Every day, as long as he has energy, Alan Cohen analyzes the box scores as he did as a boy in New York after his Giants moved 3,000 miles away in 1958.
And for 40 years in the insurance industry, primarily in Hartford, facts and figures, evaluating data were his livelihood. When Cohen retired, he dove headfirst into the grainy microfilm world of baseball’s forgotten history, joining the Society for Baseball Research (SABR) in 2010, contributing to websites and databases like retrosheet.org. , seamlessheads.com and baseball-reference.com.
“I’ve discovered that there is nothing in life that can’t be solved with an Excel spreadsheet,” said Cohen, 77, a longtime West Hartford resident.
He has been focusing much of his time and skills on finding and recording the history of the long-lost Negro Leagues. Cohen’s work, as part of a small, tenacious army of researchers, gained validation this week when MLB announced that the committee it formed to review Negro Leagues statistics had approved numbers from 1920 to 1948 for inclusion in official records. .
National Baseball Hall of Fame Library // /Keynote USA/Getty Images
Josh Gibson steps up to the plate after hitting a home run in a Negro League game. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972.
“Some people object to the Negro Leagues being considered major leagues, the seasons were short, the schedule, all that,” Cohen said, “except for one little thing: the Negro Leagues were the only league, they didn’t have an option, The best players were there and we must recognize them.
“The average fan has to understand that this was the only thing these players had and that the conditions in which they played were not very good.”
Much of what we know about the Negro Leagues and its players comes from oral histories. Going beyond that and attaching real numbers to stories is what Cohen’s work is all about.
Over lunch at WeHa this week, Cohen opened his laptop and opened a spreadsheet with information he had just extracted from a Missouri newspaper from 1937, a game played by the Kansas City Monarchs in May of that year. One game, one digit at a time, he and his co-researchers have been tracing the histories of the seven leagues in which black players played during baseball’s long era of segregation and putting together puzzles.
“For games in a given year, we are given a game assignment,” Cohen said. “For these games, I get a newspaper article and a score, go into the spreadsheet and enter the data.”
Many summer nights, Cohen does the opposite, as a game-day correspondent with the Yard Goats, entering data from games so a story and a box score can be generated. Working backwards is like an archaeological dig, the clues are fascinating and only fuel the desire for more.
Cohen has done a study on Josh Gibson, the Hall of Fame catcher and slugger who was at the forefront of this week’s news, as he now ranks as the one with the highest batting average (.373) in the baseball history. Cohen, who has written about Gibson for SABR publications and made presentations of his work in Cooperstown, has hit 393 home runs in his career between 1930 and 1946, of which 166 are now officially counted. When Gibson, who died at age 35 in 1947, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972, his plaque said he had reached nearly 800, one of many legends associated with him.
“What’s up with all this stuff?” Cohen said. “I had read about him hitting home runs in all these major league stadiums, read about the 800 home runs, the ball coming out of Yankee Stadium, all that, so I started researching and the truth was much better, as I found out. His productivity at Griffith Stadium (in Washington, DC) allowed him to hit a home run approximately every five games. … Every time Josh Gibson hit a home run, it was written about.”
On Friday, Cohen said, Seamheads plans to add six home runs to Gibson’s total. SABR suggests that some home runs Gibson hit while his team, the Homestead Grays, were unaffiliated, should count.
The Negro Leagues of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were not as organized as the American or National Leagues, “official” statistics do not exist, some were lost, and schedules were informal.
Generally, regular season league games were played on weekends, and these are from which the statistics will be tallied where a box score can be found. Teams played exhibition games during the week or after the season. Cohen discovered that newspapers of the time covered Negro League games, but in some cases the box scores included hits and runs, but not at-bats. In the days of typesetting, the small agate type was always plagued by errors, players with similar names could get confused.
It’s complicated and still evolving. Satchel Paige, Cohen explained, pitched more seriously for the Birmingham, Cleveland and Pittsburgh franchises of the Negro National League between 1927 and ’36, but after that he performed primarily in exhibitions where he could earn more money and perhaps only made a cameo appearance. After the color barrier was broken in 1947, Paige was an All-Star with the St. Louis Browns of the American League at ages 45 and 46.
So far, Hartford’s legendary Johnny Taylor has been credited with a 17-17 record in 51 games from 1935-44.
Willie Mays, who debuted with the Giants in 1951, will have a few more hits added to his total from his days as a teenager playing in the Negro Leagues. Cohen, as part of the post-1948 SABR subcommittee, has been searching for games Mays played in 1949. Hank Aaron played briefly for Indianapolis in 1952, but is not expected to have hit enough home runs to regain his record, surpassed by Barry Bonds . 762 against 755.
The painstaking process of developing all this information will continue for years. Certainly, Cohen, official goal scorer Jim Keener and I will be analyzing this while we’re in the Dunkin’ Park press box on summer nights, where Cohen has been known to arrive announcing his latest findings. Believe me, these researchers are obsessed with details and the numbers they are uncovering are not guesses.
“The information that will be told is accurate,” Cohen said. “But it is incomplete.”
This is where I’m going to object. If it is not complete, how can it be accurate? No matter how many wins are identified for Satchel Paige or home runs for Josh Gibson, they probably won’t be close to the numbers they achieved. And how can you declare a lifetime batting average when there are some number of unaccounted for at-bats?
But if the statistics are not perfect, and they never will be, I applaud the intention and effort to give these players the recognition they were denied in life. Researchers who care so much about it, like Alan Cohen, only contribute to our understanding of baseball history, they don’t try to rewrite it.
More for your Sunday Read:
Dom Amore: How Ian Cooke Recommitted and Rediscovered His Allure for NCAA-Bound UConn Baseball
Conard Graduate Degree
West Hartford’s Casey D’Annolfo, who captained football, basketball and lacrosse at Conard High (class of 2001) and stood out in all three at Tufts (2006), coached the Tufts men’s lacrosse team to the national championship of Division III in Philadelphia last week. beating RIT, 18-14, in the final.
D’Annolfo’s eight-year record at Tufts is 122-18, with four consecutive trips to the D-III Final Four.
Short shots from Sunday
*The WNBA informed local television stations this week that they would no longer be allowed to record video during games, a move to protect broadcast rights holders but seemingly counterintuitive given the momentum The W has gained in popularity.
After a few days of emailing, a common sense compromise was reached and local media will be able to film from a different location. Local coverage, especially in major markets that have largely ignored their WNBA franchises, can only add value to television and streaming rights by encouraging casual fans to look for where and how to watch. I’m wrong?
Dom Amore: CT Sun remains undefeated and they warn that the best is yet to come
*More than two centuries have passed since British soldiers set fire to the White House, but we are about to get revenge. …We’ll send the Mets to London.
* Windsor’s Jason Pinnock, starting safety with the Giants, is leading his second youth football camp and signing, in partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of Hartford. The autograph signing, at Bears BBQ on Front Street in Hartford, June 14 from 6:30 to 8 pm. The camp, on June 15, at Day Hill Dome, is sold out.
*Also sold out, with more than 1,000 expected, is the Franciscan Sports Banquet and Silent Auction at the Aqua Turf in Southington on Tuesday night. Dan Hurley will receive the San Francisco Award.
*Tough situation for the Yard Goats and Rockies as top pitching prospect Carson Palmquist (4-1, 2.76 ERA, 66 strikeouts in 45 2/3 innings) went on the seven-day disabled list this week.
*It’s always fun to watch UConn compete against powerful baseball programs with in-state kids making up a big part, with Ian Cooke (New Milford), Ryan Hyde (Berlin), Braden Quin (New Fairfield) and Korey Morton (Norwalk) among the greats contributors in the victory over Duke.
Rick Scuteri/KeynoteUSA
Ángel Hernández, who has long been an easy target on social media for his performance as an umpire, abruptly retired this week after 33 years in the Major Leagues. The powers that be should have come to the top of this saga years ago.
Last word
I’m not going to criticize Ángel Hernández, a decent man who simply wasn’t a very good umpire in the Major Leagues, in the wake of his abrupt midseason retirement. He blamed MLB and the umpires union for allowing this to fester for decades. Just like players and coaches, referees should be held accountable for his performance, especially given some of these soft ejections I’ve been seeing. But there are better, more professional ways to do this than waiting for a social media frenzy to do the dirty work and ultimately eject a referee. Yes, Hernandez needed to go, but he just didn’t feel right about the way it happened.
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