''Total Baseball'' (latest edition , first published 1989) is a

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 tea ...

encyclopedia first compiled by

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 ...

and

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 ...

in 1989. The latest edition, published in 2004, is its eighth.''Total Baseball, Completely Revised and Updated: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia''
"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 Thorn, realized that the current ''Baseball Encyclopedia'' endorsed by Major League Baseball contained numerous significant mistakes. Schwarz, Alan. ''The Numbers Game : Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics''. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. These included miscalculations by earlier statisticians, typographic mistakes made by the original score keeper, and even "phantom" players who did not actually exist and were added to a box score incorrectly,

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 ro ...

being a notable example. In addition, Thorn and Palmer took the liberty of correcting mistakes not commonly accepted by the baseball community, such as the apparent discovery that

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 las ...

actually garnered 4,189 hits, not 4,191, or that Walter Johnson in fact had 417 career wins, not 416. Thorn and Palmer also included new,

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 ques ...

statistics developed by statisticians like

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. ...

, such as

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 ...

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 ...

. The first edition of ''Total Baseball'' sold 75,000 copies, and by its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia.

References

Baseball books Baseball statistics {{baseball-stub

History

See also

References