David William Vincent (July 26, 1949 – July 2, 2017) was an American baseball

official scorer In the game of baseball, the official scorer is a person appointed by the league to record the events on the field, and to send the official scoring record of the game back to the league offices. In addition to recording the events on the field ...

, statistician, and historian. He was called "The Sultan of Swats Stats" by ESPN and was often quoted by

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), ...

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

, Fox, ''USA Today'', and other media outlets regarding the history of the home run.

Biography

Vincent was born in

Waltham, Massachusetts Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, th ...

, and he studied music, earning an undergraduate degree and a doctorate. After a stint as a band director, Vincent went to work as a computer programmer for

Electronic Data Systems Electronic all cash BSN acc: 1311729000110205 Data Systems (EDS) was an American multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Plano, Texas which was founded in 1962 by Ross Perot. The company was a subs ...

(EDS) and for

Hewlett Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

once they bought out EDS. Vincent lived in

Centreville, Virginia Centreville is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States and a suburb of Washington, D.C. The population was 73,518 as of the 2020 census. Centreville is approximately west of Washington, D.C. History Colonia ...

. A long-time member of

SABR The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is a membership organization dedicated to fostering the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball primarily through the use of statistics. Established in Cooperstown, New ...

, he kept SABR's official home run statistics, and was presented with the organization's highest honor, the

Bob Davids Leonard Davids (March 19, 1926February 10, 2002), known as Bob Davids or L. Robert Davids, was an American baseball researcher and writer and the founder of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. He wrote numerous freelance articles on ...

Award, in 1999. Vincent was also an official scorer for the

Washington Nationals The Washington Nationals are an American professional baseball team based in Washington, D.C.. They compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member of the National League (NL) East division. From 2005 to 2007, the team played in RFK Stadiu ...

and the founding secretary of

Retrosheet Retrosheet is a nonprofit organization whose website features box scores of Major League Baseball (MLB) games from 1906 to the present, and play-by-play narratives for almost every contest since the 1930s. It also includes scores from every major ...

, which is collecting play-by-play accounts of every game in major league history. In addition to his work with home runs, Vincent had a special research interest in the history of umpiring. Vincent wrote several books including: * ''Home Run: The Definitive History of Baseball's Ultimate Weapon'' * ''The Midsummer Classic: A Complete History of Baseball's All-Star Game.'' (co-author) * ''Home Run's Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Monumental Dingers, Prodigious Swingers, and Everything Long-Ball'' * ''The Ultimate Red Sox Home Run Guide'' (co-author) * ''Home Runs in the Old Ballparks: Who Hit the First, the Last, and the Most Round-Trippers in Our Former Major League Parks, 1876-1994'' Vincent died in Centreville on July 2, 2017, from stomach cancer. He was 67.

References

External links

* 1949 births 2017 deaths Baseball statisticians Baseball writers Deaths from stomach cancer in the United States Sportspeople from Waltham, Massachusetts {{US-baseball-bio-stub