Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1097: How the Big Mac Was Made

Episode Date: August 14, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about “Babe Ruth’s Legs,” then talk to researcher and statistician David Neft about how he rebuilt baseball’s historical record to create the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, or “Big Mac,” which provided the most comprehensive and accurate account of the sport’s statistical past when it was published in 1969, and which […]

I didn't mean to live that many lives Compilers, like the feature of classic take-downs I didn't mean to live that many lives The tail end of a long receiving line You're a holdout Hello and welcome to episode 1097 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. This is going to be a history episode of the podcast.

In just a couple minutes, we are going to talk to David Neft, who essentially made everything that we do possible. He came up with the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, the really first comprehensive, accurate encyclopedia published in 1969. It took an enormous amount of effort and research. So we're going to get the origin story of that encyclopedia that really made possible everything that has happened since. And you have something brief that you want to say before we get to David? Something brief. I guess two things brief, because having now spoken with David already in the future and the past, I feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the project that he did. And it's been so many decades, but it's given me palpitations anyway we talk briefly in the uh in the interview about

babe ruth there is a picture of the book that has a table of babe ruth's statistics as shown in the book anyway i was searching for a babe ruth statistic on baseball reference and i typed in babe ruth maybe you've all maybe everybody's already done this i don't know maybe this is something that's well known but i typed in babe ruth and two players came up actually one of them is babe ruth that makes that makes sense That's what I was going for. And the other one is Samuel Bird. Samuel Bird played from 1929 to 1936. And he shows up not because his name was Babe or Ruth or Babe Ruth, but because his nickname was Babe Ruth's legs. Sammy Bird or Samuel Bird was nicknamed Babe Ruth's legs.

And I can tell you it's because according to to the Baseball Reference bullpen page, their Wikipedia, Sammy Bird earned the nickname Babe Ruth's Legs or Babe Ruth's Caddy as he often replaced Ruth as a pinch runner late in the Babe's career. He later became a professional golfer who won 23 pro events. So congratulations to Sammy Bird, who decided he was not going to try to live up to the Babe Ruth standard and instead became, I don't know, maybe the Babe Ruth of golf? Probably not because I hadn't heard of him before, but I'm going to say that. Anyway, he is apparently, I think, the first person to ever appear in a World Series and a Masters tournament. In any case, it's interesting for a few reasons. Sammy Bird, he played between the ages of 22 and 29. In his career, he had 10 triples and he had just 17 stolen bases and 10 caught ceilings. So Sammy Bird, not so fleet of foot, but nevertheless, still, I guess quite a bit

faster than late career Babe Ruth. But I think what's most interesting to me is I'm having trouble thinking of another example of a player whose nickname includes another player's name. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing is coming to mind right now. It's pretty rare, I guess, nowadays that you get that kind of relationship, like where a player over a long period of time becomes known for being a caddy to another player in that kind of way, just because of the way rosters have changed and team turnover has changed and just how players are deployed in games has changed. So I can't even really think of what the equivalent for that would be today. Like unless you had maybe a setup man who was paired with a closer for a really long time, but you know, something like that. That closer, like many Yankee relievers, were known as the bridge to Mariano over the years. But I have a hard time. It's not like you even get like platoons over a period of many years now that are stable and that we really internalize. So that seems like a product of the past. I can't come up with any good example in recent years.

Yeah, I'm trying to think like maybe if the Dodgers had some sort of really good young lefty, they could call him Kershaw's understudy. But that's probably you can't really refer to Alex Wood as such. They're just two very different pictures. So probably one of those things we'll never see again. One of those nicknames that comes from probably someone in the newspaper who's like, oh, this is going to be clever. And then it's stuck because that's all that there was in 1929. But in any case, maybe maybe the only such nickname in baseball history. I don't know how to search. Yeah. Maybe Julio Rios can be Kershaw's understudy when he comes back. Yeah. We can get it started here. All right. Something else? No. No. I don't have anything else. Do you? Okay. No, I don't. Because as people are listening to this, I have been away for some days. We are pre-recording this episode because I'm going away, so I can't talk about the current baseball that is happening or has happened since we are speaking now. It gets really hard to talk with the correct

tenses when you're trying to talk about a podcast that you are pre-recording and you don't know when people are listening to it. But the point is, I haven't seen baseball for the last few days by the time that people are listening to this. And so I don't know what's going on right now in baseball. I hope it's something fun. I hope everyone listening right now has some exciting baseball stories to think about, but we are not talking about them today. I personally can't believe what the Orioles just did. Yeah, I'll just leave some space so we can insert me calling on a phone to pronounce a player's name or something when this goes to print. No. Okay, so we will now get to David.

And I hope you all enjoy the story as we did. Nothing's better Nothing's better than a Big Mac Nothing's better Nothing's better Nothing's better than a Big Mac Nothing's better Nothing's better So you may have read about our guest today in a couple of good accounts that have been published. Maybe you've read Alan Schwartz's great book

about the history of baseball stats, The Numbers Game, which went into the story in detail. Maybe you read Rob Neier's account for FiveThirtyEight earlier this year. But just in case you haven't, I will read a snippet of a paragraph from Rob's piece. He says, a world without the Big Mac, that's what we're talking about today, the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, nicknamed the Big Mac. A world without the Big Mac might not just mean a world without BaseballReference.com. It might also mean a world

without Bill James, which might mean a world without Sabermetrics, a world without Moneyball, a world without the analytics that have transformed so many other sports. As John Thorne,

Major League Baseball's official historian, says today, it was a revolution. This was the Moby Dick of baseball statistics, not only for its size, but also for its place in baseball history. And I think you can add us to that list of things that we would not have. We would not have my career or Jeff's career or this podcast. We owe a debt to the man who put together the Big Mac, and he is talking to us now. His name is David Neft. Hi, David. Hi, good to talk to you. Yeah, great to talk to you too. And I was just saying before we started recording that even though I have read about how

you created this book, it still seems improbable or incredible to me that it ever happened given the enormity of the undertaking. But I guess we should start earlier than that with how you got interested in building a baseball encyclopedia. And when you were a kid, just getting into baseball stats, what was the best available source of them? Okay. Well, when I was a kid, there were multiple sources. No one source did everything. There were the baseball guides every year. There was the Sporting News publication, the Baseball Register, which did a terrific job on active players. There was Who's Who in Baseball. There was Baseball Magazine. And in the early 50s, there was the Turk and Thompson Baseball Encyclopedia put out by A.S. Barnes and Company. That book was a very important book, but it was very limited because statistically, for each player, all they had was the years they played, who they played for, position, games played, and then either batting average if you were a position player,

or won and lost record if you were a pitcher. That's all there was. But it was a normal-sized book. It wasn't an outsized book. Well, there's not a lot you can do with that information if you're interested in the numbers to the extent that we are, and I guess you were. So what was the impetus for you to want to build a better baseball encyclopedia? Well, when I was 17 years old, first of all, I had a lucky accident of geography for becoming a baseball nut.

I grew up within walking distance of two major league ballparks, Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. So, and in those days, there were very, very few night games. And on weekday afternoon games, at the end of the sixth inning, I believe, they would open the gates. People could go out and people could come in, come in for free. They didn't care. There were tons of empty seats, you know. If you became a fan, if you brought a soda, they came out ahead. So, on several occasions, it was something to do on the way home from school.

Watch the last couple of innings on the way home. Different world, you know, different time, different world. Then when I was 17 years old, I got a job at a very large summer camp for children. And the rule at this camp, to be a camp counselor, you had to be at least 19 years old. So when I was 17, and again, when I was 18, I had a job that they called the gate man, sort of the internal traffic cop at the front gate. People came in and told them where to

park, how to get to where they were going, et cetera, et cetera. And when I was hired for the job, the guy who hired me warned me that most, you know, at least half the time I was on the job, there would be nothing happening and nobody around. So he said, bring plenty of stuff to read. Well, I started figuring out how much reading material I would have to take for that amount of bedtime for eight weeks. And instead of, you know, packing a trunk full of paperbacks, what I did was I got a copy of the Turkin-Thompson Encyclopedia, and I took a pad of paper with me, and I started on dead time looking through that book and getting interested in certain facets of baseball

that I didn't know anything about, particularly 19th century Major League Baseball. And it was fascinating. And at that point, I just said to myself, gee, wouldn't it be nice to do a bigger and better one, you know, not just have batting average, et cetera, et cetera. And just, you know, a teenager's idle thoughts, having essentially no significance whatever.

When I got back to New York City, which is where I lived then, I found out that Spalding, Albert Goodwill Spalding, who was a major league pitcher and then started the Spalding Sporting Goods Company, which issued Spalding guides every year. When he died, he left his library to the New York Public Library and started going to the reference library at 42nd Street and started looking at 19th century Spalding guides and early 20th century guides

and discovered they had a fair amount of information in them, not everything that you would expect in later guides, you know, the guides that were current in the 1950s, but a lot of information that generally people hadn't seen. So again, the idea percolated that one of these days would be nice to do that. Now, skip in time forward to 1965. I was a principal in a small company called Information Concepts Incorporated, which was formed that year. And the CEO of the company and two of the other officers of the company had worked for IBM. So they knew people at IBM. And we got a consulting contract from IBM to design a system, a portable system, that they could take around the various sporting events to promote what IBM could do with computers for sports.

And as part of that contract, a colleague and I went up to Cooperstown to see what was there from a baseball standpoint. And I met Lee Allen. And that really was the start of what happened. colleague and I went up to Cooperstown to see what was there from a baseball standpoint, and I met Lee Allen. And that really was the start of what happened that resulted in the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. Because I found out a couple of things in Cooperstown. First of all, I saw for the first time baseball's official sheets, which are a sheet for each player each year, which has that player's full day-by-day record throughout the season. I also found out that Lee Allen had Cy Thompson, the Thompson of Turk and Thompson's, file of baseball players. And Lee had started with a group of people collecting demographic information about the players. And Lee had two loose-leaf notebooks, one for the

very early days, one for the more recent days, that for each year had all the rookies. And hopefully not all of it filled in. And you know, their last name, first name, middle name, how they threw, how they batted, height, weight, date of birth, place of birth, date of death, place of death, etc. This is quite a treasure trove of information. He also told me about a friend of his named John Tattersall who had done an amazing amount of research on 19th century baseball, but in particular the National League in the 19th century, and had compiled stats from box scores. There were no official sheets in the 19th century, and had compiled stats from box scores.

There were no official sheets in the 19th century, and done this amazing collection. So, all that duly noted, we finished the consulting project. The IBM system got built. We took it around some baseball games to a lot of... What we eventually wound up doing was a truck was built with an electronic message panel that could be hoisted up from the side of the truck, like a little scoreboard. And that was taken around to various baseball games, golf tournaments, tennis tournaments, et cetera, et cetera, promoting IBM. And then a year later, 1966, through our IBM connections, a couple of us were invited to go to Radnor,

Pennsylvania, which is where TV Guide was, headquarters of TV Guide. It was not only editorial headquarters, but it was where it was printed. And they showed us their brand new IBM system for setting type electronically. That's the event that really made the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia possible, economically possible. Because think of that book and think of having to set type on a linotype machine and then proofread every line of 2,300 pages of six-point type. Right. Yeah, exactly. It couldn't have happened. I mean, the economics wouldn't have worked out.

The book that eventually resulted from all of this work is known for having been groundbreaking. It's also known for how well it sold and, of course, for its heft. I believe, what was the official weight? Six and a half pounds. It was 2,200 pages. And just thinking about thinking

about the idea of i don't know if you've been around on baseball reference.com but thinking about a printed handheld version of that it's it's overwhelming admittedly and when you it's one thing to be 17 and you have free time on your hands and you're you're wishing that there were books of better information but to actually get started, at what point do you think that you were able to appreciate the enormity of the undertaking that you were going through with? Because it seems mind-boggling today to think about all of the effort, all of the manual labor that went into this.

What were you prepared for as you got started? I had a pretty good idea what was involved. But what happened, started working on it in 1967. At that point, I had no idea of how many copies were going to be sold. But what happened was our relationship with Major League Baseball was unbelievable. I mean, here I was, this young man, I was 30 at the time, I had never worked in the sports business, and I could call up the PR director of any Major League team and get whatever I wanted immediately. Major League Baseball's commitment to this project was incredible. And when it was clear how much it meant to them, that, you know, it's like contagious spirit that infused all of us working on the project with the realization, first of all, of what a big deal this was. And second of all, that we darn well better get it

right. And I mean, there must have been so many questions that just couldn't be answered at the time with the information you had available, which to me, to Jeff, I mean, we are old enough, I guess, to remember the pre-baseball reference era, but our whole careers, essentially, we have had all of this information at our fingertips and not just the seasonal lines and the play-by-play and the game logs, but now pitch-by-pitch information and spin rate and exit velocity. And we're so conditioned to having this just at our fingertips or at someone smarter than our fingertips who can look it up for us. And back then, there just must have been so many questions that couldn't possibly have been answered. If you wanted to know who was the leader in X, Y, or Z, to answer that question would have either required going to the library, doing an enormous amount of manual research,

or just saying, I don't know, there's no way to know, which is a very unfamiliar feeling, I think, for baseball fans of today who have this near certainty that we can answer almost any question. And that's partly because of the work that you did on this project. But at the time, it just must have been so different from how it is for baseball fans being raised today, where there is this complete thorough record. And back then, it just must have been a fog to a large extent. Yeah, that's true. And also, that's why it led to so many of those other things that Rav Naya was referring to in his piece, that researchers and people who were very, very interested realized that the combination of this book and the evolution of electronic equipment, computers and the like, not only produced the encyclopedia, but made it possible to keep going.

So, I mean, one of the most wonderful things that we have now is RetroChate. Right. That fantastic, Dave Smith's fantastic volunteer effort that is producing lots of things that we never had before, where you can go in and find out what somebody does against left-handed pitching. Who knew that before? Right, yeah. Because there was such a dearth of information when you were beginning the project, obviously when you were done, given how well the book sold and given how much support you got from Major League Baseball, it was the project was well received, but you would occasionally run into a situation where you would find out that a

thought to be understood a baseball record was incorrect, and you would have to amend those existing records to different numbers. So how were you able to deal with what I'm sure was at least partially negative feedback to people who found out that the numbers they believed in were actually wrong? Okay. At the beginning of the project, a five-person committee was set up to deal with not only the issues you just raised, but what definitions we would use, what standards we would use on the book. And also remember, one of the things that was different about the late 1960s as opposed to now, at that time, the commissioner's office had less power and the two leagues had more power. And the statistical records were the responsibility of each league. So this committee consisted of Joe Reichler from the commissioner's office,

Bob Holbrook, PR director of the American League, Dave Grody, the PR director of the National League, Jack Lang, the secretary treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and me. And we had two formal meetings. We all physically got together in 1968 and a lot of phone calls and conversations back and forth. And the committee decided on certain rules and principles that

would be followed, all of which, by the way, are in the encyclopedia. One of the things I insisted in the book that we document everything that we did so that future researchers can get an idea of what was going on. And then part of the systems work in this was that baseball is very much what accountants call a double entry bookkeeping system. The number of hits by the batters has to equal the number of hits given up by the pitchers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we programmed all of this into the computer so that when we finished a year, we would get out a bunch of error messages, and we would go through them. We would find out, we would first of all take care of those that turned out to be our mistakes, something that we did wrong.

And then when we were finished, when we got them taken care of all of our mistakes, And then when we were finished, when we got them taking care of all of our mistakes, we divided baseball into four periods, took all of the changes, and sent a copy to all the committee members. But basically, the American League stuff to Bob Holbrook, the National League stuff to Dave Brody, with a list of errors, together with our recommendations of what to do with them. And that worked basically very well. One of the things that makes sense, but also is fortunate in terms of publicity is the more serious errors tend to be for the much earlier years. In other words, we found cases in the 19th century of the league office cheating. Some owner gave somebody in the league office, you know, a few bottles of scotch in return for changing a player's records at the end of the season.

Or in the case of the American Association in the 1880s, to bolster their claim of having great players, they inflated the batting records of some of their stars systematically every year. But that's a long, long, long time ago. The closer you got to the modern period, the fewer the errors. So in other words, the crowning achievement, the last period of time, the four periods we divided into, 1946 to 1968. And for 1946 to 68, National League, which coincides 46 was the year that Seymour Seawolf joined the Elias Sports Bureau, the National League had no errors from 46 through 68. Zero. Wow. So I got a small taste of this sort of experience myself

because I worked at the Elias Sports Bureau for one summer and two winters when I was still in school and Seymour was there, who you just mentioned, looking over my shoulder and I was entering these daily logs that you're talking about and we would get a roll of microfilm, I think, from the Hall of Fame and we would open it up on a microfilm reader, which I had never used to that point. And, you know, they were very finicky, the machines. And then you'd print out like a seasons full of game logs essentially for a player. And at the time, we were just entering those very tediously into Elias's computer system so that they would have that information accessible to them in the future when they were running queries for people. And it was extremely monotonous, and you would inevitably make mistakes.

And at the end of entering a full team season, you would check the totals, and the totals never matched the individual player totals. So you'd have to go back and see where you pressed the wrong key at some point. where you press the wrong key at some point. And I spent quite a while doing that. And, you know, I was distracting myself listening to the radio or something while I was doing it just to stay sane. But I can't even imagine doing that for all of baseball history. Granted, baseball history was less long then than it is now, but it was still very long at the time.

And I'm even more fascinated by the information gathering stage, let alone the entering it all manually into a computer. But you hired a team of researchers and Alan Schwartz published the notice that you ran in the Sporting News. So I'll just read it here. It says, Wanted a baseball nut group involved in sports history wishes to add to its permanent New York research staff, a person who is thoroughly familiar with baseball history and statistics, And then salary and where you send your information. You got a lot of responses to that and you ended up hiring 21 researchers to basically rebuild the entire statistical record of baseball in a year. So how does that happen, especially at that time when this stuff was not online? You had to go get it and travel was not as fast and communication was not as easy. I just can't imagine doing this as thoroughly as you did it.

So what was the game plan? It must have been almost like a military campaign planning this. Well, what I had done as part of the thinking this through and developing the proposal initially to sell the idea to baseball and then to the Macmillan Company, I had done some traveling and I had looked at newspapers. One of the fortunate byproducts of most of this period, no night baseball, was that there were in every major league city, there were afternoon newspapers and the afternoon newspaper always had what they called a sports final edition. And for much of baseball history, in most of the major league cities, and nothing is ever 100% in this business,

they would not only have a detailed count of the game and a detailed box score, but they had a play-by-play. And in addition to that, as I said, the ball clubs were helpful. So, for example, Bob Brown, the PR director of the Orioles, they had kept their scorebook, essentially a copy of the official scorer's scorebook for the game, for every game that the Baltimore Orioles ever played since they had moved from St. Louis.

So there were things available to us that one way or another I found out about. And I found out about most of these things before we started doing the actual research on the project. So I knew which libraries to send people to. I knew which newspapers to tell them to go to. It was pretty well set up in advance. And by the way, you said you were at Elias for a while. So you knew Steve Hurt. Yes. And Steve started out part-time, age 17, freshman at Fordham, working on Big Mac. Oh.

Yeah, he ended up going to my high school. In the article that Rob Nyer wrote about this, there's a picture of one of the pages, and the picture rather appropriately features Babe Ruth's statistical record. And within there, you see all of his seasons, a lot of his numbers, you have his full name, his height, weight, some biographical information, you have his nickname. It also has these two notes, 1922 suspended by team and 1925 illness. Now, those are, of course, those are accurate statements, but how did you decide what information was going to go into this giant comprehensive manual? Because those two notes are of particular detail. And was it more a situation where you included

what you could find? Or how did those two trivia facts, I guess, come to be in the book? Again, we adopted a set of principles. If a player missed four weeks, four continuous weeks of the season or more, which we knew from the official sheets, because you could see gaps, to explain to the fans what happened, we would put in what we called an injury code into the computer. And what you saw was the tool writing out what we called injury codes. There were obviously more than just injuries, but that's what happened. So Babe Ruth, when he was suspended for illegal barnstorming in the beginning of the 22 season, and when he ate far too many hot dogs in 1925 was listed. And was the work that you and your team did,

did that become part of the RetroSheet database or did they have to redo the work that you did? Because for the encyclopedia, you're just publishing seasonal lines and RetroSheet is going game by game and collecting box scores and going back as far as possible. They actually do it.

They did, okay. They essentially started from scratch, but again, since we published the list of newspapers we used, things like that, they weren't exactly starting from scratch. You know, time, you always build. It's like a ladder, just like we had built upon the Turkin-Thompson Encyclopedia. Turkin-Thompson was built upon the book that Ernie Lannigan did in 1922. RetroStreet and Baseball Reference and everything came afterward, built on the Baseball Encyclopedia from 1969. in my age group grew up with computers and are so accustomed to using them. But I guess people of my age, you know, will see the depictions of computers coming in in the mid 60s, the time that we're talking about here. And, you know, maybe they saw it on Mad Men, or maybe they saw it in Hidden Figures, the movie last year. And it's always like this giant mainframe box comes into an office and

no one knows what to do with it and everyone's sort of suspicious of it and it just sort of sits there. Was that what it was like at the time when you were feeding these numbers into a computer? Did you have trouble finding uses for the computer at that time? Because it's kind of funny, you're mentioning IBM and the same thing is happening now, 50 years later, IBM and its Watson supercomputer. I think people are still figuring out what the applications of that are. I was just reading an article about that yesterday, how there's all this promise and hype, but it's not actually that clear in what ways it's useful. So I'm curious what that was like at the time and the process of actually feeding the stats into the computer. Well, no, one other thing.

The baseball encyclopedia wasn't the only thing we were working on. I mean, this is a company doing lots of computer-oriented things headed by a group of ex-IBMers. So there was nothing strange about it. We also had some very good systems people. I mean, Neil Arman, Bob Hislop, Joanne Cotterill, and others were really, really good at what they did. So, yeah, it was perfectly natural to a lot of the people there.

The interesting thing, of course, is at that time in particular, I was probably the least computer literate person in the joint. And what was the process for feeding all of these stats into the computers? Would you have to just... Punch cards. Yeah. So that must have been... It was the 1960s. Right.

That must have been extremely time consuming, even after you have... Lots and lots of punch cards. Yeah. Gosh. Sounds so daunting to me to imagine that this was done. But I guess it was easier than it had ever been to that point. So maybe it didn't sound so daunting at the time. It probably seemed like it was so convenient because it couldn did have some forays into putting together books on football and also basketball. And of course, you're best known for the baseball volumes. But how did the processes compare there? And was that, I guess, what was the motivating factor as well?

Because you were a self-described baseball fan, baseball nut had been since you were young. So what was driving the processes to find information for two other major sports? I'm a researcher and a statistician. I love to find out stuff. I've always been a fan of other sports, football, basketball, track and field. So football particularly needed a fair amount of work, I mean, particularly in the early days. Obviously, football is easier because only major league professional football started in 1920. So you don't have to go back to the 19th century

the way you do in baseball. And, of course, the huge difference is there's so many fewer games. So football is inherently easier. But you know what goes on I'm still working on football I'm doing stuff now for the pro football all the same So all computerized I'm just going to read this paragraph from the numbers game

About that process of feeding the information into the computers Alan Schwartz writes Each player received a 17-inch wide sheet of printout paper On which researchers would fill in his yearly statistical totals Alan Schwartz writes, Four weeks later, thousands of IBM punch cards would return from Israel and be loaded onto magnetic tape. Sorting the information inside the computer took hours, not the instance with which we are spoiled today. Armin couldn't even see the data unless he pulled a small portion off a tape and line printed it. Most of the time he had to feel around in the dark. So, again, it's pretty amazing. He spent months putting in 15 hours a day, seven days a week to keep everything straight, it says, even working with assistants.

So, wow. I guess everyone was passionate about the project, which must have helped because if you weren't, this would have been tough. We knew the significance of what we were doing. Let's put it that way. You know, book publishing at the time, a company the size of Macmillan would publish 400 trade books a year. Basically, they would get, this wasn't official, but they would get A, B, or C-level treatment. C-level, a blurb about the book was put into the semi-annual catalog, given to the sales staff.

B-level, in addition to that, you had a small publishing party to which the press was invited. And at that little party, the editor of the book held up the book and said how wonderful it was. A-level, you had a slightly larger press party. The head of the publishing company or the editor-in-chief was the one who held up the book and talked about it. And you had access to a member of the publicity department at the publishing house to line up promotional stuff. When the Baseball Encyclopedia was published at the publishing party, the launch party, the person who held up the book was the commissioner of baseball. The publicity department at Macmillan didn't touch this book.

They hired a separate PR firm just to do this book. It was different. And so the book ended up being 2,338 pages and six and a half pounds and ended up selling more than 100,000 copies. And I'm curious about whether you foresaw what would come from this. Not that you necessarily could have imagined something like baseballreference.com in 1969, but just the research that was enabled by this process. And I mean, could you foresee that baseball's statistical methods and inquiries would become much more sophisticated that could you foresee something like sabermetrics coming along because of these numbers? Or were you not really thinking of that at the time and you just wanted accurate totals just for the sake of knowing what

happened? I wish I could say I foresaw all of this, but I can't. I foresaw a little bit because having had conversations with a lot of the major league teams, I saw some of the things that even then were going on. For example, on base average was being used by a quarter of the major league teams, let's say, at that point, even though it wasn't in general circulation. So to a very tiny extent, the answer is yes, I saw some of the ways where things were going, but just, you know, a tiny, tiny,, for this project and everyone listening who has spent hours probably perusing Baseball Reference and Fangraphs and all of these sites, all of the advanced stats that those sites publish are based on these basic stats that we wouldn't have, or at least wouldn't have to the degree of accuracy that we do without you and without the Big Mac and your research staff. So not that you necessarily did it for us 50 years in the future, but maybe you did.

Maybe you were thinking of future generations of baseball fans and whatever your motivations were at the time, I'm glad that it led you to do this because it's really given a gift to all of us. So thank you so much for doing it and for sharing the story with us too. Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Thank you very much. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who've already pledged their support include Tim Morton, Joe Camerata, James Walker, Thomas Schiavone, and Clark Goebel. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group

at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. If you're looking for something else to listen to, Michael Batman and I should have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up now. We talked to Chris Goetz, the White Sox director of player development, about how he is developing all of the many White Sox prospects that they've accumulated over the last year. We also talked to Liz Roescher of Yahoo about girls and women in baseball and choosing baseball over softball.

You can find that on the Ringer MLB show feed. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you later this week.