The Retro Sheet
Official Publication of Retrosheet, Inc.
This edition of the Retro Sheet will be a bit abbreviated. Although we are a bit behind the planned schedule for publication, it is important that this issue be distributed before our annual meeting in Kansas City. Our bylaws stipulate that our annual meeting be in conjunction with The SABR convention, which runs this year from June 6 to June 9. The annual Retrosheet meeting, which is open to all interested parties, will take place on Sunday morning, June 9 in Lester Young Room A (3rd floor of the Marriott). You will find elsewhere in this newsletter a brief summary of the proposed agenda for our annual meeting. Any reader of this newsletter who wishes to place additional items on that agenda should contact Dave Smith as soon as possible; all requests will receive careful consideration. By the way, due to our time constraints, this edition is being prepared by Dave Smith.
Retrosheet has always been correctly characterized as an enormously ambitious effort, but one consideration which makes the ultimate goal seem more attainable is the celebration of as many meaningful milestones as possible, thereby subdividing the work into bite-sized chunks. We have just completed a major one of these milestones by copying the scorebooks of the Tigers. We have now, therefore, received cooperation in obtaining copies of the complete holdings of all 26 Major League franchises that existed in 1983. There are, of course, thousands of games out there for which we do not yet have accounts and there is still a huge amount of work to do in processing the games we have in hand. Nonetheless, I believe we should all be very proud of the collection we have assembled. Many thanks to the large number of volunteers who have donated their time, money, and power of persuasion to completing the circle of acquisition from Major League teams.
There are three major additions since the last newsletter and some smaller ones as well. The biggest news is that the Tigers sent Dave Smith all their pre-1980 scorebooks in batches of four seasons at a time (the 1980-1983 books were copied earlier). These scorebooks, which were kept by Hal Middlesworth (sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press and later PR Director for the Tigers), go back to the 1953 season and are nearly complete, missing only two games from early in 1953. Fortunately for us, those missing two games were against Cleveland and Chicago and we have the scoresheets from those opponents. In addition these Tigers scoresheets give us the complete play by play for the careers of two more Hall of Famers, Al Kaline and Jim Bunning. Once again we must thank Cliff Kachline for his generous help in getting us started with the Tigers. The next large set of games came from the White Sox. We have had good relations with the South-siders for several years, but for a variety of reasons there was still a gap of several seasons (from 1973 to 1980) that remained to be copied. Stuart Shea went to Comiskey Park a few times late this winter and got the job finished, giving us all White Sox games back to 1952 plus their home games from 1951. Ron Rakowski has been pursuing Jim Ferguson and his scorebooks for several years. Jim began his sports career as a writer in the Cincinnati area covering the Reds. He was later the PR Director for the Padres and is currently the Secretary for the National Association, which is headquartered in Florida. Ron made arrangements with a Tampa resident who is a SABR member to borrow Jim's Cincinnati scorebooks and make copies. The first of the copied books, from 1959 and 1960, have arrived and are excellent copies. Since the Reds team appears to have no books prior to the 1968 season, these accounts from Jim Ferguson are extremely valuable. Hopefully in the next few months the remainder of Ferguson's books up through the 1967 season will be copied as well. The minor (in terms of number of games, not importance) acquisitions are some newspaper accounts that Luke Kraemer (1956 and 1964), Ron Rakowski (1951, 1955, 1959 and 1960), Dave Smith (1951 and 1954), Lyle Spatz (1916) and Joe Dittmar (many World Series games; more in a moment) copied. All but the World Series games from Joe came from microfilm (let's hear it for interlibrary loan!). Joe borrowed a scrapbook from a coworker that contained not only play by play but pitch by pitch accounts of several World Series from 1907 into the 1920s. The source of these accounts was a Pittsburgh newspaper. Clearly this find must be explored further in the hope that such detail was available for regular season games as well.
In the last newsletter there was a call for volunteers to help with All-Star games, the only category of 20th century games for which we have done no computer entry. One reason for this gap is the need to construct the appropriate rosters for each season so that DWENTRY can be used to enter the games. This daunting task has been completed by Tim Cashion, who already possessed the rosters for each All-Star team for each year. Tim took our yearly rosters for individual teams and did the necessary cutting and pasting to construct All-Star rosters for all seasons, 1933-1995, including 1945, the year that rosters were chosen but no game was played due to wartime travel restrictions. Narrative accounts of all the All-Star games are readily available and the next stage will be the entry of these games into the computer; Tim will take the lead on this phase of the activity.
Following sets of games are in the computer.
Full Seasons (both leagues) 1983 1982 Missing 3 games NYN @ SDN (April 27th 29th) 1961 Leagueseasons AL 1981, 1975 (missing 1), 1967, 1964, 1963 (missing 25), 1962 (missing 30), 1960 "Completed" leagueseason NL 1980 Translated 100%; Input 70% Teamseasons BRO 1957, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1953, 1952, 1951, 1950, 1949, 1948, 1947 CIN 1976 LAN 1964, 1963, 1962, 1960 NYN 1973, 1964, 1963, 1962 (minus four games) PHI 1973, 1972, 1964 SFN 1971, 1970, 1969, 1968 (missing 3 games), 1967, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1962, 1960, 1959 (missing 2 games), 1958 SLN 1963 BAL 1981, 1980, 1979, 1978, 1977, 1976, 1966 CLE 1949 DET 1968, 1959 (minus 3 games) KCA 1980, 1979, 1978, 1977, 1976, 1974 MIN 1977 NYA 1963, 1962, 1960, 1959In addition, all postseason games (World Series and LCS) are completed, as are all "playoff" games, such as the 1951 series between BRO and NY1 (you remember, the Giants won on Bobby Thompson's homer).
Below is the tentative agenda for the meeting in Kansas City.
From time to time this space is used to describe specific situations which arise during inputting where the instructions for DWENTRY don't necessarily give the needed answer. The July, 1995 issue of the newsletter covered several such examples; the single topic for today is missing plays. Happily enough there aren't too many times that a scoresheet has a blank for a play or is illegible, but on those occasions it is important to indicate clearly that there is missing information. In this way these missing plays will be distinctly flagged and it will be easier to find them later on when subsequent research will hopefully fill in the blanks. There are three different styles in common use:
The long version of the scoreboard which details the status of each season will return in the next issue of the newsletter. The short version summary is as follows:
Total Games in Computer (All Years before 1984) 26918 Games Entered since last Report 2865 Days since last Report (2-18-96 to 5-25-96) 98 Games Entered per Week (14 weeks) 204.6 Games Entered per Day 29.2The smallest number of games in a single week during this period was 118 and the highest was 379. As exciting as these numbers are, they fail to highlight one other point which is really remarkable. With the acquisition of the Detroit and the remaining Chicago White Sox scoresheets, we are now missing a total of two AL games from 1966 to 1983 (9-27-75 DET at MIL and 7-04-78 OAK at SEA). The sobering counterpoint to this wonderful news is that in the NL for the same interval we are missing 630 games, 343 of which involve the Atlanta Braves and 420 of which were played before 1972.
In the last newsletter the call went out for help in setting up a Retrosheet page on the World Wide Web. Four Retrosheetians responded to that call: Mark Pankin, Sean Lahman, Tim Cashion, and Leanna Bush. As a result a demo web page has been set up and sample files are being posted at the present time. If all goes well, we should be able to access the page at our Kansas City meeting. There are still many details to work out, but it is very exciting that we are making this step, which should not only greatly increase our visibility, but also make it easier for everyone to have access to our data.
There are four items to recount in this area, one of which is complete while the other three are in various stages of preparation.
Some of the information that was sent to the Dodgers about Jackie Robinson is especially interesting and a few highlights are worth noting here.
Category Retrosheet Official SB 196 197 BB 742 740 SO 290 291There are two separate differences in the bases on balls category, both in 1948. In addition we found 46 caught stealings for him in the first years of his career when this was not an official category. Total Baseball shows him with 30, with which we agree for the years they cover, but our work makes it clear that he was caught 76 times.
Several distinct efforts have been completed and others initiated.
In past newsletters it has been pointed out that game accounts from old newspapers will become increasingly important to us. We have completed the acquisitions from teams, as summarized above, and there are several efforts underway to obtain scorebooks from retired sportswriters or the families of deceased writers. However, all of those "modern" sources represent an ever-dwindling resource. There is, fortunately, another type of source for game accounts and that is the newspapers which carried play by play for many years, some into the 1960s (Boston, Chicago), but most of which stopped in the 1950s. Most of the needed newspapers are preserved on microfilm and it is a tedious job to plod through them, making copies of the play by play. We have about 3000 game accounts in this format so far, 80% of which were copied by Dave Smith from the New York Evening World microfilm obtained on interlibrary loan. Most of the remainder are Cleveland games from 1917 to 1927 copied by Jim Weigand. It is crucial that we organize our efforts as we approach the microfilmed accounts, so that we use the time and money of our volunteers in the most efficient way possible. As a preliminary to the actual copying, it is a good idea to have as thorough a survey as possible of what is available from newspapers in various cities. Joe Dittmar, who is an exceptionally thorough and careful newspaper researcher, has devised a form to carry out this cataloguing. The next two pages have the codes that Joe established for doing this analysis and his results from analyzing the Philadelphia newspapers in 1901. One could certainly argue that there are other ways to present this information, but Joe's method is excellent and it seems reasonable for us to follow it. The next step is to solicit volunteers to at least compile the survey and hopefully begin making copies. However, prudence dictates that no one launch a large scale copying effort before checking with Dave Smith to be sure we are duplicating previous effort. One of the appealing features of this newspaper activity is that it can be done by many different people, whereas the processing of scoresheets is still very much localized to RetroCentral where everything is stored. The microfilm work is tedious, but it is very important to our ultimate goal; help in this effort is fervently sought.
N - Narrative:
Did the newspaper cover the game and to what depth?
3 = details of virtually all the run
scoring, great plays, fan Interaction, etc. whether home or road
games
2 = limited descriptions of some run
scoring home and/or away
1 = very little coverage of game details
0 = practically no verbal description
of most games
P - Play-by-play:
Does this newspaper regularly Include play-by-play description?
3 = usually the full game
2 = usually the first few innings then
stops to go to press
1 = P-B-P infrequent
0 = never carries P-B-P
B - Boxscore:
Does the newspaper carry a boxscore for every game?
3 = boxscores ahead of their time-carrying
offensive and defensive stats, stolen bases, batter strikeouts
and walks for both home and road games
2 = good boxscores but may omit some
items such as which batters walked or struck out
1 = abbreviated or no boxscores for
home or away
0 = boxscores rare or nonexistent
I - images (Photos):
Does the newspaper usually Incorporate photos with its game accounts?
3 = always carries one or more photos
for every game (player or action)
2 = photos accompany game descriptions
at least 50% of the time
1 = infrequent game photos
0 = rarely or never carries photos of
baseball
C - Cartoons:
Are cartoons/illustrations used to show highlights of the game's
action?
3 = almost always
2 = frequently
1 = rarely
0 = never
T - Trivia:
Does the coverage Include a separate section of non-game notes
describing such
things as injuries, upcoming pitching
assignments, travel schedules, umpire feuds, etc.
3 = almost always
2 = frequently
1 = rarely
0 = never
1901 Newspaper N P B I C T Notes
Daily News 0 0 0 0 0 0 No baseball coverage
Evening Telegraph 1 2 1 0 0 0 PBP for part of home-team (Phils or A's)
games in "Night Edition"
Evening Times 2 0 2 0 0 3 Road coverage comparable including boxscores
North American 1 0 3 0 0 0 Road coverage comparable including boxscores
Northwest Record 0 0 0 0 0 0 Local neighborhood news only
Phila. Bulletin 0 0 0 0 0 1 Gives merely a short summary of previous
day's game
Phila. Gommercial 0 0 0 0 0 0 Business only
Phila. Item 0 0 0 0 0 1 Don't waste your time
Phila. Inquirer 1 0 3 0 1 1 Road coverage comparable including boxscores
Phila. Press 2 0 2 0 0 0 Road coverage comparable including boxscores
Phila. Record 2 0 3 0 0 0 Road games have comparable boxscores but get
"0" for narrative
Public Ledger 2 0 3 0 1 0 Road coverage comparable including bosxcores
N=narrative: P=play-bv-play: B=boxscores; I=images(photos); C=cartoons; T=trivia
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Page Updated: 9/6/96
Copyrighted: Retrosheet, 1996