Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1183: Extra, Extra, Read Ball About It

Episode Date: March 1, 2018

In a bonus, non-team-preview episode, Ben Lindbergh talks to FiveThirtyEight’s Rob Arthur about his new research into the changing construction of the baseball and its possible effect on the rising home-run rate. Then Ben talks to trailblazing baseball researcher Tom Shieber, the senior curator at the Hall of Fame and a recent recipient of SABR’s […]

You can go to church and sing again You can judge me by the color of my skin You can live a lie until you die One thing you can't hide Is when you cripple inside Take it cause Hello and welcome to episode 1183 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, flying solo today actually for a bonus episode of Effectively Wild. So during our team preview podcast series, it becomes very difficult to schedule non-preview guests, but there were a couple people I really wanted to talk to today. So we're doing an additional episode this week. Jeff was occupied and couldn't join me, but he'll be back tomorrow for the regularly scheduled team preview podcast. Later in this episode, I'll be talking to Tom Schieber, a longtime

baseball researcher who just won Sabre's Henry Chadwick Award, which is given out annually to a few of the most accomplished baseball researchers out there. Tom is the senior curator at the Hall of Fame. He's also a longtime Sabre member. He blogs at the Baseball Researcher site, and he does a lot of investigative deep dives into baseball history that have fascinated me for years. So I'm happy that he won this award and wanted to have him on to talk to him about it and about his work and his origin story and some of the tidbits about baseball he's turned up over the years. So that will come a little later in this episode. But first,

we have an update on the baseball and on the rapid record rise in home run rate. So last week, Rob Arthur was writing for Vice News about the fact that the Justice Department is not enforcing civil rights anymore. Yes, that's as scary as it sounds. But this week, he is back to doing hard-hitting investigative journalism about other important questions. Okay, maybe not quite as important, such as, is the baseball juiced? And he is joining me now. He has a new article up at 538 about this very important topic. And Rob, you and I have obviously been fascinated by this question and have been looking into this question for the past few years, both together and separately, and have attacked the problem in a number of

different ways. But to this point, we've been sort of looking at the outside of the ball and the behavior of the ball as measured in laboratory tests and as captured by various statistics, tracking and otherwise, now you are going under the surface. You have delved into the core of the ball itself. So what did you do and what have you found? So working with a team of people at ESPN Sports Science, the television show, and in particular, a guy named Tim Dix, we collaborated with some scientists at USC and Kent State to do, as you said, some investigations of the inside of the ball. So specifically at the University of Southern California, we had the balls CT scanned, which

has been done before. But what we found is that the balls are very different. The ones manufactured after 2014 are very different than the ones manufactured before. The balls made after the 2014 season, one particular layer of rubber within the core is significantly less dense than in balls made prior to that. So we don't know what that means for the performance characteristics of the ball itself, but it does seem to show that the construction of the ball is different. So after we did that, we then took the balls to Kent State and had them do a different kind of analysis, something called a thermogravimetric analysis, where they essentially cook the ball and then

they look at what speed the different materials vaporize. And so they can use that. We've really tortured these baseballs over the past few years. We're firing them out of cannons and melting them and cutting them up. It's really cruel. Yeah, basically every scientific method is just some elaborate torture device for these baseballs. So what it does is by cooking them, you can tell what every layer of the baseball is made of. And so we looked at that particular layer that we found was less dense, and we found that it also has chemical differences that are significant, statistically significant. So we believe it to be actually a different kind of rubber.

Again, we don't know what this means for the actual performance of the baseball. We can't go from the material is different to saying that the coefficient of restitution or the bounciness of the baseball is necessarily different. But your work with Mitchell Lichtman showed that the COR is different. And so the fact that there are these structural changes to the ball that coincide with changes

to the bounciness and the air resistance of the baseball, I think shows that there is probably something different about this new baseball that is contributing to the home has carried. And again, that's based on StatCast information. But none of this has said why it was flying differently or bouncing differently. And so this is giving us a potential explanation for that. And so it kind of corroborates the stats in a sense because if you see that the stats are different,

there has to be some kind of root cause for why the ball is behaving differently. And so now the investigation that you've collaborated on here has given us at least some characteristics that are different that then kind of back up the observed differences in performance. Right. Yeah. And the less dense layer of rubber in theory could contribute to a bouncier baseball, but that gets to a level of sort of material science that I don't think anybody really knows how to turn like a less dense layer of rubber into what exactly that means for the ball. But there's definitely the possibility that given the changes we saw, you would also see changes in the performance characteristics like we've measured. Right. Okay. And so there was also

a patent application that you turned up from early in 2015 that Rawlings filed. So what does it say and what bearing, if any, does it have on these differences you've discovered? That's a very interesting question. The application was filed in January of 2015, and it is ostensibly for both softballs and baseballs, but the design of the baseballs described in the patent application is very different than Major League Baseballs. With that said, the patent application seems important because in it they describe trying to create a baseballball that is more lively, but still within the limits that are set by the softball league they were manufacturing this for.

And the way they do that is by slightly tweaking the rubber that goes into the softball and putting more polymers in. So there are some similarities between what's described in the patent and what we saw in terms of the chemical makeup of the new MLB baseball. It doesn't seem like they took this patent application and then used it to create Major League Baseballs because that would entail a whole bunch of changes that would be more obvious than what we saw. But it does speak to this idea that Rawlings had at least considered in another instance that they could take a softball and make it more lively, but keep it within the limits that were set by that league and not have it exceed those limits, which has been this major talking point for Rob Manfred essentially since the home run search has begun, that the baseball

is still within the limits that are set by the league. It just seems to be a lot more lively within those limits. So I do think it speaks to this idea that Rawlings had considered this before, maybe for a different type of ball, maybe with a different type of construction technique. But it does show that they could do this. They can make up baseball that's livelier, but still within limits. Yeah. And so the changes that these tests detected, is this something that if your eye sliced open a ball, we would be able to detect in some way?

Or are these differences so minute that it really takes these advanced tests to reveal them? and research is that these really small differences in the ball, seemingly in the characteristics, like the outer characteristics of the ball, just the size, the weight, the seam height, all of that can produce pretty significant differences in how the ball actually behaves. So is that the case also with the core, that these are small differences that maybe you couldn't even see or feel, but can produce these larger differences in how the ball performs. That does seem to be the case here.

So we found there was a slight difference in weight in the cores of the balls, but the difference is so small, it's a half a gram. So that's, to put that in context, that's roughly the weight of a paperclip. So unless you are, you have incredibly, incredible sensory perception, you would never be able to tell holding two baseball cores that one is lighter than the other. So you'd have to actually measure it. And the chemical differences similarly are totally invisible to the naked eye, at least. Like the color of the cores is the same.

There isn't a big difference in terms of just touching them. So you would have to actually go through and scientifically test it. scientifically test it. But even that half gram difference we found, according to some math that was done in collaboration with Alan Nathan, or at least with his oversight, that half gram difference would propel the ball about six inches further than a ball that was slightly heavier. So even that tiny little insignificant change, the weight of a paperclip is enough to very slightly impact the carry of the ball. And so it's like you said, like every one of these changes is almost at the limit of or beyond the limit of human perception, but it's enough to really significantly impact the home run rate in the league.

And the researchers were confident that even though this was not an enormous sample of baseballs, that you could trust the differences between different samples? Yes, you can actually see it. We provide the CT scans in the article. And so it's very obvious to the naked eye just looking at the CT scans, and you don't have to be a CT technician to tell that there's a pretty significant difference in density. So even though we only had eight balls tested, it was easy to tell that there was something going on with this particular layer of rubber that was different. So I guess if you're a conspiracy theorist, you might say, well, these differences are so small

because they thought they could just tweak a bunch of different things in a lot of barely noticeable ways and it would be the perfect crime and no one would ever detect these differences. But I think probably the way I would interpret it is just that it's not hard to imagine these things varying unintentionally just because it's not something that you can notice by feeling it or looking at it or weighing it in your hands or something like that. So it's fairly easy to imagine, you know, if the limits are not that strict and it doesn't seem like they are in a lot of cases that these differences could creep in. I don't know how, you know, whether a machine is just slightly differently calibrated or someone tweaks a setting somewhere or it's just random or what.

But you could easily imagine all of these things sort of stacking together in a way that would pass an inspection or pass someone's notice and yet still add up to something pretty significant. Yeah, that's one of the remarkable things about it is that it seems to be several different independent characteristics, the weight of the ball, the bounciness of the ball, the seam height of the ball that are all contributing independently. And they all seem to be contributing in this one direction to make the baseballs livelier. But any one of those individual characteristics, the difference is fairly small. And so, like you said, there is, as someone at Rawlings put it, there's natural variation in the manufacturing process. So, tiny differences like a half a gram can potentially slip through. As they noted,

they're dealing with a lot of organic components. So, it's not something where they can always control the process perfectly. They're dealing with yarn that comes from sheep or cowhide that comes from cows. So those cows aren't always every time the same. And the machines that build these baseballs are not always the same. So tiny little variations in those components or in the machines or in the process of how the baseballs are built could potentially be enough to cause the differences that we found and might even pass the quality control standards of Rawlings or of Major League Baseball. So it's really very small differences, but in total, they add up to a fairly significant increase. Yeah. So you, at the end of the article, come up with an estimate, putting all this together, of how much of the home run surge we've seen might be baseball related.

So can you go over that? Yeah, so basically six inches comes from the weight, as I mentioned before. A lighter ball travels a little bit further. About five feet comes from the air resistance of the ball, which I had written about earlier and were able to measure with PitchFX. And that might be a consequence of seam height. It might be a consequence of a different texture of the ball, as some pitchers have been complaining about. So that's five feet.

And then another three feet comes from the bounciness of the baseball. And you had tested that with the air cannon tests in the Ringer article. So you add it all up, you get 8.6 feet. And after you get that, you can translate that to a percent increase in the number of home runs using a formula that Alan Nathan came up with. It ends up being something like 25 to 30% increase in home runs. If you look at the actual spike in home runs from 2014 to 2017, you get 46%. So in total, we're explaining something like half to two thirds of the increase in home runs over that time frame by changes to the ball itself.

And those, by the way, are just the changes we know about. So there could, in theory, be additional changes that would have altered the ball in other ways that could promote or could take away home runs. But regardless of those things, it does seem like the changes to the ball that we've noticed are big enough to explain the majority of the home run spike. the ball that we've noticed are big enough to explain the majority of the home run spike. And there's probably other contributions on top of that, from philosophical shifts in terms of the fly ball revolution to pitchers being different or talent levels between hitters and pitchers being different. But it does seem like the major factor, the thing that explains the majority of the variation is the baseball itself. Yeah. And then in theory, hitters notice that the ball is carrying better,

so they are being rewarded for getting the ball in the air. And so that leads to a lot of the swing-changing stuff that we've heard of and increased fly ball rates and launch angles and all of that that's just adding on to this effect. So what does MLB and what does Rawlings say about this latest investigation?

I'll start with MLB. We knew at the end of last season, they were starting to get so much pushback, especially during the World Series with the record-breaking home run totals and all that, that they formed this commission to study the baseball and show that it's actually not changed and everything is fine and nothing is different. So we talked to a member of that commission and we talked to some people in baseball and they weren't able to release the exact findings of that commission. We believe that that report will be available soon. But they said that the weight, circumference, seam height, and bounciness of the ball were all within ranges that were unlikely to significantly affect home run rates. So this is partially a denial, but partially not, because one of the things that they said they didn't measure, so I mentioned weight, circumference, seam height, bounciness. One of the things they didn't measure and don't know whether it's within the range is

air resistance of the baseball. So they're denying a big part of it and also not denying or not commenting on, I should say, whether the air resistance of the baseball could have contributed to the home run increase. They also declined to say whether a bunch of small changes to each of those things independently would be enough to impact the home run rate in a significant way. So I'm hopeful that when they release the report, they will address that. that. But in the meantime, we're sort of left with this possibility that, as you mentioned, there's a lot of tiny things, almost imperceptible things that would add up to one big increase in home runs. And Rawlings? So Rawlings was a little different to this point. And to this point in our reporting, both the stuff that you and I have done together and separately, I think there's been

almost a complete denial that the baseball has changed at all. When we got on the phone with someone from Rawlings, Kathy Smith-Stevens, this was the first time I'd heard them admit that there is actually some manufacturing variation that occurs in the manufacturing of these baseballs. And so there can be some natural variation that happens. They also admitted that they continuously tweak or change the way that the baseballs are manufactured. So they're not saying that the tweaks they make aren't going to change the way the baseball performs. In fact, the way they do them is specifically to minimize any change wouldn't significantly impact the baseball, but together would lead up to this home run surge that we found. So they sort of admitted that it was possible that there were small changes, but said that in total, they haven't seen any evidence that the total performance of the baseball has changed. So again, we have a sort of denial,

but not complete of what's going on and what we found. So I thought it was interesting for both Rawlings and MLB that we're making a little bit of progress and that we're sort of getting them to at least admit that the baseballs could have changed. And maybe there were tweaks to the manufacturing process. So we're not getting to the point where they're actually saying, yes, the baseballs are different. But there is some evidence that at least there may have been slight tweaks in the way that the baseballs were made. Yeah. And clearly they're taking the issue more seriously, or they're at least looking into it, although they've denied in the past that there's any meaningful difference in the ball. It seems as if we've heard not only this task force that they've commissioned to look into it in greater

detail, but also maybe storing the baseballs in climate-controlled rooms this year and possibly humidors in every park in future seasons. So it does seem as if they are monitoring this sort of thing and looking into it more deeply. And I don't know whether we'll ever have them come out and say, yes, the ball is different or something. I don't even know if it's in their best interest to do that, even if they think it's true, but they aren't ignoring the issue. I guess that's something we could say at least. Yeah, there's some progress there. I think it was definitely worse to be completely ignored than to at least be able to get someone on the phone and get them to speak to this.

So yeah, like you said, I don't know if they'll ever come out and say, well, actually the baseballs were slightly different or are slightly different. But at this point, the evidence seems to be mounting and I know that there are other efforts in progress to build even more evidence. So I think that it's clear that something about the baseballs is different, whether or not they admit it. Yeah. And I looked toward the end of last spring training at the spring training home run rate, because that is generally a decent indicator of the regular season home run rate. So maybe I'll revisit that later in the spring once we've had

more games, but you took a quick look, right? Just at the very, very early action there. And it still seems like home runs are being hit. Yeah. It's almost exactly the same rate as last year. So this could be essentially the same record-breaking pace as last season. Right. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you never know because if it is this sort of manufacturing variation, these things that you've discovered, that could change back to what it was just as quickly as it changed to what it is. So it's hard to be able to count on this sort of thing from season to season. And if you're a team and you're trying to decide what sort of offensive player to sign or what you want your pitching approach or hitting approach to be, it can be kind of tough to count on this lasting because obviously none of us predicted that this surge was going

to happen and we can't really predict whether it's going to stop happening at some point. So I don't know. Obviously, it's affecting every player and every team to a certain extent, but some players and some strategies get affected disproportionately by this. So there is more uncertainty in that area. Yeah, definitely. I think even as a pitcher, right? I talked to some pitchers last season about the home run surge and what they were doing to deal with it,

if anything. And so I think there's a lot of strategy there in terms of pitching up in the zone if you're dealing with hitters that are trying to uppercut the ball more. So even the pitchers have a lot of skin in the game in terms of what the baseball is going to be this year as opposed to what it was last year. And so I think there's really a lot of people who their strategies depend on these random manufacturing variations. Mm-hmm. All right. Are there any more tests still left to be performed?

Any other ways we can dissect these things for any other scientists we can call in to examine a baseball? I'm sure there are many left. I mean, one thing that I don't think any of us have touched yet is the yarn within the baseball. So maybe that's different. That was, I believe that was the case in a previous time that baseballs were changed.

So maybe that's the next area to go. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, I will link to the article for anyone who wants to check out all the details and the math and the images and compare side by side. And it's probably important for you to continue to keep your eye on the Justice Department and

police violence and all the other subjects you've investigated. But I'm glad you still have a little time to be on the juiced ball beat. So please keep up the investigation. I certainly will. It's a great pleasure to be able to find that the ball is different. All right. Well, you can find Rob's article at FiveThirtyEight and much of his other work there, as well as at other sites, Vice and Slate and Wall Street Journal, New York Times, et cetera. You can find him on Twitter also at NoLittlePlans with underscores between the words. Rob, thanks for the update.

Thanks for having me on. All right. So I will take a quick break and I'll be back in just a moment with baseball researcher Tom Schieber, who like Rob and his fellow researchers has relied on images to find out things we didn't know about baseball, if not the baseball. Back in just a second. What's inside What's inside If you follow Tom Schieber on Twitter, then just within the past few months, you've been treated to, among other things, an 1880 debunking of the myth that Abraham Lincoln learned of his presidential nomination while he was playing baseball.

A screenshot of a full history of baseball published in 1856. A reference to a baseball card collector from a 1912 short story. An 1886 argument that pitchers, quote, be not compelled to bat. A 1927 minor league box score featuring a hitter named Abbott getting plunked by a pitcher named Costello, a notice Babe Ruth published in the paper when he lost the diamond ring, an 1873 game played under a 10 innings and 10 batters rule, and most memorably, a 1902 account of an official score killed when a knife he was holding was hit by a foul ball and driven into his heart, which actually happened,

apparently. These are just a few of the many intriguing tidbits unearthed by Tom in his decades of delving into baseball's past. And that work was recently recognized by Sabre, which named him one of the 2018 recipients of the prestigious Henry Chadwick Award for Baseball Research. Tom is the senior curator at the Hall of Fame, and he joins me now from his office in Cooperstown, which I picture as a kind of clutter of historic scorecards and tattered uniforms and fading photos crammed into every available inch. Am I close, or is your workspace not actually littered with antique sports relics? It's not littered with antique sports relics, but it is littered with antique sports relics,

but it is littered with all sorts of other stuff that isn't as valuable. So there's lots of images on my wall from exhibits that I've done or from just favorite ballplayers or lots of books and things like that. I try not to be too, I try to be organized. Yes.

But yeah, we try to keep the artifacts and ephemera and all of these very important items that we want to have last for a long, long time out of people's offices and in a place where they're going to be well preserved. Yeah, organization is probably pretty important for a curator. I would imagine that's a big part of your job. But I want to get into your whole career and your discoveries. But I want to start at the beginning because you have just a perfect origin story. Your interest in baseball research came along in this really serendipitous way where you have a chance occurrence that maybe ends up determining a lot of your life. So can you recount that story?

Yeah, I think, yeah, that's well said. I was, boy, I think I was in first grade. My recollection is not poor. This is why I'm a researcher. I write stuff down, but I was not doing that for the large portion of my life before becoming an actual researcher. and I brought it home and showed it to my dad, and I didn't know the names. I didn't know who these guys were, although I did like baseball. I already liked baseball. And so some of the names I could decipher, and I figured out who they were, whether it's Joe DiMaggio or Frankie Frisch or Dizzy Dean, but other ones were a little bit more cryptic because the signature wasn't that great or I just didn't know the name or whatever. And I think probably I did a little bit of, I mean, I'm a first grader

at this point, not so much research, but my dad was helping me out with things. But I did learn that these people were important baseball players. And looking back on it, I'm sure it was much later when I really started getting into baseball research, which is probably when I was 11 or 12, something like that. I revisited the ball and was able to figure out that it was most likely a baseball from an old-timers game at Bush Stadium and Bush Memorial Stadium, which is, I'm from St. Louis. So that would make sense. And I think we figured out when the guys passed away, so you could figure out, you know, a possible final date for this kind of thing. And, you know, I honestly, I have one thing I've actually, you know, now I actually do a lot of research for my living and yet I haven't looked into the ball again. I really should. It's ironic because it did get me started into how to do research and

how to read books and this kind of thing. And yet I never have gone back to it to check it out again. Maybe I'm a little worried that I wouldn't be able to find it. I don't know. Maybe it'll turn out to be a forgery and your whole career will be a lie. Well, it could be a forgery, but that wouldn't mean my career is a lie. But I appreciate the concept. But no, that was kind of neat. But honestly, I guess that was a little bit of a seed. Maybe that pushed me over the edge. But my dad, my brothers all sort of had research elements to what they were doing. None of it related at all to baseball, not necessarily even related to history. But they did certain things that were, as I look back on them, somewhat researchy.

And I'm the youngest of four siblings. And so I think I saw this. I think I saw that it was natural to do this kind of thing, which probably isn't natural. But for whatever reason, I was the one that got interested in baseball. And from that baseball history, my family is not particularly interested in sports. I don't have one of these stories where it was passed down by my father or my grandfather. Neither do I. Yeah. I didn't find any valuable baseballs in the gutter, though. You have no idea how it ended up there, I assume. I don't. I don't have an idea how it ended up there. Somebody lost a nice baseball.

Yeah. So if you're listening and it's your baseball, you can email me and you can reclaim it from Tom. So I have to ask about your earlier life also as both a baseball nerd and an astronomy nerd. I'm curious about your earlier job as, I guess, you worked at a solar observatory, Mount Wilson in California. And I would imagine there are some commonalities there in that in both of these jobs, you're sort of poring over imagery and looking at details and differences. But how did you start there? And are there any parallels? And how did you transition from that to baseball? Sure.

Well, first of all, I will say there's really, I should know, I worked a dozen years in solar physics. I've worked now close to 20 years at the Hall of Fame. There's no overlap. I mean, I've racked my brain. There really isn't. So I'll try and make this quick because I'm not sure how exciting it's going to be. But I've always liked, essentially always liked doing baseball research and baseball history,

although I was never interested in general history until I actually really got into baseball history out of college. And then I sort of got into history, but I never liked history courses, didn't do well in history courses. So I thought I wanted to be a baseball writer. I thought I wanted to cover sports. The problem was I wasn't that pretty good of a writer, and I also was fairly problematically shy. So that's not very good if you want to go out and

interview people. So that didn't really pan out so well in the few attempts that I made at that. So then I fell back on my interest in science and I enjoyed mathematics and sort of applied math. And I ended up going to college and getting a degree in physics and doing an undergrad thesis related to solar physics using data from Mount Wilson Observatory, where they have a couple of solar telescopes. And then I ended up getting a job there because I did okay with that and I enjoyed it. And I really didn't think, quite frankly, there was going to be too much of a chance to make a living doing baseball history or baseball research. And I will be honest with you, there really isn't that much of a chance. There's not a lot of jobs like there.

And I think, you know, you would agree that you feel pretty lucky that you managed to make a living and survive doing it. Chase your dreams out there, folks. But it's not a very likely route. But anyway, but I did have a lot of contacts in baseball research. I joined Sabre in 1981, actually, so quite a while ago. And I did intern at the Sporting News in St. Louis. So I was very lucky the Sporting News was there and I made a lot of connections there. That was important. And so eventually a job opened at the Hall of Fame to do their website, actually. And I had done the website

for the telescope that I worked at on Mount Wilson. So I had the web ability. I felt confident about my baseball interests and baseball research ability. So I took a big risk and took a huge pay cut and came out to Cooperstown and eventually made my way over to the curatorial department. And now I head up the curatorial department. So you founded Sabre's Pictorial History Committee in 1994. And for people who don't know, can you explain what that is and how you came to create it? Yeah, I've always been interested in baseball images. That certainly is pretty much the first thing I was doing when I was a kid doing baseball research was I would get a lot of baseball books that had photos in them, and I would index them. So I would go through and I'd say, oh, this is a picture of Babe Ruth is on this page.

And the idea of creating this index that goes across all these books would be then sort of as I got better and better identifying players, I could sort of revise it. Here's a player who is unidentified, but maybe a year later now I can identify this guy because I know what he looks like. Not as hard to do today in our wonderful world of the Internet and the World Wide Web. But back in the day when I was doing this in the mid-1970s, I just had to rely on taking a look at images in books and doing a lot of cross-referencing. And I got to be pretty good. I don't know why I have this talent, but pretty good at remembering faces. I have actually a fairly bad memory in general, but the faces and names of ballplayers I did pretty well with.

I don't know why. So anyway, I've always been interested in baseball photos and baseball images in general. When I joined Sabre, I was not doing so much. I wasn't doing any publishing really, but I was reading what they were doing. And I continued to enjoy the baseball image research. So I eventually pitched, I can't remember honestly if I was, I guess I was not on the board of directors yet, but it was before I was on the board of directors. I pitched the idea of a committee. I was surprised there wasn't a committee having to do with baseball images. There's all sorts of other committees, but there wasn't one having to do with images. And I was very careful to call it the pictorial history

committee because I didn't want to call it the photo Committee. I wanted it to be broad. So I wanted it to cover any kind of image, whether that was a photograph or work of art or a moving image. So although it tends to be much more photo related, but in the original proposal, it was, the scope was wide. And yeah And I just think it's fun. I really love the fact that when you see an image of somebody, and gosh, especially if that image is moving, they really seem to be much more real. You know, it's one thing just to get a name, nothing to get a name and a first name. That makes them even more real. And just each step of the way.

And so there's something about the images that made it much more real for me. I think that was part of the attraction. But I love being able to identify, especially if I if the book didn't know who a ballplayer was, and I did, I was I felt very accomplished that I could fill that little gap in. Yeah. So you mentioned how the internet has changed things. What are some examples of ways in which your work has been made easier or just possible? I mean, what are some research projects maybe you've undertaken that would have been much more daunting or not doable at all, say, when you formed that committee almost 25 years ago? Right. So, well, certainly the proliferation of images on the web is great. Now, of course,

you still have to be a good researcher and take identifications with the appropriate grains of salt. And everybody knows that just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's true. But it does mean that it's a lot easier to gain access to information. But, yeah, so the proliferation of images, whether they're images on people's websites to databases of images, images on people's websites to databases of images, whether it's the Library of Congress is a fantastic, obviously, collection that they've put online of images from their prints and photos department, and a huge percentage is baseball related. That's a goldmine. And the funny thing is there's lots of goldmines out there. And then, of course, the proliferation of digitized historical sources, whether it's old

newspapers or magazines or yearbooks or whatever the case may be. And these things just make it really great. And I want to say easier to do the research. It's a different kind of research than what I initially was doing, which is books and microfilm and microfiche and trudging to a locale. I mean, when I was uh on the mountain and in astronomy sometimes i was i would take a trip to new york to do go to a library and just trudge through stuff and you don't have to go as far so i suppose there's there is the use factor there but you still have to do you still have to be a very good researcher and understand what the pitfalls are of doing searches online which is think, a really fascinating topic

that has not really been particularly well dealt into. One of the pluses and minuses to doing this very modern form of research. And some of the exercises that you've gone through, I want to talk about some of the fun ones, but there are also many significant ones. What would you consider your greatest contributions to our knowledge about baseball? You know, the biggest blank spaces maybe that you've been able to fill in through your work over the years? I really feel that many blank spaces. The spaces that are blank are pretty small. But I think you sort of hit on it. You mentioned fun. And I'll tell you what I do with my blog, which I've been doing for, I don't know, for maybe nine or ten years now.

So I've obviously been doing baseball research for over 40 years now. But I've been blogging for nine or ten years. And I try to make all of my blog entries fun. I don't necessarily succeed, but I know I'm trying. And what I really want to try and do is to sort of show the process and sort of hold people's hands as they read along and see how I did my work and try and make it entertaining and fun. And just because it's fun doesn't mean it isn't necessarily important. It's important to me and hopefully there's some neat discoveries that come out of it. I think that's, honestly, that's where I think what I'm trying to do is just show the fun

that I have doing baseball research and make it light. I'm not sort of a particularly, while I may be detail oriented, I don't think I'm particularly, I'm not sure the right word, but overly serious about it. But people have mentioned, oh, you go into every little detail. Well, I think in a lot of ways I sort of need to, to figure out certain things. But I just love the fact that you can find a little thing that seems curious or strange or intriguing and start digging into it. And it starts taking you all sorts of different paths. And inevitably, it seems like some of these paths are quite interesting. Some of them do shed light on something new.

Some are surprising. But hopefully, when I relate it, whether it's honestly, whether it's through the blog, whether it's through my work here at the Hall of Fame, which is as a curator, I'm a storyteller through exhibits, whether it's little tweets, I hope to make it surprising, engaging, fun, interesting. That's my goal. Yeah. And make it surprising, engaging, fun, interesting. That's my goal. Yeah, and at the Baseball Researcher blog, which I will link to, it's baseballresearcher.blogspot.com. And you generally have somewhere between

five to 10 posts a year on there. And each one is sort of a deep dive into a very specific question or trying to identify an image. Like last year, for instance, you took the famous photo of Mickey Mantle in the latter stages of his career. There's a famous picture of him in Life magazine where he's tossing his batting helmet seemingly after making an out maybe and returning to the dugout. And we know that that picture had to be taken at some point during the first half of the

season in 1965, but no one knew exactly what day or what out he had just made. And so you're able to discover this sort of thing. And often it seems impossible that you'll be able to, because there just isn't all that much information on the surface. You know, it's a Yankee game, you know, it's at Yankee Stadium, but it seems like it would be hard to narrow it down further than that. But then you keep looking and okay, there's a guy standing on deck and we can see his number. So we know that it's this guy. And so it must have been this day because Mantle had to be batting ahead of that guy and had to make an out. And so you comb through the play-by-play and eventually just through process of elimination, you've managed to narrow these things down

that when you start out, just seems like it's a mystery that will be forever lost to time. And I guess you could say, what does it matter if it's this game in 1965 or that game in 1965? But it's very satisfying, at least to me, to follow those investigations

and sort of unravel the mystery along with you. So what are some of the techniques that you have found helpful when you're doing one of these investigations of an image that at first seems like it's not going to yield whatever secret that you're trying to discover, but ultimately you manage to find out what you're looking for? discover, but ultimately you manage to find out what you're looking for. One of the secrets is to stick with it and know that lots of times I run into all, nothing but dead ends and those don't end up on my blog. Believe me, there's lots of things where I worked very hard and didn't get anywhere. There's sometimes where I work very hard, don't get anywhere. And then I pick it up again. And I have a couple of, there's one in particular, I can't, I think I did it last year on a photograph of Frank Chance. And that I found at the Library of Congress that has him posing at a ballpark. And right next to him is a guy who's dressed up as like Mephistopheles. It's just

bizarre. And I love it because it's very strange. And it was actually somewhat, it was misidentified initially at the Library of Congress as part of the Chicago Daily News photos, which are now at a different location. They used to be at the Library of Congress. And they thought it was a Chicago ballpark. And I quickly was able to determine it was not a Chicago ballpark, but it still didn't, I didn't really care so much about that part. I'm like, why is there a guy dressed up as a devil on the field? And really couldn't make any headway. I couldn't come up with a date or anything. And I've actually been working on this for years. I mean, as in, I would work on it a little bit and I'd not get anywhere. And I'd

pick it up again 18 months later and try again. And eventually, I did bump into what I needed to bump into. But that took a long time. And believe me, it's not important at all. And that blog was just for me. I mean, honestly, I didn't care if anyone read it because I just needed to put down that I've got it. I at least figured out the date of this thing. So a little bit of a mystery as to why the guy's dressed the way he is. But, you pick and pick and pick away at it, something pops up. And I've developed this bizarre habit, which of when I look at images, when I look at movies, I love movies and not necessarily baseball movies, and I'll watch them over and over. I really start looking at places that are not the obvious place to look. So when you're looking at this picture of Frank Chance and this guy with the devil outfit, obviously that's the first thing you notice. But I'm looking in the background. I'm looking at Frank Chance's feet. I'm looking at the first bass bag. I'm looking at all sorts of other things because oftentimes that's where the subtle clues

are really going to add up. And like what you mentioned with that Mickey Mantle photo, Mickey doesn't help us out at all in that photo. But all these other things do. And I find that really fun, especially when I can make my way towards something, some sort of discovery or some sort of entertaining information that comes out of it. Yeah. Well, thinking of filling in some of the blank spots, I was thinking of an article you wrote for Baseball Perspectives when I was the editor a few years ago there, where you were able to figure out what the handedness of some 19th century players was, and that information was not known. And you found a book that had images of old baseball cards that showed them holding bats or holding up balls. And so you were able to derive their handedness from that. So it's nice

to know, but what are some of the other investigations either that you've personally found the most satisfying to get some sort of answer or maybe that has caught on, attracted the most attention, kind of captured people's imaginations the most? Sure. Well, regarding that article that you had me do for Baseball Perspectives, thanks very much. It was a lot of fun. Regarding that article that you had me do for Baseball Perspectives, thanks very much. That was a lot of fun. The funny thing about that is baseball handedness for batting or throwing, that's a sort of core concept for any baseball encyclopedia, whether it's online or on paper. People always wonder, oh, how did this guy bat or throw?

It's just part of what you get when you look up a ballplayer. And people don't tend to think about it too much in general. It's the Sabre Biographical Committee people that are into it or a few others. But I just thought it was funny that the sort of most obvious, straightforward way of figuring out how a guy batted, which is look at him batting, wasn't used when there's all these great early photos of guys from a long time ago who are shown batting. Now they're posing and you have to still do some good research. You have to make sure that, hmm, did this photo get accidentally reversed? So I'm going to go down the wrong road. So you still have to kind of double check things. But I was surprised to find, I guess I just thought, well, this was a pretty obvious thing.

Someone's already done this. And apparently that isn't the case. So just looking at, it's very brute force. It's not a subtle thing where I had to search a bunch of newspapers and find a mention that the guy batted left-handed. Although I've done that kind of thing as well, but I love it when it's actually kind of right there in front of you and that's the way to solve it. One of my favorite mysteries that I've not solved and sort of will be, I'll throw a big party when it gets solved, is a mystery about some baseball that's in the movie, The Maltese Falcon, which is a favorite of mine from 1941, a classic bogey movie. And there's a scene in there where one of the guys, Gunsel,

his name is Elijah Cook, Elijah Cook Jr. is the actor. He's holding a newspaper, and it's not that tough. I mean, when you see this scene, the newspaper takes up half the screen. And he's holding the newspaper in front of his face, but the audience sees the newspaper, and it has an image of a catcher. And actually, a different Henry Chadwick Award winner from long ago, a guy named Jules Teigel, who won the Chadwick Award the very first year, 2010, that was out, he had asked the question, which was, can anybody tell me who that catcher is? Which was just, that's really silliness, right? But it sounds like a lot of fun. And so I worked at that.

And I found some neat things that came out of it. I went down all sorts of different roads, none of them answering the question, but answering other questions. I was eventually able to figure out the exact issue of the paper that's being held, which is interesting because every other newspaper that you see in that movie,

and most newspapers in general in movies, are props. And they're not real papers. They're created to further a plot or something like that. But this was actually a real newspaper. I was able to determine that, but still have not been able to figure out who the catcher is because even though I've got the exact date in the paper and that's on microfilm, back in the old days, there's multiple issues of a paper in each day. You have your first issue and then second and third.

You know, you could have many issues. You know, they do the stop the presses thing and they add an article or they move an article around or whatever. And as far as I can tell, any microfilm versions of this paper are from later issues. And I was able to determine that it was almost assuredly the first edition that day. Because as it turns out, of all the luck, the paper that he's holding came up the day after Lou Gehrig died. And so what they did is after most likely the paper didn't carry that at the beginning, the first issue of the day, then when they found out that Lou Gehrig passed away, that's a big deal. They stopped the presses. They rearranged everything.

They got rid of this photo of Catcher and instead put in a photo of Lou Gehrig and covered the presses. They rearranged everything. They got rid of this photo of Catcher and said, put in a photo of Lou Gehrig and cover the story. But the first edition is not what's in the microfilm. So ironically, after doing all this work, and I was able to whittle things down, I still don't know who the Catcher is. do the brute force method, which is try and get a very high quality copy of the cell from the movie and actually read the caption, which looks like it's in pretty good focus, believe it or not. And I may have enough information that I'll be able to tell at least a date or some sort of clue that evaded me because I can't figure out from stills from my DVD. My Blu-ray DVD wasn't good enough. So I need to go back to the – after all that work, brute force it and just read what's on the paper. But there's a lot of other ones where it's gotten a lot of press, I guess.

There was some footage I found at the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Center, which turned out to be the first day that Babe Ruth came back from the so-called bellyache around the world. But what that meant was it was also the first day of Lou Gehrig's 2130 games played streak. And darn if he isn't in the background in one of the pieces of footage. So here's a guy who at the time was basically a no-name guy, happens to be in the background as Babe Ruth is being filmed. But that was the very day that he started that consecutive game, Slade Streak, and that was just very fortunate. Yeah, right.

Yeah, I've always enjoyed this sort of thing myself. I'm sure it seems frivolous to some people, but there was like a TV show, the TV show Elementary, the Sherlock Holmes show. I did an article at PP once because they had a scene where you could see a baseball game on TV in the scene. And it was strange. Everything seemed to be out of order, maybe from different games. So I was trying to piece together how they ended up.

When did this particular play come from? And then I talked to the people who worked on the show and asked them how it ended up so disjointed in this sequence. And that was really fun. When I was at BP, Larry Granillo did a popular post for us on identifying the baseball action in Ferris Bueller's Day Off because they show a Cubs game there and he tried to figure out which Cubs game it was. So you've done some some things like

that is there anything else any other white whales that you are really hoping to solve one day or that you tried and failed oh it's very jealous of that article about the ferris bueller i kicked myself for not doing that that's like gosh that was so such a good idea why didn't i do that so i don't know i'd have to look through. A number of my blogs, actually, blog postings, don't have complete endings, but they're far enough along that I thought they were interesting and fun. But The Maltese Falcon is, honestly,

in a lot of ways, the one that I'm looking for the most, which is ironic because that's the whole concept of the movie, is they're looking for The Maltese Falcon, and they get the wrong one. So I'm sort of repeating what the fat man was doing, trying to track this thing down and end up getting just a lead version that was a fake. So I think that's kind of funny. But I never know what I'm going to bump into. I can't think off the top of my head of one that still is out

there that I haven't nailed down. But just, yeah, there's a bunch. There's a bunch. I just like to come up with interesting things that just pop across my screen and just dive in and see where it takes me. of in the archives that people never see or haven't seen? I know they're rotating collections, but do you have any favorite artifacts that you've come across that maybe the world hasn't gotten a glimpse of, or maybe you were even the first to recognize the significance of? Well, so we're very lucky. We have a very excellent collection and it allows us to tell so many different stories. And that's what it boils down to. As a curator, a curator is a storyteller. We just use whatever we get our hands on to tell a story. So, you know, a director, a movie director tells a story through film or a writer tells a story through words on paper. I tell a story through film or paper or words on paper or

images or artifacts. It's sort of the core concept for a museum is telling a story through an artifact. But it's still storytelling. And so that's what I do. And we do have a great collection with which to tell these stories. The vast majority of our collection is in storage. That doesn't mean that we're trying to hide it or there's something wrong with it.

It's just that we don't have all this space, time, money, and staff in the world to display it all. When you compare the percentage that we have on exhibit to the percentage that most museums have of their objects on exhibit. We actually have a very high percentage on exhibit. It's very difficult to come up with an exact number. And of course, I'm not going to count individual baseball cards because that'll throw off our denominator terribly. But you could say it's probably around 20% or so on exhibit at any one time. So, yes, we do try and rotate artifacts,

but sometimes there's not really an artifact to rotate. You need this one key artifact to tell the story, and then nothing else is going to do. There have been objects that, upon further research, I've been able to figure out, oh, here's a neat story about this that we didn't know before. And those are always fun, so that's a form of research, but it tends to be fairly three-dimensional related. And, yeah, there's great ones like that. I have lots of

favorite objects. I get that question a lot. What's your favorite object? And it's like asking you, who's your favorite child? Luckily for me, I only have one child, so that's not a problem to answer that question, but I can see how it would be difficult for someone with more than one child. And so honestly, it sounds corny and i've heard other people say this but it's oftentimes my favorite object is the one that i'm working on right now or i'm delving and doing research on and this is not me being uh putting my pr hat on for the hall of fame it's just me being a baseball fan the collection is fantastic and the artifacts are really cool tell great stories and are just exciting to be around.

And that's what's the core concept for a museum. When you're telling a story through an artifact, you want the visitor to be excited that I can't believe I'm standing in front of this bat or this ball or this object that I never even thought I would see in a baseball museum. I love it when the object is not an obvious object. And we have just tons of those. There's a ton of great objects. And yeah. Well, before I let you go, are there any upcoming posts or upcoming exhibits that you're working on now that you'd like to plug?

Well, we're thinking about doing an exhibit about Moberg. That's in the planning stages for that. And he's a very interesting story. And so hopefully that'll happen. We've got a couple other that are being developed that are going to be coming out in a few years. A lot of people don't realize how long it takes to do an exhibit. I'll give you an example. On our third floor, we have an exhibit called One for the Books,

which is about baseball records. Most this, longest that, that kind of thing. And that exhibit from the official OK from our upper management or senior staff saying, yep, let's do this to the ribbon cutting took basically exactly two years. I think a lot of people think, well, an artifact comes here, and then they put a bunch of artifacts in a case, and they maybe type out some labels, and we're done. And it's much more complex than that, much more work going into it. And it would take a whole other show to talk about that process. But it's fascinating. I love the process. And so, yeah, we have lots of exhibits that are on the docket out there. But yeah, hopefully this mobile thing

will happen, and hopefully it'll happen sometime soon. All right. Well, I will link to your work. Everyone should check out some of these investigations that you've conducted. If anyone listening has an original print of the Maltese falcon, please let me know. I will relay that to Tom or, or yeah, or if you have any other mysteries that you want solved that might intrigue him, I'd be happy to pass them along or Or you can, of course, contact him directly. You can find him on Twitter at T. Schieber. That's S-H-I-E-B-E-R. And again, I will link to his site. So congratulations again on the award. And thanks for all the research over the years. It's been really fun to follow. Ben, thanks very much. And enjoy your show. And say hi to Jeff for me. Will do.

All right, that will do it for today. By the way, congrats as well to the other three recipients of this year's Henry Chadwick Awards. Jefferson Burdick, who was a pioneering baseball card collector. Bob McConnell, who was an original Sabre member and did a lot of biographical research about 19th century baseball and the minor leagues. And Andrew Zimbalist, the well-known sports economist whom I quoted in an article just last week. You can support the podcast, help keep us going, by pledging on Patreon. Five listeners who've already pledged their support at patreon.com slash effectivelywild and got even more for their money this month with a bonus episode include

Earl Pope, Conrad Swartz, Justin Lonstein, Samuel Derrick, and Christopher Johnson. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com, or if you're a Patreon supporter via the Patreon messaging system, thanks to Dylan Higgins for doing extra editing this week. And we will be back tomorrow to preview the St. Louis Cardinals and the Atlanta Braves. Talk to you then. Outro Music