$Unique_ID{BAS00003}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Introduction}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{
Thorn, John
Palmer, Pete}
$Subject{Introduction Total Baseball Society for American Baseball Research
SABR}
$Log{}

Total Baseball:  1994 Edition

Introduction


     When it first appeared, in 1989, Total Baseball was the most complete,
most authoritative, and most informative--not to mention the biggest--baseball
book ever published. It came into being because its creators saw that there
was nothing else like it and because its publishers had faith that fans would
want such a book:  a virtual baseball library in one volume. (A dozen
conventional books could be bound between these covers.) In fact, it could be
said that Total Baseball is the first true baseball encyclopedia because it
offers not only the game's numbers but also the stories behind them. In this
incarnation, Total Baseball builds upon that foundation to provide new
stories, new stats, and a painstaking review of all the data that went into
the first three editions.
     This book is divided into two parts. The first consists of prose features
on subjects of interest to all baseball fans, from the general reader who
wishes to know more about the game's trivia and lore to the advanced fan who
wants to know about its business and law. The origins of the farm system;
black baseball before Jackie Robinson; complete balloting for the Hall of
Fame, MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year awards; women in baseball;
scandals and controversies; . . . but why tease you with the pleasures that
await you while (we hope) holding you captive with this Introduction? Simply
be assured that Total Baseball will be totally absorbing, whether you begin
with "The True Father of Baseball" and read straight through to the end of
Part 1, or scan the Table of Contents for what appeals at the moment. The
writers gathered together here are the experts in their fields, as befits an
encyclopedic reference work, and even the most erudite reader will learn
countless new things about this great game.
     The same holds true for Part 2, which contains the playing and pitching
registers, a variety of rosters, a year-by-year statistical summary of major
league play since 1871, home-road statistics and more. The stats newly
developed for this book--like the Clutch Hitting Index or Relief Ranking--will
please the devotee of sabermetrics, who may know about Runs Created,
Production, and the whole Linear Weights System but who has never before been
offered these stats applied to all of baseball's 14,052 players. The
traditional computations will appeal to baseball scholars, who know what a
tangle of briars the historical record has become over the last two decades,
as individual player records have been altered without making corresponding
changes to other players on the same team. (For more on this, see the much
longer Introduction to Part 2.) And the cornucopia of stats old and new--for
everyone from all-time leaders to cup-of-coffee nonentities--will provide
days, months, and years of archaeological delight for baseball fans of all
stripes.
     Total Baseball joins the game's most knowledgeable writers, most of them
members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), with the game's
great historical database, the one built up over two decades by Pete Palmer.
Benefiting from the painstaking research of hundreds of friends and colleagues
in SABR, we have corrected many errors and omissions in the eighth edition of
Macmillan's Baseball Encyclopedia, relying not upon the numbers enshrined by
tradition or official edict but upon the evidence. How many hours have been
spent scanning the handwritten official records of the early years of the
century or reviewing box scores and scoresheets and game summaries! It would
have been easier not to bother, to accept, for example, a game mistakenly
entered twice in the record for 1910 so that Ty Cobb could keep his 1910
batting championship and career total of 4,191 hits. But there can be no
statute of limitations on historical error; the researcher and historian must
go where the evidence leads them, and if the result upsets some commonly held
notions, so be it.
     This book is as good as we know how to make it, but we do want to hear
from you about our blunders (we know there will be some, as there were in the
previous editions) or about your research (which may be as important to
subsequent editions of Total Baseball as that of, say, Walt Wilson or Bob
Tiemann was for this). We believe that history is process, not product, and
our aim has been for Total Baseball to reflect the state of the art in
baseball research and to convey its editors' love for the game.