The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (57 page)

Benton’s and Newsom’s careers as hurlers encompassed both 1934 and 1952, which were, respectively, Ruth’s last and Mantle’s first full years in the majors. Paige is perhaps subject to challenge, since the big leagues’ old racial barriers made it impossible for him to pitch against the Babe in anything but exhibition games.

A: Dan Brouthers, Nick Altrock, Bobo Newsom, Mickey Vernon, Early Wynn, Ted Williams.

Q: How many players can you name whose active careers spanned at least four calendar decades?

An infuriating question, answerable only by zealots wearing bottle-bottom eyeglasses who have wasted their lives groveling in the fine print of the baseball record books. Brouthers, a Hall of Fame slugger and first baseman, appeared in his first big-league game in 1879 and his last in 1904. Newsom’s career stretched from 1929 to 1953, Vernon’s and Williams’ from 1939 to 1960, Wynn’s from 1939 to 1963. Nick Altrock’s span is 1898 to 1924, or maybe even 1933, but he barely merits inclusion, since most of his appearances after 1912 (he was a left-handed pitcher) were token affairs—an inning or two per year. He may be remembered by a few elders (including this scribe) as a beloved long-time coach with the Senators who used to team with Al Schacht in a clown act between the games of doubleheaders in baseball’s sunshine days.
*

More infuriation?

A: Dodgers, Cubs, Browns, Senators, Red Sox, Senators, Browns, Tigers, Browns, Tigers, Senators, Dodgers, Browns, Senators, Dodgers, Athletics, Senators, Yankees, Senators, Giants, Athletics, Senators, Athletics.

Anybody got the question? Oh, come on, this one is easy.

Q: Name in order all the major-league teams for which Bobo Newsom pitched. (Or, variantly, name the pitcher who served more terms as a Senator than Strom Thurmond.)

A: c, King Kelly; 1b, Ted Kluszewski; 2b, Harvey Kuenn; 3b, George Kell; ss, Don Kessinger; of, Willie Keeler, Al Kaline, Ralph Kiner; p. Sandy Koufax, Tim Keefe, Jim Kaat, Jerry Koosman.

Q: Name an all-time-best lineup of players with names beginning with “K.”

No single answer is right here, but this is a game that can be played for hours on end among badly bitten fans or, solo, by insomniac baseball freaks in the darkest hours of the night. Utterly useless disputes and time-wasting reveries can ensue, thus providing some of the true secret rewards of fandom. Your team, of course, can play for any letter of the alphabet; if you start with “C,” for instance, it is possible to come up with an All-Hall-of-Fame lineup. “K” is more rewarding than one might think at first, however. It isn’t easy to relegate Chuck Klein, Charlie Keller, Harmon Killebrew, Ken Keltner, Tony Kubek, or Highpockets Kelly to the bench, as I have done, but with pinch-hitters like that, one probably doesn’t need a very deep bullpen: Jim Konstanty, Ray Kremer, Ellis Kinder, and Alex Kellner. (Harvey Kuenn, incidentally, never did play second base, but my manager, Eddie Kasko, is not afraid to experiment a little with a lifetime .303 hitter like Harv.) Let’s add Eddie Kranepool to the club, for good luck, and the back-up catcher, of course, is Clyde Kluttz. Probably I have left somebody out. If you need a little help in scouting him, take along Paul Krichell.

And just one more—absolutely the final one.

A: Three feet seven inches.

Q: How tall was Eddie Gaedel, the midget whom Bill Veeck sent up to bat as a pinch-hitter for the St. Louis Browns against the Tigers on August 19, 1951?

Gaedel walked, of course (which was the whole idea), and the rules of the game were instantly changed to prohibit such high unseriousness. The story is not complete, however, unless one adds:

A: Pearl du Monville. (Yes, I know, I know, but this is part of the same question. Stop complaining.)

Q: Name the midget who was signed up to pinch-hit for a big-league team in James Thurber’s
Saturday Evening Post
story “You Could Look It Up,” published a full decade before Veeck’s coup.

You could look it up.

This interrogative outburst has been inspired by the recent publication of two significant (and significantly different) volumes of baseball records. One is the long-awaited new edition of
The Baseball Encyclopedia
(Macmillan; $17.95), which attempts to update the epochal first edition, of 1969. The other is
The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball
(Grosset & Dunlap; $5.95 paperback, $14.95 in the regular edition), which presents the essential data of the game in year-by-year rather than biographical fashion. Macmillan’s original
Baseball Encyclopedia
was recognized almost from the instant of its publication as the most accurate and rewarding book of baseball records ever compiled. The original edition (let’s call it “Mac I”) had its beginnings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when a group of young computer scientists who had allied themselves as Information Concepts, Inc., approached Robert Markel, an executive editor at Macmillan, and suggested that it was high time that the new capabilities of computer science be permitted to go to work on the vast, almost oceanic depths of essential baseball statistics that had accumulated over the years. They had found the perfect partner, for Markel had previously published a number of original and most successful sports books, including
The Glory of Their Times,
by Lawrence S. Ritter, which is a glowing re-creation of the early days of big-league baseball as told by some surviving Nestors of the game. Markel was enthusiastic about the new proposal, and became even more enthusiastic when he learned that ICI had independent financial backing that would begin to support the enormous costs of programming the work and building the essential data bank—a Fort Knox of stats. The ICI planners—notably, two men named Paul Funkhouser and David S. Neft—had in mind an eventual computerization of baseball that would hook up the scoreboards in all the big-league parks to a single central electronic brain, which would also pick up and print and store all the statistics of the game as they happened. In computer circles, this is known as “real-time” work. It could also be called dream-time work, for the costs of the scheme were admittedly phenomenal, and organized baseball is not known for its instant response to brand-new ideas or to unexpected financial disbursements of any nature. In any case, the cost of the preparation of the data for Mac I sailed right through the independent financial backing and up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, effectively postponing the advent of ICI as an instantaneous electronic sports colossus, but not before it had provided Macmillan with a data bank of incomparable value and interest. The primary source of the data was the daily “official sheets” of baseball statistics kept by the American League (since 1905) and by the National League (since 1902). For corroborative evidence and for the statistics of all the nineteenth-century contests, the compilers consulted local libraries and ancient newspaper files, and the precious records of famous baseball students like the late Lee Allen, the official historian of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, and John Tattersall, a Philadelphia steamship executive. (Tattersall has compiled a history of every home run ever struck in major-league competition, including the inning, the number of men on base, and the pitcher.) All this digging yielded a formidable body of figures (the first-draft specifications came to eight thousand pages), and included a few corrections of famous old individual statistics: Ty Cobb’s hallowed Most Hits was raised from 4,191 to 4,192, as the result of two previously overlooked games he played in 1906.

Mac I came out in the fall of 1969, to instant success. Priced at twenty-five dollars, it eventually sold some fifty thousand copies in the bookstores, plus another fifty or sixty thousand via book clubs and mail orders. It is an elegantly organized, beautifully printed and laid-out volume of 2,337 pages, containing (among a great many other things) a statistical summary of the changing team averages over the years; a summary of individual leaders in batting, pitching, fielding, and so on; a year-by-year roster of all the teams and their players and statistics (the dates, here and elsewhere, go back to the National League of 1876, and also include vanished big leagues like the Players League, the American Association, the Union Association, and the outlaw Federal League); an alphabetical roster of every major-league player and his batting record; an alphabetical roster of all pitchers and their pitching records; a register of managers; and a description of every World Series game, with accompanying data. The book, in short, was a self-certifying classic that made its fortunate purchasers wonder how they and the game had ever got along without it. My own copy, its spine lettering almost worn away by my ceaseless browsings and burrowings, is now kept under lock and key, for the volume is irreplaceable.

Irreplaceable, alas, despite its official replacement, Mac II, which came out in June. My first misgivings about the new edition were instantaneous when I noticed that the price had been dropped to $17.95 and the number of pages cut by more than a third, to 1,532. How, I wondered, could anyone have enforced a diet upon a book that carried an additional five years of new players and new records? One could understand the need to keep the price of the new book beneath a range acceptable only to independently languid bibliophiles, but the attempt at a more popular price suggested that the current editors of the work did not understand the necessary dimensions and classic purposes of a basic reference work. The makers of Mac II have skimped and shaved, sometimes sensibly but more often oddly or arbitrarily or thoughtlessly. New listings of no-hit games and Hall of Fame members are welcome, and so are descriptions of the new Championship Series games, which were first played after Mac I. Gone, however, is the essential year-by-year roster of all the teams and all their players—the section in Mac I that most warmed and pleased old fans, since it repopulated the playing fields of their recollection with long-forgotten batteries, ancient double-play combinations, and nearly vanished bench-warmers. (Hello, Gene Desautels!
Ave,
Russ van Atta!) Gone from each player’s statistical biography are mentions of important injuries and of years lost to military service. Gone, appallingly, are his accompanying World Series figures—as if these were somehow not germane to the man’s total performance.

What this means in terms of day-to-day usefulness is dismaying. I can imagine, for example, a young fan spending an hour or two musing over Ted Williams’ lifetime records. How good
was
the Splendid Splinter? In the new volume, he would not be able to learn that Williams missed out on some 450 games of major-league action because of his military service in 1943–45, and some 250 more games for the same reason in 1952–53. Extrapolating his prime-season figures, the sprout might have discovered that this duty time represented a possible loss of 160 career home runs, which would have brought Williams to a lifetime total of 681—right up there in Aaron-Ruth country.

When
was
it that Dizzy Dean had his toe broken by a line drive in an All-Star Game, and then ruined his arm forever by pitching before it was quite healed? When was Eddie Waitkus shot by that unknown female admirer? How many World Series games did it take for Lou Brock to steal his record-breaking fourteen bases? When, and for whom, did Rogers Hornsby play in the World Series? Why did Sandy Koufax quit so suddenly? Why did Nemo Gaines require special permission to attempt a career in the majors? How many at-bats did Walter Alston have in the majors? How tall was Eddie Gaedel? Mac I says; Mac II either doesn’t say or mumbles. It’s a pity.
**

The Grosset & Dunlap volume, which turned up about the same time as Mac II, is a reference work built primarily around the old yearbooks of the game—every name and every offensive statistic of every season. Career averages are to be found in five “era summaries,” and several ingenious codes supply much of the quirky individual details that Mac II has dropped. The “career-interruption” code, for instance, lists seventy-three separate forms of bad news, including “LA—Leg amputated”; “SU—Suspended for hitting or abusing umpire”; “JL—Returned to Japanese league”; and “JA—In jail for assault.” The printing and paper and typography are not up to the quality of the Macmillan volumes, but there are a number of counterweighing innovations, possibly even including the sizable and rather fervently written descriptions of each major-league season and its happenings. The best new material here is some averages I have never seen before, including lifetime
differences
in winning percentages for pitchers and the winning percentages of the teams they played for. The simple lifetime percentages for pitchers, for instance, find Jim Palmer first on the list of currently active players, with .682, and Tom Seaver second, with .640. The lifetime difference list, by contrast, places Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal at the top of the active list, and Palmer and Seaver don’t show up on it at all. Here, too, at last, are the very first comparative performance figures for black, white, and Latin players, which confirm what has so far been only broadly perceptible: a huge overall increase in numbers of black and Latin players since 1947 (but a much smaller one among pitchers); batting averages, slugging averages, and stolen bases notably higher for non-white players than for whites; a clustering of black and Latin stars at the top levels of baseball accomplishment. These figures, as
The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball
counsels, open enormous areas of speculation that should be explored with care and in the company of sociologists and other experts.

The new reference book, primarily intended for paperback sale, is also the work of Robert Markel, now the editor-in-chief at Grosset & Dunlap, who reunited David Neft and some of the other ICI alumni to put together a different sort of “Fan’s Companion.” The data bank compiled for Macmillan was no longer available to them, of course, and the figures in the new work were put together by hand—with a resulting proofreading bill of ten thousand dollars and oculists’ fees as yet unknown.

A few moving figures have been observed amid the digit-thickets. On a sunny afternoon in the middle of April, I welcomed the Red Sox in their first visit to the Yankees’ sublet, Shea Stadium, and watched Mel Stottlemyre beat Luis Tiant, 2–1, in a game that was full of early-season false hints. The young Bosox, who had dropped Orlando Cepeda and Luis Aparicio at the end of spring training, showed none of the speed and power and confidence that subsequently distinguished their campaign this year, and the two Yankee scores came about as the result of malfeasances—a wild peg to first by the Boston catcher, and a hit batsman and bases-loaded walk by Tiant. (Tiant, who has the most entertaining and effective move to first base of any right-hander, did not pick anybody off this day. Once, I congratulated him on this highly specialized talent, and he grinned and said, “Oh, my father he had a much better move than me. [Tiant
père
was a celebrated Cuban hurler of his day.] He say he used to strike out batters with it.”) Further evidences of springtime were the three straight singles rapped out by Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles. Normally a docile batsman, Nettles was enjoying an almost Faustian prosperity at the plate, which eventually brought him eleven home runs in the month of April, tying a league record. He was at a loss to explain this. “I don’t know,” he said in the clubhouse. “I’m just seeing the ball better, or s
omething.”
He looked embarrassed—the proper expression of a player waiting for the averages to bite him.