PIONEERS: Dave Smith

Sixth in a new series

Dave Smith

What is Retrosheet? Today, 35 years after its founding, no hardened baseball fan would be pressed to answer. But maybe you are new to the world of baseball statistics — whether (a) the raw data compilations and double-entry accounting that have obsessed fans since before MLB was a gleam in its founder’s eye; or (b) the next-step formulations known as averages; or © the analytical measures known as sabermetrics. Without the first, there would be neither impulse nor reason to create the second and third. Today’s profile is about gathering the basic facts of major-league play and, in particular, Dave Smith, the man whose vision became Retrosheet.

Who created the game’s foundational stats? Some unknown scorer who kept track of players’ runs and outs (also known as Hands Out or Hands Lost) and permitted newspaper encapsulation of the game in the box scores of the 1840s. Base hits and their differentiation — singles, doubles, triples, homers — came later. The batting average in its current form was not devised until 1871.

Early box score in New York Herald, October 25, 1845

Who first expanded the primitive box score and began to record baseball’s year-end stats? Maybe it was Henry Chadwick, but as with baseball itself, it may be foolish to ascribe each innovation to a single inventor.

Who was the first to display the game’s historical stats in a single volume? Ernie Lanigan, in 1922, in his Baseball Cyclopedia.

The Baseball Cyclopedia, by Ernest J. Lanigan, 1922

What was MLB’s first official encyclopedia, recording player names, births, deaths, and rudimentary stats? The Turkin-Thompson volume of 1951. That concept was vastly expanded by David Neft and the ICI team in 1969, for Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia, and then further with Total Baseball in 1989, for which Pete Palmer was my statistical sidekick. Then came the massive online presence — searchable! — at MLB.com and Baseball-Reference.com, spelling doom for those once-beloved eight-pound books.

In the same year that Pete and I launched our magnum opus, Dave Smith came up with an idea so implausible as to appear preposterous: to obtain a play-by-play account of every major-league game. And yet … by now, he and his 500 or so fellow diggers at Retrosheet have very nearly accomplished that goal: with some games still missing, Play-by-plays have been found and/or deduced from 1917 to 2023, with box scores going back into the previous century. Earlier years are underway, and 1912 is complete.

Turkin-Thompson, The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, 1951

Uncovering errors in mathematics or transcription (Smith prefers to call them “discrepancies”), the Retrosheet team does not declare its mission to be the reset of MLB’s historical record. Its data is free to anyone who asks for it, and for whatever use desired. No one has ever made a penny from its efforts, least of all its founder. Retrosheet.org is a nonprofit website where anyone can find authoritative — research about not only ballgames (via annual game logs) but also ballparks, managers, franchises, schedules, milestones, transactions, and more.

So who is Dave Smith, the man with the plan? A true hobbyist — and in baseball parlance, an amateur: that is, one who plays for love, not lucre — Dave Smith has had a day job all these years as a professor of microbiology at the University of Delaware. In 2014 he retired from that position, and in 2022 he handed over the reins of Retrosheet to Tom Thress. Yet he remains active in studies bacterial and baseballistic, continuing to publish essays on strange things that have piqued his interest, such as “Presidential Namesakes,” which he wrote for Our Game.

I decided to search for players who had the names of presidents as their first and middle names. I did not look for players whose first and last names matched a president such as John Kennedy, an infielder for the Senators, Dodgers and others in the 1960s and 1970s. By the way, the ballplayer Kennedy and the president Kennedy had the same birth date, May 29, but 24 years apart.

Brian Murphy story, April 9, 2023

Brian Murphy wrote a fine article about Retrosheet’s founder for mlb.com a year ago, upon which I could not improve: https://bit.ly/3wBm0KR. In that story I described Smith’s original vision as “a task so immense that … that it might have daunted Imhotep, the pharaoh’s architect, as he contemplated the pyramid before setting a first stone.”

For MLB’s historical record, quarrying each stone (a game) and dragging it into place can represent a labor of exceeding difficulty. Even for the very first game of the National League — on April 22, 1876, between the Boston Red Stockings and the Philadelphia Athletics — no complete play-by-play has yet been found, though we do have a box score. The 19th century remains a vast uncharted landscape for play-by-play charting, and so do the 29 years of MLB-recognized Negro Leagues, which for Retrosheet has become the next frontier.

“In the end,” Alan Schwarz wrote in The Numbers Game, “Retrosheet has become a celebration of baseball built by fans for fans. Their sense of community and love for their favorite sport pulse through every web page.”