A few months ago, while rummaging through a box of moldering books from my adolescence, I came across a monogrammed Bible I had been given at my bar mitzvah. I don't think its faux-leather spine had been cracked more than twice. For salvation, at least in those years, I preferred another sacred tome, received on my 10th birthday: the Baseball Encyclopedia. The agate type of that good book was an Eden for me; I spent untold hours exploring the legendary feats of its bygone heroes and contemporary idols. I wasn't much of an athlete and compensated for my lack of skill on the diamond by embracing its history. The Encyclopedia was my entree into that world, one that opened with a personal invitation from the game's commissioner, Bowie Kuhn. "Dear Baseball Fan," he wrote. "Here, without doubt, is the finest and most complete of all record books."
The art of the stat
A presumptuous claim, perhaps, but to diehard fans of the game it seemed warranted. In a review of the first edition, published in 1969, Los Angeles Times sports columnist Charles Maher called it "awesome." The book's editor at Macmillan, Bob Markel, proposed running an ad that pictured it next to the King James Bible, with a caption reading "VOLUME II." "The powers that be shot that one down," says Markel.
The Encyclopedia was surely a book of miracles (how else to explain Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak?) and none greater than its own existence. Though statistics had always been, as Kuhn noted, an "essential" part of the baseball experience, before the Encyclopedia the sport had neither a comprehensive nor a trustworthy record book. Statistics predating 1930 were notoriously unreliable. Before that time, the game's books had been kept with something less than actuarial diligence -- when they weren't being cooked altogether.
As Alan Schwarz relates in "The Numbers Game," his joyful account of baseball's statistical obsession, the job of reconstructing that history fell to David Neft, a Columbia University-trained statistician and former Harris pollster. Beginning in 1967, he led a team of more than 30 on a two-year blitz through America's newspaper archives, retrieving and cross-checking box scores and game stories in a Herculean -- sometimes Sisyphean -- effort to set baseball's record straight.
The mass of data Neft and his team collected was outsourced to Israel for coding onto IBM punch cards and then formatted to design templates created by Macmillan's revered art director, Abe Lerner. The result was a milestone for baseball and also for the publishing industry: The Baseball Encyclopedia was the first American trade book to be typeset entirely by computer.
