715: Uncovering the Lost Home Run of Babe Ruth
By Manny Gómez
Designing a Plan of Action
As Mr. Neft describes, “once you can set type electronically, it changes what you can do with a big database book because you can build a database and then write the software for the formats, and never have to set type or proofread.”
Having this technology changed print forever.
Fast forward to 1967. David Neft is charged with heading a committee of researchers tasked with building baseball’s first, most comprehensive encyclopedia. They decide to divide baseball into four groups, by years, built around official sheets.
According to Mr. Neft, “baseball official sheets started in 1903 in the National League and 1905 in the American League.” Before that, there was nothing.
The four groups were:
- Baseball before official sheets
- The start of official sheets through 1919
- 1920 – 1945
- 1946-1968
Official sheets were kept by the official scorer before being sent to those in charge of the stats in each league. At the time, official sheets were controlled by the two leagues, not MLB. Mr. Neft and his team were able to obtain official sheets by reviewing microfilm copies at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Mr. Neft and his committee started with the easiest of the groups, 1946-1968 and 1920-1945. They entered into a database the official sheets from group three and four (above) using a double entry bookkeeping system. “So, for any game, hits given up by the pitchers has to equal hits made by the batters,” Mr. Neft explained. They’d use this system to write software to detect if there were any errors that might be caused by faulty data entry or caused by a mistake in the official sheets.
The periods before 1920 would be tricky. According to Mr. Neft, “certain statistics that we consider integral to the game, like RBI’s, didn’t come into the official records until 1920.” So, groups one and two would pose more problems when collecting data.
“From the start of official sheets through 1919,” Mr. Neft said, “we entered the official sheets, but there was a tremendous amount of information that was not on the official sheets.” RBI’s, batter strikeouts, double plays, even earned runs didn’t start until 1913 among many others.
Mr. Neft and his team had to dig deeper and look beyond the official sheets.
The Search for Baseball History
To collect missing information in group two, the start of official sheets through 1919, Mr. Neft’s committee created entry forms and then spread out across the US in search for missing data. They’d use the newspapers of the home team and the away team, checking and double checking that they had written the correct information on their entry forms.
The committee would then return and enter this information into the computer.
As predicted, the most difficult of the groups was group one, baseball before official sheets. “For that period, we had a variety of methods,” Mr. Neft said. Luckily, according to Mr. Neft, “John Tattersall from Philadelphia had a hobby of doing two things regarding baseball.” Mr. Neft continues, “He kept a log of every home run ever hit in MLB and he had a collection of newspapers from 1876 through 1900 for the National League.”
Mr. Tattersall pretty much produced stats for the National League for those years. “We augmented stuff from newspapers and changed some things according to decisions of organized baseball,” Neft said.
To collect the rest of the stats, Mr. Neft and his committee did everything from scratch. At the time, with no TV and no radio, newspapers were the source of information. Fortunately, newspapers would publish a “Sports Final Edition” every evening which included the play-by-play for that afternoon’s baseball game. “Where nobody published the play-by-play,” Mr. Neft explained, “there was always at minimum an explanation how all the runs were scored.”
It took two years for Neft and his committee to collect all of this data. While it was labor intensive, part of the difficulty comes when the public is made aware of some changes to the history they’ve come to know and love.