Total Baseball is a baseball

Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...

 encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn

John Thorn

John Thorn is a noted sports historian, and the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball.-Early life:Thorn was born in Stuttgart, West Germany. His Polish Jewish parents had come there as refugees. He immigrated to the United States in 1949...

 and Pete Palmer

Pete Palmer

Pete Palmer is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, Palmer's book The Hidden Game of Baseball is often referred to as providing the foundation upon which the field of sabermetrics was built.Palmer began his...

 in 1989. The latest edition, published in 2004, is its eighth. The encyclopedia contains seasonal and career statistics in numerous categories for every Major League

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...

 player, as well as historical, opinion, and year-by-year essays.

History

The idea for Total Baseball originated when two baseball statisticians and historians, Palmer and Thorn, realized that the current Baseball Encyclopedia endorsed by Major League Baseball contained numerous significant mistakes. These included miscalculations by earlier statisticians, typographic mistakes made by the original score keeper, and even "phantom" players who did not actually exist and were added to a box score incorrectly, Lou Proctor

Lou Proctor

Lou Proctor is an example of a "phantom ballplayer," an American baseball player listed in the baseball encyclopedias by mistake. Over two dozen "phantoms" have been expunged from baseball's official record book Total Baseball and its predecessor, The Baseball Encyclopedia.Proctor was not a...

 being a notable example. In addition, Thorn and Palmer took the liberty of correcting mistakes not commonly accepted by the baseball community, such as the apparent discovery that Ty Cobb

Ty Cobb

Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb , nicknamed "The Georgia Peach," was an American Major League Baseball outfielder. He was born in Narrows, Georgia...

 actually garnered 4,190 hits, not 4,191, or that Walter Johnson in fact had 417 career wins, not 416. Thorn and Palmer also included new, sabermetric statics developed by statisticians like Bill James

Bill James

George William “Bill” James is a baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics...

, such as runs created

Runs created

Runs created is a baseball statistic invented by Bill James to estimate the number of runs a hitter contributes to his team.-Purpose:James explains in his book, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, why he believes runs created is an essential thing to measure:With regard to an offensive...

 or total average

Total average

Total average is a baseball statistic devised by sportswriter Thomas Boswell in the 1970s. The statistic is designed to measure a hitter's overall offensive contributions....

. The first edition of Total Baseball sold 75,000 copies, and by its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia.