''Total Baseball'' (latest edition , first published 1989) is a
baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...
encyclopedia first compiled by
John Thorn and
Pete Palmer in 1989. The latest edition, published in 2004, is its eighth.
''Total Baseball, Completely Revised and Updated: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia''
"Amazon.com." Found under "Product Details." Retrieved on 2008-12-02 The encyclopedia contains seasonal and career statistics in numerous categories for every Major League player, as well as historical, opinion, and year-by-year essays.
History
The idea for ''Total Baseball'' originated when two baseball statisticians and historians, Palmer and Thorn, realized that the current ''Baseball Encyclopedia'' endorsed by Major League Baseball contained numerous significant mistakes.[ Schwarz, Alan. ''The Numbers Game : Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics''. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004.] These included miscalculations by earlier statisticians, typographic mistakes made by the original score keeper, and even "phantom" players who did not actually exist and were added to a box score incorrectly, Lou Proctor
A phantom ballplayer is either a baseball player who is incorrectly listed in source materials as playing in a Major League Baseball (MLB) game, often the result of typographical or clerical errors, or a player who spent time on an MLB active ro ...
being a notable example. In addition, Thorn and Palmer took the liberty of correcting mistakes not commonly accepted by the baseball community, such as the apparent discovery that Ty Cobb
Tyrus Raymond Cobb (December 18, 1886 – July 17, 1961), nicknamed "the Georgia Peach", was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) center fielder. He was born in rural Narrows, Georgia. Cobb spent 22 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, the ...
actually garnered 4,189 hits, not 4,191, or that Walter Johnson in fact had 417 career wins, not 416. Thorn and Palmer also included new, sabermetric statistics developed by statisticians like Bill James, such as runs created or total average. The first edition of ''Total Baseball'' sold 75,000 copies, and by its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia.
See also
* Total Sports Publishing {{refimprove, date=July 2009
Total Sports Publishing refers to a book publishing company based in Kingston, New York, that operated from 1998 to 2002. Prominent author John Thorn served as the division's publisher throughout its existence.
Tota ...
* Baseball statistics
Baseball statistics play an important role in evaluating the progress of a player or team.
Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itsel ...
References
Baseball books
Baseball statistics
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