The Baseball Encyclopedia is a baseball reference book first published by Macmillan in 1969. Nine further editions of the book were released between 1974 and 1996. The Baseball Encyclopedia features statistical summaries for Major League Baseball (MLB) players.
Background Baseball reference books that predate The Baseball Encyclopedia include the Baseball Cyclopedia, which was first released in 1922, and The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, which was published during the 1950s and 1960s. These books included rudimentary player statistics, but major gaps existed in their coverage. Games played were tallied for all players, while batting average was provided for hitters and pitchers' win–loss records were listed. Other statistical categories were not provided by these books. Official baseball records and various publications had numerous errors and inconsistencies, which were most apparent with pre-1920 data. One publication by The Sporting News listed two different 1899 National League batting average leaders within a 16-page span. By the mid-1960s, advances in computer technology allowed for a level of data collection that would support a project aimed at producing an accurate and comprehensive record book for MLB. Statistician David Neft, who had recently been hired by computer data processing company Information Concepts, Inc. (ICI), first proposed a new baseball encyclopedia in 1965. Two years later, he pitched the idea to Bob Markel, Macmillan's executive editor. Markel, a baseball fan, liked the concept and eventually Macmillan bought rights to The Baseball Encyclopedia, despite concerns by company president Jeremiah Kaplan about the proposed $25 price of the book. Neft assumed the role of editor-in-chief.
First edition
Research and development In 1965, Neft sought out research assistance by putting help wanted ads in The Sporting News, which yielded four assistants. It was eventually determined that, to provide the greatest amount of accuracy possible, daily statistics for all players would have to be recreated. ICI sought to use box score information from MLB games played since 1876 to create a statistical database, which would be utilized in making files for all players and managers. Biographical details for approximately 5,000 players had already been compiled by Lee Allen, a historian at the Baseball Hall of Fame, and his research provided an early foundation. Another boon to research efforts for the book came from ICI's acquisition of scrapbooks owned by steamship executive John Tattersall. His records included a full collection of box scores dating back to 1876, and a mostly complete daily statistics log that covered the period between 1876 and 1890. The data, however, was not sufficient to calculate stats that had not been tracked contemporaneously, such as earned run average, runs batted in, and saves. To permit these categories to be deduced for each season, Neft's research team consulted newspaper accounts of old games, focusing on the 1876–1919 period. The research team ultimately expanded to 21 people, who went to libraries throughout the U.S. to obtain the needed information. This process took two years to complete. The Baseball Encyclopedia was an early example of computer software being used in the book publication process. Author Alan Schwarz credits it as the first book with computer typesetting (excluding phone books). Every player's data were individually compiled on sheets of paper, with the information coded into punch cards by a firm in Israel. Once the cards came back from overseas, ICI placed them in magnetic tape and data was sorted by an IBM 360 computer. The system allowed for teams' season statistics to be totaled, combined, and compared with the numbers kept by the leagues; inconsistencies were flagged by the computer and logged by Neft for investigation. Among the issues resolved was the existence of a small number of phantom ballplayers who had been recorded in box scores as appearing in a game despite not existing. One example was a Cleveland Blues player named Woodruff, who was credited with playing as a right fielder in a 1901 game. The player was actually Bob Wood, who was normally a catcher but made infrequent appearances as an outfielder; a telegraph operator incorrectly interpreted Morse code that read "Wood rf", leading to an error in the box score. An ad in The Sporting News claimed that The Baseball Encyclopedia took three-and-a-half years to research and develop, and that it cost $1.5 million to produce. Neft remarked that the book "took seven hours to print ... but a year and a half to tell the computer what to do."
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