Dom Amore’s Sunday Read: CT man in the thick of Negro League research; Conard grad’s lacrosse title and more

Each day, for as long as his energy holds out, Alan Cohen pores over box scores the way he did as a kid in New York after his Giants moved 3,000 miles away in 1958 .

And during 40 years in the insurance industry, mostly in Hartford , facts and figures, evaluating data were his livelihood. When Cohen retired, he plunged head first into the grainy microfilm world of baseball’s forgotten history, joining the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in 2010, contributing to websites and databases like retrosheet.org , seamheads.com and baseball-reference.com .

“I’ve found there is nothing in life that can’t be solved with an Excel spread sheet ,” said Cohen, 77, a longtime West Hartford resident.

He’s been focusing much of his time and skills toward finding and logging long-lost Negro Leagues’ history. Cohen’s work, as part of a small, dogged army of researchers, gained validation this week when MLB announced the committee it formed to review Negro Leagues stats had approved numbers from 1920-48 for inclusion in the official records .

“Some people take exception with the Negro Leagues being considered major leagues. The seasons were short, the scheduling, all of that,” Cohen said, “Except for one little thing: The Negro Leagues were the only league. They didn’t have an option. That is where the best players were and we have to recognize them.

“The average fan has to understand, this was the only thing these players had and the conditions under which they played were not great.”

Much of what we’ve known about the Negro Leagues and its players comes from oral histories. Getting beyond that and attaching real numbers to the stories is what Cohen’s work is all about.
Over lunch in WeHa this week, Cohen opened his laptop to a spreadsheet with information he had just culled from a 1937 Missouri newspaper, a game played by the Kansas City Monarchs in May of that year. One game, one digit at a time, he and his co-researchers have been tracing the histories of the seven leagues in which Black players played during baseball’s long era of segregation and putting puzzles together.

“For games in any given year, we’re given a game assignment,” Cohen said. “For these games, I get a newspaper article and a box score and I go into the spreadsheet and input the data.”

Many a summer night, Cohen does the opposite, as a game-day stringer with the Yard Goats, inputting the data from the games so that an article and box score can be generated. Working backward is like an archeological excavation. The clues are fascinating and only feed the desire for more.

Cohen has made a study of Josh Gibson, the Hall of Fame catcher and slugger who was at the forefront of this week’s news, as he is now listed as having the highest lifetime batting average (.373) in baseball history. Cohen, who has written on Gibson for SABR publications and made presentations of his work at Cooperstown, has found 393 career home runs between 1930 and 46, of which 166 are now officially counted. When Gibson, who died at age 35 in 1947, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972, his plaque said he’d hit nearly 800, one of many legends connected with him.

“What about all these things?” Cohen said. “I had read about him hitting home runs in all these big league ballparks, read about the 800 home runs, the ball hit out of Yankee Stadium , all of that, so I started doing the research and the truth was much better, as I found out. His productivity at Griffith Stadium (in Washington, D.C.), he had one home run every five games or so. … Any time Josh Gibson hit a home run, it was written about.”

On Friday, Cohen said, Seamheads plans to add six home runs to Gibson’s total. SABR is suggesting that some home runs Gibson hit while his team, the Homestead Grays, were not affiliated, should count.

The Negro Leagues of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were not as organized as the American or National Leagues. “Official” stats do not exist, some were lost, schedules were informal.

Generally, regular-season league games were played on weekends, and these are the ones from which stats will be counted where a box score can be found. The teams barnstormed, played exhibition games during the week or after the season. Cohen has found newspapers of the time did cover Negro League games, but in some cases box scores listed hits and runs but not at-bats. In the days of typesetting, the tiny agate type was always rife with errors, players with similar names might be confused.

It’s complicated and still evolving. Satchel Paige, Cohen explained, pitched more seriously for the Negro National League’s Birmingham, Cleveland and Pittsburgh franchises between 1927 and 36, but after that performed mostly in exhibitions where he could make more money and might only make a cameo appearance. After the racial barrier was broken in 1947, Paige was an All Star with the AL’s St. Louis Browns at ages 45 and 46.

So far, Hartford’s legendary Johnny Taylor has been credited with a 17-17 record in 51 games between 1935-44.

Willie Mays, who debuted with the Giants in 1951 , will have a few more hits added to his total, from his days as a teenager playing in the Negro Leagues. Cohen, as part of SABR’s post-1948 subcommittee, has been looking for games Mays played in 1949. Hank Aaron played briefly for Indianapolis in 1952, but it’s not expected that he hit enough home runs to reclaim his record, surpassed by Barry Bonds, 762 vs. 755.

The painstaking process of developing all this information will go on for years to come. Certainly, Cohen, official scorer Jim Keener and I will be chewing on this for as long as we’re around the Dunkin’ Park press box on summer evenings, where Cohen is known to arrive announcing his latest finds. Trust me, these researchers are obsessive about details and the numbers they are unearthing are not guesses.

“The information that will be counted is accurate,” Cohen said. “But it’s incomplete.”

This is where I will quibble. If it’s not complete, how can it be accurate? No matter how many wins are identified for Satchel Paige or homers for Josh Gibson, it will not likely be close to the numbers they achieved. And how can a lifetime batting average be declared when there are any number of at-bats unaccounted for?

But if the stats aren’t perfect, and never will be, I applaud the intent and effort to give these players the recognition they were denied in their lifetimes. Researchers who care so deeply about it, like Alan Cohen, are only adding to our understanding of baseball history , not trying to rewrite it.

More for your Sunday Read:

Dom Amore: How Ian Cooke re-committed, and rediscovered his mojo for NCAA-bound UConn baseball

Title for Conard grad

West Hartford’s Casey D’Annolfo , who captained football, basketball and lacrosse at Conard High (Class of 2001) and lettered in all three at Tufts (2006), coached the Tufts men’s lacrosse team to the Division III national championship in Philadelphia last week, beating RIT, 18-14, in the final.

D’Annolfo’s eight-year record at Tufts is 122-18, with four consecutive trips to the D-III Final Four.

Sunday short takes

*The WNBA informed local TV stations this week they would no longer be allowed to shoot video during games, a move to protect broadcast rights holders, but seemingly counter-intuitive given the momentum the The W has gained in popularity.

After a few days of emailing, a common-sense compromise was reached and local media will be able to shoot from a different location. Local coverage, especially in major markets that have largely ignored their WNBA franchises, can only add value for TV and streaming rights by encouraging casual fans to seek out where and how to watch. Am I wrong?

Dom Amore: CT Sun remain unbeaten, and they warn their best is yet to come

*It’s been more than two centuries since British soldiers set fire to the White House, but we’re about to get even. … We’re sending the Mets to London .

*Windsor’s Jason Pinnock, starting safety with the Giants , is running his second youth football camp and autograph signing, partnering with the Boys and Girls Club of Hartford. The autograph signing, at Bears BBQ on Front Street in Hartford, June 14 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The camp, June 15, at Day Hill Dome, is sold out.

*Also sold out, with well over 1,000 expected, is the Franciscan Sports Banquet and silent auction at the Aqua Turf in Southington Tuesday night. Dan Hurley will be receiving the Saint Francis Award.

*Rough break for the Yard Goats, and the Rockies, when prime pitching prospect Carson Palmquist (4-1, 2.76 ERA, 66 strikeouts in 45 2/3 innings) went on the seven-day injured list this week.

*Always fun to see UConn compete against powerful baseball programs with in-state kids doing much of the representing, like Ian Cooke (New Milford), Ryan Hyde (Berlin), Braden Quin (New Fairfield) and Korey Morton (Norwalk) among the big contributors in the win over Duke .

Last word

I’m not going to pile on Angel Hernandez, by all accounts a decent man who was just not a very good major league umpire, in the wake of his abrupt midseason retirement . I do fault MLB and the umpires’ union for letting this fester for decades. Like players and coaches, umpires should be held accountable for performance — especially given some of these soft ejections I’ve been seeing. But there are better, more professional ways to do this than waiting for a social media feeding frenzy to do the dirty work and finally drive an umpire out. Yes, Hernandez needed to go, but it just didn’t feel right the way it came down.