Tom Ruane’s most recent Retrosheet roundup
Stats are signposts to stories, I have said lately, in connection with MLB’s newly embraced Negro Leagues records, but my friend Tom Ruane and Retrosheet truly prove the point. He posted this article recently at his invaluable site, https://bit.ly/3d2hLeM. With his kind permission, I offer it below in illustrated form. I will follow on, by and by, with his earlier three Retro-Reviews for this decade. All the links to player records are within the Retrosheet and SABR orbit and thus may introduce you to some of those singular delights.
Tom writes:
“This article is a continuation of the Retro-Review articles. As with the other pieces, this is not intended to be a proper history of the decade. Instead, each review is a collection of things that interested me while I was helping to proof the box scores for that year and generate the html files for our website.
“In addition, from time to time I will be focusing on a few of the statistical discrepancies from these years. These are cases where the data being displayed on Retrosheet’s website differs from either the current official statistics or what was considered official at the time. In many cases, it is unclear which version is correct, but in many others the official view is pretty obviously wrong and at some point ought to be corrected.
“Of course, like the earlier articles, this one would not have been possible without the work of dozens of Retrosheet volunteers [see Acknowledgements below] who worked on digitizing the major league box scores for the 1900s.”
While 1904 is perhaps best known today for what it didn’t have (a World Series), it did have one of the most exciting pennant races in baseball history. On August 22nd the entire first-division of the American League was within two games of each other. Even the fifth-place Naps were only five games back. From August 27th until the last series of the season, the Boston Americans and the New York Highlanders would be within a single game of each other for all but four days. Even the White Sox hung around the top of the league, and weren’t eliminated until Boston beat them on October 3rd.
On October 7th, Boston took a half-game lead into New York for the start of a five-game series to decide the pennant. They dropped the opener on Friday to Jack Chesbro, who pitched a five-hitter to win his 41st game of the season, already five more than any other pitcher had won since 1893. His workload during the last months of the season look bizarre to someone accustomed to pitch counts and six-inning quality starts, but it was extreme even by the standards of the day. After he had pitched that complete game to put his team into first-place, when New York took the field in Boston the next day, needing only a split of the two remaining double-headers to capture the pennant, Chesbro was once again on the mound and things, to put it mildly, did not go well.
At this point, I should make it clear that this was not manager Clark Griffith’s idea. According to The Sporting News: “Griff’s plan was to keep Chesbro in New York while the Highlanders invaded Boston. But Old Fox’s scheme was upset by Jack showing up at Grand Central Terminal to make the trip. Farrell said he could go. It was a fatal decision….”38
And I should also note that the only reason the team had to get on that train to Boston was because New York’s owner Frank Farrell, anticipating that his team would be playing out a string of meaningless games rather than fighting for the pennant, had rented out his park to Columbia University so their football team could play Williams College. So yes, the Highlanders had voluntarily given up home-field advantage for the most important doubleheader of the season, but at least Columbia managed to defeat Williams 11–0.
Where were we? Oh right: Boston, Saturday.
After holding Boston scoreless through the first three innings, Chesbro got battered for five hits and six runs in the fourth. Boston would add seven more runs against rookie reliever Walter Clarkson on their way back into first place with a 13–2 rout. The second game was a well-pitched seven-inning affair between Cy Young and Jack Powell, the only run of the game being scored on an error by third-baseman Wid Conroy. With the double-header loss, the Highlanders had to win both games back in New York on Monday and sent out — who else? — Jack Chesbro, with a single day’s rest in the first. Pitching with less than two days’ rest was nothing new for Chesbro down the stretch. He made fourteen starts from September 5th to the end of the season and half of those were with one day of rest or less. And while it’s easy to be critical of his heavy workload in the late stages of that season, he had won his first five of those seven starts, and was only hit hard on October 8th.
I mentioned in the previous article that Mathewson and McGinnity were the last National League teammates to combine for 800 or more innings. Well, Chesbro and Powell set the post-1901 major league mark with 845 innings between them. Number three on their depth chart that season (and the pitcher who probably would have started at least one of the games in the series) was Al Orth, who had come over from the last-place Washington Senators in late July, but he had been injured in his previous start on October 3rd and couldn’t pitch.
The first game of that last doubleheader [October 10] is one of the most famous of the Deadball Era. It pitted Chesbro against Bill Dinneen, last year’s World Series hero, who was also pitching with a single day’s rest. New York took a lead in the bottom of the fifth with a two-out rally that featured Chesbro’s second hit of the game (he had tripled in the third), a run-scoring single by Patsy Dougherty and a bases-loaded walk to Kid Elberfeld. Boston came back to tie the game in the top of seventh courtesy of two errors by Highlander second-baseman Jimmy Williams, and the score stayed tied at two until Lou Criger led off the top of the ninth for Boston with a single. A sacrifice and an infield out moved Criger along to third and brought Freddy Parent to the plate. Chesbro got two quick strikes on him but his third pitch was wild and went all the way to the backstop, Criger jogging home with the go-ahead run. Two walks in the bottom half of the ninth gave the home crowd a glimmer of hope before Dougherty struck out to end the game.39
That wild pitch would haunt Chesbro for the rest of his life, and it is front and center in almost every account of his baseball career. His widow is reported to have campaigned major league baseball to have the scorer’s call changed to a passed ball,40 and to take one example of many, a review of his career by the New England Historical Society is titled “Happy Jack Chesbro, the Yankees’ Bill Buckner of 1904.” It’s obviously unfair to focus on that one pitch as the reason the Highlanders didn’t take the pennant in 1904. For example, the game probably wouldn’t have been tied in the top of the ninth were it not for Jimmy Williams’ two errors in the seventh, and they may very well have split Saturday’s double-header if Wid Conroy had held on to that throw at third base in the fifth inning, or if those games had been played in New York as originally scheduled. But fair or unfair, we tend to remember the last in a series of events that led us to one place instead of another, and for the 1904 Highlanders, that event was Chesbro’s wild pitch.
And not that this definitively decides the wild-pitch/passed-ball debate but here is how The Boston Globe described that pitch the next day: “He [Chesbro] took his time and tried to send the ball close and high, but was spellbound when he saw it soar over the catcher’s head and go bang against the backstop….” I thought it interesting (and obviously not prophetic) that the sportswriter’s next sentence was: “Parent singled to center, thereby taking the curse off the bad work of Chesbro.”41
The National League pennant race became far less dramatic when the New York Giants went on an 18-game winning streak in mid-June, turning what had been a close three-team race into a foregone conclusion. The Giants had both the best pitching and hitting in the league. For the second straight year, Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity won at least thirty games apiece, improving on their combined mark from the year before, 68–20 compared to a 61–33 mark in 1903. It was the second time Mathewson had won thirty or more games in a season and he had yet to lead his team, much less his league, in wins. It was the last time a team has had two thirty-game winners, the next closest being Hal Newhouser and Dizzy Trout for the second-place Detroit Tigers in 1944, who won 29 and 27 games respectively.
Despite scoring the most runs in the majors in 1904, the Giants didn’t boast any players with great offensive numbers. They led the majors in slugging and on-base percentage without a player among the leaders in either. They did it by being somewhat better than average up and down their lineup. With the exception of catcher, the Giants had a higher OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) than the league average at every position. And besides, this was the Deadball Era and great offensive numbers weren’t exactly in fashion. Ginger Beaumont led the league with only 185 hits. Yes, Honus Wagner hit 44 doubles, but no one else in the league had more than 28.
As I alluded to in the opening, there was no World Championship Series between the two league champions following the 1904 season. On September 27th, John T. Brush, the owner of the Giants, issued a statement congratulating his team for winning the National League pennant for the first time since 1889, and then went on to say: “There is nothing in the constitution or playing rules of the National League which requires its victorious club to submit its championship honors to a contest with a victorious club in a minor league. The club that wins from the clubs that represent … the eight largest and most important cities in America, in a series of 154 games, is entitled to the honor of champions of the United States without being called upon to contend with or recognize clubs from minor league towns.”42
At the time, the three teams still in contention for the American League pennant were in three “towns” (Boston, New York and Chicago) also home to NL teams. But his main point was that the AL was not a major league and unworthy of his team’s attention. This decision was very unpopular, causing Giants manager John McGraw to come to his defense, arguing that the decision not to play the Americans was his and his alone. In an open letter to the “Base Ball Patrons of New York,” he writes in part: “The people of New York have been kind enough to give me some credit for bringing a pennant to New York, and if there is any just criticism for the club’s action in protecting that highly prized honor the blame should rest on my shoulders, not Mr. Brush’s, for I and I alone am responsible for the clubs actions.”
He went on to say that while he wouldn’t put the NL pennant (“the highest honor in base ball”) in jeopardy by playing the AL champions, he would be glad to in the future if “the National League should see fit to place post-season games on the same plane as championship games and surround them with the same protection and safeguards for square sport….”43 Which is pretty much what happened the following February, with the two leagues agreeing on a format for future World’s Championship Series that I presume included sufficient protection and safeguards for square sport.
Only six players had multihomer games in 1904. One of them was the Highlanders’ Willie Keeler, who hit two inside-the-park home runs on August 24th. They are the only homers he hit in a span of 483 games from July 13, 1901 to April 25, 1905.
And speaking of home runs, on October 7th, George Stovall hit a first-inning homer off of his brother, Jesse Stovall. It was the first home run of brother George’s career, one which would span a dozen years, ending with him as a player-manager of the Federal League’s Kansas City Packers in 1915. For Jesse, it would be the last game of his major career, one that began the previous year with five straight wins during a September call-up with Cleveland, including back-to-back shutouts followed by a ten-inning three-hitter, but ended with him posting a 2–13 mark with the 1904 Tigers, included ten straight losses to start the year. There would be two more brother-brother home run combinations, with the Ferrells in 1933 and the Niekros in 1976.
Two things happened on the base paths on May 27th that you don’t see every day. The first was turned in by the Phillies Rudy Hulswitt who was called out for being hit by a batted ball twice in one game. It’s relatively rare to get hit once in a game, but this is the only time I’ve seen it happen twice. In both cases, he got in the way of an apparent base hit, either ending or curtailing a rally, causing a sub-headline in the story concerning the loss the next day to read: “Phillies Are Also A Bit Dopy On The Bases And Aid Not A Little In The Hubites’ Victory.”44
At the other end of the baserunning spectrum, Giants first-baseman Dan McGann set a season-high by stealing five bases in a game against Brooklyn that day. First-basemen tend to be slower than average players, but Johnny Neun in 1927 was also playing first when he repeated McGann’s feat. The last first-baseman with as many as four stolen bases in a game was rookie John Jaha in 1992. Neither Neun nor Jaha would have as many stolen bases in their careers as the 42 McGann stole in 1904 alone.
On April 25th Cy Young gave up only two first-inning runs on his way to dropping a 2–0 decision to Rube Waddell and the Athletics. Waddell, back with Philadelphia after getting suspended the previous August, blanked the Red Sox in his next start as well, this time allowing only a single hit, and when he faced Cy Young on May 5th for his third straight start against Boston, his scoreless-inning streak reached 32 before he gave up a run in the bottom of the sixth. By that time, all eyes were on Young, who had already retired the first 18 Athletics on his way to the first perfect game in American League history. It was the third perfect game of nine or more innings in the major leagues, the previous two coming within a span of five days in 1880, when Worcester’s Lee Richmond victimized the Cleveland Blues on June 12th, and Monte Ward did the same to the Buffalo Bisons in the Providence Grays’ 5–0 win on the 17th.
While it didn’t attract much attention at the time, in his loss to Waddell on April 25th, Young retired the last nine Athletics without a hit. He appeared in relief five days later, entering the game in the third inning with two runners on and no one out, and held his opponents without a hit over the final seven innings. So when he took the mound on May 11th in his first start since his perfect game, he had pitched 19 hitless innings in a row. Young would extend that to a record 25 1/3 straight before surrendering a hit with one out in the seventh.45 That game would be scoreless until Boston’s Patsy Dougherty’s single pushed across the winning run in the bottom of the fifteenth inning. Young’s scoreless streak would reach an AL record 45 innings before ending in the eighth inning on May 17th, when Red Donahue, the opposing pitcher, singled to drive in the first of three runs in Cleveland’s 3–1 victory.
Young’s sole ownership of the scoreless-inning mark would not survive the season. After finishing August with a 8–10 record, Doc White had a September to remember in 1904. It started with a three-hit shutout on the fifth before taking a 5–3 decision in Cleveland four days later, giving up the last run of the game with none out in the bottom of the ninth. These would be the last runs he’d allow the rest of the month as he proceeded to pitch five straight shutouts, including a one-hitter, two-hitter, three-hitter, and four-hitter. He would finish the month with a seventh game winning streak and 45 consecutive scoreless innings, one that would end with two outs in the first inning of his first outing of October.46
A well-rested Rube Waddell came into Chicago for a four-game series in early June and, fresh off back-to-back shutouts over the Tigers and Highlanders, boasted that he would pitch all four games against the White-Sox.47 I’m not sure why Connie Mack agreed to go along with this scheme, but Rube was allowed to start the first three games before Mack came to his senses. He got removed after two innings in the first one, a 14–2 rout and the only game all season that saw the Athletics use more than one reliever. The loss inspired a writer for the Chicago Journal to write a poem that began:
“In the morn,” said the Rube, “I was full of glee,
In the eve I was full of prunes!
For the brutal Sox beat my speed like a drum,
And pounded some wonderful tunes!”
And ended five stanzas later with:
Such was the tale of the Twenty-one Hits,
The tale of the batting rally,
How the White Sox handed three pitchers theirs,
And did it symetrically!48
Having had most of the previous day off, Waddell came back and pitched his team to a 6–3 win the next day, but pitched poorly in his third straight start, going the distance in a 6–1 loss and striking out only one batter all day, a season low (not counting a two-batter outing on September 5th) for the pitcher who would set the league record for strikeouts in a year with 349, a mark that would stand (with apologies to Bob Feller in 1946) until Nolan Ryan struck out 383 in 1973. The Athletics’ brain trust came to their senses after that and called off the experiment, giving Waddell six days to recover before sending him out again.
On June 4th a huge crowd (37,223) at the Polo Grounds saw the Reds’ Jack Harper and Joe McGinnity face each other in a battle of unbeaten pitchers. It is the only time since 1901 that two pitchers with at least seven wins apiece and no losses have faced each other. [Harper was 7–0, McGinnity 13–0.] The crowd size was said to be a record, easily eclipsing the 31,000 said to have attended the 1886 Decoration Day game between the Giants and the Detroit Wolverines (although the New York Times only listed the size of that crowd at over 26,000 … 20,000 who paid their way in plus another 6,000 who “were clamoring for admission” and let in without tickets),49 as well as the 31,500 who attended the previous year’s game at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Pirates.50
Record or not, the game certainly lived up to expectations. The Reds pushed across a run in the top of the first, one that looked like it might be enough to hand McGinnity his first defeat of the year when the Giants went into the bottom of the ninth still down 1–0. Art Devlin led off the inning with a double: “and pandemonium broke loose. Men, women and children in the stands and on the field shrieked, shouted, and showed other manifestations of enthusiasm, and it was some time before play was continued.” McGann sacrificed him to third, Bresnahan scored him on what today would be called a sacrifice fly (but back then was simply a productive out), and the game headed into extra innings. A throwing error in the top of the eleventh gave the Reds a 2–1 lead. But two singles and another deep fly tied the game in the bottom half as darkness brought an end to the game.
A week later, the Cubs were in town and, apart from the visiting teams, things were strangely similar. Where the two earlier starters had entered their game a combined 20–0, this time McGinnity and his opponent, Bob Wicker, were 19–1. Last week’s contest was played before a record crowd of 37,223; this one, before an even larger crowd of 38,805. And finally, where the previous game was tied at 1–1 heading into the eleventh inning, this one was scoreless into the top of the twelfth, when the Reds turned a single, infield out and another single into a run, while the Giants, who managed only two singles all day against Wicker, went out in order in the bottom half, sending McGinnity to his first defeat of the year.
Harper and McGinnity had a rematch in the first-game of the double-header on August 31st, this time at the Palace of the Fans in Cincinnati. Their combined record at the start of the day was 46–10, and their winning percentage of .841 is the second highest since 1901 (with a minimum of twenty decisions each). Once again, it was a low-scoring extra inning affair, won by New York in the top of the eleventh on a two-out error by Joe Kelley, the Reds player-manager. By that time, two of the Giants players had been ejected for arguing a call at second, an argument that took place while the Reds were scoring a run, and a third Giant, Frank Bowerman, who wasn’t playing, was arrested for assaulting a fan, one Alfred Hartzel, a music teacher and I must assume, a particularly vocal supporter of the Reds.51
Oh, and the highest combined winning percentage since 1901 for starters with at least twenty decisions each: the identical 17–3 records both the Astros’ Darryl Kile and the Braves’ Denny Neagle brought into their game on August 28, 1997. Neagle won, 4–2.
Speaking of enthusiastic fans, after the Giants swept Boston in a double-header on September 5th in front of a near-record crowd of 37,327: “… the enthusiastic spectators made a wild demonstration. They rushed on the field to carry Mertes, Ames, Browne and others off the field on their shoulders. A couple of thousand made a dash for manager McGraw. In trying to escape McGraw slipped and fell. His left foot was twisted under him and several of the fans fell over the little manager in their excitement. McGraw tried to rise, but was unable to do so. He was carried to the clubhouse, where a physician examined his leg and said it was fractured.”52
His ankle turned out to be only dislocated, but I’m sure the little manager’s pride was fractured.
The Cardinals’ Jack Taylor lost to Pittsburgh in the first game of their July 31st double-header. In the offseason, he would be accused by the Pirates of conspiring with gamblers to lose the game, and tried by the Board of Directors of the National League. While Taylor admitted drinking heavily the night before, and that his heavy drinking left him in no condition to pitch the next day, he argued that he tried his best to win in spite of his hangover. Mike Grady, his catcher that day, came to Taylor’s defense and was instrumental in Taylor getting a stiff fine for his poor behavior rather than a lifetime ban for throwing a game.
But Grady’s testimony, at least as reported in The Sporting Life at the time of his hearing, makes no sense. According to the paper: “Grady said he did all of the signaling and Taylor never crossed him once; the score was 5 to 3 in favor of Pittsburg, and was tied up to the last inning, when, with the bases full and two out, Smith had two strikes on him and Grady signaled Taylor for a fast ball close to Smith’s chin. The batsman pulled away and the ball, hitting the handle of the bat, dropped just out of reach of the third baseman.”53
But the score of the game was 5–2, not 5–3, and the Pirates led from the second inning to the end. Their last score was in the seventh, a single that merely increased their lead from two to three runs.
A follow up on the Red Ames item from 1903 [set to appear next at Our Game; in his career, Ames threw four shutouts shortened to five innings]: Otto Hess was inserted into Cleveland starting rotation on August 18th. It was his first appearance on the mound for the Naps since giving up ten runs in the last inning of a 21–3 loss to the Highlanders more than a month earlier. Hess pitched just well enough to keep his spot before throwing a three-hit shutout on September 17th. He would hold three more teams scoreless in his next five starts, including a one-hitter, and finish with an 8–7 record. So what does this have to do with Red Ames? Well, three of his shutouts lasted only five innings, setting the post-1901 season mark.
The 1904 Washington Senators were a really bad team. They were so bad that year that they inspired sportswriter Charley Dryden’s famous line “Washington — first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” They finished the year with four starting pitchers who lost 23 or more games, although one of those pitchers, Tom Hughes, came over from the Highlanders in July so only 12 of his 23 losses came while pitching for Washington. Still they finished the year with the pitcher (Happy Townsend) who shares the AL record for the most losses in a season, along with three others who are tied for twelfth place.
One of the better players on that Washington team was Frank Huelsman, who came to the team from the St. Louis Browns in a trade on July 14th. It was the end of the long, record-setting journey for Frank, one that began in Chicago on the White Sox bench. After appearing in only three games in six weeks, he was sold to Detroit, who put him in left-field for four games before returning him to Chicago. A single pinch-hit appearance later, he was on his way to the St. Louis Browns, where they played him regularly in the outfield for three weeks and then sent him on to the Senators, where he found a home for the rest of the year.
When the dust had settled, Frank had tied the record for the most teams played for in a single season, a record originally set in 1892 by Tom Dowse.54 It wouldn’t happen again until Willis Hudlin’s 1940 season. It got more common after that, with ten more occurrences between 1951 and 2016, before Oliver Drake set a new standard by appearing with five teams in 2018.
And finally, I thought I’d take a look at a discrepancy that was discovered and thoroughly investigated nearly 75 years ago, involving a single statistic that was over forty years old at the time: the number of Rube Waddell’s strikeouts in 1904. For years, it had been listed in the record books as 343, but as Bob Feller started to approach that figure in 1946, people started to take a closer look, or as Cliff Kachline put it at the time: “Competent research experts, going over box scores of all the games in which the Rube appeared 42 years ago, have come up with various other totals, ranging all the way from 347 to 352.”55 The researchers identified eight games where there was some disagreement in contemporary accounts about the number of Waddell’s strikeouts, and by the time they had come to a consensus, they’d settled on a number (349) one more than Bob Feller’s total.
I don’t have really much more to add, except to point out that the only thing unusual about the story is the effort that people took to ensure the number was as accurate as possible. There are reasonable doubts about the stats associated with over ten thousand games during the Deadball Era and as people have the time, energy and resources to resolve these doubts, we should expect to discover small changes (like a 343 turning into a 349) at nearly every turn.
Acknowledgements
A host of people worked on making these box scores available to baseball researchers. The team doing doing this included Dave Lamoureaux, Javier Anderson, Greg Antolick, Mark Armour, Bob Boehme, Tom Bradley, Clem Comly, Larry Defillipo, Jonathan Frankel, Gary Frownfelter, Mike Grahek, Chuck Hildebrandt, Howard Johnson, Ryan Jones, Herm Krabbenhoft, Sean Lahman, Walter LeConte, Dan Lee, Bob LeMoine, Trent McCotter, Sheldon Miller, Jack Myers, Dave Newman, Bill Nowlin, Charlie O’Reilly, Ian Orr, Pete Palmer, Gary Pearce, J.G. Preston, Charles Saeger, Carl Schweisthal, Terry Small, Tom Stillman, Tom Thress, Dixie Tourangeau, Steve Vetere, David Vincent, Ron Wargo, Ron Weaver, Paul Wendt, Rob Wood, and Don Zminda,
Notes
[these commence with #38 because earlier notes are affixed to the author’s roundups of the 1901, 1902, and 1903 seasons, which will appear at Our Game soon enough.]
38. "Daguerreotypes Taken Of Former Stars Of The Diamond,” The Sporting News, November 30, 1933, page 7.
39. "Boston Champions Capture The Pennant,” The Boston Globe, October 11, 1904, pages 1 and 4–5.
40. Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella, “The Biographical History of Baseball” (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 1995), page 77.
41. "Boston Champions Capture the Pennant,” The Boston Globe, October 11, 1904, pages 1 and 4–5.
42. "No World’s Series,” The Sporting Life, October 1, 1904, page 5.
43. "Shoulders The Blame,” The Sporting Life, October 15, 1904, page 6.
44. "Boston Lands On Chick Fraser,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 28, 1904, page 10.
45. It is often confusing what we mean by a hitless or scoreless inning. For example, how many hitless innings did Young pitch on April 30th? He entered the game after Winter had allowed two hits. So clearly, the third inning wasn’t hitless, despite the fact that Young retired three straight. Would it have mattered if Young had given up a hit to the first batter he faced before retiring the next three? Scoreless innings are even more problematic. When Young relieved Winter, runners were on second and third: what if one of those inherited runners had scored on one of the outs Young recorded? Or what if he had recorded two outs without a score, left the game, and the next reliever allowed a run? In general, and where possible, I am going to calculate these streaks as the number of outs recorded between either hits allowed by or runs charged to the pitcher. I added the “where possible” above because without play-by-play data, it is often not possible to determine precisely where a hit or run occurred within an inning. In the case of Young’s hitless streak, we know that the last hit he surrendered on April 25th came with none out in the sixth and that the next hit he allowed came on May 11th came with one out in the seventh. So instead of the 24 consecutive innings in most record books, we consider the streak to include the last three outs in the sixth inning on April 25th as well as first out of the seventh on May 11th, or 25 1/3.
46. Expanding upon the previous footnote, we currently show Young and White with streaks of 45 innings, but that is only because we do not currently have play-by-play data for the games at the end-points of these. But from newspaper accounts, we know that we will eventually show Young’s streak at 45 1/3 innings and White’s at 46 2/3 innings. Now I realize that this is a controversial way of figuring these kinds of things, but there are plenty of on-line places where you can go to see the length of these calculated in a more traditional way if this bothers you.
47. "Chicago Gleanings,” The Sporting Life, June 18, 1904, page 7.
48. Whittier, “Twenty-One Hits,” The Sporting Life, June 18, 1904, page 5.
49. "Winning Even Honors,” The New York Times, June 1, 1886, page 2. The crowd size referred to the second game of the separate admission double-header. The morning game was said to have drawn 7,000.
50. "Baseball’s Record Crowd,” The New York Times, June 5, 1904, page 9.
51. "Warlike,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 1, 1904, page 4.
52. "Giants Take Two from Boston Men. Manager McGraw Hurt by Enthusiastic Rooters After the Games,” The Boston Globe, September 6, 1904, page 5.
53. "The Taylor Case,” The Sporting Life, February 25, 1905, page 4.
54. If you count the 1884 Union Association as a major league (and for some odd reason, MLB does), you can add George Strief and Harry Wheeler to the list.
55. Cliff Kachline, “Statisticians Still Fanning Figures Over Bobby Feller’s Whiff Mark,” The Sporting News, October 9, 1946, Page 12.
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