While we wait for baseball to return, Joe Posnanski will count down his top 60 moments in baseball history — think of it as a companion piece to The Baseball 100 — with a series of essays on the most memorable, remarkable and joyous scenes of the game. This project will not contain more words than “Moby Dick,” but we hope you enjoy it.
The creation of Baseball-Reference
April 2000
Hold on for a second. Before we begin, I just want to look up something.
How many players have had five extra-base hits in a game?
OK, thanks for waiting: The answer is 11. That’s only since 1904. Not sure about the years before that but, honestly, I don’t really care that much about the years before that.
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Lou Boudreau was the first to do it in 1946. He hit four doubles and one homer in a July game at Fenway Park against Boston. In the same game, Ted Williams hit three home runs and had eight RBIs, and I wondered if that was his career-high for RBIs in a game. Turns out, yes, it was. He had seven RBIs in four other games, but this was the only one with eight.
Milwaukee’s Joe Adcock was next to get five extra-base hits in a game. That was 1954, in Brooklyn. Adcock had been a moderate power hitter, nothing special, coming into the game. He had broken his bat the night before and so he borrowed an extremely heavy bat from a backup catcher named Charlie White. We could talk about Charlie White — he started his career in the Negro Leagues — but let’s try to stay focused. Adcock hit four homers that day (the fifth player ever to do it) and added a double.
“If I played for the Dodgers,” Adcock said after the game, “I’d hit 35 homers a year just in this park.”
Sixteen years went by before Pittsburgh’s Willie Stargell did it. He hit three doubles and two homers in Atlanta in a game against the Braves. Henry Aaron hit two homers that same day.
Next: Steve Garvey did it for the Dodgers in 1977 — three doubles and two homers against the Cardinals at Dodger Stadium.
Twenty-five years went by before another player had five extra-base hits in a game. In 2002, you might remember, Los Angeles’ Shawn Green hit four homers in a game at Milwaukee and, like Adcock, he also had a double.
And there has been a flurry of five-extra-base-hit games since then. Kelly Shoppach did it for Cleveland in 2008 (three doubles and two homers). Texas’ Josh Hamilton in 2012 became the third player to hit four homers and a double. In 2015, Boston’s Jackie Bradley Jr. hit three doubles and two homers in a game against Seattle and Félix Hernández.
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The Cubs’ Kris Bryant did it in that magical year of 2016; he hit three homers and two doubles against the Reds. He went on to win the MVP. Chicago went on to win the World Series.
José Ramírez did it in 2017, hitting three doubles and two homers in a game against the Tigers. And, finally, Matt Carpenter pulled it off in 2018 when he hit three homers and two doubles. You might recall that Carpenter was pulled in the sixth inning of that game. I didn’t understand it then. I don’t understand it now. I’ll never understand it.
So why did I go through all of that? Two reasons. One, I am utterly incapable of avoiding baseball rabbit holes, as should probably be obvious by now. But two: This rundown is a miracle. Nothing less. I could have spent every minute of every day in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s looking through the stats for the list of players who had five extra-base hits in a game, and I never would have finished.
Honestly, I’m not even sure how I would have started. Trying to manually look up the players with five extra-base hits in a game would have been like trying to manually look up the average weight of the European unicorn.
Yes, Baseball-Reference changed everything.
The worst job I ever had was at 17 when I was paid to call people who were delinquent on their mortgages. I had a lot of bad jobs in those days, but I would say that was the most soul-sucking. It also was the highest paying: $4.50 an hour.
I used my earnings to buy The Baseball Encyclopedia.
For those of you too young to remember, The Baseball Encyclopedia was a book that weighed a metric ton and had the statistics of every player in baseball history. It was a massive undertaking, and when it was first published in 1969, it basically set off the sabermetrics revolution. By the time I came along, it was (in my memory) exorbitantly priced at $69.95.
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It might have been the most expensive thing I owned when I went to college. It was definitely the heaviest thing I owned, and that included the Pontiac T-1000 I bought from my parents.
But it was worth every pound and every penny. Before The Baseball Encyclopedia, there were only two ways I knew to get baseball statistics. One was to look on the back of baseball cards. And two was to look at the famous “Who’s Who In Baseball,” a little red paperback they would have in the newsstands next to the Farmers’ Almanac and books of horoscopes. But these methods had severe limitations. The Baseball Encyclopedia had everyone.
It’s a fairly direct route from The Baseball Encyclopedia to Baseball-Reference. There are countless people who played a part, but we can probably narrow it down to three.
A man named Pete Palmer had been obsessively keeping baseball statistics since he was a boy. At 13, using the meager resources available at the time, he began to build his own statistical archive by typing players’ stats on index cards. And he just kept going into adulthood, even after graduating from Yale, even after he began working as an electrical engineer.
And what he found was that there were errors in the record. A lot of errors. No, seriously, a lot of errors, thousands of them, some of them huge. (Ty Cobb’s hit total was wrong, for example.) And when he met baseball writer John Thorn, the two of them plotted the idea of creating a new kind of baseball encyclopedia, one with a much wider range of statistics as well as beautifully crafted essays that would bring people closer to the history of the game.
They eventually wrote “Total Baseball,” which remains the greatest baseball encyclopedia ever published. Thorn’s essays are marvelous. And from a statistical perspective, it added fielding stats, sabermetric stats and countless other wonderful numbers. It opened worlds.
So that was the first step. The second step happened in the early days of the internet. In 1993, “Total Baseball” put out a CD-ROM — wow, remember those? — with statistics on it. It was a pretty rudimentary thing, even in those days, but a young man named Sean Lahman saw possibilities.
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I don’t believe I’ve ever met Lahman but it sounds like we have lived somewhat parallel lives, you know, if I had been a lot smarter. He got a baseball encyclopedia about the same time I did. He became fascinated by baseball statistics about the same time I did. And in 1993, well, this is where we break apart. He figured out how to, in Palmer’s words, reverse engineer the “Total Baseball” CD-ROM and create a baseball statistical database that he put on the internet.
The Lahman database was an enormous resource for countless aspiring baseball analysts.
And one of those was a graduate student named Sean Forman. He was living in Georgia at the time and was supposed to be working on his dissertation, but he was bored. He decided to take the Lahman database and create an online baseball encyclopedia, one that would help fans answer their most pressing questions.
It turned out that Forman had a genius for creating an easily searchable encyclopedia that was fun to use. At first, he put his little creation on a site called “Big Bad Baseball,” but then he thought it should probably be its own thing. He bought one gigabyte of server space for $20 a month.
He called his site Baseball-Reference.com.
“One thing I sometimes wish,” Forman says, “is that I had picked a less generic name.”
I don’t want to make it sound like Baseball-Reference is the only wonderful place where I spend my time. I probably spend almost as many blissful hours at FanGraphs. I have a second home at Retrosheet. I get lost often at Baseball Savant. I cannot live without Baseball Prospectus (especially Cot’s Baseball Contracts) or Bill James Online. And so on. I can’t name them all.
But there is something different about Baseball-Reference. To be honest with you, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the difference until Forman himself explained it. We were talking about the uber-statistic Wins Above Replacement. WAR is controversial, not only because it tries to take everything a ballplayer does and stuff it into one number but because FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference compute WAR differently.
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This is especially true for pitchers. FanGraphs’ WAR (often called fWAR) is built on Defense-Independent Pitching Statistics — which means it focuses entirely on a pitcher’s strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed. Baseball-Reference’s WAR (bWAR) is built on how many runs a pitcher allows. There are numerous adjustments made. To me, it’s more interesting how similar the numbers end up being rather than how different. But the point is they are very different.
And here’s what Forman has to say about them:
“Here’s how I would put it,” he said. “If I was looking for advice for my fantasy team, I would probably look at FanGraphs’ pitching WAR. And if I was looking to see which player was more valuable in, say, 1972, I think I would probably look at our WAR. I think that sort of speaks to what we’re trying to do. In many ways, I would say that FanGraphs and most other baseball sites are more looking forward. And we’re more about looking backward.”
Yes! That’s exactly it! I had never thought of it exactly that way, but, yes, what makes Baseball-Reference so glorious is that it unabashedly looks backward into baseball history. You know what the two biggest days of the year are for Baseball-Reference? First, you probably guessed, is trade deadline day, when people are looking to see the statistics for the players their team just got.
But second is Hall of Fame election day. Baseball’s differentiator, really, is its timelessness. We care about baseball history in ways we do not for other sports. As such, we care about the Baseball Hall of Fame in ways we do not care about the Pro Football Hall of Fame or the Basketball Hall of Fame or the Hockey Hall of Fame.
When election day comes, we go in droves to Baseball-Reference every year to ask the same question: What is greatness?
Forman’s purpose from the start was to answer questions. At first, these were relatively simple questions such as “Who is the active leader in getting hit by pitches?”*
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*Shin-Soo Choo with 150, though Anthony Rizzo at 145 figures to roar by once we start playing ball again.
But the more questions Baseball-Reference answered, the more complicated the questions became, and soon they began offering the opportunity to search individual games, then the opportunity to search individual splits, so that it now takes a second to answer who hit the most two-out homers in 2019 (Gary Sánchez with 18) or who hit the most home runs in a career when facing a pitcher for the fourth time or more in a game.*
*The answer to this question is Babe Ruth with 111. Nobody is close. I actually think this is important: One-seventh of Ruth’s home runs were hit when facing the pitcher the fourth or fifth or sixth time through the lineup. Henry Aaron had only 79 such homers. Barry Bonds had only 33 such homers. Mike Trout has 11. Different game.
It’s beautiful the way that Forman — who is now president of the multi-faceted Sports-Reference, which also features sites for pro and college football, pro and college basketball, hockey and soccer — pushes for new features. The site is about to unveil its new “Stathead” search engine, which could lead to all sorts of fun breakthroughs. One thing Forman is talking about now is an inning finder which would allow you to quickly find, say, every inning where the Cincinnati Reds hit three home runs.
And then Forman and company are always adding stuff. You can now find Korea Baseball Organization standings and stats. Also Chinese Professional Baseball League stats. You can go to the frivolities section and find the best player born on May 8 (19th-century star Dan Brouthers, Hall of Famer Edd Roush and Cy Young Award winner Mike Cuellar would be at the top of the list), glance at all the retired numbers in baseball (so weird to see that Rusty Staub’s number is retired for the Washington Nationals), play the wonderful Oracle of Baseball game where you can see the most direct line from one player to another.
Mike Trout was teammates with Eric Young Jr. in 2018.
Eric Young Jr. played with Jamie Moyer for the 2012 Rockies.
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Moyer played with Gary Matthews on the 1986 Cubs.
Gary Matthews played with Willie Mays on the 1972 Giants.
Baseball-Reference really is a daily miracle, something beyond our imaginations only a few years ago. In fact, I still have my copy of “Total Baseball.” Let me look something up for you — what do you want? Make it something easy: How about John Smoltz’s career save totals. Hold on a second …
Keep holding …
Just about got it …
OK, got it. John Smoltz had zero career saves. Maybe that’s because this “Total Baseball” book is from 1991.
Follow the rest of the 60 Moments series on our topic page
(Top photo of Matt Carpenter on July 20, 2018: Patrick Gorski / USA Today)