Folks,

A fortnight ago I phoned Rick Benner to talk about 19th century
collegiate baseball records, especially game logs. I promised him I
would both explain Spalding's Guide coverage and illustrate game logs in
email to this group. I have written some details in useful tables and
the unknown number of email articles will follow pretty quickly now.

GAME LOGS. I will not get to game logs in this article. Let me say
merely that a simple game log is a list of records, one for each game,
providing the date, two team names or other identifiers and two scores
in runs. Given a league, which is essentially a group of teams in one
season, a complete simple game log for the league is sufficient to
reconstruct daily league standings (with runs scored and allowed)
throughout the season. Indeed, the Retrosheet web encyclopedia gives
for every major league season from 1871 daily standings derived from
game logs.

COLLEGE BASEBALL in SPALDING'S GUIDE 1883-1884
Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide (official for the National League)
includes coverage of two collegiate base ball associations, the Western
or Northwestern and the Inter-Collegiate or American, in both 1884 and
1885, the only editions I have checked for collegiate base ball. There
is no other coverage of college baseball. The official association names
are unclear to me. For short I will call them the Western or WCA and
the Inter/-Collegiate or ICA.

Each of the four articles features the immediately preceding season with
game results for teams, season batting and fielding records for players.
Spalding's 1885 also covers the spring 1884 annual meeting of the ICA.

Neither collegiate association was new in 1883 but the Western was new
in 1882. Spalding's 1885 says "the first year saw only half-organized,
half-disciplined nines in the field" and says that Michigan did not lose
a game without even giving a count. Apparently to Spalding's, it
achieved some new formality in 1883. There were four clubs in the
Western each year: Michigan (strongest), Northwestern, Wisconsin, and
Racine in 1882; Northwestern, Wisconsin, Racine, and Beloit in 1883 and
1884. The University of Michigan used professional players and withdrew
when the Western passed restrictions for 1883, replaced by Beloit
College.

The Inter-Collegiate was established 6 December 1879, says Spalding's
1885 before summarizing each season with a prose paragraph and a table
of standings in team-vs-team format. Six colleges clubs were
represented but "the convention voted to exclude college players from
their names who participated in professional club teams" so Yale
ultimately withdrew. Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Amherst
played a double round robin, essentially home and home, and finished in
that order with W-L records 6-2 to 2-6. The season continued to be a
home and home double round robin. Yale re-entered in 1881 and won four
successive pennants, two evidently in playoffs. The only other change
in membership was the absence of Dartmouth during 1883 only.

PLAYER DATA
In this series I will not cover the player data in any detail but here
is an account of scope that omits what is redundant because it is
literally repeated or it can be derived.

WCA 1883
For 38 players in one list ordered by batting average, who played at
least 3 of 6 games (mainly 6 of 6):
SURNAME,
CLUB,
POSITIONS,
rank in batting,
-games played,
-base-hits,
-batting average,
-runs
runs per game,
-fielding average,
rank in fielding.
That is five independent numerical data(-). Some of the fielding
averages are impossible in only ten games: .999, .998.
For five players in a second list ordered by batting average, who
played 1 or 2 games, the same data

WCA 1884
For 36 players in one list ordered by batting average, who played at
least 3 of 6 games (mainly 6 of 6):
: surname, positions, club, games, batting avg, fielding avg, fielding rank
That is three independent numerical data.
For 9 players in a second list ordered by batting average, who played
1 or 2 of 6 games, the same data.


ICA 1883
For 10 to 12 players on each of five teams, which may be all players,
grouped by team:
: surname, positions, games by position, at bats, runs, batting avg, fielding
avg
That is five independent numerical data for everyone listed at only one
fielding position.
For each team as a whole, at the bottom of each table, the same data.

ICA 1884
For precisely nine players on each of six teams, who played at least 9
of 11 games (for playoff participants Yale and Harvard) down to 6 of 10
games (two players), grouped by team:
: surname, positions, games played, batting avg, fielding avg
That is three independent numerical data.
For each team, batting and fielding averages, ranks by batting and
fielding average, and the average of batting and fielding averages(!).
That is two independent numerical data beyond the W-L records and runs
scored-allowed that are in the game results.

P/\/ \/\/t

Paul Wendt, Watertown MA, USA <pgw@...>
Chair, 19th Century Committee, SABR
Owner-Administrator, 19cBB (egroup at Yahoo)