A New Nine

What do Charlie Comiskey, Frank Grant, Clark Griffith, Ned Hanlon, Connie Mack, Wilbert Robinson, Sol White, George Wright, and Harry Wright all have in common? They're members of the Baseball Hall of Fame and are not included as playable characters in my Strat-O-Matic set because they were inducted in non-player categories. They were all players in the nineteenth century, however, and they're all bona fide Hall members, so they ought to be included in my league! And with nine more potential players (only one of whom, Griffith, is a pitcher), we would easily end up with enough guys to create a fourth team -- and without resorting to the use of early twentieth-century players such as Christy Matthewson or the middle infielders from "Baseball's Sad Lexicon".

Consequently, I've commenced the long, laborious, and most likely foolish attempt to build Strat-O-Matic stats for these gentlemen. To get started, I'm diving into Baseball Reference to get better acquainted with the site and how to find and manipulate the data I'll need to crunch. My task has some additional complexity because two players (Grant and White) were early Negro League stars for whom little data is available and two others (the Wright brothers -- no, not those Wright brothers!) date back to, literally, the dawn of professional baseball. Despite these challenges, I'm excited about exploring the numbers and bringing some new guys into my little fantasy league!