Author: fartheroffthewall

“How Retrosheet Saved Baseball”

The author: Jay Wigley
The details: Wiglesius Press/self published, 228 pages, $27.99 hardcover, $19.99 paperback, released April 3, ‘26
The links: The author, Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less:

Probably no surprise we again seek clarity on how baseball followers value statistical bookkeeping by referencing the work of David M. Henkin’s “Out of the Park: How to Think About Baseball.” Just as we did during Day 12 with sizing up the historical context of Robert Coover’s “The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.” in relation to how the game encourages fantasy and imagination.

From Chapter 11 of Henkin’s horsehide observations:

“Baseball’s culture of obsessive statistical reckoning combines several related elements (that) have been intensified in the case of baseball by the game’s structure and the sport’s history. First is an interest in evaluating and crediting the contributions of individual players to a team’s success or failure. Second is an extraordinary faith in the capacity of numbers to precisely and reliably summarize important events. And third is a need to tell stories about the game in a language that allows for comparing events spread across time.

“The careful recording and tabulating of events within a baseball game, including events that don’t directly determine or explain the game’s outcome, has been around ever since the game became a subject of news coverage.”

And much of that were from seeds planted by Henry Chadwick, a cricket reporter from England who moved to New York in 1830, watched this odd game of baseball being played in the 1850s, reported on it for New York newspapers, and knew it needed some structure when he fleshed out what’s generally accepted as the box score and scoresheet.

A note-taking grid with codes and slashes and numbers and letters that could be a universal language was to everyone’s best interest. We find out that Chadwick’s reliance on this fact came from learning how his older half-brother, a commissioner of the board of health in Britain, saw the collected data as a scientific approach to create social order and accountability.

“It is remarkable how well documented baseball games were,” Henkin writes. “We have more detailed, exhaustive and reliable information about what happened on baseball fields over a century ago than about any other aspect of leisure culture, popular entertainment or daily life in the United States from that era.”

For better, or worse? For better, of course.

History also needs checks and double-checks on accuracy to avoid narrative pitfalls. In baseball, there is a human element that determines hits and errors, writing rules about how a pitcher is credited with a win or a loss or save on his ledger. Humans make mistakes and stand to be corrected. Numbers should have auditing.

Box scores provide that data record, transmission and storage.

And in the 21^st Century, thank goodness for Retrosheet.

“Ford Frick: Baseball’s Third Commissioner
And His Four Decades of Shaping the Game”

The author: Dave Bohmer
The details: University of Nebraska Press, 416 pages, $39.95, released April 1, ’26
The links: The publisher, Bookshop.org

“A League of His Own:
A. G. Spalding and
The Business of Baseball”

The author: Mark A. Stein
The details: Lyons Press, 352 pages, $39.95; released Jan. 6, ’26
The links: The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less:

Americans, by and large, bi or straight, show an unreasonable hesitancy in electing a woman to hold the role as president of the United States.

Given the option of a credible female over an autocratic, nihilistic, narcissistic mad man, recent history disappointingly shows that if it could be called a “perfect storm” aberration the first time, there was an unfathomable repeat performance to come.

Claims that “the people have spoken” as a result of a general abstention of the majority deciding there was a “lesser of two evils” argument that played out was just what we’d have to accept.

Major League Baseball is primed for its own commander in chief decision sooner than later. It can, if it wants, help change some generalized thinking about leadership of America’s pastime — or what’s left of it — doesn’t have to be selected from the sausage factory of candidates.

When Rob Manfred has the expiration date of his MLB commissioner contract occur in 2029, he says he’ll be done. A top-tier dame is not only waiting in the wings, but she’s openly campaigning.

Leave it to Jane Leavy (pronounced LEV-y) to come up with the most no-nonsense manifesto — womanifesto? — of how and why baseball can be great again with her late fall 2025 book, “Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fit It” (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, $32.50 — although stupidly available on Amazon.com for 77 percent off, so please don’t chase it down there).

The Long Island broadsider, who has already pounded out critically acclaimed books about the life and times of Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth, aligns her campaign promises in an aggressive way that is also as much about her journey to find the truth than it is reinforcing simple beliefs about how the game has strayed from its sweet spot.

American would love Leavy and her appropriately salty language. The game would be better for her. It already is just having her manifesto published.

Leavy may not be reasonably labeled a Luddite, but she lovingly spitballs idea to take away as much technology as possible for the sake of restoring more humanity. Whatever brings back joy and romance that’s been buried in data-driven digbats. Her idea of “three true outcomes” is finding room for more afternoon games, better access for kids in the ballpark and reversing the epidemic of pitching injuries with better guidelines in place. Along the way, she saddles up next to like-minded thinkers — Dave Roberts, Dusty Baker, Bill James and Janie Marie Smith — to add their voices.

“I know you should be commissioner,” former big-league chucker Bill “Spaceman” Lee says at one point. “You’re not for the players. You’re not for the owners. You’re for the game.”

Leavy blushes, and carries on.

Maybe she can also reverse this whole thing involved how and why Athletics moved out of Oakland, escaped to Sacramento, and await a new ballpark in Vegas to be finished.

(And, by the way, pro baseball does already have a female commissioner. Google the name Justine Siegal if you have a moment. That’s “gal” at the end, not … never mind.)