Baseball Historians Get Their own Hall of Fame

From my friend Alan Schwarz of the New York Times...

For almost 40 years, the Society for American Baseball Research has painstakingly unearthed and saluted the accomplishments of long-forgotten contributors to the game. Now it will honor the stars of its own: by creating, in effect, the Baseball Historian Hall of Fame.

SABR announced on Monday the inaugural class of winners of its new Henry Chadwick Award -– (fittingly) nine people whose work is far better known, even among casual fans, than most realize.

Among them are Lawrence Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times, and Bill James, whose Baseball Abstract series shaped a whole generation of curious fans. But I was particularly heartened to see two other names on that inaugural list: David Neft and Pete Palmer.

Neft put together the first real baseball encyclopedia, which was released in 1969. Baseball writers dubbed it "Big Mac" because it was published by Macmillan and because it contained almost 2500 pages. Neft led a team that painstakingly reconstructed the historical record by computerizing the day-by-day records of every man who had played in the majors. It was groundbreaking work. Today, we take for granted the minute detail of baseball's record at our fingertips. No other institution of human existence is so well documented. Neft went on to found his own company and publish annual encyclopedias for baseball, football, and basketball that stood as the gold standard in their respective fields. In football, Neft once again reconstructed the game's early history. The NFL did not keep any statistics before 1932, so Neft and his team slogged through old newspaper stories and built the historical record one game at at time, eventually publishing the first football encyclopedia that contained any player statistics in 1978.

I've never met David Neft, but his work influenced me in profound ways. I bought a copy of his Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball in 1985, picked it up at a used book store for a couple of dollars, and for the first time immersed myself deeply in the game's history. Much of what I know about the teams and the players came from the countless hours I spent flipping through that book, and my first attempts at building a baseball database used that dog-earred book as the primary source. That book also prompted my fascination with the sports reference genre, and over the years I have accumulated a large collection of sports encyclopedias, several hundred, many of which bear his name.

I was also very glad to see Pete Palmer's name among the inaugural nine. I had the great pleasure of meeting and working with Pete when I was with Total Sports, but his work had a profound impact on me long before that. I still remember the day when I stumbled across his book The Hidden Game of Baseball at a local bookstore in 1984 (written with John Thorn). I was 16, and in those days before Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the "sports section" of the bookstore consisted of about 15 titles. You think you know everything when you're 16, but as I skimmed through the first few pages, I felt the world change, and suddenly I was looking at the game I loved in a very different way. More than any of the concepts that Palmer wrote about, just the idea that there were other people who gave deep thought to analyzing the game and making sense of the numbers... it opened a whole new world for me.

Hidden Game was the bible for statistical analysis, and a few years later I carried that book with me to college, where I tracked down all of the old books and articles in the bibliography. That book unlocked the world of baseball research for me and invited me into a great fraternity of like minded folks.

Neither Pete Palmer or David Neft will be enshrined in Cooperstown, but this is the next best thing. They deserve the highest praise, along with the seven other inductees. I'm not only happy for them to receive this honor, but proud that we as a group could honor them.

Happy Birthday Ickey

One of my favorite players of all-time, Ickey Woods turns 44 today. His touchdown celebration captivated the nation, but folks forget he scored 15 touchdowns as a rookie and led the league with a 5.3 yard rushing average in 1988, helping to lead the Bengals to Super Bowl XXIII.



The clip above is from the 1988 AFC Championship game. It was the first of two touchdown runs by Woods en route to a 21-10 win.

Pat Metheny on Kenny G

When you do something for a living, you have a certain skill set that lets you appreciate the quality of your colleagues' work. A reporter can read a story by another reporter and appreciate the legwork that went into the investigation, or the ability to find an interesting angle in an otherwise mundane story. Filmmakers see nuances in the work of other directors that are lost on the rest of us. They can tell the difference between someone who's great and someone who's just faking their way through it.

With my fellow writers, I've found that much of our conversation centers around great examples of strong writing that we've found... whether it's a new book, or a magazine article, or a lost nugget we've dug out of a musty archive. We usually just ignore bad writing. There's usually no reason to bother commetning on it.

All too often, there's someone whose lack of talent doesn;t stop them from being a commercial success. It's a sad truth in the publishing world that most books don't sell more than a few thousand copies, but a television personality or syndicated radio host can use his platform to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a poorly written, poorly researched collection of paragraphs. That's just the way it is -- not just in the book business but in business overall. We grumble about it amongst ourselves and keep plugging away.

Occasionaly, one of these examples reaches a point where someone needs to speak out, because it's undeserved success attacks the credibility of its genre. Comedian Joe Rogan felt obliged to speak out against what he felt was plagarism by fellow comic Carlos Mencia, because "no one defended the integrity of this great art form."


And then there's this. Jazz musician Pat Metheny -- winner of 17 Grammy Awards -- was asked what he thought of saxaphonist Kenny G. He gave a scathing 1500 word response, which included a criticism of Kenny G's basic musical abilities, his knowledge of the genre, and his artistic choices. Here's a small sampling.

I first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with Jeff Lorber when they opened a concert for my band. My impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like Grover Washington or David Sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. He had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues-lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble - Lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music.

But he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the key moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again). The other main thing I noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, played horribly out of tune - consistently sharp.

It gets much, much better...

Art Without a Frame

Think you could be a scout? If I sent you coach's videotape from a high school football game in, say 1980, would you be able to tell me which quarterback went on to be a star in the NFL and which never even made it as a college player? There's no sound, the uniforms don't provide any insight, and neither kids puts up statistics that would reveal his future stardom.

I ask this question a lot. I ask casual fans. I ask writers. I ask pro coaches and personnel guys. What's most fascinating is that the closer I get to guys that actually have to make these kinds of decisions, the less likely they are to say "yes."

It's a question that interested me as I began to work on my football book, which came out last summer. I wanted to challenged the conventional wisdom about who the great football players of all time were. If Dick Butkus is the greatest linebacker of all-time, then it ought to be obvious to anyone who watches film of his games. Maybe film doesn't exist, or doesn't tell the full story. Fair enough, but then you at least ought to be able to give me some reasons why a player was so good. Tell me what it is about Red Grange that made him stand out. Explain why Jim Otto was the best lineman of his day.

It's a question that transcends sports. We learn about great works of art in the same way. Why is the Mona Lisa a great painting? What makes "Citizen Kane" one of the most important American films? If I think it's boring, am I just too unsophisticated to understand what I'm seeing?

All of these questions point toward the same issue? To what degree is "greatness" a measure of collective opinion and to what degree is "greatness" inherent. If you watch Citizen Kane for the first time tonight, will its greatness be obvious? Or is its greatness more about familiarity? Is it great because "people" have always said it was great.

I'm not the first to raise this question. In fact, it's one of the oldest epistomological debates. Is beauty a measurable fact (as Gottfried Leibniz asserted), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

In the spring of 2007, Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten wanted to probe that ageless question in a modern setting. He convinced Grammy award winning classical violinist Joshua Bell to play at the entrance of a Washington D.C. subway station, posing as a run of the mill street performer. Bell isn't as recognizable as, say Brad Pitt, but he was a child prodigy who has, at the age of 39, becmone an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. His 2003 CD Romance of the Violin sold more than five million copies and remained at the top of classical music charts for 54 weeks. Bell's instrument was a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin, for which he had paid more than four million dollars. He played Carnegie Hall at 14. He has played for Kings and Queens. The cheap seats for one of his concerts go for around $100. Would folks walking past think he was just another busker, or would they recognize and appreciate the quality of Bell's performance?

Violinist Joshua Bell playing at the L'Enfant Plaza subway station
in Washington, D.C. on January 12, 2007. Bell is at far left.
Full video available at Washington Post website.

Weingarten started by posing the question to Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

Slatkin was wrong.

Bell played for 45 minutes and more than a thousand people passed by. Just seven stopped to listen. The vast majority of folks didn't react at all to one of the world's greatest musicians playing a few feet away from them.

Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to music. Weingarten also interviewed one of the leading experts in the world of art.

Mark Leithauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king or pope or Medici ever did1. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. "Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for the article.

Thoughts on Health Care

After my daughter spent a month in the hospital this spring, I have a whole new perspective on the debate raging over health care reform.

A fascinating new study helps to illustrate, the urgent need to move away from the for-profit health insurance model. According to a joint study by Harvard University and Ohio State University, sixty percent of US bankruptcies in 2007 were driven by medical bills. What's really alarming is that 75% of those folks had health insurance.

"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.

"For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection," he added.

And why is that? Because if you do get sick and need significant treatment, odds are your policy will simply get cancelled. According to the report, a quarter of people lose their insurance coverage immediately when they suffer a disabling illness, and another quarter lose it within the first year. Insurance companies (or employers who offer their own plans) save money by dropping you if you're too expensive.

Critics of reform scream about the possibility of rationing health care under a single-payer system, but the reality is that we already have rationing. Insurance companies protect their profits by dropping folks who need expensive care, or putting artificial limits on how many days you can spend in the hospital, how many times you can visit a doctor, or even annual caps on how much they'll spend for your care. All of those things that the Fox News crowd warn us could happen under "Obama Care" are exactly the things we have right now.