Baseball History - Evaluating a Past No One Has Seen

This week the Baseball Hall of Fame announced the nominations of players who played before 1943, the nominations are the work of a History Overview Committee of the Baseball Writers Association of America. The committee is made up of veteran sports writers aided by the staff of the Research Library at the Hall of Fame. There was one name of interest to Dead Ball fans, that of Sherry Magee an outfielder who played primarily with the Phillies and the Boston Braves.

Magee certainly had an illustrious career with a life time batting average over .290, more than 2000 hits and one batting title. But I for one was more than a little surprised that Magee would be nominated before Jake Daubert, first baseman for the Dodgers and Reds. Daubert had more hits, won two batting titles and had a career batting average over .300. Others who post on the SABR Dead Ball list had other nominees including Bill Dahlen and Stuffy McInnis and, I am sure, others had their favorites as well.

I am sure the committee did its best to be objective, but it becomes a subjective process, if for no other reason, because no one on the committee ever saw any of them play. Nor, of course, did those of us who are advocating for someone else. Evaluation of Dead Ball players has to based on historical research - my feelings about Daubert are based research done on our forthcoming book, "The Major League Pennant Races of 1916."

The whole question speaks to something that started to concern me when Paul and were working on this book. How do those who talk and write about baseball to the largest audiences - ie, sportswriters and broadcasters, include in their thinking those played the game from the founding of the National League in 1876 through whatever point people living today actually saw games and players. Of course, the latter date will move forward every day expanding that period where there is no eye witness experience.

In my opinion the problem is that unless sportswriters and broadcasters are aware of the game's history and especially its great players, they will tend to make judgements based more or less on their own experience and that of those had eyewitness experience. For example, the belief that Ted Williams was the greatest hitter in baseball history is literally carved in stone in his statue at Fenway Park. Yet if we are talking about life time batting average, Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson and several others had higher averages.

Williams may get the nod on the combination of power and average, but there are other more egregious examples. I think it was in 2006 I heard some Mets announcers anoint Jeff Kent as the greatest offensive second baseman in baseball history. Somehow I doubt that they even considered Nap Lajoie, Rogers Hornsby and/or Frankie Frisch in those evaluations - all of whom have better numbers than Kent.

I am not trying to argue that earlier ball players were superior, some were some weren't and, in large measure, it is a matter of opinion. But opinions should be grounded in fact which can't happen if 50 or so years of baseball history aren't even part of the equation. At some level this isn't a new problem, it is just that the period of time is greater.

Billy Hamilton, of Newark New Jersey, was a great 19th century player in the Hall of Fame who still holds a number of records including consecutive games with a stolen base and stolen bases in a game. Yet Hamilton wasn't elected to the Hall of Fame until the 1960's some 30 years after it opened and from what I have read in his file, the efforts of his daughters to honor their father's memory had a lot to do with that. On my long list of books to write is a biography of "Sliding Billy" and when I do, this whole issue of how we honor those we never saw play is going to be part of the story.

On the reading front, the good news is that I am 400 pages into Robert Remini's fine biography of Henry Clay, the bad news is that there are almost another 400 pages yet to go, but I am enjoying it. I am also approaching the mid point of Jane Austen's third novel, "Mansfield Park." It is very different from "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice" so I need to reserve judgement, but hopefully in a few weeks will have something to say.