Sports Biblio Digest, 12.8.19: Remembering Seymour Siwoff
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Beauty of Baseball Boredom; Baseball Fans and Broadcasters; Marvin Miller at the Smithsonian; Being Like Wilt; Earl Campbell; 76ers Crossover Art; The Ethics of Walking in Cricket; An Architectural Ski Tour; Welcome Back Wankdorf
* * * * * * * *
The man who taught many sports fans, mavens, broadcasters and front office officials alike how to really keep score was remembered this week as the “recording angel of statistics,” among other things.
Seymour Siwoff, who died last Friday at the age of 99, did make statistical analysis an integral part of sports beyond baseball. But he viewed his work as less about numbers and more about history, long after he became owner of Elias Sports Bureau, the official record-keeping agency of North America’s professional sports leagues.
“What I enjoy most about statistics is the chance they give you to relive the past,” he has said.
That rich data became manna for fans, especially in already numbers-heavy baseball.
It’s been 50 years since a noted Sports Illustrated profile foreshadowed the analytical revolution to come, with Siwoff at the helm.Writes Jerry Kirshenbaum:
“In encouraging the proliferation of statistics, Siwoff has had the good sense to realize that they are valuable only insofar as they reflect what happened in yesterday's game and generate interest in what might happen tomorrow. They thus are tools primarily for the historian and the public-relations man, an insight that eludes the fetishist who indiscriminately collects meaningless statistics for no apparent reason but to talk to them, little caring that they often have nothing to say in reply.”
Siwoff’s scrapbooks with newspaper clippings were gradually replaced by computers, but the exhaustive modern analysis of statistics had its godfather, before the arrival of Bill James and including the fast-growing obsession over professional football.
Several months before he died, Siwoff sold off Elias, to his grandson, ending employment or ownership there going back to 1938, when he started out as an accountant.
Hot Stove Buffet
Boring baseball, as the hand-wringers like to say, but that’s part of the beauty of the game, in the minds of the purists;
The everlasting bond between baseball fans and broadcasters;
Before the advent of the Grapefruit and Cactus leagues, major-league baseball did spring training deep in the heart of Dixie;
Sen. Bernie Sanders isn’t just running for president, he’s making a big deal of halting minor-league contraction and wants to meet with Commissioner Rob Manfred;
Marvin Miller in being featured in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, another place where he’s being honored before the Baseball Hall of Fame, whose Veterans Committee is unlikely to serve up the name of the former players’ union boss for enshrinement once again. He’s in some interesting Smithsonian company, where an Andy Warhol painting of Pete Rose hangs.
A Few Good Reads
The recent failings of the U.S. men’s soccer program are occasionally blamed on the lack of identifying and developing Latino talent, but the issue is far more complicated than that, and this piece in The Nation suggests neglect that isn’t backed by any solid evidence. The problem isn’t diversity but talent, and it’s a dearth that runs across many ethnic and socioeconomic lines;
The German Bundesliga is trying some new ways to get American fans to tune in, but it’s rough sledding against the juggernaut of the English Premier League;
A Q & A with Kely Nascimento-DeLuca, aka the daughter of Pelé, who’s doing a documentary film, “Warriors of the Game,” about women’s soccer round the world;
A fresh look at Michael Murphy’s popular book “Golf in the Kingdom,” still highly inspirational since its publication in 1972;
The issue of walking in cricket is a considerable one, and here's a speculative piece at what noted philosophers may have thought of the practice;
In November, the Philadelphia 76ers staged an art exhibit to coincide with the launching of their crossover branding platform, and it includes custom jerseys, fashion, music and even cuisine. Among the illustrations is the legendary Julius Erving on a dunk;
An immigrant girl from India tried her hand at basketball, to feel more like an American living in West Virginia, and took to shooting free throws underhanded;
Meet the magician of NFL broadcasts, who wields the most creative TV camera in the game;
An architectural ski tour of Les Arcs, built 50 years ago as a modernist shrine in the French Alps;
Wankdorf Stadium, home of West Germany’s “Das Wunder Von Bern” victory in the 1954 World Cup finals, is getting its old name back as the Swiss champions Young Boys have completed a new sponsorship deal.
Sports Book News
James T. Farrell, the author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, was prodigious baseball fan. Just out from the University of Nebraska Press is Charles DeMotte’s “James T. Farrell and Baseball,” which focuses on the American writer’s realistic works set in southside Chicago in the early 1900s, including during the Black Sox years.
Here’s more from UNP in its spring 2020 catalogue.
Now Hear This
Earl Campbell biographer Asher Price is interviewed on the New Books in Sports podcast;
Official baseball historian John Thorn joins host Rob Neyer on the SABRcast.
* * * * * * * *
The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 187, published Dec. 8, 2019.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.