Total Baseball; The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball
New York: Total Sports, 1999. Sixth Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Format is approximately 8.75 inches by 11.125 inches by 3.75 inches. Heavy book requiring added shipping outside the United States. vi, 2538 pages. Tabular data. Several pages at the front and back are creased. DJ has some wear and soiling. John A. Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a German-born sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. Thorn is the author and editor of numerous books, including Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, Total Football: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Football, Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame, The Hidden Game of Baseball, The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947–1957, and The Armchair Book of Baseball. His 2011 book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, published by Simon & Schuster, was an in-depth chronicle of the seminal development and pioneers of the sport. A New York Times review of the latter book referred to Thorn as "a researcher of colossal diligence." Thorn is also the co-author with Pete Palmer and Bob Carroll of The Hidden Game of Football and with them co-editors of Total Football. His book New York 400, a graphic history of the city timed for its quadricentennial, created with the Museum of the City of New York and Running Press, was published in September 2009. He founded Total Sports Publishing. In June 2006, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) bestowed on Thorn its highest accolade, the Bob Davids Award. Total Baseball (first published 1989) is a baseball encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. The latest edition, published in 2004, is its eighth. The encyclopedia contains seasonal and career statistics in numerous categories for every Major League player, as well as historical, opinion, and year-by-year essays. The idea for Total Baseball originated when two baseball statisticians and historians, Palmer and Thorn, realized that the current Baseball Encyclopedia endorsed by Major League Baseball contained numerous significant mistakes. These included miscalculations by earlier statisticians, typographic mistakes made by the original score keeper, and even "phantom" players who did not actually exist and were added to a box score incorrectly, Lou Proctor being a notable example. In addition, Thorn and Palmer took the liberty of correcting mistakes not commonly accepted by the baseball community, such as the apparent discovery that Ty Cobb actually garnered 4,189 hits, not 4,191, or that Walter Johnson in fact had 417 career wins, not 416. Thorn and Palmer also included new, sabermetric statistics developed by statisticians like Bill James, such as runs created or total average. By its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: Reference Works, Research Aids, Major League Baseball, MLB, Professional Sports, Pitchers, Home Runs, All-Stars, World Series, Statistics, Teams, American League, National League, Negro Leagues, Sports Records
ISBN: 1892129035
[Book #84961]
Price: $115.00