I have been working for the past few months on a project to get the stats for the 1911 Eau Claire Commissioners in the Minnesota-Wisconsin League. The "Minny" League had some problems that year, and two teams, Red Wing and Wausau, actually dropped out before the season ended. Other teams had money issues. One of those teams was Duluth. In fact, Duluth didn't even have the money to pay their official scorekeeper. In defiance, the scorekeeper decided to hold on to the stats. Thus, the league was unable to issue final statistics.
Because I'm on the Eau Claire Baseball Memorabilia Committee, and because this committee is considering re-vamping Carson Park and paying tribute to all the former Major Leaguers that played for Eau Claire, I decided I needed a full roster of those 1911 players. And as long as I was getting a roster together, I figured I may as well see if I can piece together the season in stats from the boxscores listed in the paper. Well, there were only a couple times where the game had to be re-constructed to figure out the stats, but by and large all the information was there.
Although the work was a bit tedious, it was actually sort of fun. I found myself rooting for the team and complaining about the players. I couldn't understand why this guy named Kick just had to bat leadoff, despite the fact he couldn't hit and wasn't all that fast. Another guy was the hottest hitter on the team before being benched for a new arrival. And another guy was a late season pickup who, if you combined his fielding percentage and batting average you still couldn't come up with 1.000. In fact, you take his slugging percentage plus fielding and you still don't get there (.946). He played 13 games at 2B and had 18 errors. That's Rickie Weeks-like! This guy's name is Foss, and I bet you won't see him in any baseball encyclopedia. Oh, plus there was the race for the hitting crown--the chase for 100 hits (in 109 games, there were four that made it). All good stuff. And yesterday, I finished the project!
Next up is 1912, though I know I'm missing at least two Eau Claire games from that season. Burleigh Grimes made his professional debut for EC that season, but even he was not enough to keep the league going. They folded early--there were only four teams to begin with--due to lack of money. Again, no stats were officially sent in to League offices.
One thing I learned from doing this is that you cannot trust the newspaper for accuracy in those days. Rarely would a day go by where I wouldn't find some sort of math error. Even the sanctity of the League Standings was compromised most of the time. With a week left in the season, the paper reported something like one fewer win and two more losses than the team actually had. They offered no explanation as to why it was mixed up. For weeks at a time it would be off, the magically someone must have reconciled it. It's a good lesson for researchers--don't take everything to be correct just because it was in a paper.
