Baseball Research Journal

The Fall 2020 edition of “SABR's Baseball Research Journal” (Volume 49, issue 2), runs the gamut of research, from the nineteenth century to events that took place in 2020. The article that anchors this issue of the journal, appearing last, is Richard Hershberger's account of the "First Baseball War," in which the nineteenth-century clash between leagues contributed to the creation of the reserve system that suppressed free agency until the late twentieth, while Mary Hums and her team document MLB's decision to change the name of the "disabled list" to "injured list," including the advocacy and rationale behind the change, and an analysis of fan reactions to it. As always, we have some articles that delve into stats to enhance our understanding of the game. Among them, Theo Tobel gives us a breakdown of brushback pitches: do they really intimidate batters and provide an advantage to the pitcher? Randy Robbins noticed a statistical quirk in the record of Warren Spahn and it prompted an examination of one of the game's pitching greats. Will Melville and Brinley Zabriskie undertake the task of trying to determine how much benefit, if any, the 2017 Astros derived from their cheating efforts, while Irwin Nahinsky analyzes the effects of luck and skill on team success. Ron Backer looks at Lou Gehrig in a new light-klieg lights, in fact-in his article on Gehrig's Hollywood career, which like his life and playing career was cut short by ALS. Charlie Pavitt delves into the fact that a player's ethnicity can be a predictor for what position he plays in MLB. Howard M. Wasserman examines Jewish players through the lens of their performances on Yom Kippur, while Alan Cohen examines one of the great hitters of all time, Josh Gibson. Because of racial segregation, Gibson never had the opportunity to play in the major leagues, but because many Negro League teams did play games in major league ballparks, we can look at those performances to prove how prodigious he truly was. An image of Josh Gibson graces the cover of this issue, in a piece of original art by Gary Cieradkowski, the creator of the Infinite Baseball Card Set.

The Spring 2025 issue of the Baseball Research Journal looks at baseball in many places, including the American prairie (Lawrence, Kansas), the Mexican border (the "Original Cactus League") and north of the border in Canada. We have a statistical look at what Negro Leaguer Josh Gibson's career might have looked like had he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, an examination of Gus Greenlee's "United States League," and how the Harrisburg Giants avoided the ban on Sunday baseball. We also examine how Walter Alston got the chance to manage the Dodgers-for 23 years, seven pennants, and one world championship-because Charlie Dressen wanted a multi-year contract that the Dodgers refused to grant, and we present profiles of this year's winners of SABR's Chadwick Award: Rob Fitts, Gary Gillette, and the late Richard Malatzky. ON THE COVER: The Harrisburg Giants joined the Eastern Colored League in 1924 with a powerful lineup centered around player-manager Oscar Charleston. With Rap Dixon and Fats Jenkins flanking him, Harrisburg had one of the best outfields in baseball history. Ladies of the Night Game: Toronto's Lighted Diamonds and the Women Who Pioneered Playing Under the Stars by Stephen Dame "Despite Hanlan's Point Stadium being home to the Toronto Maple Leafs for 22 seasons, not a single ballgame was ever played at night there, though [temporary] floodlights [were used] whenever a rugby match, football game, or starlit opera required light. In 1930 Sunnyside Stadium... became the first stadium in Toronto to feature purpose-built, permanent floodlights. The 3,000-seat stadium was specifically designed for use by female athletes [and] had been the main women's softball facility in Toronto since 1925. From the day it opened, competitors in three different leagues played in front of huge paying crowds." Scoreboard Numbers vs. Uniform Numbers: The 1931-34 Detroit Tigers and the Letter of the Law by Herm Krabbenhoft "Unlike today, where players are assigned uniform numbers that very rarely change within a season, the ID numbers of players at Navin Field in Detroit could vary from game to game. As was the custom, the ID numbers reflected the batting order, giving the leadoff hitter number 1, the next batter 2, et cetera. A new scorecard had to be bought for each game-or at least for each series, since the scorecards could not be re-used from one series to the next-nor could the numbers be memorized. These constant changes were certainly not fan-friendly." The Impact of Laser Assisted in Situ Keratomileusis (LASIK) on Major League Baseball Batting Performance by M.P. Geiss and David Portney "Some ophthalmology practices advertise LASIK as a means for improved athletic performance, but does LASIK improve performance for MLB players? Professional baseball players have been shown to have incredibly high visual acuity because exceptional visual function is required to succeed in the sport. A significant number of MLB players have publicly acknowledged their history of LASIK, increasing the potential sample size for analysis, and the extraordinary amount of statistical data on MLB player performance allows for direct analyses of consistent performance metrics."