Clearing The Bases - Issue 058

Read Time:9 Minute, 59 Second

Hello and welcome to Issue 058 of Clearing The Bases, an email newsletter in conjunction with the My Baseball History podcast hosted by Dan Wallach.

On Wednesday, March 11^th, our latest episode with ADAM DAROWSKI went live.

Adam is the Executive Director of Design at Sports Reference, and a Negro Leagues and Latin American baseball historian, focused on the intersection of statistical analysis and historical preservation. He is a designer and developer with over 25 years of experience with tech companies of all types—from tiny startups to billion dollar unicorns. Adam joined Sports Reference in late 2020 on a full-time basis after a long stint as a design consultant where he worked on their responsive site redesign and their Stathead launch.

The Sports Reference sites first launched with Baseball-Reference.com in April of 2000 by Sean Forman, who formed Sports Reference, Inc. in October of 2004. Sports Reference has steadily grown over the years, and currently has 42 full-time employees. In addition to Baseball Reference, Sports Reference also makes Pro Football Reference, Basketball Reference, College Football Reference, College Basketball Reference, Hockey Reference, FBref for soccer, Stathead, Immaculate Grid, and Immaculate Footy. They strive to work with respect, reliability, and craftsmanship, with the goal of democratizing sports data, so their users can enjoy, understand, and share the sports they love.

And that’s something that just absolutely spills out in this interview with Adam. It is so clear that he just loves baseball. He has been a member of the Society for American Baseball Research since 2013, and has presented multiple times at the annual SABR convention. In his free time, when he’s not working at Sports Reference, Adam is a baseball historian focused on the Negro Leagues and Latin American baseball. His work, both personally and professionally, focuses on the intersection of statistical analysis and historical preservation. He enjoys building genuinely loveable and aggressively functional products that support those goals.

Like in 2012, when he launched the Hall of Stats, an alternate Hall of Fame populated by a mathematical formula, with the help of his friends Jeffrey Chupp and Michael Berkowitz. Or his Outsider Baseball All-Stars research, for which Adam has also created a dedicated website. He has spent the past few years meticulously combing through statistics from professional baseball leagues across the globe to compile a list, along with researchers Scott Simkus and Von Spalding, of every player in professional baseball history to have accumulated 4,000 or more hits in their career. Adam has spent years researching Black and Latin players, and has unparalleled access to the databases which document all of their statistics. To say that the Venn Diagram of his personal interests and areas of expertise intersect at a unique center which makes him the perfect person to have the discussion we have in this interview is an understatement.

On December 16, 2020, Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that Major League Baseball would be correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history by officially elevating the Negro Leagues to “Major League” status. And, now, I’d like to note here that “elevating” is a word chosen by Major League Baseball, and is one which many Negro Leagues historians, researchers, and advocates have taken umbrage with. The usage of the word “elevate” implies that the Negro Leagues were somehow beneath the Major Leagues. That they were less than. That it should have been an aspiration for players in the Negro Leagues to want to play in the white Major Leagues, because the AL and NL were a step above.

On June 15, 2021, Baseball Referenced made the following announcement: “We have dramatically expanded our coverage of the Negro Leagues and historical Black major league players. Major Negro Leagues (from 1920-1948) are now listed with the National League and American League as major leagues. We are not bestowing a new status on these players or their accomplishments. The Negro Leagues have always been major leagues. We are changing our site’s presentation to properly recognize this fact.

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Adam Darowski’s own research has helped him understand the real-life and historical implications of the integration of the Major League record books, and his personal experience interviewing other researchers, historians, authors, and experts about this very subject makes him uniquely qualified to relay those implications to us. This topic can be extremely messy, and oftentimes there may not be one true answer or a single correct way to do or interpret something.

There are statistics from those seven accepted Negro Leagues which are missing, and missing statistics from other Negro Leagues which, if found, may potentially qualify them to be considered Major in the future. But Adam expertly walks us through some difficult questions, like why those statistics are missing in the first place, whose decision it was to determine which Leagues are worthy of being considered Major, and why you might see two different numbers when you look at two different websites which each claim to show you the same statistic and display that stat’s all-time leader board.

So, as you can imagine, in this episode, we cover LOTS of ground.

Adam tells us all about what it’s like to work at Sports Reference, from having his hand in the day to day operations of Baseball Reference and Stathead, to how he builds the baseball Immaculate Grid on a daily basis.

We find out the difference between what is considered a major and minor league, because while the Major Leagues as we know them today may just be the American and National Leagues, there have been multiple Major baseball leagues dating all the way back to the 1870s which are different than the American and National Leagues.

We learn why the Negro League and Black baseball statistics which have recently been integrated into the Major League record books are actually more accurate in most cases than those of the exclusively or predominantly white leagues of the past.

And we hear how all of this is a fluid process, with statistics that are constantly changing as researchers uncover more and more box scores which were previously thought to have been lost to the sands of time, meaning the numbers we see atop those all-time leader boards today, may not be the numbers we’ll see there tomorrow.

I don’t want to give too much away, but the episode is out now, so you can listen to it as soon as you get done reading this email and re-listen whenever you want after that. Don’t forget to CLICK HERE to follow along with the liner notes as you listen.

The liner notes have more than 250 specifically curated photos and videos which directly and chronologically follow the conversation Adam and I had. And the best part is, these liner notes are filled with statistics and graphics sourced directly from Baseball Reference and Immaculate Grid. In the caption for each, I also included extra links so you can do a deeper dive into any particular person or story which piques your interest as you listen.

As you know, we do giveaways associated with each episode, and the winner of the trivia contest from this episode with Adam Darowski will win a copy of The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues, a collection of essays and research compiled by Baseball Reference. The book is a unique introduction to the history of the segregation of professional baseball, telling the story of the Negro Leagues while simultaneously recounting how researchers, statisticians, and historians rebuilt and rediscovered the history of Black baseball that was pushed into obscurity in the wake of Jackie Robinson and integration.

You can enter for your chance to win by following @shoelesspodcast on twitter or bluesky and re-posting the pinned post at the top of our profile which mentions the latest episode with Adam Darowski. That post asks a trivia question which is answered during the episode. Answer that trivia question correctly with your re-post, and you’re automatically entered into the contest. We’ll pick a winner before the next episode of the podcast goes live on Wednesday, April 8^th. All you have to do to be considered is follow us on twitter or bluesky, and quote that pinned post before then, but feel free to tag a friend in the comments or write why you think you should win. It may help your chances of winning…

Our January episode featured an interview with the amazing Gary Cieradkowski, who is a renowned baseball historian, researcher, author, and artist (you can listen to that episode HERE). Gary is best known within the card industry for his Infinite Baseball Card Set, an ever-growing, independently produced collection of cards highlighting a mix of baseball outsiders, overlooked legends, and untold stories. He is also the author of The League of Outsider Baseball: An Illustrated History of Baseball’s Forgotten Heroes. His designs and illustrations can also be found at Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Wrigley Field, Ebbets Field Flannels, and the Federal League-themed Smoke Justis bar and restaurant in Northern Kentucky.

Just this past week, it was announced that Gary was selected as the winner of the 2026 Jefferson Burdick Award, which honors individuals who have made significant contributions to the baseball card hobby, by SABR’s Baseball Cards Research Committee. The Jefferson Burdick Award was first presented in 2020, and the inaugural winner was Michael Aronstein, who was our guest for Episode 4 of Season 4 (you can listen to that episode HERE).

But that means that of the seven winners of the Jefferson Burdick Award, I have interviewed two of them. Or, if we were going to say that in terms Baseball Reference would display on the MBH profile there, I’m batting 0.2857. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. Congratulations to Gary for the well-deserved recognition. He truly is one of the best to ever do it.

Spring Training has been going on, which means the 33^rd Annual NINE Spring Training Conference took place in Tempe, Arizona last week. Our friend, Willie Steele, who is the Co-Director of the conference and W.P. Kinsella biographer, reached out to let me know he was not the only person there wearing a My Baseball History shirt, and sent me this photo as proof. First of all, if this is you in this photo, thank you for the public support. Please shoot me an email so I can send you a gift.

And second of all, if you’re reading this right now and don’t have an MBH shirt of your own, I want YOU to email me, too, so we can sort that out and get one to you. They’re $20 each, plus shipping, and they help cover the costs of hosting the website and disseminating the podcast to all of the different platforms where you can listen to the show across the world.

Don’t forget, it’s a huge help when you Rate and Review the podcast on whatever platform you choose to listen. 5-Star ratings help our podcast get shown on more people’s suggested podcast pages, which means more people will hear our show. It just takes a couple of seconds of your time, but it really helps us a lot. And of course, liking us on social media, interacting with our posts, and sharing things with your friends is great, too. Feel free to forward this email to anyone in your life who loves baseball, and hopefully they’ll enjoy the podcast and learn a thing or two. But no matter how you choose to support us, even if it’s just by listening, we appreciate you being here.

Until next time, I’m Dan Wallach, and this is My Baseball History.