Society for American Baseball Research
Collegiate Baseball Committee Newsletter
June 2003 (03-3)

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the position or official policy of SABR or its Collegiate Baseball Committee

REMINDER!

The SABR meeting in Denver is now less than a month away so make your travel, hotel and registration arrangements as soon as possible. The Collegiate Baseball Committee will meet at 1:30 PM on Friday, July 11th, so we hope you can be there to discuss future plans, the website and other projects that might be interest. Rick and Jay will both be attending the meeting.

WEBSITE UPDATE

Here is an update from Rick Benner regarding the details now provided on our website (www.ncaa-baseball.com/sabr). Although there is still a lot of work to be done, here are some observations concerning the work up to this point.

Number of Major Leaguers
Not surprisingly, the University of Southern California (USC) has the largest number of major leaguers confirmed through the 2002 season with 93. The others are:

These totals are likely to change for many of the schools when the 2003 debuts are included. Schools such as St. Mary's, Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Santa Clara and Villanova have a large number of players who are either unconfirmed or who years played in college are not yet known.

37 of the colleges have not produced a known major leaguer, though some of these schools have a potential player who is not yet confirmed.

Unconfirmed Players
Though the goal of this Committee is to identify major league players who played college baseball, and to confirm this information by isolating what seasons they played on their college team, many schools still have "unconfirmed" players.

The information on these web pages were gathered from a variety of sources, from the college's own information and wbsites to Baseball America's The Baseball Draft, The Sporting News Baseball Register, previous work by this Committee, namely Cappy Gagnon, current members and researchers and by a lot of digging through yearbooks and library archives.

Still, this leaves us with a lot of players who have been identified with a certain college, but are not yet confirmed as having played there. The following colleges have ten or more unidentified players. Many of these players will be eliminated because they did not play college baseball at that school.

Fordham 38, Penn 23, Holy Cross 21, Georgetown 19, Boston College 16, Manhattan 15, Notre Dame 15, San Francisco 13, Niagara 13, Lehigh 12, Santa Clara 10, Missouri 10.

For those of you who would like to contribute, just glance through the pages of the school or schools that interest you or are nearby and look for the items in italics. That indicates that the information is still needed.

Critical need geographical areas are the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, New York City, Chicago area, Buffalo/Syracuse area, Philadelphia area and Boston. I hope to visit some schools in the Boston area this summer as I travel to New Hampshire, and perhaps take in a couple of the eastern Pennsylvania schools on the way back. But it is not only the major metropolitan areas that we need help with, and it is not always the pre-World War II players that we lack information on. There are 157 colleges with one or more unconfirmed players, probably even one near you.

There are 198 colleges with one or more players on the list where the years that a player played baseball at that college is needed. In some cases, one or more years are known, but the entire career at that college is still at issue. These colleges have the greatest number of "years played" needed: Santa Clara 53, Fordham 52, Saint Mary's 51, Villanova 43, Holy Cross 38, Boston College 35, Georgetown 35, Penn 34, Brown 33, Manhattan 26, Pepperdine 23, Oregon 22, Western Michigan 22, Notre Dame 21, Maryland 21, Bucknell 20.

19th Century Players
Though a number of colleges claim to have played intercollegiate baseball back into the 1800s, we identified only 55 Division I colleges with at least one possible 19th Century player. I say possible because players during that century are not always identifiable. A number of colleges of that era also ran an academy or prep school for post-high school students who were not quite ready for collegiate academics. At some prep schools or academies, an athlete might be allowed to participate in intercollegiate athletics, and sometimes not, but a college may not make the distinction when compiling a list of their major leaguers.

Also, finding reliable rosters and/or box scores are not that easy either. Most colleges produce a student yearbook, but these generally did not come into vogue until the early 1900s. Even then, since baseball is a spring sport and yearbooks needed to be printed early to be distributed by graduation, baseball information is either omitted or relegated to a subsequent edition. For example, at Dartmouth the 1910 yearbook contains information on the 1908 baseball team, and this continues until the mid-1930s.

19th Century yearbooks tend to be produced by fraternities and overlook athletics altogether. But at most schools they don't exist. These colleges have the most potential 19th century players: Holy Cross 23, Penn 20, Brown 19, Fordham 14, St. Mary's 10.

Since SABR already has a 19th Century committee, chaired by Reed Howard, we may be able to get some assistance there. He has already been gracious enough to provide lineups for a number of teams.

Other Research Needs
There are also a number of other needs to help us enhance the website product. You'll notice three other items included on each college's web page; the history of the name of the college, the baseball team history and the Hall of Fame.

The names of the college are included to assist you, the researcher, in identifying what school a player is associated with. Newspaper articles on players tend to use a common form of the college name which can create some confusion as to what school is being referred to. Having the chronology of the progression of the college name can assist in locating what particular school a player belongs to. For Division I there are 33 colleges that still need name history. The percentage will increase as we start to add smaller schools.

We have not yet identified the baseball history of 162 colleges. Again, this is significant because a potential player could not have played baseball for a college that did not have a baseball team. One example is Davidson College. We had Doc McJames as a possible player there. He made his major league debut in 1895, but Davidson did not begin baseball until 1902. Goodbye, McJames!

Division I Conferences
No surprises here, but below are the number of confirmed major leaguers by conference as they are now aligned for the 2003 season.

In defense of the Big Sky, as a conference they dropped baseball in 1975 and the only current Big Sky school with a baseball program, Sacramento State, competes as a baseball independent. If the ACC adds Miami, Syracuse, and Boston College as currently contemplated, then the ACC will probably move up to 2nd.

SUMMER DRAFT

Our webmaster, Jeremy Mills, has done an evaluation of the summer draft and provides this interesting view of his research findings:

Below is some quick analysis from the recently completed 2003 Major League Baseball Draft. A complete copy of the tables by school is available on the SABR website (http://www.ncaa-baseball.com/sabr/2003draft.htm) .

Of the 1,480 players chosen during the draft, 619 (42%) were drafted from 4-year colleges and 313 (21%) were selected from 2-year colleges. The highest concentration of collegians was taken in the first half of the draft, while the number of junior college players chosen increased throughout the draft. The table below breaks the draft into 10 groups of 148 picks (approximately 5 rounds each) and shows the trends in 4-year and 2-year players chosen.

Of the 619 players selected from 4-year schools, 518 were from Division I universities. The “BCS” conferences dominated this list, with the Big 12 leading the way with 52 selections, followed by the SEC with 49 and the Pac 10 with 45. All 30 Division I baseball conferences had at least one player selected. Here are totals by conference:

The collegiate players selected came from 265 4-year colleges and 169 2-year colleges. Arizona State had the most draft picks of any university, with 12 players selected. Cal State Fullerton was second with 11 selections, and 10 other colleges (all 4-year) had more than 6 players taken in the draft. The most players selected from a 2-year college was 6, which was the case for 5 schools (Cowley County in Kansas, Dixie in Utah, Grayson County in Texas, Meridian in Mississippi and Sacramento in California). The following table shows the number of schools that had each number of picks (from 1 to 12). A complete list of the number of picks for each college will be posted on the Collegiate Committee website in late June.

As we head through the post season, it is interesting to note how many of the draft picks were still playing at the time of their selection. The draft took place between the regional and super regional rounds of the Division I post season, and 111 draft picks were on the 16 teams still playing at that time. Fifty-four of those players will compete in the College World Series, while 57 of the players were eliminated in the super regional round. The following table includes the number of draft picks for each of these 16 schools.

Finally, there has been quite a bit of discussion lately about the drafting of college players versus drafting high school players. The following table lists the number of draft choices by each team, broken down by the level of the last school attended. Not surprisingly, Oakland and Toronto are near the bottom of the list in terms of high school selections. It’s also interesting that Oakland was the first team to stop drafting (after the 40th round), and all but 4 teams made selections in the 50th round.

“FOREARM BASHES”

A special thanks to all of the researchers out there who have provided valuable information and furthered the “cause”:

Jon Daly- matched more than half of the possible Holy Cross players to the years they played for the Crusaders.

Pat Laverty- matched sixteen 19th Century Brown players with the years played, and eliminated three others who did not.

Joel Rippel- confirmed years played for all Minnesota players and eliminated a number of others who did not play for the Golden Gophers.

Some of you did some excellent research into non-Division I players and we will recognize all of these efforts as we post the schools in future newsletters. For those of you looking for a way to contribute, there are plenty of facts waiting to be discovered.

Hope to see you at the SABR Convention next month!