A couple of years ago, when I was going through the 1910 Philadelphia Evening Telegraph as part of my batter strikeout research, I started noticing many references to the intentional passing of Napoleon Lajoie in the play-by-play accounts. Further looking at Lajoie's career stats shows that the 1910 season stands out as an aberration in regards to his walk totals - he had 60, his next most was 47, while most were in the 30's.
I made a mental note that I should sometime look into this.
Well, recently I was in a discussion on one of the Tigers message boards and it was suggested that I do some research on intentional bb's and that triggered me to take a second look at the 1910 Lajoie season (thanks Lee Panas).
What I am looking for in my research is keywords such as "intentionally" or "purposely" passed. Now I understand that true Intentional Walks as they are perceived nowadays - with the catcher stepping out, may not have existed (not up on my IBB history) and that these IBB's could well be defined as "pitching around" rather than true IBB's, the fact that the newspaper verbiage is explicit is leading me to define them as IBB's for this study.
In addition to my Lajoie research, I hope to make observations of other players that have similar play-by-play verbiage to frame my Lajoie research.
I have just restarted my research and have gone through the following newspapers:
Philadelphia Evening Telegraph (play-by-play - pbp)
Chicago Tribune
Boston Globe
Washington Post
St. Louis Republic
St. Louis Globe Democrat
Detroit Times (pbp)
New York Evening World (pbp) (no pbp in August/Sept)
New York Evening Telegram (pbp) (no pbp in August)
The big ones I still need to do are the hometown papers (via GeneologyBank.com):
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Cleveland Leader
also:
Philadelphia Inquirer
New York Times
Boston Herald
New York Herald
Washington Times
There may be another Chicago paper I need to check - need to check my notes for which ones to look at (hopefully with some help from my Chicago friends).
I am sure I am missing a few other papers I should/need to check.
So far, I have found 21 occurrences of IBB's of the 47 walks I have found.
One thing that I am making sure I am doing is cross-checking each game/walk across multiple sources to see if there is confirmation. If there is not confirmation, it does not necessarily.
Once I get all of my data, I will publishing a detailed account of my findings.
As part of it, I also plan on framing the IBB data around the infamous Cobb/Lajoie batting race.
Will need to look at Cobb's game data as well.
If anyone has any additional resources or research, I would appreciate it.
Thanks again for reading my posts.
JF
This blog will cover my ongoing baseball research, mostly missing batter strikeout seasons, but also other baseball stuff. In addition, I will occasionally ponder stuff on baseball cards - a hobby which I have been into on and off over the years.
About Me
- Jonathan Frankel
- I am a long time baseball fan who became interesting in documenting the "missing" batter strikeouts a few years back as an outgrowth of my interest in the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Grew up w/ the Big Red Machine. I now follow them and my new hometown, Detroit Tigers. Member of SABR off and on since 1979.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
I wanted to kick off this edition of my blog with a recent scan that I did from the 1912 Detroit Times (a bit large, but wanted to make su...
-
A couple of years ago, when I was going through the 1910 Philadelphia Evening Telegraph as part of my batter strikeout research, I started n...
-
Living up here in Detroit, I have had a chance this season to see quite an enjoyable, albeit frustrating at times, Tigers team. They did w...
-
In this blog entry, I am going to off normal topic a bit. As you may notice, I have renamed my blog to read "K's, Cards, and Thing...
-
Still plowing my way through the 1888 AA Cleveland games and I think I have come across a "missing" player. In a September 5, 1...
-
I recently read of Zack Greinke having 3 consecutive starts for his team. They were not complete games, but I thought I would check my line...
-
For awhile I had been wondering who was the better "strikeout avoider" - Willie Keeler or Joe Sewell. Sewell's numbers have ...
-
While going through the 1888 AA Cleveland lineups, I ran across an interesting ending to a game that I wanted to go ahead and post. On Jun...
-
As I was going through the 1887 AA games a few months back, I ran across a game that I found a bit unusual for the time period - a team that...
-
Next up, the AA Champion St. Louis Brown Stockings. Primary Source: St. Louis Republic (GeneologyBank.com) Had batter k's in about 7...
Intentional Walk didn't become a stat until 1955
ReplyDeleteYep, officially. Still interesting to research how the earlier players were "IBB'ed"/pitched around. Thanks for reading the blog, Daniel.
ReplyDeletewhy did your blog stop in 2013?
ReplyDeleteAre you still researching AA batter strikeouts?
where is Frankel? why no more estimated strikeouts?
ReplyDeleteI'm still here. Just been busy with my regular life.
ReplyDeleteStill in the middle of 1890 AA. Was working on Toledo (was at the Toledo Public Library a few months ago scanning game/pbp accounts.
Look forward to seeing your 1890 AA batter strikeout results in Baseball-Reference.
Delete