i9s is currently a passion project for two people, Daniel & Dirk.
Hi, I’m Daniel
Baseball was my dominant obsession as a boy. I can still name the starting lineup of most of the New York Yankees’ teams of the late 1970s. And even into the 1980s. The 1990s actually left me no longer a Yankees fan, but that’s another story.
My obsession manifested in an ongoing love affair with baseball simulation–at the time, Strat-O-Matic. I would wager I hand-entered more SOM cards into its early computer version (mine was on the Commodore-64) than any other person (easily multiple thousands). At the same period of time, my Mom and I would eagerly read the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract–I still have the old, oversized paperback versions, and much of James’ writing formed the way I thought about baseball. And frequently made me laugh out loud.
As I grew up, my interest in the history of the game deepened, and collided with my general political interests, leading me to learn as much as I could about baseball, pre-integration, with a fantasy of creating a set of Strat-O-Matic cards that would let someone replay baseball from 1901 on with fully integrated rosters.
Enter Dirk, who you’ll learn more about below. Dirk was far ahead of me in that research. I made a deal with him: I would join a Strat league he ran which needed a new owner if he would work with me on the projections.
I don’t think a project like this necessarily requires additional bonafides, but if so, I ran one of (maybe the) first websites dedicated to projecting the success of minor league ballplayers (it was called Prospects, Projects & Suspects) and my now-defunct web development company implemented SABR’s first content-managed website.
Hi, I’m Dirk
My earliest baseball memory was in 1979, five years old, as my dad threw tennis balls at the garage door for my friend and I to field on the rebound. One of us would pretend to be Bucky Dent; the other Babe Ruth, despite neither of us being Yankees fans. It reflects how large the dent of Dent’s 1978 home run was, and how long Babe’s shadow loomed as the greatest player in history.
While baseball was a constant in my childhood and teenage years it was just one of a variety of rotating interests. That all changed when I was 19. First, I saw the movies Bull Durham and Field of Dreams in close succession, creating a love for the history and origins of the game. Then, I stumbled across a copy of John Holway’s Blackball Stars which ignited my passion: the real “Field of Dreams” should not have been about someone who may or may not have thrown the World Series; “Field of Dreams” should have been about these men, the thousands of athletes who never got to play in the, ahem, “Major Leagues” with the likes of Cobb, Mathewson, and Ruth. In discovering the old Negro Leagues I found my own personal cause: posthumously integrating their stories into the narrative of “Major League” history.
In various ways, I worked on this project through most of the 1990s. My initial efforts were aimed in two directions. First, more generally, I wanted to accurately depict the career statistical essence of the Negro League greats in juxtaposition to their Major League brethren. This took concrete form with the publication of Strat-O-Matic’s “Career Normalized” (CN) computer game product. By using their swing at creating a statistical essence for each Major League player, I could use that as the reference point to create equivalent versions for the Negro Leaguers. This had the happy byproduct of also providing usable “cards” that could be played with in the CN league I had created with an extended group of friends.
My second and more specific early effort was working toward authoring a biography of Oscar Charleston. I felt that Charleston, in particular, had been lost to history despite perhaps being the greatest player to have ever lived. While Buck O’Neil overflowed with memorable anecdotes and stories about the later Negro League stars such as Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Cool Papa Bell, Charley’s peak was before Buck’s time. He didn’t gain the same reputational lift as the later black players from the famous ambassador. So, over the course of years, I started researching about this lost legend. I drove and interviewed Bill Owens and Double Duty Radcliffe, who both played with Oscar. I ordered microfilm from my university library of the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier to read the accounts of his day. I visited archives and read every book published on the Negro Leages through the late 1990s. As an undergraduate without a mentor on the biography project I was ill prepared to actually manifest a manuscript on the man, but in the process I unearthed a trove of research. I remember that ESPN, in 1995, had made a great celebration of the 100 year anniversary of Babe Ruth’s birth. I wrote them a letter in 1996 asking them to do the same for Oscar Charleston. The letter went unanswered, and nary a mention was made.
My work began to take a more productive form when I connected with Daniel. The statistical work I had done in the context of the Strat-O-Matic CN universe was inherently narrow and, while I had done a ton of research, a biography on Oscar Charleston was going nowhere. The work, which became the i9s project, was both substantive and focused. It also benefited from the heat of collaboration and the possibility of sharing the work on the internet – a novel thing at the time, indeed. We worked on this for a while before our lives went in different directions and the project went fallow.
It was a surprise and joy when, a few years later, I learned that the 2006 Special Committee on the Negro Leagues Election put 17 more Negro League players in the Hall of Fame. As I read about the results and the process, and saw the names of researchers whom I had communicated with back in the 1990s being included among the decision makers, I cried tears of joy. While the necessities of life had taken me in a different direction the thing that mattered to me – that the injustices of the past being acknowledged and corrected – was happening. I couldn’t have imagined this being possible just a decade before.
A few years ago Daniel resurrected the i9s work. Some 30 years on from my initial interest and efforts, I’ve lived the major portion of my life: career, family, children. Lacking now the leisure time and inexhaustible endurance to work of my youth, my passion for the work persists. And, despite wonderful modern resources on the internet that have given us so much more information and resources to understand the Negro Leagues the core of what i9s was trying to do – to model what the careers of black players would have been in the Major Leagues – has still never been done. Maybe, now, is the time to do it.