| A friend of ours used to like to spend some ofhis freetime thumbing through the list of major league base-ball players. One of his delights was to assemble a teamof players named Smith. I personally haven t taken thetime to count the Smiths, or the Joneses for that matter,but I m certain there are enough of each to field arepresentative team. Overall, beyond the Smiths andJoneses there are, since 1901, almost 10,000 men whohave played major league baseball. Of course, few haveleft their mark on the ages, and many only came up tohave their proverbial "cup of coffee." Still, it is a rarehonor to have appeared in at least one game, and a fantasy which most of us share. This friend of ours, whose presence no longer gracesour lives, was Lee Allen. At the time of his death in1969, Lee was historian at the Baseball Hall of Fame inCooperstown, New York. The Sports Encyclopedia:Baseball, which is the big brother to this handy paper-back, was dedicated to his memory and to all he repre-sented in baseball research. In many ways, Lee was apioneer whose main passion was not so heavily sta-tistical as it was to hunt for the missing pieces of docu-mentation which made up the man: birth, death, middlename, born as (some men changed their family name),and even such trifles as bats, throws, height, and weight.Lee spent the last part of his life collecting such informa-tion. Happily, his efforts, and the efforts of all thosebefore and after him, are included in this rich collectionwhich includes every man to have played in the majorleagues since 1901. |
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