Fill in the blank

Had to get a tire replaced this morning. While sitting in the waiting room, I picked up a recent copy of The Sporting News which carried feature about the questionnaires the publication would hand out to players each year in preparation for the defunct Baseball Register.

This article included reproductions of the forms from Willie Mays in 1951; Rocky Colavito (undated); Warren Spahn (1947); Bill Mazeroski (Jan. 2, but no year); Ted Williams (1939); and Roger Maris (1957). They asked for such information as hobbies, playing experience, name of spouse and children, etc.

What caught my eye was the space for “ancestry.”

The form changed over the years. In earlier versions, it was just a blank line for the player to fill in. Later on, there were a series of “check lines”:

___ English ___ French ___ German ___ Hebrew ___Irish ___ Other

You get the idea. Mays wrote “Negro” on his blank line. Maz put down “Polish” in his “other” line; Williams wrote “Welsch/French,” neglecting to include his maternal Mexican heritage. Conspicuous by its absence: Italian. (Of course, there were practically no Latin America presence in those days.)

Maybe I’m being too sensitive, but one of these designations is not like the others.

Steve Gietschier, former senior managing editor of research at The Sporting News, said in an email

The Sporting News began the practice of distributing biographical questionnaires to major league players and prospects as part of the effort to publish the Baseball Register starting in 1940. As you know, each Register entry included not only stats but also biographical data, including such questions as: Hobbies, How Your Name is Pronounced, and Most Outstanding Achievement in Baseball.

Most players filled out the questionnaires. Some did so year after year. The early ones make for interesting reading.

When I started at TSN in 1986, we were no longer distributing questionnaires. The thinking was two-fold: first, we were getting the data we needed directly from the clubs, and second, modern players were simply not willing to fill out questionnaires.

Tim Wiles, director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown said

For much of the 20th century, the Hall of Fame sent very similar questionnaires to players, stopping sometime in the 1980s after the return rate plummeted in reverse proportion to player incomes…

Our questionnaires also have an ethnicity line, with some interesting results.

When I started here, Greg Maddux and Steve Carlton were the only guys to win 4 Cy Youngs. While both are a bit iconoclastic and have senses of humor, they both list “Native American” as their ethnicity.

In a subsequent note, Wiles wrote, “It all comes down to: By whose definition? My favorite permutation is: Is Fergie Jenkins an African-American, even though he’s Canadian?