“It took just seven hours to print… the book, but a year and a half to tell the computer what to do.”
Books of Numbers… and Stories
I have been crazy about baseball, particularly its statistics, since the age of 10. I started by watching games on my family’s black and white television set, collecting and studying Topps baseball cards, and reading everything I could find about the game and its rich but scattered history. In 1967, it seemed that one had to piece together information from these various sources to get anything resembling the full picture.
At 16, I was introduced to the secret “reference room” of my high school library. I riffled through the card catalog, wondering if there could possibly be any book about baseball which I hadn’t yet read or discovered. I came across an unfamiliar listing – The Baseball Encyclopedia – and walked over to section 796.357 to find it.
I hardly left the library for the rest of my high school career.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is the keeper of the game’s history, through artifacts, memories and – most importantly – words and numbers. But 50 years ago, those words and numbers were spread out through a myriad of publications, making the whole picture of the game’s history a nebulous target.
That all changed when the first baseball reference volumes – aided greatly by computer publishing – were born.
The Baseball Encyclopedia was first published by Macmillan in 1969, and ceremoniously introduced by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn on Aug. 28 of that year. There had never been anything quite like it. There had been books with partial records of players throughout the game’s history, or complete records for selected players, but this one had the full batting and pitching records of every man who had played even one game in the major leagues, not to mention basic biographical information for each one. It was type-set by computer (the first commercial book ever done that way), contained 2,347 pages, weighed 6½ pounds, and cost $25, a hefty sum for a book in those days.
David Neft, Director of ICI
The Baseball Encyclopedia was developed by Information Concepts Incorporated (ICI), an early computer systems company. ICI, directed by David Neft, enlisted the services of Lee Allen, Historian for the Baseball Hall of Fame, and researcher/collector John Tattersall, and built a data-base from published box scores and game accounts dating back to 1876. Other key contributors included Robert Markel of The Macmillan Company, Systems Manager Neil Armann, and Associate Editor Jordan Deutsch. Dozens of other researchers and programmers did the grunt work, including recreating stats which weren’t recorded throughout history (e.g., pre-1913 ERAs, pre-1920 RBI, and pre-1969 saves, not to mention pinch-hitting and relief pitching records).
As Neft said, “It took just seven hours to print… the book, but a year and a half to tell the computer what to do.”
Lee Allen’s biographical research files were a key to the project but, sadly, he didn’t see the finished product. Allen died May 20, 1969, just 100 days before the book came out.
The Baseball Encyclopedia came to be simply known as “Macmillan” among baseball aficionados. Besides player records, it contained sections on special achievements, all-time leaders, seasonal summaries, managers, post-season and All-Star Games. It is not coincidence that the Society for American Baseball Research was formed less than two years after the first edition came out, and that major league attendance soared in the 1970s. Macmillan began issuing revised editions every three years or so, usually with Joseph Reichler listed as editor, with some lapses of statistical accuracy and cuts of significant information.
The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball first appeared in 1974, the brainchild of ICI’s David Neft and Richard Cohen, among others. A large paperback, it covered 20th century baseball statistical history on a year-by-year rather than player-by-player basis. As Neft & Cohen wrote, “Instead of primarily presenting an alphabetical list of all ballplayers, we have placed the emphasis on the season so that the reader will be able to perceive baseball as a team sport from year to year and follow the ballplayers and their achievements in more direct relationship to one another.” This format also made the book easier to update, and more than 20 new editions were issued over the next three-plus decades.
Macmillan’s first direct competitor came in 1989, with the publication of Total Baseball. With accomplished author John Thorn providing the editorial work and statistical guru Pete Palmer the numbers, it had practically everything The Baseball Encyclopedia had, and more, including newly-available stats (such as caught stealing, on-base percentage, and Palmer’s “Total Player/Pitcher Ratings”), hundreds of pages of essays about various aspects of the game’s history, and coach and umpire registers. It quickly surpassed Macmillan in popularity and credibility. Total Baseball went through various publishers (one of which went bankrupt) and managing editors, with new editions issued every couple of years. The last one weighed 11 pounds and cost $59.95.
Yet another encyclopedia entered the field in 1998: The STATS, Inc. All-Time Major League Handbook and Sourcebook. STATS had planned to publish nearly a decade earlier, but Total Baseball beat them to the punch and set back their schedule. Listing Bill James, John Dewan, Neil Munro, and Don Zminda as the contributors, this two-volume set contained the best tabular information of all the previous encyclopedias, and still more. The 2,696-page Handbook had batting, pitching, and fielding records for every player in major league history, without the inconvenience of separate batter and pitcher registers, and including stats (such as intentional walks, sacrifice hits and flies, grounded into double plays, hit by pitch, wild pitches, balks, and full fielding records at each position) not available in any of the other books. The 2,653-page Sourcebook (which came out a few months later) had seemingly everything else, including seasonal league records, post-season and All-Star Games, awards, ballparks, managers, and umpires.
A new book was unveiled in 2004: The Barnes & Noble Baseball Encyclopedia. A year later, Sterling (a subsidiary of B&N) took over the publishing and aligned with ESPN, renaming the product the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, and taking advantage of a wider distribution circuit. A large paperback with a retro price-tag ($24.95), it was edited by Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer and updated four years in a row. It contained most of the key elements of its predecessors, plus some welcome additions (e.g., All-Star selections, disabled list information), yet at fewer than 2,000 pages was more user-friendly.
But between the saturation of the market, and the emergence of online resources, the various paper encyclopedias began dying off. Macmillan published its 10th and final edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia in 1996. A second edition of The STATS, Inc. All-Time Major League Handbook came out in 2000, but according to Neil Munro it did poorly at the cash register and was not reissued. Total Baseball’s eighth and last edition was published in 2004. The final Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball came out in 2007, and the (apparently) last ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia followed a year later.
Nowadays people tend to get their information at the click of a mouse, from such websites as Baseball-Reference.com (which got most of its information from Pete Palmer) and MLB.com, and prefer not to pay for or wrestle with 11-pound books.
But those books remain forever in the Hall of Fame’s A. Bartlett Giamatti research center, available for reference at any point. The history they preserve – and the stories that they told – will live on for all time.
The instant gratification of the computer will never replace the euphoria of those free periods in my high school library, immersed in the amazing first Baseball Encyclopedia. As famed baseball author and analyst Bill James writes, “Major league players don’t deserve the wispy, ephemeral immortality of buzzing electrons; they deserve the cold, marble permanence of black ink on white pages.”
Bill Deane is a freelance writer from Cooperstown, N.Y.
