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Total Baseball
''Total Baseball'' (latest edition , first published 1989) is a baseball encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. The latest edition, published in 2004, is its eighth. "Amazon.com." Found under "Product Details." Retrieved on 2008-12-02 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. History The idea for ''Total Baseball'' originated when two baseball statisticians and historians, Palmer and ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baseball
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 (batting 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 (referred to as the fielding 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 (the place where the player started as a batter). The principal objective of the batting team is to have a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Thorn
John A. Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a German-born sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. Personal profile Thorn was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in a displaced person's camp to which his Polish Jewish parents had come as refugees. Less than two years after Thorn was born, his family emigrated to the United States, and settled in The Bronx, New York City. "I fell in love with aseballcards before I loved the game, when I discovered that baseball was something that all the kids on my street corner cared about," Thorn said in a 2013 profile. "I was an immigrant kid and was looking for a way into America. With my background I saw myself as an underdog, and so Brooklyn had to be my team. I began watching the game seriously when I was eight, in 1955, on my Admiral television, but I had already begun to follow their exploits in the daily newspapers my father brought ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pete Palmer
Pete Palmer (born January 30, 1938) 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. Baseball work Palmer began his career as a baseball analyst when he worked for the Raytheon Corporation as a radar systems engineer. At night, after his co-workers had left for the day, Palmer used the company's (at the time) cutting-edge computers to run advanced simulations analyzing historical baseball statistics. In 1982, he gained notoriety when he recognized a scorekeeper's error which counted a 1910 Detroit Tigers box score twice, crediting Ty Cobb with an extra two hits and three at-bats. That year Cobb was declared the batting champion, despite an unsuccessful effort by the St. Louis Browns to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), with 29 in the United States and 1 in Canada. The NL and AL were formed in 1876 and 1901, respectively. Beginning in 1903, the two leagues signed the National Agreement and cooperated but remained legally separate entities until 2000, when they merged into a single organization led by the Commissioner of Baseball. MLB is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. It is also included as one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada. Baseball's first all-professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was founded in 1869. Before that, some teams had secretly paid certain players. The first few decades of professional baseball were characterized by rivalries between leagues and by players who often jumped from one te ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Schwarz
Alan Schwarz (born July 3, 1968) 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 describe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lou Proctor
A phantom ballplayer is either a baseball player who is incorrectly listed in source materials as playing in a Major League Baseball (MLB) game, often the result of typographical or clerical errors, or a player who spent time on an MLB active roster without ever appearing in an MLB contest during his career. Most of the first form of phantom players date from the 19th or early 20th century, with at least one showing up as late as World War II. A modern-day phantom ballplayer is generally caused by the player being removed from the active roster by a subsequent action (such as being optioned to a minor league team) or the team reaching the end of their season, and the player not having later opportunity to play in a major league game. Many of these phantom players were September call-ups in backup roles. Phantoms who never were *Edward L. Thayer supposedly played one game for the 1876 New York Mutuals; he was listed in ''The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball'' as having been bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ty Cobb
Tyrus Raymond Cobb (December 18, 1886 – July 17, 1961), nicknamed "the Georgia Peach", was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) center fielder. He was born in rural Narrows, Georgia. Cobb spent 22 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, the last six as the team's player-manager (baseball), player-manager, and finished his career with the History of the Philadelphia Athletics, Philadelphia Athletics. In 1936, Cobb received the most votes of any player on the 1936 Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, inaugural ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, receiving 222 out of a possible 226 votes (98.2%); no other player received a higher percentage of votes until Tom Seaver in 1992. In 1999, the ''Sporting News'' ranked Cobb third on its list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players." Cobb is widely credited with setting 90 MLB records during his career. His combined total of 4,065 runs scored and runs batted in (after adjusting for home runs) is still the highest ever produced by any m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sabermetric
Sabermetrics, or originally SABRmetrics, 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. Early history Henry Chadwick, a sportswriter in New York, developed the box score in 1858. This was the first way statisticians were able to describe the sport of baseball by numerically tracking various aspects of game play. The creation of the box score has given baseball statisticians a summary of the individual and team performances for a given game. Sabermetrics research began in the middle of the 20th century with the writings of Earnshaw Cook, one of the earli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bill James
George William James (born October 5, 1949) is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he termed sabermetrics in reference to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose. In 2006, ''Time'' named him in the ''Time'' 100 as one of the most influential people in the world. In 2003, James was hired as senior advisor on Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox and worked for the team for 17 years during which they won four World Series championships. Early life James was born in Holton, Kansas; his mother died in 1954 when he was five. His father was a janitor and a handyman. After four years at the University of Kansas (KU) residing at Stephenson Scholarship H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Runs Created
Runs created (RC) is a baseball statistic invented by Bill James to estimate the number of runs a hitter contributes to their team. Purpose James explains in his book, ''The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract'', why he believes runs created is an essential thing to measure:With regard to an offensive player, the first key question is how many ''runs'' have resulted from what he has done with the bat and on the basepaths. Willie McCovey hit .270 in his career, with 353 doubles, 46 triples, 521 home runs and 1,345 walks -- but his job was not to hit doubles, nor to hit singles, nor to hit triples, nor to draw walks or even hit home runs, but rather to put runs on the scoreboard. How many runs resulted from all of these things? Runs created attempts to answer this bedrock question. The conceptual framework of the "runs created" stat is: RC = \frac where *A = On-base factor *B = Advancement factor *C = Opportunity factor Formula Basic runs created In the most basic runs cre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Total Average
Total average is a baseball statistic devised by sportswriter Thomas Boswell and introduced in the 1978. It was also described in his 1982 article "Welcome to the world of Total Average where a walk is as good as a hit". It is designed to measure a hitter's overall offensive contributions, on the basis that "all bases are created equal". The statistic was included in issues of ''Inside Sports''. The definition of the statistic is simple. A player gets a credit for every base accumulated and a penalty for every out made. So a player gets one credit for a single, walk, stolen base or being hit by a pitch; two for a double; three for a triple; and four for a home run. A player's total average is calculated by summing the accumulated bases and dividing by the number of outs the player makes. Formula When initially announced in an article in ''Inside Sports'', the formula for total average was: TA = \frac Boswell revised the formula, which by 1981 had been modified to its final form: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Total Sports Publishing
{{refimprove, date=July 2009 Total Sports Publishing refers to a book publishing company based in Kingston, New York, that operated from 1998 to 2002. Prominent author John Thorn served as the division's publisher throughout its existence. Total Sports Thorn and Michael Gershman had been packaging books for other publishers since the late 1980s, most notably their baseball encyclopedia, Total Baseball. Thorn and Gershman called their company "Baseball Ink." The pair joined forces with internet news company KOZ, Inc. to form Total Sports in 1998. The new company was headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, and led by George Schlukbier. Thorn's publishing division took root in his hometown of Kingston, New York, while Gershman headed the company's Manhattan office on Park Avenue. This merger proved to be an ill-fated arrangement. The burst of the dot-com bubble led the two companies to split after less than two years. Thorn led a management buyout of the publishing division d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
