numbers like that. Were they slower, or easier to hit, than Sonny Siebert?

Even in today’s game, which lends itself to the accumulation of, by historic standards, high strikeout totals for a good many pitchers and batters, the strikeout is, as it always has been, just another way to make an out. Yes, it is a sure way to register an out without the risk of advancing baserunners and so is highly useful in a situation like man on third with fewer than two outs; otherwise, it is a vastly overrated stat because it has nothing to do with victory or defeat—it is mere spectacle. A high total indicates raw talent and overpowering stuff, but the imperative of the pitcher is simply to retire the batter, not to crush him. What’s not listed in your daily averages are strikeouts by batters—fans are not as interested in that because it’s a negative measure—yet the strikeout may be a more significant stat for batters than it is for pitchers.

On second thought, maybe it’s just the same. So few errors are being made these days—2 in 100 chances, on average—maybe there’s not a great premium on putting the ball into play anymore. Sure, you might move a runner up with a grounder hit behind him or with a long fly, but on the other hand, with a strikeout you do avoid hitting into a double play. At least that’s what Darryl Strawberry said in his rookie season when asked why he was unperturbed about striking out every third time he came to the plate!

Bases on balls will drive a manager crazy and put lead in fielders’ feet, but it is possible to survive, even to excel, without first-rate control, provided your stuff is good enough to hold down the number of hits. Occasionally you will see a stat called Opponents’ Batting Average, or opponents’ On Base Average, or Opponents’ Slugging Percentage, all of which seem at first blush more revealing than they are. In fact these calculations are all academic, in that it doesn’t matter how many men a pitcher puts on base. Theoretically he can put three men on base every inning, leave twenty-seven baserunners allowed, and pitch a shutout. A man who gives up one hit over nine innings can lose 1–0; it’s even possible to allow no hits and lose. Who is the better pitcher? The man with the shutout and twenty-seven baserunners allowed, or the man who allows one hit? No matter how sophisticated your measurements for pitchers, the only really significant one is runs. [Today I might add, “unless you’re evaluating players for purposes of salary offer or acquisition.”]

The nature of baseball at all points is one man against nine. It’s the pitcher against a series of batters. With that situation prevailing, we have tended to examine batting with intricate, ingenious stats, while viewing pitching through generally much weaker, though perhaps more copious, measurements. What if the game were to be turned around so that we had a “pitching order”—nine pitchers facing one batter? Think of that for one minute. The nature of the statistics would change, too, so that your batting stats would be vastly simplified. You wouldn’t care about all the individual components of the batter’s performance, all combining in some obscure fashion to reveal run production. You’d care only about runs. Yet what each of the nine pitchers did would bear intense scrutiny, and over the course of a year each pitcher’s Opponents’ BA, Opponents’ OBA, Opponents’ SLG, and so forth, would be recorded and turned this way and that to come up with a sense of how many runs saved each pitcher achieved.

A stat with an interesting history is completed games. This is your basic counter stat, but it’s taken to mean more than most of those measurements by baseball people and knowledgeable baseball fans. When everyone was completing 90–100 percent of his starts, the stat was without meaning and thus was not kept. As relief pitchers crept into the game after 1905, the percentage of completed games declined rapidly…. By the 1920s it became a point of honor to complete three quarters of one’s starts; today the man who completes half is quite likely to lead his league. [Another sentence that raises an eyebrow in 2012.] So with these shifting standards, what do CGs mean? Well, it’s useful to know that of a pitcher’s 37 starts, he completed 18. That he accepted no assistance in 18 of his 37 games is indisputable; that he required none is a judgment for others such as fans or press to make. There is managerial discretion involved: it is seldom a pitcher’s decision whether to go nine innings or not, and there are different managerial styles and philosophies.

There are the pilots who will say give me a good six or seven, fire as hard as you can as long as you can, and I’ll bring in The Goose to wrap it up. There are others who encourage their starting pitchers to go nine, feeling that it builds team morale, staff morale, and individual confidence. Verdict: situation-dependent, to a fatal degree. CGs tell you as much about the manager and his evaluation of his bullpen as they tell you about the arm or the heart of the pitcher.

Can we say that a pitcher with 18 complete games out of 37 starts is better than one with 12 complete games in 35 starts? Not without a lot of supporting help we can’t, not without a store of knowledge about the individuals, the teams, and especially the eras involved. The more uses to which we attempt to put the stat, the weaker it becomes, the more attenuated its force. If we declare the hurler with 18 CGs “better,” how are we to compare him with another pitcher from, say, fifty years earlier who completed 27 out of 30 starts? Or another pitcher of eighty years ago who completed all the games he started? (Jack Taylor completed every one of the 187 games he started over five years.) Or what about Will White, who 1880 started 76 games and completed 75 of them? But the rules were different, you say, or the ball was less resilient, or they pitched from a different distance, with a different motion, or this, or that. The point is, there are limits to what a traditional baseball statistic can tell you about a player’s performance in any given year, let alone compare his efforts to those of a player from a different era.

Perhaps the most interesting new statistic of [the last] century is the one associated with the most significant strategic element since the advent of the gopher ball—saves. Now shown in the papers on a daily basis, saves were not officially recorded at all until 1960; it was at the instigation of Jerry Holtzman of the Chicago Sun-Times, with the cooperation of The Sporting News, that this statistic was finally accepted. The need arose because relievers operated at a disadvantage when it came to picking up wins, and at an advantage in ERA. The bullpenners were a new breed, and as their role increased, the need arose to identify excellence, as it had long ago for batters, starting pitchers, and fielders.

The save is, clearly, another stat that hinges on game situation and managerial discretion. If your are a Ron Davis on a team that has a Goose Gossage, the best you can hope for is to have a great won-lost record, as David did in 1979 and ’80. To pile up a lot of saves, you have to be saved for save situations, as Martin reserves Gossage; Howser, Quisenberry; or Herzog, Sutter. These relief stars are not brought in with their teams trailing; the game must be tied or preferably the  lead is in hand. The prime statistical drawback is that there is no negative to counteract the positive, no stat for saves blown (except, all too often, a victory for the “fireman”).

In April 1982, Sports Illustrated produced a battery of well-conceived, thought-provoking new measurements for relief pitchers which at last attempted, among other things, to give middle and long relievers their due. Alas, the SI method was too rigorous for the average fan, and the scheme dropped from sight. It was a worthy attempt, but perhaps the perfect example of breaking a butterfly on the wheel. The “Rolaids Formula,” which at least takes games lost and games won into account, is a mild improvement over simply counting saves or adding saves and wins. It awards two points for a save or a win and deducts one point for a loss. The reasoning, we suppose, is that a reliever is a high-wire walker without a net—one slip may have fatal consequences. His chances of drawing a loss are far greater than his chances of picking up a win, which requires the intervention of forces not his own.

So today, when we have BABIP, WHIP, VORP, plus video analysis to back up the late-night noodling, we have better ways to evaluate pitching, and especially to correlate it, or unshackle it, from fielding.

This is the third installment on the subject of how baseball’s statistics evolved from Outs and Runs in 1845. The text below continues the publication online, for the first time, of the opening chapter of The Hidden Game of Baseball (1984). Other statistics introduced before the turn of the century were stolen bases (though not caught stealing), sacrifice bunts, doubles, triples, homers, strikeouts for batters and for pitchers, bases on balls, hit by pitch (HBP), and erratically, grounded into double play (GIDP). Caught stealing figures are available on a very sketchy basis in some of later years of the century, as some newspapers carried the data in the box scores of home-team games. From 1907 on, [Ernie] Lanigan recorded CS in box scores of the New York Press, but the leagues did not keep the figure officially until 1920. The AL has CS from that year to the present, excepting 1927 … [while] the NL kept CS from 1920 to 1925, then not again until 1951. […]

The sacrifice bunt became a prime offensive weapon of the 1880s and began appearing as a statistical entry in box scores by 1889. The totals piled up in the years when a single run was precious—from 1889 to 1893, then again from 1901 to 1920—were stupendous by modern standards (sacrifices counted as at bats until the early 1890s). Hardy Richardson had 68 sacrifice hits in 1891 (in 74 games!), Ray Chapman 67 in 1917; today it is unusual to see a player with as many as 20.

Batter bases on balls (and strikeouts) were recorded for the last year of the American Association, 1891, by Boston’s Clarence Dow, and for some years of the mid-’90s in the National League, but didn’t become an official statistic until 1910 in the NL, 1913 in the AL. Caught stealing, hit by pitch and grounded into double plays were not kept steadily in the nineteenth century, making it impossible for modern statisticians to apply the most sophisticated versions of their measures to early players.

The [next century added] little in the way of new official statistics—ERA and RBIs and SLG are better regarded as revivals despite their respective adoption dates of 1912, 1920, and 1923. These are significant measures, to be sure, but they represent official baseball’s classically conservative response to innovation: wait forty or fifty years, then “make it new.” Running counter to that trend have been baseball’s two most interesting new stats of the century [to 1984], the save and the game winning RBI. Both followed in fairly close relationship to a perception that something was occurring on the field yet, because it was not being measured, it had no verifiable reality [a later analogous situation became the middle reliever’s Hold]. (Another such stat which did not survive, alas, was stolen bases off pitchers, which the American League recorded only in 1920–24.)

The same could have been said back in 1908, in a classic case of a statistic rushing in to fill a void, as Phillies’ manager Billy Murray observed that his outfielder Sherry Magee had the happy facility of providing a long fly ball whenever presented with a situation of man on third, fewer than two outs. Taking up the cudgels on his player’s behalf, Murray protested to the National League office that it was unfair to charge Magee with an unsuccessful time at bat when he was in fact succeeding, doing precisely what the situation demanded. Murray won this point, but baseball flip-flopped a couple of times on this stat, in some years reverting to calling it a time at bat, in other years not even crediting an RBI.

The most delightfully loony stat of the century (though the GWRBI [gave] it a run for the money) was unofficial: the “All- American Pitcher” award, given to the Giants’ reliever Otis Crandall after the 1910 season, then sinking into deserved oblivion. It went like this: Add together a pitcher’s won-lost percentage, fielding percentage, and batting average, and voila, you get an All-American. Crandall’s combined figures of .810, .984, and .342, respectively, gave him 2,136 points and, according to those in the know, the best mark of all time, surpassing Al Spalding’s 2,096 points of 1875. Who is the all-time All-American since 1910? You tell us. But seriously, folks, the idea wasn’t a bad one—measuring the overall ability of pitchers—it was just that the inadequacies of the individual statistics were magnified by lumping them in this way.

There have been other new statistical tabulations in this century, but of a generally innocuous sort: counting intentional bases on balls, balks, wild pitches, shutouts, and sacrifice bunts and sacrifice flies against pitchers. Other new stats of a far superior quality appeared in the 1940s and ’50s but have not yet [as of 1984] gained the official stamp of approval. […]

Now that the genealogy of the more significant official measures has been described, it’s time to evaluate the important ones you saw in the newspapers over breakfast, and a few which are tabulated officially only at year’s end, or are found in the weekly Sporting News. [This sentence today seems particularly wistful and quaint.]

The first offensive statistic to consider will be that venerable, uncannily durable fraud, the batting average. What’s wrong with it? What’s right with it? We’ve recited the objections for the record, but we know as well as anyone else that this monument just won’t topple; the best that can be hoped is that in time fans and officials will recognize it as a bit of nostalgia, a throwback to the period of its invention when power counted for naught, bases on balls were scarce, and no one wanted to place a statistical accomplishment in historical context because there wasn’t much history as yet.

Time has given the batting average a powerful hold on the American baseball public; everyone knows that a man who hits .300 is a good hitter while one who hits .250 is not. Everyone knows that, no matter that is not true. You want to trade Bill Madlock for Mike Schmidt? Bill Buckner for Darrell Evans? BA treats all its hits in egalitarian fashion. A two-out bunt single in the ninth with no one on base and your team trailing by six runs counts the same as Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world.” And what about a walk? Say you foul off four 3–2 pitches, then watch a close one go by to take your base. Where’s your credit for a neat bit of offensive work? Not in the BA. And a .250 batting average may have represented a distinct accomplishment in certain years, like 1968 when the American League average was .230. That .250 hitter stood in  the same relation to an average hitter of his season as a .277 hitter did in the National League in 1983—or a .329 hitter in the NL of 1930! If .329 and .250 mean the same thing, roughly, what good is the measure?

So in attempting to assess batting excellence with the solitary yardstick of the batting average, we tend to diminish the accomplishments of (a) the extra-base hitter, whose blows have greater run-scoring potential, both for himself and for whatever men may be on base; (b) the batter whose talent is to extract walks from pitchers who do not wish to put him on base, or whose power is such that pitchers will take their chances working the corners of the plate rather than risk an extra-base hit; (c) the batter whose misfortune it is to be playing in a period dominated by pitching, either because of the game’s evolutionary cycles or because of rules-tinkering to stem a previous domination by batters; and (d) the man whose hits are few but well-timed, or clutch-they score runs. In brief, the BA is an unweighted average; it fails to account for at least one significant offensive category (not to mention hit by pitch, sacrifices, steals, and grounded into double play); it does not permit cross-era comparison; and it does not indicate value to the team.

And yet, the batting champion each year is declared to be the one with the highest batting average, and this will not soon change. The Hall of Fame is filled with .300 hitters who couldn’t carry the pine tar of many who will stay forever on the outside looking in. Knowledgeable fans have long realized that the ability to reach base and to produce runs are not adequately measured by batting average, and they have looked to other measures, for example, the other two components of the “triple crown,” home runs and RBIs. Still more sophisticated fans have looked to the slugging percentage or On Base Average. […]

How well do these other stats compensate for the weaknesses of the BA when viewed in conjunction with it or in isolation? The slugging percentage does acknowledge the role of the man whose talent is for the long ball and who may, with management’s blessing, be sacrificing bat control and thus batting average in order to let ‘er rip. (The slugging percentage is the number of total bases divided by at bats rather than hits divided by at bats, which is the BA.) But the slugging percentage has its problems, too.

It declares that a double is worth two singles, that a triple is worth one and a half doubles, and that a home run is worth four singles. All of these proportions are intuitively pleasing, for they relate to the number of bases touched on each hit, but in terms of the hits’ value in generating runs, the proportions are wrong. A home run in four at bats is not worth as much as four singles, for instance, in part because the run potential of the four singles is greater, in part because the man who hit the four singles did not also make three outs; yet the man who goes one for four at the plate, that one being a homer, has the same slugging percentage of 1.000 as a man who singles four times in four at bats.

Moreover, it is possible to attain a high slugging percentage without being a slugger. In other words, if you have a high batting average, you must have a decent slugging percentage; it’s difficult to hot .350 and have a slugging percentage of only .400. Even a bunt single boosts not only your batting average but also your slugging percentage. […]

Other things the slugging percentage does not do are: indicate how many runs were produced by the hits; give any credit for other offensive categories, such as walks, hit by pitch, or steals; permit the comparison of sluggers from different eras (if Jimmie Foxx had a slugging percentage of .749 in 1932 and Mickey Mantle had one of .705 in 1957, was Foxx 7 percent superior? The answer is no.. […]

Well, how about On Base Average? It has been around for quite a while and still [in 1984] is not an official statistic of the major leagues. But it does appear on a daily basis in some newspapers’ leaders section, weekly in The Sporting News, and annually in the American League’s averages book (since 1979, when Pete Palmer put it there). The OBA has the advantage of giving credit for walks and hit by pitch, but is an unweighted average and thus makes no distinction between those two events and, say, a grand-slam homer. A fellow like Eddie Yost, who drew nearly a walk a game in some years in which he hit under .250, gets his credit with this stat as does a Gene Tenace, one of those guys whose statistical line looks like zip without his walks. Similarly, players like Mickey Rivers or Mookie Wilson, leadoff hitters with a lot of speed, no power, and no patience are exposed by the OBA as distinctly marginal major leaguers, even in years when their batting averages look respectable or excellent. In short, the OBA does tell you more about a man’s ability to get on than BA does, and thus is a better indicator of run generation, but it’s not enough by itself to separate “good” hitters from “average” or “poor” ones.

RBIs? Don’t they indicate run production and clutch ability? Yes and no. They tell how many runs a batter pushed across the plate, all right, but they don’t tell how many fewer he might have driven in had he batted eighth rather than fourth, or how many more he might have driven in on a team that put more men on base. They don’t even tell how many more runs a batter might have driven in if he had delivered a higher proportion of his hits with men on base. (The American League kept RBI Opportunities—men on base presented to each batter—as an official stat for the first three weeks of 1918, then saw how much work was involved and ditched it.) […]

The RBI does tell you something about run-producing ability, but not enough: It’s a situation-dependent statistic, inextricably tied to factors which vary wildly for individuals on the same team or on others. And the RBI makes no distinction between being hit by a pitch to drive in the twelfth run of a game that concludes 14–3 and, again for comparison, the Thomson blast. [The counting stats are limited in their usefulness, except to say that, the fellow who hit 39 doubles was better at that skill than the fellow who hit 38.]

It’s an odd fact that from being the most interesting stat in the early days of baseball, runs has become the least interesting stat of today; it’s odd in that runs remain the essence of baseball, remain the key to victory. What has happened over the years is that the correlation between runs and times reached base has been almost constantly widening. In 1875 the number of hits allowed per nine innings was incredibly, not much different from what it is today. Tommy Bond of Hartford allowed only 7.95 hits per nine innings (facing underhand pitching was easy?). Bases on balls were in force at the time, but eight balls were required to get one, which accounts for their scarcity in the 1870s. Today, with walks greatly increased and hits only somewhat reduced, the number of runs per nine innings has dropped dramatically, although not the number of earned runs. Indeed, as the ratio of hits to runs has diminished through the years, the ratio of earned runs to total runs has increased. In 1876, for example, the National League scored 3,066 runs, of which only 1,201—39.2 percent—were earned. By the early 1890s this figure reached 70 percent, an extraordinary advance. It took until 1920 to reach 80 percent, and by the late 1940s it leveled off in the 87-89 percent range, where it remains.

In the fourth and final installment, we will move on to pitching statistics, thus setting the scene for the sabermetric revolution that, in 1984, was still regarded as nerdville and nothing more.

Let’s return to the subject of how baseball’s statistics came into being and changed over time. The text below continues, in excerpted form, the publication online, for the first time, of the opening chapter of The Hidden Game of Baseball (1984). Chadwick’s bias against the long ball was in large measure responsible for the game that evolved and for the absence of a hitter like Babe Ruth until 1919. When lively balls were introduced—as they were periodically from the very infancy of baseball—and long drives were being belted willy-nilly, and scores were mounting, Chadwick would ridicule such games in the press. What he valued most in the early days was the low scoring game marked by brilliant fielding. In the early annual guides, he listed all the “notable” games between significant teams—i.e., those in which the winner scored under ten runs!

Chadwick prevailed, and Hits Per Game became the criterion for the Clipper batting championship and remained so until 1876, when the problem with using games as the denominator in the average at last became clear. If you were playing for a successful team, and thus were surrounded by good batters, or if your team played several weak rivals who committed many errors, the number of at bats for each individual in that lineup would increase. The more at bats one is granted in a game, the more hits one is likely to have. So if Player A had 10 at bats in a game, which was not as unusual in the ’60s, he might have 4 base hits. In a more cleanly played game, Player B might bat only 6 times, and get 3 base hits. Yet Player A, with his 4-for-10, would achieve an average of 4.00; the average of Player B, who went 3–for–6, would be only 3.00. By modern standards, of course, Player A would be batting .400 while Player B would be batting .500.

In short, the batting average used in the 1860s is the same as that used today except in its denominator, with at bats replacing games. Moreover, Chadwick posited a primitive version of the slugging percentage in the 1860s, with total bases divided by number of games; change the denominator from games to at bats and you have today’s slugging percentage—which, incidentally, was not accepted by the National League as an official statistic until 1923 and the American until 1946 (the game was born conservative). Chadwick’s “total bases average” represents the game’s first attempt at a weighted average—an average in which the elements collected together in the numerator or the denominator are recognized numerically as being unequal. In this instance, a single is the unweighted unit, the double is weighted by a factor of two, the triple by three, and the home run by four. Statistically, this is a distance leap forward from, first, counting, and next, averaging. The weighted average is in fact the cornerstone of today’s statistical innovations.

The 1870s gave rise to some new batting stats and to the first attempt to quantify thoroughly the other principal facets of the game, pitching and fielding. Although the Clipper recorded base hits and total bases as early as 1868, a significant wrinkle was added in 1870 when at bats were listed as well. This is a critical introduction because it permitted the improvement of the batting average, first introduced in its current form in the Boston press on August 10, 1874, and first computed officially—that is, for the National League—in 1876.

Since then the BA has not changed. [NOTE: later research revealed an earlier inception of the concept for a modern batting average, by Hervie Alden Dobson in the Clipper of March 11, 1871.] The objections to the batting average are well known, but to date [i.e., 1984] have not have not dislodged the BA from its place as the most popular measure of hitting ability. First of all, the batting average makes no distinction between the single, the double, the triple, and the home run, treating all as the same unit—a base hit—just as its prototype, Runs Per Game, treated  the run as its unvarying, indivisible unit. This objection was met in the 1860s with Total Bases Per Game. Second, it gives no indication of the effect of that base hit; in other words, it gives no indication of the value of the hit to the team. This was probably the objection that Chadwick had to tabulating base hits originally, because it is not likely that the idea just popped into his head in 1867, upon which he decided to act immediately; he must have thought of a hit-constructed batting average earlier and rejected it.

A third objection to the batting average is that it does not take into account times first is reached via base on ball, hit by pitch or error. This, too, was addressed at a  surprisingly early date. In 1879 the National League adopted as an official statistic a forerunner of the On Base Average; it was called “Reached First Base.” Paul Hines was the leader that year with 193, which included times reached by error as well as base on balls and base hits. But the figure was dropped after  that year. […]

The year 1876 was significant not only for the founding of the National League and the official debut of the batting average in its current form; it was also the Centennial of the United States, which was marked by a giant exposition in Philadelphia celebrating the mechanical marvels of the day. American ingenuity reigned, and technology was seen as the new handmaiden of democracy. Baseball, that mirror of American life, reflected the fervor for things scientific with an explosion of statistics far more complex than those seen before, particularly in the previously neglected areas of pitching and fielding. The increasingly minute statistical examination of the game met a responsive audience, one primed to view complexity as an indication of quality.

When the rule against the wrist-snap was removed in 1872, permitting curve pitching, and as the number of errors declined through the early 1870s—thanks to the heightened level of competition provided by baseball’s first professional league, the National Association—the number of runs scored dropped off markedly.

With the pitcher unshackled—transformed from a mere delivery boy of medium pace, straight balls to a formidable adversary—the need to identify excellence, to plot the stars, arose just as it had for batters in the 1860s. Likewise as fielding errors became more the exception than the rule, they became at last worth counting and contrasting with chances accepted cleanly, in other words, the fielding percentage. Fielding skill was still the most highly sought after attribute of a ballplayer, but the balance of fielding, batting, and pitching was in flux; by the 1880s pitching and batting would begin their long rise to domination of the game, Chadwick’s tastes notwithstanding.

The crossroads of 1876 highlights how the game had changed to that point, and how it has changed since.

In that year, the number of offensive stats tabulated at season’s end … was six: games, at bats, runs hits, runs per game, and batting average. Of these, only runs and runs per game were common in the 1860s, while that decade’s tabulation of total bases vanished. The number of [official] offensive stats a hundred years later? Twenty. (Today [i.e., 1984] the number is twenty-one, with the addition of the game winning RBI.)

The number of pitching categories in 1876 was eleven, and there some surprises, such as earned run average, hits allowed, hits per game, and opponent’s batting average. Strikeouts were not recorded, for Chadwick saw them strictly as a sign of poor batting rather than good pitching (his view had such an impact that the pitchers’ K’s were not kept officially until 1887). The number of [official]pitching stats today [i.e., 1984]? Twenty-four

The number of fielding categories in 1876 was six. One hundred years later it was still six (with the exception of the catcher, who gets a seventh: passed balls), dramatizing how the game—at least the hidden game of statistics—had passed fielding by. The fielding stats of 1876 were combined to form an average, the “percentage of chances accepted,” or fielding percentage. A “missing link” variant, devised by Al Wright in 1875, was to form averages by dividing the putouts by the number of games to yield a “putout average”; dividing the assists similarly to arrive at an “assist average”; and to divide putouts plus assists by games to get “fielding average.” These averages took no account of errors. (Does Wright’s “fielding average” look familiar? You may have recognized it as Bill James’s Range Factor! Everything old is new again.)

This is all testimony to the changing nature of the game—not just to the evolving approaches of statisticians, but to fundamental changes in the games. […] The public’s appetite for new statistics was not sated by the outburst of 1876. New measures were introduced in dizzying profusion in the remaining years of the century. Some of these did not catch on and were soon dropped, some for all time, others only to reappear with renewed vigor in the twentieth century.

The statistic that never resurfaced after its solitary appearance in 1880 was “Total Bases Run,” a wonderfully silly figure which signified virtually nothing about either an individual’s ability in isolation or his value to his team. It was sort of an RBI in reverse, or from the baserunner’s perspective. Get on with a single, proceed to score in whatever manner, and you’ve touched four bases. Abner Dalrymple of Chicago was baseball history’s only recorded leader in the category with 501. Now there’s a major league trivia question.

Another stat that was stillborn in the 1870s was times reached base on error (it was computed again in 1917 –19 by the NL, then dropped for all time). Its twentieth-century companion piece, equally short-lived after its introduction in the 1910s, was runs allowed by fielders. Lanigan records this lovely bit of doggerel written to “honor” Chicago shortstop Red Corriden, whose errors in 1914 let in 20 runs:

Red Corriden was figuring the cost of livelihood.

“‘Tis plain,” he said, “I do not get the money I should.

According to my figrin’, I’d be a millionaire

 If I could sell the boots I make for 30 cents a pair.”

Previously mentioned was another stat which blossomed in only one year (1879), Reached First Base. This resurfaced, however, in the early 1950s in an improved form called On Base Average, which may be the most widely familiar of all unofficial statistics. [It was made official in 1985, the year after publication of Hidden Game.] In the same manner, the “total bases per game” tabulation of the 1860s vanished only to be named an official stat decades later in its modified version of slugging percentage. And yet another 1860s stat, earned run average, dropped from sight in the 1880s only to return triumphant to the NL in 1912 and the AL in 1913, when Ban Johnson not only proclaimed it official but also dictated that the AL compile no official won-lost records (this state of affairs lasted for seven years, 1913 –19.)

Another stat which was “sent back to the minors” before settling in for good in 1920 was the RBI. Introduced by a Buffalo newspaper in 1879, the stat was picked up the following year by the Chicago Tribune, which in the words of Preston D. Orem, “proudly presented the ‘Runs Batted In’ record of the Chicago players for the season, showing Anson and Kelly in the lead. Readers were unimpressed. Objections were that the men who led off, Dalrymple and Gore, did not have the same opportunities to knock in runs. The paper actually wound up “almost apologizing for the computation.” Even then astute fans knew the principal weakness of the statistic to be its extreme dependence on situation—in a particular at bat, whether or not men are on base; over a season or career, one’s position in the batting order and the overall batting strength in one’s team. It is a curious bit of logical relativism to observe that fans of the nineteenth century rejected ribbies because of their poor relation to run-producing ability while twentieth-century fans embrace the stat for its presumed indication of that same quality.

More tomorrow!

In an odd rush of events, last weekend I attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, where I took part in a panel with Bill James, John Dewan, Dean Oliver, and John Walsh. After one day back at home, I departed for Phoenix to attend the NINE Spring Training Conference, a baseball history and culture affair I have addressed previously, but this time I am a noncombatant, with no obligation other than fun. I will stay out here to March 15, when I will attend the SABR Analytics Conference, a new and promising venture at which I’ll be part of a “how sabermetrics began” panel with Dick Cramer, Gary Gillette, and Sean Forman.

Bill James was the not the first to think about baseball in sabermetric terms, though he coined the term and is the godfather of the burgeoning movement, now prevalent in all individual and team sports. When MIT held its first conference five years ago, two hundred people attended. Last year the attendance topped a thousand, barely. This year it exceeded 2200. Bill must have been unimaginably gratified to see the fruits of his labors. I was, too, a little. I tweeted from the conference, “Feeling like Rip Van Winkle to be here and see how huge sports analysis has become since Pete Palmer and I partnered 30 years ago.”

I am not and have never been a statistician, but I might fairly be called an early worker in the lonely fields of sabermetrics (in football, too, with Palmer and the lamentably departed Bob Carroll). My statistical writing is surely behind me, and I confess that I struggle to maintain interest amid the current swarm of digitally convergent information: batted ball and pitch locations, advanced defensive metrics, and endless video to assess bat speed, arm angles, and the like. However, thanks to SABR—at my first national convention, as a member of two weeks standing, the first two men I met were Carroll and Palmer—I have a place in sabermetric history.

Let me share with you with some portions of the opening chapter of The Hidden Game of Baseball, published in 1984. I was asked at the conference whether I would wish to see it reprinted. “No,” I replied, not in any revised or updated fashion. It is a historical marker, a period piece that reflects where we were then in our thinking.” The book is now prized among collectors and retains an honored place among today’s sports analysts. Here goes:

Before we assess where baseball statistics are headed, we ought first to see where they’ve been.

In the beginning, baseball knew numbers and was not ashamed. The game’s Eden dates ca. 1845, the year in which Alexander Cartwright and his Knickerbocker teammates codified the first set of rules and the year in which the New York Herald printed the primal box score. {I have recently, in Baseball in the Garden of Eden, upended some notions about the Knicks]. The infant game became quantified in part to ape the custom of its big brother, cricket; yet the larger explanation is that the numbers served to legitimize men’s concern with a boys’ pastime. The pioneers of baseball reporting—William Cauldwell of the Sunday Mercury, William Porter of Spirit of the Times, the unknown ink-stained wretch at the Herald, and later Father Chadwick—may indeed have reflected that if they did not cloak the game in the “importance” of statistics, it might not seem worthwhile for adults to read about, let alone play.

Americans of that somewhat grim period were blind to the virtue of play (much to the befuddlement of Europeans) and could take their amusements only with a chaser of purposefulness. Baseball, though simple in its essence (a ball game with antecedents in the Egypt of the pharaohs), was intricate in its detail and thus peculiarly suited to quantification; statistics elevated baseball from other boys’ field games of the 1840s and ’50s to make it somehow “serious” like business or the stock market. […]

[Henry]Chadwick’s cricket background was largely the impetus to his method of scoring a baseball game, the format of his early box scores, and the copious if primitive statistics that appeared in his year-end summaries in the New York Clipper, Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player, and other publications.

Actually, cricket had begun to shape baseball statistics even before Chadwick’s conversion. The first box score reported on two categories, outs and runs: Outs, or “hands out,” counted both unsuccessful times at bat and outs run into on the basepaths; “runs” were runs scored, not those driven in. The reason for not recording hits in the early years, when coverage of baseball matches appeared alongside that of cricket matches, was that, unlike baseball, cricket had no such category as the successful hit which did not produce a run. To reach “base” in cricket is to run to the opposite wicket, which tallies a run; if you hit the ball and do not score a run, you have been put out. […]

Cricket box scores were virtual play-by-plays, a fact made possible by the lesser number of possible events. This play-by-play aspect was applied to a baseball box score as early as 1858 in the New York Tribune; interestingly, despite the abundance of detail, hits were still not accounted. Nor did they appear in Chadwick’s own box scores until 1867, and his year-end averages to that time also reflected a cricket mind-set. The batting champion as declared by Chadwick, whose computations were immediately and universally accepted as “official,” was the man with the highest average of Runs Per Game.

An inverse though imprecise measure of batting quality was Outs Per Game. After 1863, when a fair ball caught on one bounce was no longer an out, fielding leaders were those with the greatest total of fly catches, assists, and “foul bounds” (fouls caught on one bounce). Pitching effectiveness was based purely on control, with the leader recognized as the one whose delivery offered the most opportunities for outs at first base and the fewest passed balls [by his brave catcher, behind the bat with neither mask nor mitt].

In a sense, Chadwick’s measuring of baseball as if it were cricket can be viewed as correct in that when you strip the game to its basic elements, those that determine victory or defeat, outs and runs are all that count in the end. No individual statistic is meaningful to the team unless it relates directly to the scoring of runs. Chadwick’s blind spot in his early years of baseball reporting lay in not recognizing the linear character of the game, the sequential nature whereby a string of base hits or men reaching base on error (there were no walks then) was necessary in most cases to produce a run. In cricket each successful hit must produce at least one run, while in baseball, more of a team game on offense, a successful hit may produce none. […]

Early player stats were of the most primitive kind, the counting kind. They’d tell you how many runs, or outs, or fly catches; later, how many hits or total bases. Counting is the most basic of all statistical processes; the next step up is averaging, and Chadwick was the first to put this into practice. […]

As professionalism infiltrated the game, teams began to bid for star-caliber players. Stars were known not by their stats but by their style: Every boy would emulate the flair of a George Wright at shortstop, the whip motion of a Jim Creighton pitching, the nonchalance of a John Chapman making the over-the-shoulder one-handed catches in the outfield (this in the days before the glove!). But Chadwick recognized the need for more individual accountability, the need to form objective credentials for those perceived as stars (or, in the parlance of the period, “aces”). The creation of popular heroes is a product of the post-Civil War period, with a few notable exceptions (Creighton, Joe Start, Dickey Pearce, J.B. Leggett).

So in 1865, in the Clipper, Chadwick began to record a form of batting average taken from the cricket pages—Runs Per Game. Two years later, in his newly founded baseball weekly, The Ball Players’ Chronicle, Chadwick began to retotal bases, total bases per game, and hits per game. The averages were expressed not with decimal places but in the standard cricket format of the “average and over.” Thus a batter with 23 hits in six games would have an average expressed not as 3.83 but as “3-5”—an average of 3 with an overage, or remainder, of 5. Another innovation was to remove from the individual accounting all bases gained through errors. Runs scored by a team, beginning in 1867, were divided between those scored after a man reached base on a clean hit and those arising from a runner’s having reached base on an error.

In 1868, despite Chadwick’s derision, the Clipper continued to award the prize for the batting championship to the player with the greatest average of Runs Per Game. Actually, the old yardstick had been less preposterous a measure of batmanship than one might imagine today, because team defenses were so much poorer and the pitcher, with severe restrictions on his method of delivery, was so much less important. If you reached first base, whether by a hit or by an error, your chances of scoring were excellent; indeed, teams of the mid-1860s registered more runs than hits! By the 1876 season, the first of National League play, the caliber of both pitching and defense had improved to the extent that the ratio of runs to hits was about 6.5 to 10; today [i.e., 1984] the ratio stands at roughly 4 to 10. […]

The Outs Per Game figure was tainted as a measure of batting skill because it may reflect as easily a strikeout or a double unsuccessfully stretched into a triple. Or, in a ridiculous but true example, a man might get on base with a single, then be forced out on second base on a ground ball. The runner who was forced out is debited with the out; not only does the man who hit the grounder fail to register a notch in the out column—if he comes around to score he’ll get a counter in the run column.

In the late 1860s Chadwick was recording total bases and home runs, but he placed little stock in either, as conscious attempts at slugging violated his cricket-bred image of “form.” Just as cricket aficionados watch the game for the many opportunities for fine fielding it affords, so was baseball from its inception perceived as a fielders’ sport. The original Cartwright rules of 1845, in fact, specified that a ball hit out of the field—in fair territory or foul—was a foul ball! “Long hits are showy,” Chadwick wrote in the Clipper in 1868, “but they do not pay in the long run. Sharp grounders insuring the first-base certain, and sometimes the second-base easily, are worth all the hits made for home-runs which players strive for.”

More than a century later, after dozens of new statistics had been created to apportion individual accomplishments, sabermetricians came around full circle to the view that outs and runs were what mattered in the end. I will continue this stats history tomorrow.

Call the roll of Yankee greats, past and present, and one names so many of baseball’s all-time heroes—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, and more—that it is easy to think that they alone made the Yankees. Likewise, the unparalleled Yankee record and the pride that goes with it might lead one to believe that the club had always been successful, that its tradition truly begins with that first flag in 1920. But the path of history is not that simple, of course, and it stretches back toward a hazy and inglorious beginning—in Baltimore of all places.

Why, in an article about the early history of the New York Yankees, would we write of John McGraw and his boisterous Baltimore Orioles? Because the past matters in baseball as in no other sport, and because a special interest attaches to how the Yankees’ birth and antecedents molded their spirit and shaped their destiny. Before they came to be known as the Yankees, as astute fans know, the New York franchise in the American League was known as the Highlanders, who debuted at Hilltop Park in northern Manhattan in April 1903, twenty years before The House That Ruth Built. Few, however, know that the Yankees’ Book of Genesis begins at an even earlier page, and that the Bronx Bombers were begat from the odd couple of Ban Johnson and John McGraw.

The Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s were celebrated for their ingenuity, their championships, their great stars, and—beyond anything seen in baseball before or since—their toughness. In 1894, the first year of their championship run, they featured Wee Willie Keeler, Hughie Jennings, Joe Kelley, Wilbert Robinson, Dan Brouthers, and John McGraw, who was the poster boy for cheating, umpire baiting, and all-around rowdyism (as loutish on-field behavior was then termed). Their batting averages ranged from a low of .335 to a high of .393, and today all six are in the Hall of Fame. But as great as they were, they could not stem a decade-long decline in fan interest. With the 1891 demise of the American Association, which for a decade had been a formidable rival circuit, the monopolistic National League swelled from eight teams to twelve, and its postseason competitions between first- and second-place finishers drew yawns. Furthermore, in an ownership construct that would not be tolerated today, syndicates controlled the shares of several clubs at once and shuffled the players between them as the need or opportunity arose.

In 1899 the Robison brothers, who owned both the St. Louis and Cleveland clubs, denuded the roster of the latter (including Cy Young) for the benefit of the former, condemning the Cleveland Spiders to an all-time-worst record of 20–134. Brooklyn and Baltimore, too, were commonly owned—Ned Hanlon acted as manager of the Superbas and team president of the Orioles.

John McGraw had been the Orioles’ player–manager in 1899, but when he got wind of the NL’s intent to drop Baltimore in 1900 he threatened to form an American League team with Ban Johnson and assist him in mounting a major league threat. Inability to secure a ballpark in time to open the 1900 season, however (Hanlon was no longer using the Union Grounds but he’d be damned if he’d let McGraw have it), doomed the AL franchise and did nothing for McGraw’s bargaining position. In mid-February he sheepishly re-upped as manager of the NL Orioles. Only two weeks later, however, the other shoe dropped at last, as the rumored contraction of Baltimore—along with Cleveland,Washington, andLouisville—was announced as fact. The syndicate clubs hoped that by consolidating their interests they could cut their losses, and by reducing the league to eight teams they might heighten interest in the pennant race … or at least conclude the season with only seven losing teams rather than eleven.

Louisville owner Barney Dreyfuss, hung out to dry and paid a measly $10,000 for his franchise, outflanked his adversaries, borrowing money to buy a half-interest in Pittsburgh and then moving the best of his Louisville players there (including Honus Wagner and Fred Clarke), thus turning the consolidated Pirates into a dominant team. The radically reformed NL of 1900 would remain immune from further change until 1953. Brooklyn, meanwhile, was given first rights to Baltimore’s players, and Charles Ebbets and Ned Hanlon picked up the contracts of McGraw, Robinson, and rookie sensation Joe McGinnity, as they had done one year earlier with Jennings, Keeler, and Kelley.

McGraw and Robinson refused to report to Brooklyn, citing their business interests in Baltimore, which included a shared interest in the Diamond Café, a billiards parlor where, incidentally, duckpin bowling was first played. As punishment, they were sold to St. Louis. The pair held out until late May, when the Cardinals acceded to their demand that the reserve clause be stricken from their contracts, freeing them to play where they wished in 1901. Chances are that when McGraw signed with St. Louis he had already reached a tacit understanding with Johnson that the two would do their utmost to make the American League a major for 1901. McGraw wished revenge against Hanlon and the Brooklyn club that had raided the Orioles, and Johnson knew that to strengthen the new league, he would have to raid the old, not simply take its leavings.

The great consolidation, which had left many major league players suddenly unemployed, emboldened Johnson. In 1900, he had renamed his Western League—well established as a top-rank minor circuit—to become the American League, with designs on East Coast cities. Foremost among these was New York, where the Giants had fallen on hard times under the enigmatic ownership of Tammany big shot Andrew Freedman, who with John Brush, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, had been the engineer of syndicate baseball, salary caps, and other surefire tickets to dissension. The AL had to bide its time, however, as its designs on a stadium site in Gotham were foiled with even more political muscle than they had been in Baltimore. As soon as Johnson’s emissaries began sniffing around a ballpark-sized lot on Manhattan Island, Freedman’s gang made sure that a road would be cut through it.

The AL operated as a minor circuit in 1900, but then in the fall of that year Johnson made a peace overture to the NL that asked for parity as a major league, with access to certain lucrative territories while foregoing certain others and guaranteeing respect for NL player contracts. As he expected, however, the proffered olive branch was rebuffed. NL president Nick Young wished success to the AL, he said, but considered it an outlaw, not a major league. And so Johnson went to war, abrogating the National Agreement and thus opening the door to raids on NL player contracts. Johnson also placed franchises in current NL cities Philadelphia and Boston as well as former NL cities Washington and Baltimore to complement his strong Midwestern franchises in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Three of the league’s 1900 clubs—Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Buffalo—were dropped. Baltimore, as McGraw was secretly assured in 1901, was the stalking horse forNew York, ready to be moved once a ballpark site and politically connected ownership were secured.

Relying upon the adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Johnson and McGraw set aside their evident temperamental differences: Johnson had pledged that one of the main tenets of his new major league would be respect for umpires; McGraw was the game’s premier umpire baiter. As might have been predicted, they were cruisin’ for a bruisin’. As manager of the AL entry in Baltimore, the feisty McGraw and his Orioles quickly reverted to their NL ways—spitting, cussing, kicking, and even punching umpires with whom they had a difference of opinion. On August 7, Johnson felt compelled to suspend Orioles first baseman Burt Hart for belting an umpire. Never lifted, the suspension amounted to a lifetime ban. Two weeks later in Baltimore, Joe McGinnity, who had returned to town after his year in Brooklyn, spat in the face of umpire Tom Connolly. Oriole Mike Donlin, a McGraw favorite, then decked Detroit’s Kid Elberfeld, and an on-field riot ensued, involving players, fans, and police. This was not the decorous league Ban Johnson had envisioned.

The 1901 Orioles finished three games over .500 but drew poorly. Johnson couldn’t wait to get them to New York, but the Big Apple was not yet ripe. McGraw visited New York several times in the off-season to meet with potential investors and scope out possible ballpark sites. Unbeknownst to Johnson, however, McGraw was talking to NL people, too, including the hated Freedman, whose master plan to transform the NL into one huge syndicate of eight clubs, run centrally, had been defeated. Freedman wished to sell his Giants to Brush and buy into an AL franchise in New York but Johnson, once burned in his alliance with McGraw, was twice shy about welcoming an even more combative owner.

(Before we leave 1901, file this under what might have been: In preseason training at Hot Springs, Arkansas, McGraw had tried to pass off Charlie Grant—a fine African American second baseman who had played with Chicago’s Columbia Giants—as a full-blooded Cherokee, on the assumption that a Native American could be brought up to the big club despite the “gentlemen’s agreement” against admitting black ballplayers. However, Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey—also with spring-training facilities in Hot Springs—outed Grant, who had no choice but to return to the Columbia Giants. “If Muggsy really keeps this Indian,” Comiskey is reported to have said, “I will get a Chinaman of my acquaintance and put him on third.”)

McGraw marked the opening of the 1902 season by being booted out of the Orioles’ game in Boston. At the end of April he protested calls by umpire Jack Sheridan by sitting down in the batter’s box until he was expelled. Johnson then handed him a five-day suspension. The AL was still at war with the NL, but McGraw seemed now to be at war with Johnson as well, and in June all hell broke loose. Severely spiked by Dick Harley in a game with Detroit on May 24, Muggsy was forced to perch on the sidelines until June 28, when he marked his return by again tormenting umpire Connolly, getting tossed, and refusing to leave the field. Connolly forfeited the game to Boston.

This time Ban Johnson had had enough. He sent McGraw a wire on June 29: “As of today, you are suspended indefinitely.” John McGraw never wore an Orioles uniform again.

Was his provocation deliberate? Was McGraw looking to justify actions he had already planned to take? McGraw had in fact participated in secret meetings during his convalescence from the spiking—first with Frank Farrell, a racehorse owner with political connections who would become the owner of the Highlanders; then with Fred Knowles, secretary to Freedman, who asked whether McGraw might wish to consider managing the Giants. McGraw, now under the June 29 suspension he had appeared to incite, met with the Orioles board of directors, who owed him $7,000. He offered to forgive the amount in exchange for his unconditional release. Unwilling or unable to cough up the dough, the directors freed him to do as he pleased.

McGraw had somehow gotten wind of Johnson’s intent to move into New York in 1903 without him—that the managerial spot of the New York Americans had been offered to Clark Griffith, who had been Comiskey’s ally on the Chicago AL club since the 1900 season. Let McGraw tell his side of the story, as he did to Fred Lieb some eighty years ago, recounted in the latter’s The Baltimore Orioles (Putnam, 1955):

Do you want to know why I left Baltimore, and the American League, in 1902? Well, I’ll give you the real story. The move to shift the Orioles to New York had been contemplated for some time. In fact, I did much of the ground work, built up the contacts, scouted around for grounds, and was to get a piece of the club. Naturally, I assumed I would be manager. Then I suddenly learned that I no longer figured in Johnson’s New York plans and that he was preparing to ditch me at the end of the 1902 season. So, I acted fast. If he planned to ditch me, I ditched him first, and beat him to New York by nearly a year.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, McGraw’s next steps were absolutely frigid. On July 8 his four-year deal with the Giants was officially revealed. Next he set about to wreck the team and the league he was leaving, combining with Brush, on behalf of Freedman, to buy 201 shares of Orioles stock from team president John J. Mahon for $50,000. McGraw also swapped his half interest in the Diamond Café for Wilbert Robinson’s stock. On July 16, the announcement went to the press that Brush and Freedman—with McGraw’s clandestine assistance—now owned a majority interest in the Orioles and were free to send the club’s players to either the Reds or the Giants. McGraw secured for the Giants pitchers McGinnity and Jack Cronin as well as rising stars Dan McGann and Roger Bresnahan. Brush claimed Cy Seymour, Kelley, and Donlin for the Reds (though Donlin was still in jail after being sentenced to six months time for assaulting an actress and her escort).

On July 17, the day after this spectacular climax to the era of syndicate ball, the Orioles, left with only five players, forfeited a game to the St. Louis Browns and their franchise to the league, which was forced to borrow players from other teams so that Baltimore could complete its schedule. Two days later, McGraw managed his first game inNew York, losing to the Phillies. On August 25, Johnson announced what McGraw had already known: the AL’s intention to move the Orioles to New York in 1903, with Griffith as the Americans’ manager. Before the 1902 season was over, Brush sold the Reds and bought the Giants from Freedman, who took the money and ran away from baseball.

In January 1903, representatives of the two leagues got together and came to a peace agreement of sorts that recognized the admission of the New York American League club, soon to be dubbed in the press as the Hilltoppers or Highlanders. Brush continued his private fight against the move, and his animosity toward Johnson and his league extended to the end of the 1904 season, when he and McGraw withheld their Giants from that year’s World Series. Lieb recalled that, for the rest of the decade, “There was a cold war between the two clubs. The Giants’ official family, and writers friendly to them, disdainfuly referred to the Highlanders as the Invaders.”

But Johnson had found two men with the necessary money and influence to push the deal through. The publicly revealed owner was Farrell, the gambler and racing-stable owner; the other, unannounced at the time, was Big Bill Devery, an ex–chief of police and political bagman. They paid $18,000 for the Baltimore franchise, selected coal dealer Joseph Gordon to act as their president, and built a ramshackle ballpark in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, in time for the home opener on April 30, 1903.

The rest is history. This has been the prehistory.

As the response to George Wright’s “lost” interview from 1888 about baseball uniforms was highly complimentary, I give this space over to him once again. The time is again June 1888, the subject is baseball bats—including a number of variants that recall the corked bats of recent times—and the authority is impeccable. In the undefeated 1869 campaign of the Cincinnati Reds, in 57 contests that came against National Association clubs, George Wright’s bat produced an average of five hits and ten total bases per game, collecting 49 home runs among his 304 hits and batting .629. To the argument that the opposition was frequently soft: In the club’s19 games against fellow professionals (the Reds won all, of course), he hit 13 home runs and batted .587. I am indebted to my friend and estimable historian Bob Schaefer for the woodcut illustrations below. Now, to quote the nonpareil player of the age.

There is one curious thing in connection with base ball bats and their use by both professional and amateurs throughout the country which I think has not as yet been noticed, or at least received due attention.

I refer to the very marked changes which have taken place within my own recollection in the size and shape of base ball bats. It is queer whit an effect experience, change in playing rules, and especially the science of curving the ball have had upon them. Formerly long bats were all the rage, and players, both professional and amateur, held up legs of wood, some of them 3-1/2 feet in length, and fanned the air in a way that would seem perfectly ridiculous to the average player to-day.

Henry Chadwick of Brooklyn, the veteran among base ball reporters, was the first to introduce what was known as the square bat. It was forty-two inches in length, and was truly an immense affair. That was about the year 1860, away back in the days of the Knickerbocker, Eagle and Gotham clubs. Chadwick was always present at the games, sitting on the benches, invariably carrying an umbrella under his arm. The square bat, however, proved a fizzle, as the claim that more force was gained in the strike with less labor to the batsman proved untenable when put to the actual test.

At about the same time a hollow ash bat, loaded with a movable ball of lignum vitae, was used as an experiment by some players. A hole was bored some distance into the larger end of the bat, the lignum vitae ball inserted and the hole stopped up, This ball played freely back and forth in the hollow, and whenever the batsman brought forward the bat for the strike the ball rolled toward the end away from the handle, and the ball sent in by the pitcher struck the bat at a point opposite the lig­num vitae ball. There was little advantage gained by this, however, as the rolling and snapping of the ball inside the bat often sounded like the tick of a foul ball and oc­casioned considerable trouble.

About the year 1873-4, in the [Boston] Red Stock­ing nine, a couple of bats made of willow, with cane handles, like those of cricket bats, were introduced. They had a certain spring end snap to them, but cost about $5 apiece, and as one would last on an average only one game, it was rather ex­pensive. The bail went off with a snap and a spring, but the handles proved weak and were constantly breaking.

One of the most curious bats ever gotten up was one that was put into my hands to test. From the larger end, on the outer surface of the bat, a number of grooves were run up toward the handle for about six inches perhaps. This artful contri­vance was to do away, if possible, with any such things as fouls or “ticks,” the claim being that the ball on striking the bat would catch upon the grooves and al­ways be hit “fair.”

This, however, was soon abandoned. A laughable thing happened in connection with another crank “bat” once while I was testing it, which is perhaps worthy of mention. Some person had taken a bat, bored a hole in the larger end for about six inches, inserted several small rubber balls about two inches in diameter, and plugged up the end with cork so as to give to the bat no additional weight. The idea was to have a springy bat that would not crack.

I was striking, and neither the pitcher nor the catcher knew anything at the time about the “crank” bat. A ball was pitched and I struck at it, but unfortunately the stopper in the end of the bat came out and three or four of the rubber balls flew out in all directions, some at the pitcher, some at basemen, and some at the shortstop. There was a pretty lively scrimmage for those balls, I can tell you. I was put out on a “foul,” one “liner,” one “pop fly” and two “sky scrapers” all at once. This was cer­tainly discouraging for a batsman, and I need hardly say that this unfortunate episode brought its career to a timely close.

The real reason for the substitution of the short for the long bat is its lighter weight, and the sharp, quick blow which one can give with it. In an “in-curve,” for instance, the long bat would have to be brought in near the body to hit the ball at all, although the striker generally allows the “in” and “out” curves to pass him, and strikes at the “drops” and “risers.” If any one would invent a base ball bat that would last a season without breaking, a player would willingly give $5 for it. But bats made of the very best stuff are con­stantly breaking.

“Base ball players are the hardest men in the world to suit in matters relating to their own outfitting when the choice is left to themselves,” said a well known sportinq goods dealer. “Take the matter of bats, for instance, and there are only two men in the Allegheny club who are good judges of the article. These are [Abner] Dalrymple and [Cliff] Carroll, who practically pick out the sticks for the whole team. Carroll brought back with him from Chicago a round dozen good sticks, and probably as many more have been selected since the boys gathered in at the beginning of the season. The Allegheny boys use a good sized bat, weigh­ing: all the way from thirty-eight to forty-five ounces and averaging from thirty-five to thirty-seven inches in length. Another thing that 1 have noticed as peculiar about some of the boys is their superstition re­garding a certain stick, which they call their lucky stick and will allow no one else to use. I have seen them stand about open lots watching with deep interest a lot of urchins play until one of them made a good hit. They would then move up, examine the bat, and in all probability buy it for ten times what it cost, though it might be a piece of the commonest kind of ash.”

For a story that would run in the Boston Herald on Monday, June 18, 1888, a reporter engaged George Wright, the sporting-goods magnate (Wright & Ditson) and one-time idol of the baseball world, to offer his thoughts on a subject seldom addressed: the evolution of the baseball uniform. “THE LADIES USED TO BLUSH,” was the headline writer’s master stroke. “When Harry Wright First Wore the Red Stockings,” the heading continued, descending to “Evolution of the Modern Base Ball Costume.”

George Wright had retired as an active player after the 1882 season but was still involved in the game. In 1884 he had been an owner of the Boston franchise in the Union Association, a rival major league that lasted only one season, 1884. And by the end of this year in which he granted the interview, he would join his old teammate and rival Albert G. Spalding on a round the world tour, playing both baseball and cricket, which he had commenced to play with the St. George Club juniors at age nine. At this point I give my column over to George Wright, elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937, four months after his death at age ninety, and one of my all-time favorite figures in baseball history. His words have not appeared in print or on the web in all the nearly 125 years since he uttered them.

Thirty years ago, when I first began to play ball [i.e., 1858], there were no professional clubs in existence, and the regularly organized clubs of the time wore uniforms which would seem exceedingly strange and grotesque at the present day. In those days players wore long pants of various colors, either of grey, white, dark blue, or of a mixed check material. Extending down the side of the leg on the seam was sewed a broad white or red stripe, which gave, as you may imagine, a decidedly military air to the garment, in marked con­trast to that worn today. At the ankle the pant leg on the outer side was split up a dis­tance of perhaps six inches, and two buttons sewed on, so that by this means the pants could be securely fastened. At a little later period some players made use of a wide skate strap, binding it tightly about the pant leg, instead of the two-button arrangement before alluded to. Both of these contrivances were to aid the player if possible in stooping to pick up a hot grounder, to prevent catching the fingers in the loose cloth and spoiling the play, and also to guard against dirt and small stones flying at the leg while running the bases. There were no sliding pads used in the pants in those days, and I do not remember ever seeing a player try to slide a base.

The shirts worn by the old-time players wore generally made of white, blue or red flannel. Some clubs also had blue and white or black and white checked shirts, made very much in the style of those of the present day [i.e, 1888], but it was seldom that the club name appeared on the shirt front. The caps worn by players were invariably of bright colors, made of merino or flannel, with eight pieces to the crown, plenty large enough, with old-fashioned “peaks” or visors of leather. Well can I remember the caps worn by the Harvard College nine in, I think, the year 1866, while the team was on a tour to New York. They were of a jockey pat­tern, and fitted close to the head, with very long peaks or visors. I umpired one of the games they played with the Active club. The nine seemed pretty well used up, especially the catcher, who had a very black eye, which he had received in a game the day before, and he was forced to play in another posi­tion. Of course, the mask was not in use in those days. The base ball belts of the olden time were made of webbing of various colors, and on the back of one of them would be inscribed in many cases the word “captain.”

In regard to the matter of base ball shoes, the lapse of time has also caused a very marked change. The very first shoes worn by base ball players were made of white canvas, laced high up on the ankle. Now and then, perhaps, some player would have a calf or black leather shoe made to suit his own peculiar fancy, but the high laced canvas shoe was really the first shoe worn. A little later the French calf shoe was found to be more serviceable, in that it would wear much better and longer than canvas, and formed a more satisfactory protection against wet weather, more surely guarding the feet from the damp ground. The shoe of the present day in use to the majority of players is what is known as the “Kangaroo,” a shoe much lighter and stronger than those formerly in use, laced well down to the toe, similar to a running shoe. Some time ago Wright & Ditson made a pair of these kan­garoos for Capt. John Morrill, and to this fact I attribute a large measure Capt. John’s good playing this season. This shoe was first introduced by a Philadelphia shoemaker.

In the matter of spikes for baseball shoes the first ones used were the same as those now placed upon cricket shoes. There were four spikes on each shoe, three at the sole and one at the heel. Later on Peck & Snyder of New York introduced spikes screwed into plates set into the sole and heel of the shoe, which could be removed at the player’s will by the use of a key especially prepared for the purpose. But the principal objection to them was that the hole from which the spike was removed would very quickly fill with dirt, after the manner of the heel plates in the old fashioned club skate, which all boys in times past have spent so much time over in digging out. There was also great danger to a player, while fielding or running bases, of being spiked. For this reason a malleable iron plate was invented by some one, with three wide points placed at the centre of the sole of the foot. After this the iron plate, on account of its malleability, would get dull and would not catch on the ground, hence the final introduction of the steel tempered plate now in use. The spine of today is riveted securely to the sole of the shoe, in place of being screwed on as of old, and a well-tempered plate will last a season.

In former times the pitcher, by the con­stant rubbing and chaffing of the right foot upon the ground, would very soon wear a hole completely through the toe of his shoe. To obviate this an extra piece of leather was put on at this point; but this in turn proving inadequate, the present cup-shaped piece of brass, extending half-way round the inner edge of the toe, was introduced. This contri­vance will last a season, and is used now pretty generally. But there is another matter which I feel sure the public will feel more in­terest in than anything of which I have yet spoken. I refer to the introduction and adop­tion of knickerbocker short pants among base bail players.

My brother Harry first brought about this important change, and it was somewhat in this manner: The Young America Cricket Club of Philadelphia used often to come to New York, where my brother then was, to play games, and on one of its trips, in the year 1865, the captain of the cricket club presented my brother with a pair of long red stockings. In the succeeding year, 1866, when my brother went on his western trip, he took these stockings with him, and also had made for him a pair of knickerbocker pants to go with them. An extract taken from a Cincinnati paper in regard to this very matter will, perhaps, be of peculiar interest:

Now, be it known that knickerbockers, today so com­mon—the showing of the manly leg in varied colored hose—was unheard of, and when Harry Wright occasionally appeared with the scarlet stockings, young ladies’ faces blushed as red as its hue, and many high-toned members of the club denounced the in­novation as immoral and indecent. There were, however, strenuous supporters of the new idea—strong-headed radicals—and at a meeting on Third street they got possession, ‘by strategy, my boy,’ and adopted the uniform, afterward to be a byword, a nickname, a term of ridicule and finally of glory—that is ‘base ball history.’ Later, in 1868, the Cincinnati club, which had up to that time been composed of gentlemen playing ball simply for pleasure, was con­vened into a professional organization, and in the fall of the same year took its famous trip through the eastern cities, appearing for the first time in red stockings, thus introduc­ing in a general way knee breeches and long stockings into base ball. 

All of these historical facts In regard to base ball occurred, you must remember, in and around New York city, where the game of base bail really had its origin. The game was played, of course, in New England, but it was really the old English game of rounders, where there were no bases used, but the players ran to a stake or post placed in the ground. This was, then, in 1858 the New England style of playing our present national game. In New York, at this time, were the Knickerbocker, Gotham, Eagle and Mutual clubs, having their club ground at Hoboken, N. J., at a place called the Elysian Fields. This ground was surrounded by a long line of oak and maple trees, running alongside the Hudson river, and it often happened that some player hit the ball high over the tops of the trees, whence it would sail into the waters of the river far below. Then the game would be stopped for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes to pre­vail upon some youth to strip and swim for it. If the swimmer was successful in his search, the players would give him 25 to 50 cents, for it was a costly matter in those days to lose a ball, costing, as they did, $2 each. Consequently, this proffered reward kept the small boys in the neighborhood constantly on the alert for long hits over the tree tops, and much rivalry existed as to who should be the chosen swimmer

As 1 have before said, the rows of trees were the only enclosure to the grounds, and hence no admission fee was charged to the crowds of business men, clerks, etc., who, just as at the present time, daily came from the busy city after a hard day’s toil to enjoy the pleasure of seeing a good game of ball and who had only to walk or pay their fare to the grounds to witness their favorite sport. There was also at the Elysian Fields a large hotel called Perry’s, where the clubs had their headquarters. There were, of course, other base ball dubs in existence in Brooklyn, notably the old Atlantics, Stars, Excel­siors, Enterprise, etc., but the real centre of base ball was at Hoboken. Here there were located three grounds, where from six to eight clubs would play practice games on various afternoons of the week, and it was here, while a member of the Gotham club, that I first learned to play ball.

This interview with an unnamed “old pioneer” appeared on page 14 of the San Francisco Examiner on November 27, 1887. It lay buried in the microfilm archives until 2004, when Randall Brown published extensive excerpts from it in his landmark article, “How Baseball Began,” in SABR’s National Pastime. Brown wrote:

The Giants played their first games in San Francisco on Thanksgiving, 1887. The arrival of the New York club (with added attraction Mike Kelly) was big news, especially in the Examiner. True to his pledge “to keep the public fully acquainted with all the phases and variations of the national game, wherever played,” editor and publisher W. R. Hearst [who in the next year would be first to publish "Casey at the Bat"] provided many columns on baseball that week. There were inning-by-inning accounts, interviews with stars like Tim Keefe and John Ward, a feature on the superstitions of ballplayers, and on Sunday, November 27, an “interesting history” entitled “How Baseball Began–A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It.”

Because the entirety of this recollection, undoubtedly that of William Rufus Wheaton, has not yet been presented on the web, I offer it here in precise transcription, with variant spellings and styles intact.

HOW BASEBALL BEGAN 

A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It.

PLAYED FOR FUN THEN. 

The Game Was the Outgrowth of Three-Cornered Cat, Which Had Become Too Tame.

Baseball to-day is not by any means the game from which it sprang. Old men can recollect the time when the only characteristic American ball sport was three-cornered cat, played with a yarn ball and flat paddles.

The game had an humble beginning. An old pioneer, formerly a well-known lawyer and politician, now living in Oakland, related the following interesting history of how it originated to an EXAMINER reporter:

“In the thirties I lived at the corner of Rutgers street and East Broadway in New York. I was admitted to the bar in ’36, and was very fond of physical exercise. In fact we all were in those days, and we sought it wherever it could be found. There were at that time two cricket clubs in New York city, the St. George and the New York, and one in Brooklyn called the ‘Star,’ of which Alexander Campbell, who afterwards became well known as a criminal lawyer in ‘Frisco, was a member. There was a racket club in Allen street with an inclosed court. [A note in the Clipper on October 23, 1880 evokes the period: "In olden times Chatham square used to be an open meadow or common, and was the play-ground of the boys of this city.  Baseball was the favorite game played on the square, but it was then a simple pastime, with flat sticks or axe-handles for bats, and yarn balls.  Occasionally a boy, more lucky than the rest, would bring on the ground a ball made of a sturgeon’s nose, procured from the racket court in Allen street, where it had been driven over the wall by a rash blow."]

Myself and intimates, young merchants, lawyers and physicians, found cricket to[o] slow and lazy a game. We couldn’t get enough exercise out of it. Only the bowler and the batter had anything to do, and the rest of the players might stand around all the afternoon without getting a chance to stretch their legs. Racket was lively enough, but it was expensive and not in an open field where we could have full swing and plenty of fresh air with a chance to roll on the grass. Three-cornered cat was a boy’s game, and did well enough for slight youngsters, but it was a dangerous game for powerful men, because the ball was thrown to put out a man between bases, and it had to hit the runner to put him out. The ball was made of a hard rubber center, tightly wrapped with yarn, and in the hands of a strong-armed man it was a terrible missile, and sometimes had fatal results when it came in contact with a delicate part of the player’s anatomy.

THE GOTHAM BASEBALL CLUB.

[“]We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn’t suit us we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham Baseball Club. This was the first ball organization in the United States, and it was completed in 1837. Among the members were Dr. John Miller, a popular physician of that day; John Murphy, a well-known hotel-keeper; and James Lee, President of the New York Chamber of Commerce. To show the difference between times then and now, it is enough to say that you would as soon expect to find a Bishop or Chief Justice playing ball as the present President of the Chamber of Commerce. Yet in old times everybody was fond of outdoor exercise, and sober merchants and practitioners played ball till their joints got so stiff with age they couldn’t run. It is to the oft-repeated and vigorous open-air exercise of my early manhood that I owe my vigor at the age of 73.

[“]The first step we took in making baseball was to abolish the rule of throwing the ball at the runner and order that it should be thrown to the baseman instead, who had to touch the runner with it before he reached the base. During the regime of three-cornered cat there were no regular bases, but only such permanent objects as a bedded boulder or an old stump, and often the diamond looked strangely like an irregular polygon. We laid out the ground at Madisonsquare in the form of an accurate diamond, with home-plate and sand-bags for bases. You must remember that what is now called Madison square, opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the thirties was out in the country, far from the city limits. We had no short-stop, and often played with only six or seven men on a side. The scorer kept the game in a book we had made for that purpose, and it was he who decided all disputed points. The modern umpire and his tribulations were unknown to us.

HOW THEY PLAYED THEN.

[“]We played for fun and health, and won every time. The pitcher really pitched the ball and underhand throwing was forbidden. Moreover he pitched the ball so the batsman could strike it and give some work to the fielders. The men outside the diamond always placed themselves where they could do the most good and take part in the game. Nowadays the game seems to be played almost entirely by the pitcher and catcher. The pitcher sends his ball purposely in a baffling way, so that the batsman half the time can’t get a strike [meaning "a hit"] or reach a base. After the Gotham club had been in existence a few months it was found necessary to reduce the rules of the new game to writing. This work fell to my hands, and the code I then formulated is substantially that in use to-day. We abandoned the old rule of putting out on the first bound and confined it to fly catching. The Gothams played a game of ball with the Star Cricket Club of Brooklyn and beat the Englishmen out of sight, of course. That game and the return were the only two matches [i.e., games with other clubs] ever played by the first baseball club. [NOTE: These undoubtedly refer to the contests of October 1845, amply reported in the press and the subject of my previous post at Our Game.]

[“]The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker. For a playground we chose the Elysian fields of Hoboken, just across the Hudson river. And those fields were truly Elysian to us in those days. There was a broad, firm, greensward, fringed with fine shady trees, where we could recline during intervals, when waiting for a strike [i.e., a turn at bat],and take a refreshing rest.

LOTS OF EXERCISE AND FUN.

[“]We played no exhibition or match games, but often our families would come over and look on with much enjoyment. Then we used to have dinner in the middle of the day, and twice a week we would spend the whole afternoon in ball play. We were all mature men and in business, but we didn’t have too much of it as they do nowadays. There was none of that hurry and worry so characteristic of the present New York. We enjoyed life and didn’t wear out so fast. In the old game when a man struck out[,] those of his side who happened to be on the bases had to come in and lose that chance of making a run. We changed that and made the rule which holds good now. The difference between cricket and baseball illustrates the difference between our lively people and the phlegmatic English. Before the new game was made we all played cricket, and I was so proficient as to win the prize bat and ball with a score of 60 in a match cricket game in New York of 1848, the year before I came to this Coast. But I never liked cricket as well as our game. When I saw the game between the Unions and the Bohemians the other day, I said to myself if some of my old playmates who have been dead forty years could arise and see this game they would declare it was the same old game we used to play in the Elysian Fields, with the exception of the short-stop, the umpire, and such slight variations as the swift underhand throw, the masked catcher and the uniforms of the players. We started out to make a game simply for safe and healthy recreation. Now, it seems, baseball is played for money and has become a regular business, and, doubtless, the hope of beholding a head or limb broken is no small part of the attraction to many onlookers.”

[UNSIGNED]

Three games between rival clubs were played in October 1845. Any one of these might suffice to refute the longstanding claim that the contest of June 19, 1846 between the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and the New York Baseball Club was the “first match game.” The last named may still be considered the first that was certainly played by the Knickerbocker rules that were adopted on September 23, 1845, but even this assertion begs several larger questions: (a) were the Knickerbockers the first club to play by written rules; (b) were they truly the pioneer club; (c) were the Knickerbocker and New York clubs distinct, or were they blended, playing on June 19, 1846 what amounted to an intramural match like the many that the Knickerbockers had played earlier?

This is a big topic, upon which I have written previously and will again. For now, let’s focus on October 1845.

The Knickerbockers, recently organized under that name after several years play at New York’s Madison Square and Murray Hill, played their first recorded game on October 6. Although they commenced formal play in brisk weather, the Knickerbockers managed to squeeze in fourteen games before shutting down to await April 1846 and the opening of a new season. The scoring for these contests survives in their Game Book, held by the New York Public Library and, gloriously, readily available to researchers.

In the first intrasquad game, seven Knickerbockers won by a count of 11–8 over seven of their fellows in three innings. The rules calling for the victor to accumulate 21 runs over as many innings as that might take was, clearly, observed in the breach. Not for a dozen additional years would the rules of baseball require a set number of innings or players to the side, and these were at first settled upon as seven, not nine!

The umpire of this practice game was William Rufus Wheaton, who by his own account had reduced the rules of the Gotham Base Ball Club to writing in 1837. A skilled cricket player, Wheaton came to prefer baseball in the 1830s; his Gothams also went by the name Washingtons, signifying either their primacy among baseball clubs or their possible origin among the butchers and produce vendors of the Washington Market. As the years went by, the Gothams spawned offshoots, including both the New Yorks and the Knickerbockers. In 1887 Wheaton said to a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, in a piece titled “How Baseball Began: A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It”:

The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker. For a playground we chose the Elysian fields of Hoboken, just across the Hudson river…. We played no exhibition or match games [emphasis mine], but often our families would come over and look on with much enjoyment. Then we used to have dinner in the middle of the day, and twice a week we would spend the whole afternoon in ball play. 

I will post the entirety of this interview, discovered by Randall Brown in 2004, as my next entry at Our Game. To now it has appeared on the web only in excerpted form.

William H. Tucker, who in some unknown measure assisted Wheaton in laying down the Knickerbocker rules, played in ten of the fourteen contests, including the one on October 6, in which he scored three of the losing squad’s eight runs. Like Wheaton and other Knickerbockers, he had been a player with the New York Ball Club and maintained a tie to them, indeed playing in two formal matches of the New Yorks with the Brooklyn Club on October 21 and 24 of 1845, a month after he had helped to form the Knicks. In his 1998 history of American cricket, Tom Melville pointed to an even earlier contest between these two clubs, on October 11 (actually October 10), reported in the New York Morning News. Research more than a decade later has revealed a somewhat fuller account in the obscure and short-lived newspaper the True Sun:

The Base Ball match between eight Brooklyn players, and eight players of New York, came off on Friday on the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club. The Yorkers were singularly unfortunate in scoring but one run in their three innings. Brooklyn scored 22 and of course came off winners.

Wheaton also umpired the game of October 24, 1845 between New York and Brooklyn, and played in the game of November 10 to mark the second anniversary of the New York Club, which, like the recently discovered Magnolia Ball Club, had commenced play at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields in 1843—two years before the Knickerbockers.

Many of the early New York baseballists had cut their teeth on cricket, and this was true of the Brooklyn players as well. In the game of October 21, conducted at the Elysian Fields, the Brooklyn Club (possibly not the same men who had played in the game of October 10, as no box score survives) were originally reported to be the victors once again, but this report proved an error. As was reported the next day, the eight players of the New York club won handily, and did so again in the game of October 24, played at the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club, opposite Sharp’s Hotel, at the corner of Myrtle and Portland Avenues, near Fort Greene. The scores were, respectively, 24–4 and 37–19. On both these occasions the Brooklyn club included established cricketers John Hines, William Gilmore, John Hardy, William H. Sharp, and Theodore Forman. Their lineup appears to have been identical for the two games, as the Ayers of October 21 and the Meyers of October 24 may be the same individual, while the other seven men match up.

There is more work to be done with all this, certainly, but to me the NYBBC anniversary match of November 10, 1845, seems to me to have much in common with the purported “first match game” of June 19, 1846, while the games of October 1845, particularly the latter two, seem to be true match games between wholly differentiated clubs. (It could be argued–I certainly would–that the Knickerbockers played NO match games until they met the Gotham (a.k.a. Washington) club on June 11, 1851, a game the Knicks won by a count of 21-11.)

In the New York Herald of November 11, 1845 appeared the following squib, a trailing part of a larger article on trotting at the Centreville Track on Long Island.

NEW YORK BASE BALL CLUB:–The second Anniversary of this Club came off yesterday, on the ground in the Elysian fields. The game was as follows:

Runs                                      Runs
Murphy 4                             Winslow 4
Johnson 4                            Case 4
Lyon 3                                 Granger 1
Wheaton 3                           Lalor 3
Sweet 3                               Cone 1
Seaman 1                            Sweet 4
Venn 2                                 Harold 3
Gilmore 1                             Clair 2
Tucker 3                              Wilson 1
– -                                         – -
24                                         23

J.M. Marsh, Esq., Umpire and Scorer

After the match, the parties took dinner at Mr. McCarty’s, Hoboken, as a wind up for the season. The Club were honored by the presence of representatives from the Union Star Cricket Club, the Knickerbocker Clubs, senior and junior, and other gentlemen of note.

Several interesting things emerge from this notice of the game played on November 10.

Prominent Knickerbocker names are present—Wheaton, Tucker, Cone, Clair (Clare). So too are Gotham players of earlier prominence—Lalor, Ransom, Murphy, Johnson, Winslow, Case. The Davis who plays here and in the game of June 19, 1846 is not James Whyte Davis, who was elected a member in 1850 and marked his 25th anniversary with the club in 1875. Venn is Harry Venn, proprietor of the Gotham Cottage (a billiard and bowling saloon) at 298 Bowery, longtime clubhouse to the Gotham BBC. Gilmore is one of the cricketers who played baseball with the Brooklyns on October 21 and 24.

The game was played nine to the side, clearly to 21 runs or more in equal innings. The two sides were unnamed, and the game was an intramural one despite the presence of Knickerbockers. While the New Yorks and their invited friends were celebrating their second year as an organized club, on another field in Hoboken that day, the Knickerbockers were playing an intramural match all their own.

Playing with eight to the side, including a first appearance for Charles S. Debost, the squads lined up this way:

Tucker
Moncrieff
Debost
Talman
Hale/Hall
Turney
Morgan
W. O’Brien

vs.

Curry
Dupignac
Adams
Birney
Van Nostrand
Niebuhr
Hart
J. O’Brien

Charles A. Peverelly wrote this in 1866, clearly fed his lines by a member of the Knickerbockers:

On June 5, 1846, the first honorary members were elected, viz. James Lee and Abraham Tucker. At the same meeting Curry, Adams and Tucker were appointed a committee to arrange the preliminaries, and conclude a match with the New York Base Ball Club. From all the information the writer has been able to gather, it appears that this was not an organized club, but merely a party of gentlemen who played together frequently, and styled themselves the New York Club. However, the match was played at Hoboken on June 19, 1846, it being the first the Club engaged in, and the particulars are certainly not creditable as far as runs are concerned. But four innings were played, as it will be remembered the game was won by the parties making twenty-one aces, or over, on even innings.

The scoresheet from that game, depicted at the head of this post, was written over in later years, probably by James Whyte Davis, to give the game the appearance of a match between two distinct clubs. But was it viewed that way by the men who had played in it?