Book-a-Day Review: The Baseball Maniac’s Almanac

The Baseball Maniac’s Almanac: The Absolutely, Positively, and Without Question Greatest Book of Facts, Figures, and Astonishing Lists Ever Compiled, edited by Bert Randolph Sugar with Ken Samelson (Sports Publishing, 2019)

I love almanacs. Where else can you find so much information — useful or trivial, interesting or no — in one volume?

The Almanac consists of scores of records for batters and pitchers as well as chapters on the Hall of Fame, awards, managers, fielding, All-Star Games, the World Series, teams, “relatives,” and and “miscellany,” which contains all the things that couldn’t fit into the other categories. There’s also a team-by-team history. Each notation is included in a very comprehensive table of contents

Sugar, who was also an expert in boxing, died in 2012, but his work lives on, thanks to people like Samelson and Jason Katzman, who played a major role in updating the new release (he was also the editor for my Hank Greenberg book). Look for a Bookshelf Conversation with Katzman in the near future where we will discus the process of putting something like this together.

“Statistics…have been a part of baseball — indeed, the very motor of the sport — since the dawn of the game,” Sugar wrote in the introduction, “even if in the beginning their number was so few they could be entered on a postcard with more than enough room left for an oversized one-cent postage stamp,” as he gives very brief chronology of the evolution of record-keeping.

“Now I have always considered myself as part of that amateur array of baseballogists, one of a large group of enthusiasts who accumulate lists of stats …. But it wasn’t until I met a fellow traveler…named Jack McLain that I realized that my variations were as nothing as compared to those Jack had conceived — his lists defying normal categorization, like “Most Pitching Wins by Zodiac Sign,” “Most Home Runs by State of Birth….”

Indeed this is a little problem I’ve had with trivia: it can get quite a bit out of hand — Most home runs on an odd-numbered day in a month ending in “-er” by a left-handed Irishman between 5’3″ and 5’7.” But “legitimate” questions are in the eye of the inquisitor.

Needless to say, this is not a book most people sit down and read cover to cover. Some might consider it “bathroom reading,” you know, when you have a few minutes here and there. I guarantee there will be dozens of “I never knew that” to be found.