There used to be a website called The Baseball Library, and the people who ran it were kind enough to give relatively unknown writers a place to publish pieces about baseball. It was a wonderful way for people like me to amplify their work, and I happily took advantage of it.
That site doesn’t exist anymore, but I recently went hunting for some of the pieces I published there, hoping some may be worthy of pulling out of the dusty corners of the internet, polishing up a bit, and reintroducing them.
I went looking for one piece in particular, because I was quite proud of the title. Around the time the Hall of Fame changed their Veterans Committee voting process (again), I took the opportunity to look at their previous work and illustrate how poorly it had been done. To do that, I compared two catchers from the 1910s-20s, one who’d been elected (Ray Schalk) and one who hadn’t (Wally Schang). And I called it…
The Schalk-Schang Redemption.
(I will now pause to let the applause die down.)
Okay, maybe I’m taking too much credit, and maybe I’m a big fan of The Shawshank Redemption and can’t be objective about my own play on the movie title. I wrote the article only a few years after the film was released, so it was still fresh in the minds of most people, and the names of the players, when said together, just seemed to be a perfect fit. To me anyway.
I did manage to track down that article, and I must say that the title is easily the best part of it. Reading it now gives me some cringey moments. I mean, I actually wrote that Goose Goslin shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame. Just horrific. The tone, in particular, is so packed with certitude that I kinda want to go back and smack 30-something year old me.
That said, my main points in the piece were correct:
The Veterans Committee was pretty terrible, historically, in choosing players for the Hall of Fame. Not much has changed there, sad to say, with Harold Baines being the most recent example of how those committees still haven’t figured things out.
Ray Schalk really wasn’t a worthy selection to the Hall of Fame, and Wally Schang was absolutely the better baseball player between the two.
Back in September, 2001, when I first wrote and published the article, I concluded that neither should be in the Hall of Fame, they were roughly equal in value, but that Schang was likely better. Those conclusions were wrong. They weren’t of equal value - Schang (47.9 WAR) was decidedly more valuable than Schalk (33.2 WAR) - and Schang likely does belong in the Hall of Fame.
During my hunt for the article, I searched for the title, because it’s pretty darned specific and I thought it would yield the best results. I was right, and was able to unearth a copy of it in the Wayback Machine. Please go read it and sit in awe of the mediocre analytical skills I possessed 22 years ago.
Also during the search of my very specific article title, I came across a couple of places where it had been used as a source, which is always flattering. And then I came across a different mention of the phrase “Schalk Schang Redemption”, by a pretty famous baseball writer…
Bill James.
Here’s the link to an article he published on his website in 2017, about 16 years after I published mine. The overall subject is different than my critique of the Veterans Committee. Instead, it’s a ranking of the best catchers from the early 20th Century. Scroll down to the final section, and you’ll find that it’s called “7. The SchalkSchang Redemption.”
In that section, James proceeds to note that Schalk and Schang occupied the same page in a baseball encyclopedia, had a remarkably similar number of career at-bats, and that Schalk’s value came primarily from his defense while Schang’s came from his offense. He also notes how Schang played for a string of very good teams, that Schalk likely doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame, and that Schang may well have been the better player. In other words, he made many of the same points I made 16 years earlier, and selected precisely the same title.
In case you’re wondering, no, he did not cite my article as a source.
Now, for the most part, I’m not making any accusations here. The points both James and I made are pretty obvious ones for anyone who would decide to spend the time comparing these two players, so it’s certainly possible, maybe even likely, that as soon as he elected to compare the two, the result was going to cover much of the same ground that I had already covered. I encourage readers to look at both articles and draw your own conclusions about the content.
As for the title, well, I’m less charitable about that.
It’s unique, it’s funny, and I came up with it all by myself nearly 22 years ago. I’ve never seen it anywhere else, in any form, outside of my article from 2001 and legitimate citations of that article, and I am struggling to believe that Bill James just randomly, and independently, thought up the exact same title 16 years later.
I’m not telling you what to think, please be your own judge. But I am telling you what I think.
I think he saw my article.
I think he liked the title.
And I think he copied it without attribution.
That’s sort of a weird compliment in a way, I guess. But I’d have appreciated a citation much more.