The Baseball Research Journal is SABR"s flagship publication. This issue we have three articles with a Babe Ruth connection, from exploring Ruth's path through Japan in 1934 with Steven Wisensale to Roberts Ehrgott debunking some "common wisdom" about the "called shot," plus 2020 Chadwick Award-winner Michael Haupert's fascinating piece on "The Business of Being the Babe." We also have more articles delving into baseball players' off-field business and media opportunities, as John Schwarz discusses Ted Williams's business agent, "Mr. Golf" Fred Corcoran, and Michael Hoenigmann recalls that not only was Mike Piazza a prodigious slugging catcher, his IMDB/Hollywood resume is nearly as impressive. Add Mike Kaszuba's story of seeking out slugger Dave Nicholson, and a larger tale is told of how these home run heroes become part of the fabric of our culture and our lives.



Stories from the margins, away from the big-league stadiums, are always fascinating, too. Bill Nowlin reveals how a barnstorming team of Black players brought the "Boston Red Sox" to Darby, Pennsylvania, for an exhibition in 1918, while Dan Schoenholz explores one of the wacky experiments Carl Zamloch exhibited about ten years later in California: "reversible baseball" in which the bases could be run counter-clockwise. Sounds like a wacky promotion that could have been run in the early 1990s in the Niagara area of Canada, where David Siegel reveled in the brief, shining moment when there were four minor-league teams within driving distance.



The spring issue also honors the Chadwick Awardees for 2021: Robert W. Peterson, author of Only the Ball Was White, Gary Ashwill, the force behind Seamheads' Negro Leagues stats database, and Alan Nathan, the preeminent physicist studying baseball. The STEM lens can be applied to looking at the past, the present, or the future, and we have divided the articles into those that re-evaluate historical data and those that could be applied to understanding of the game today. In the former group Gary Belleville ranks no-hitters, while Cambell Gibson explores the alternative universe in which the teams with the highest Pythagorean winning average rather than the best record are the winners. Jay Wigley extends the research begun by David W. Smith of Retrosheet two decades ago asking "do batters learn during a game?" to now look at whether hitters from the Deadball Era learned during the course of a game as well. And Douglas Jordan once again finds a unique angle to look back at past greats, this time at the seemingly anomalous "black swan": a player who had never won an award before breaking out with an MVP season.


In the latter section of research articles, a team of undergrads at Columbia University headed by Anthony Montes explore optimizing outfield positioning, a team of professors and researchers just northeast of them in Connecticut, headed by Paul Canavan, test out a new form of full-body analysis using a body suit with embedded sensors rather than the camera-based motion-capture systems more commonly in use for biomechanical analysis. And another undergrad, Samuel Borgemenke, looks at how great players make championships teams... and how championship teams make great players.


ON THE COVER:


Babe Ruth continues to interest and fascinate us over 100 years after his fateful trade from Boston to New York. As Michael Haupert writes in "The Business of Being the Babe, "Babe Ruth is frequently lauded as the greatest player in Major League Baseball history, and arguably the first true superstar athlete. Ruth transcended the game of baseball, and with the aid of agent Christy Walsh, he profited tremendously from that transcendence. Whether barnstorming, making movies, or modeling underwear, Ruth had a Midas touch that allowed his income to exceed even his famously outsized spending habits."

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