Total Baseball was a 2,301 page baseball encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. By its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia. [1] The encyclopedia contains seasonal and career statistics in numerous categories for every Major League player, as well as historical, opinion, and year-by-year essays. Thorn wrote one of the chapters and edited the rest while Palmer, in collaboration with Thorn, provided the statistics.
The idea for Total Baseball originated when two baseball historians and statisticians, Thorn and Palmer, realized that the current Baseball Encyclopedia, at that time endorsed by Major League Baseball, contained numerous significant mistakes. [2] These included thousands of miscalculations by earlier statisticians, typographic mistakes made by the original scorekeeper, and even "phantom" players who did not actually exist and were added to a box score incorrectly, Lou Proctor being a notable example. [3] In addition, Thorn and Palmer corrected mistakes not commonly accepted by the baseball community, such as the discovery that Ty Cobb actually garnered 4,189 hits, not 4,191, or that Walter Johnson in fact had 417 career wins, not 414 or 416.
Thorn and Palmer also included six new, sabermetric statistics for batters and fielders and eight for pitchers. Some of these, such as runs created, were developed by statisticians like Bill James, but most were of Palmer's design. Most importantly, Thorn and Palmer normalized both conventional and new statistics for era and home park. Their most important new statistic was On Base Plus Slugging (OPS, today commonly seen on baseball cards and scoreboards) [4] for all batters since 1876 for whom bases on balls were recorded. As OPS+ the statistic was normalized for season and home park, thus permitting direct comparison of the impact of players across generations, such as Babe Ruth in 1927 and Barry Bonds in 2001.
The first edition of the book included over 1,500 pages of statistics for all of the then 13,160 players in the history of the game. [5] The Player Register section provided 27 batting, baserunning, and fielding statistics, broken out by year and team. The Pitcher Register included 28 pitching, batting, baserunning, and fielding statistics. The All-Time Leaders section included the top 100 all-time and single-season leaders in each of 95 categories.
The Roster section included the regular players, pitchers, key substitutes, and managers for all 2,010 team seasons in the history of professional baseball going back to 1871. These were grouped alphabetically by city and then by one of the six leagues: the National Association, Union Association, Players’ League, Federal League, National League, and the American League. It also included a Manager Roster, a Coach Roster, and an Umpire Roster.
The Home-Road Statistics section illustrated the powerful effects ballparks can have on batting and pitching performance. It included the won-lost and run-scoring characteristics of every park in the three most significant major leagues – the American and National Leagues and the American Association. It also included the home/road records for all teams in all leagues since 1871. Collectively, they enabled the creation of a Park Factor, a measure of batting or pitching in one ballpark compared to the average of other parks.
Total Baseball also included 41 chapters in six sections about all aspects of the game.
The History – The History of Major League Baseball, Team Histories, Postseason Play, The All-Star Game, The Changing Game, and A Baseball Calendar.
The Players –The Lives of the Players, Demographics, Foreign-Born Players, Baseball Families, No Minor League Experience, Baseball Nicknames, Mascots and Superstitions, Phantom Ballplayers, Scandals and Controversies, Tragedies and Shortened Careers, Managers, Coaches, and Umpires.
The Highlights of the Game – Streaks and Feats, Awards and Honors, and Baseball Lore.
Other Leagues – Black Ball, Rival Leagues, The Minor Leagues, Japanese Baseball, Baseball in the Caribbean, College Baseball, Baseball in the Armed Services, and Women in Baseball.
The Game Off the Field – The Business of Baseball, Baseball and the Law, Trades and Free Agency, Baseball Commissioners, The Farm System, The Fans, Concessions, Baseball on the Air, and Baseball Betting.
Appendices – Rules and Scoring, The City Series, and The Ultimate Baseball Library.
Total Baseball was “packaged” by Baseball Ink, a company founded by Thorn and David Reuther. Baseball Ink provided the contents which were edited by Rick Horgan, Senior Editor at Warner Books. Baseball Ink then designed the book, had it copyedited and proofread, then delivered it to Warner ready for the printer. [6]
The first edition of Total Baseball was published in 1989 by Warner Books and sold 75,000 copies. [7] Warner published the Total Baseball 1990 Update in 1990. It also published Total Baseball, Second Edition in 1991. The latest edition, its eighth, was published in 2004.
Baseball statistics play an important role in evaluating the progress of a player or team.
In baseball statistics, on-base percentage (OBP) measures how frequently a batter reaches base. An official Major League Baseball (MLB) statistic since 1984, it is sometimes referred to as on-base average (OBA), as it is rarely presented as a true percentage.
On-base plus slugging (OPS) is a sabermetric baseball statistic calculated as the sum of a player's on-base percentage and slugging percentage. The ability of a player both to get on base and to hit for power, two important offensive skills, are represented. An OPS of .800 or higher in Major League Baseball puts the player in the upper echelon of hitters. Typically, the league leader in OPS will score near, and sometimes above, the 1.000 mark.
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball that a player on the batting team, called the batter, tries to hit with a bat. The objective of the offensive team is to hit the ball into the field of play, away from the other team's players, allowing its players to run the bases, having them advance counter-clockwise around four bases to score what are called "runs". The objective of the defensive team is to prevent batters from becoming runners, and to prevent runners' advance around the bases. A run is scored when a runner legally advances around the bases in order and touches home plate.
Henry Chadwick was an English-American sportswriter, baseball statistician and historian, often called the "Father of Baseball" for his early reporting on and contributions to the development of the game. He edited the first baseball guide that was sold to the public. He is credited with creating box scores, as well as creating the abbreviation "K" that designates a strikeout. He is said to have created the statistics of batting average and earned run average (ERA). He was posthumously inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938.
In sports analytics, sabermetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term "sabermetrics" was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
Fantasy baseball is a game in which the participants serve as owners and general managers of virtual baseball teams. The competitors select their rosters by participating in a draft in which all relevant Major League Baseball (MLB) players are available. Fantasy points are awarded in weekly matchups based on the actual performances of baseball players in real-world competition. The game typically involves MLB, but can also involve other leagues, such as American college baseball, or leagues in other countries, such as the KBO League.
Herman C. Long was an American shortstop in Major League Baseball (MLB) who played for the Kansas City Cowboys, Boston Beaneaters, New York Highlanders, Detroit Tigers, and Philadelphia Phillies. Long was known for his great fielding range as a shortstop, but he also holds the MLB career record for errors.
Pete Palmer is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, Palmer's book The Hidden Game of Baseball is often referred to as providing the foundation upon which the field of sabermetrics was built.
In the sport of baseball, a baserunner is said to be in scoring position when they are on second or third base. The distinction between being on first base and second or third base is that a runner on first can usually only score if the batter hits an extra-base hit, while a runner on second or third can score on a single. This is also known as "ducks on the pond". Runners left in scoring position refers to the number of runners on second or third at the end of an inning and is an inverse measure of a team's offensive efficiency.
David S. Neft is an American writer and historian who creates sports encyclopedias.
Alan Schwarz is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and author, formerly at The New York Times, best known for writing more than 100 articles that exposed the National Football League's cover-up of concussions and brought the issue of brain injuries in sports to worldwide attention. His investigative and profile pieces are generally credited with revolutionizing the respect and protocol for concussions in youth and professional athletics. Schwarz's work was profiled in The New Yorker and several films, including the Will Smith movie "Concussion" and the documentaries "Head Games" and PBS Frontline's "League of Denial". The Columbia Journalism Review featured him on the cover of its 2011 Art of Great Reporting issue and wrote of his concussion work, "He put the issue on the agenda of lawmakers, sports leagues, and the media at large — and helped create a new debate about risk and responsibility in sports." The impact of the series was described by Hall of Fame sports writer Murray Chass as "the most remarkable feat in sports journalism history."
PECOTA, an acronym for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is a sabermetric system for forecasting Major League Baseball player performance. The word is a backronym based on the name of journeyman major league player Bill Pecota, who, with a lifetime batting average of .249, is perhaps representative of the typical PECOTA entry. PECOTA was developed by Nate Silver in 2002–2003 and introduced to the public in the book Baseball Prospectus 2003. Baseball Prospectus (BP) has owned PECOTA since 2003; Silver managed PECOTA from 2003 to 2009. Beginning in Spring 2009, BP assumed responsibility for producing the annual forecasts, making 2010 the first baseball season for which Silver played no role in producing PECOTA projections.
William Anthony Gamson was a professor of Sociology at Boston College, where he was also the co-director of the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP). He is the author of numerous books and articles on political discourse, the mass-media and social movements from as early as the 1960s. His influential works include Power and Discontent (1968), The Strategy of Social Protest (1975), Encounters with Unjust Authority (1982) and Talking Politics (2002), as well as numerous editions of SIMSOC.
The 1910 Chalmers Award scandal was an incident in which a Major League Baseball team, the St. Louis Browns, tried but failed to give Nap Lajoie the batting title over Ty Cobb.
Earnshaw Cook was an early researcher and proponent of sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball through statistical means.
In baseball, a number of coaches assist in the smooth functioning of a team. They are assistants to the manager, who determines the starting lineup and batting order, decides how to substitute players during the game, and makes strategy decisions. Beyond the manager, more than a half dozen coaches may assist the manager in running the team. Essentially, baseball coaches are analogous to assistant coaches in other sports, as the baseball manager is to the head coach.
The Baseball Encyclopedia is a baseball reference book first published by Macmillan in 1969. Nine further editions of the book were released between 1974 and 1996. The Baseball Encyclopedia features statistical summaries for Major League Baseball (MLB) players.
The Hidden Game of Baseball is a book by baseball statisticians John Thorn and Pete Palmer. It was published in 1984 by Doubleday and is considered to be a seminal work in the fields of sabermetrics and baseball history.
Allan Roth was a Canadian-American baseball and hockey statistician and a early proponent of sabermetrics in baseball. During his career, Roth worked for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers as their official statistician from 1947 to 1964.
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