1871.11
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Pros' Leading Averages Reported In Buffalo Newspaper
| Salience | Noteworthy |
|---|---|
| Tags | Newspaper Coverage, Statistics, Stats and Box ScoresNewspaper Coverage, Statistics, Stats and Box Scores |
| Location | |
| City/State/Country: | Buffalo, NY, United States |
| Modern Address | |
| Game | Base BallBase Ball |
| Immediacy of Report | Contemporary |
| Age of Players | AdultAdult |
| Holiday | |
| Notables | |
| Text | " BASE BALL. The Best Averages -- Names of Leading Players -- " "All the leading professional clubs of the country have published their averages, and below we give the names of the players who occupy first, second, and third positions in the averages of first-base hits . . . ." [For the Atlantic (Brooklyn), the Athletic (Philadelphia), Chicago, Cincinnati, Haymakers (Troy), Forest City (Cleveland) and other clubs, leading hitters' batting success per game was reflected in this format:] "CINCINNATI George Wright 4.27 Waterman 3.87 McVey 3.63"
|
| Sources | Buffalo Commercial, February 6, 1871. |
| Warning | |
| Comment | Richard Hershberger, 2/8/2021 (FB posting): "150 years ago in baseball: batting averages. The idea of batting averages was borrowed from cricket, and at this point is not at all new to baseball. The details, however, have not yet taken their modern form. The numerator mostly is the same. One might reasonably think that "First-Base Hits" means singles, but they actually are simply base hits, the later shortened form. The point of the "first-base" part is that the runner gets safely to at least first base, as contrasted with his hitting the ball but being put out before reaching first. Baseball vocabulary had not yet arrived at the contradiction of the batter hitting the ball without getting a hit. On the other hand, the concept of what was and was not an error, and how to account for it, was not yet fully developed.
It is the denominator that makes these averages look wacky. These are hits per game, not per at bat. Some scorers were starting to track plate appearances, but this was not yet universal. The problem with using games played is that not every player gets the same number of chances. There were, in theory, no substitutions at this time, so that wasn't the problem. In the modern game you typically figure that the top half will get about five plate appearances, and the bottom half about four. The high scores of the 1860s minimized this difference. Players saw more plate appearances, so the difference between the top and the bottom of the lineup wasn't as important. By the 1870s, however, scores are starting to drop to modern levels. The better scorers will soon start to use at bats as the denominator."
Protoball, 2/9/2021: "How were errors treated?"
Richard Hershberger, 2/9/2021: "Inconsistently. There were discussions of what were and were not errors and how this related to scoring base hits and earned runs, but not yet any consensus (stipulating that such a consensus exists even today). Probably the key is that these stats are from the clubs' own scorers. There was not yet a single official scorer. Each club had its own, resulting in two scores for the game. Since these season averages from from the individual clubs, I would assume homerism ran rampant."
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| Query | Have charts like this appeared before? Have writers been referring to such averages in plumbing the relative merits of batsmen? Did each club send its data to interested news outlets? Edit with form to add a query |
| Source Image | [[Image:|left|thumb]] |
| External Number | |
| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Submission Note | FB Posting, 2/8/2021 |
| Has Supplemental Text |
1871.11 Pros' Leading Averages Reported In Buffalo Newspaper"
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