Sixth in a new series Dave Smith What is Retrosheet? Today, 35 years after its founding, no hardened baseball fan would be pressed to answer. But maybe you are new to the world of baseball statistics — whether (a) the raw data compilations and double-entry accounting that have obsessed fans since before MLB was a gleam in its founder’s eye; or (b) the next-step formulations known as averages; or © the analytical measures known as sabermetrics. Without the first, there would be neither impulse nor reason to create the second and third. Today’s profile is about gathering the basic facts of ..read more

Fifth in a new series Harold and Dorothy Seymour, posed emblematically Geoffrey C. Ward, with whom I worked happily on Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary Baseball, said in later years that “Working on the film and book taught me [that] … while most Americans care too little about their history, the baseball community is different. The real meaning of all those apparently impenetrable stats is that the past matters. Without them no player would know where he stood, no fan could measure his or her heroes against those who have gone before. That fact alone should endear the game to any histor ..read more

My foreword to John R. Husman’s new book John R. Husman’s Roger Bresnahan: A Baseball Life will soon be published by McFarland Books. I commend it to your attention (https://amzn.to/3UrWZJY). Roger Bresnaham, 1910 Over the past two decades baseball sophisticates have derided the voting patterns and special selections of the Baseball Hall of Fame as a measure of nothing except sentimentality, foolishness and cronyism. How did Rabbit Maranville get a plaque? Or Joe Tinker? Or Roger Bresnahan? Yet the Hall’s purpose in honoring worthies of a bygone age, once famous if no longer so, has been ..read more

Fourth in a new series Larry Lester In 1970 Robert W. Peterson wrote a pioneering book, Only the Ball Was White, that brought attention to Black Baseball in the years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947. That book was followed by Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues by John Holway, whose research had preceded Peterson’s. The Baseball Hall of Fame (HOF) welcomed the legendary heroes of Black Baseball, men who had been denied their place in MLB; their plaques were placed not in a separate wing, as had originally been proposed, but alongside their distinguished peers ..read more

Third in a new series Jefferson R. Burdick Why do people collect? And in baseball, particularly, how are they different, if at all, from fans? This is the question I ask about Jefferson R. Burdick, about whom so much has been written. He was a hunter-gatherer, a historian, a listmaker — in sum, a dweeb like me. He was just the sort of person I like, who devotes as much attention to his hobby preoccupation as a professional ballplayer might to his occupation … so the difference between jock and nerd, slung at each other in derision, seems scant. Although a handful of others ..read more

Second in a new series, with new criteria David Block Among those who changed things in how, forever after, we looked at the world and ourselves, Charles Darwin might lead the pack, though Newton and Galileo and Watson & Crick might come in for a holler, too. In baseball, it’s Chadwick and Bill James, last week’s entrant in this series. What James did for baseball today, David Block has done for its past … and is just as important for its future. How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? For this we look to historians: to archaeologists of play ..read more

First in a new series, with new criteria Bill James Last year I offered at Our Game a series of 20 essays about baseball pioneers — largely ethnic, racial, gender, and disability heroes (https://bit.ly/4aEsnvd). For this season I extend that idea to those who, behind the scenes, have had a profound impact on the game — the way we play it and understand it. A Hall of Fame plaque will not be enough to make the team, nor will meritorious contributions to baseball writing or broadcasting. This time around, my selections represent those who have built things of enduring value. For me, first am ..read more

Baseball Pioneer Brown University team 1879, with White seated second from right; Lee Richmond stands at left, holding ball Bruce Allardice, the author of this comprehensive biographical piece, first researched William Edward White some 20 years ago, with our mutual friend and demon digger Peter Morris. Another pal, Stefan Fatsis, published the story — “Mystery of Baseball: Was William White Game’s First Black?” — in the Wall Street Journal on January 30, 2004. Ten years later, in Slate, Fatsis and Morris co-authored “William Edward White, the First Black Player in Major-League History, L ..read more

“Bace” and “Basse” confirmed … only yesterday The Bridges-Maverick map of 1807: corner of Spring and Hudson streets, where baseball was played in 1805 I unearthed this item on a Sunday morning traipse through a database, seeking to chase down the possible relation of Columbia College students to baseball play at the turn of the nineteenth century. It followed upon the early-baseball research of New York University librarian George Thompson, who in 2001 had hit the front page of the New York Times with his discovery of a newspaper reference to a game called baseball in New York City i ..read more

Searching for the first, in the 1860s Francis C. Sebring’s new and beautiful parlor divertissement of base-ball Who invented the game? And why didn’t he apply for a patent, a service available since 1790? Baseball was played in America before Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright were born; both went to their graves not knowing they had invented it. That opens us to a larger story, one that spills out on the web pages of Protoball. And yet, early baseball patents and advertisements are fascinating because they reveal how and when the new sport — as played by adults — began to penetrate ..read more