I’ve been working on a SABR biography about one of my favorite ballplayers, Bill Wakefield, who set a Mets’ team record for pitching appearances in 1964, the only year he played in the major leagues and Casey Stengel’s final complete season of managing, so you know that he has some stories to tell. In doing this short biography, it occurred to me that the SABR biography series has taken the place of one of Bill’s outstanding projects, the alphabetical series of biographies he started with Rob Neyer (I think)  in the 1990s and abandoned somewhere in the "A"s. No one can replicate Bill’s prose style or Rob’s research skills, of course, (except maybe Bill can research, and Rob can write, at each other's level of skill)  but these SABR bios are pretty uniformly well-written and are a real contribution to historical and factual understanding of the lives and baseball careers of the thousands of MLB players who have never been (and will probably never be) the subject of book-length biographies.

Very often, I suspect, the lives of these thousands of players have been written in bits and pieces, newspaper accounts of various ballgames and seasons, articles written about the teams of which they were a part, overviews of issues in which their names come up, etc., but these hit-and-miss pieces often contain contradictions and downright incorrect information.  (Wakefield’s signing bonus, for example, has appeared in print as $30,000, $50,000 and $60,000.) By devoting an entire article to straightening out these facts, semi-facts, and fictions through the research standards demanded by SABR, these player-bios are raising our level of understanding of baseball and of American culture.

When you read a few of these SABR-bios, most of them longer and far more detailed than Bill’s and Rob’s were (though devoid of Bill’s and Rob’s perceptive analysis, for the most part), you come to understand how doomed the original alphabetical approach was: before they ever started the "B"s, several new outstanding players whose names began with "A" must have debuted in the majors, now all too late to be included properly in the alphabetical listing. Even if Bill and Rob had begun a parallel project, that of adding names retroactively to the alphabetical listings, that, too, would have eventually required that there be an addendum to the addendum, a never-ending project that would only take away from their ability to make progress on the "B"s and the "C"s.  Simply, two men (or even two supermen like Bill and Rob) are just too few to tackle a project as huge as this one was, but the membership of SABR is, I think, sufficient to the task.  In addition to being a huge project in itself, this was also a project that was doomed by being in print, as opposed to on-line, where revisions, additions, omissions, corrections, and new bios can easily appear.

I’m having a lot of fun researching and writing the Bill Wakefield chapter. For one thing, it gives me a real charge to be in communication with someone I’ve admired since I was eleven years old, and admire more now that I’ve met him, spoken with him over the phone, and exchanged more emails with him than I can count. That’s just fun for me.

Wakefield is a rarity, a highly intelligent, highly educated (Stanford ‘66) professional athlete who is both articulate and eager to share his experiences. I imagine your average ex-athlete to be far less accessible than Wakefield is, being either dead, suspicious of "reporters," non-English-speaking, non-verbal, in ill health, or just a bad interview, but even those are not insuperable barriers to writing a good biography, just barriers to having as good a time as I’m having writing Wakefield’s.

Anyway, I may print here some of the Wakefield piece when I get it finished, or a summary or something of the sort, but my main point here is to ask if anyone is interested in doing their own biographies of players they admire. Chances are that many of your favorite athletes’ bios will already have appeared on the SABR site, but there are still many yet to be done—I thought that some of you BJOLers would be interested in a player whose bio is as yet unwritten. In the "Comments’ section, if you’re one of these BJOLers, whose biography would you’d most like to do? Even if you don't ending up writing it, tyou might inspire someone else to take a shot at it. It might be a favorite of yours, as Wakefield was of mine, or just some obscure player who caught your eye for any reason, or someone you happened to see play a few times and have wondered about, or anything, really. Through the force of sheer numbers, I’m hoping that SABR will eventually (in my lifetime? Maybe not) account for every significant player in MLB history.

There are a lot of really good writers on BJOL, so many of you will just be able to write a bio straight out of the box. But if anyone is feeling that his research skills (or motivation) exceeds his ability to put it all down in prose form, I’m sure you could find a co-author among the professional-level writers here on this website. I’ll be glad to share my own opinion of suitable co-authors for any one entry. There are enough skillful writers here that you could easily find a collaborator, who may be willing to share the research burden, or the documentation-style burden, or any other part of the project that seems intimidating to you. In the writing-professor part of my life, I’ve often paired up writers whose skills complement each other, or offered suggestions as to what needs to be worked on further, or techniques they might want to try.

But let’s start by seeing the names of players whose SABR-bios are lacking, and anyone who might interested in moving that project along. The FAQ is here: http://sabr.org/content/bioproject-FAQs but I’ll pass along some facts you may not be aware of. (That link may not work if you’re not a SABR member, but I assume there are many here who are. You will need to be a member to submit a player bio. BTW, I keep calling them "player bios" but they also include owner, manager, ballpark bios. I just read the one on Hilltop Park in Manhattan, the proto-Yankees’ first ballpark and was pleased to learn that I actually worked on that site one summer long after it was torn down—Columbia built its medical school and hospital on the site, and that’s where I worked, installing air-conditioners and TV sets in hospital rooms in the summer of 1973. WARNING: leave a lot of time to cruise the SABR players-bio site. This stuff is worse than Pringles.) Anyway, the facts, ma’am, are that it’s fairly amazing how many famous players have not have their bios done, and how many obscure players have.  You may be astonished at the Hall of Famers (Johnny Bench, to use their example) are missing bios. (Dan, your go.) And negligible players (their contrast to Bench is Bob Montgomery) have complete write-ups. So check it out and see if there isn’t someone whose life you know well, or want to know well, who’s on the list of the missing.