How Did Van Beek Make The Lineups?

Digging into another National Pastime mystery

How Did Van Beek Make The Lineups?

Okay — I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the National Pastime rosters and lineups.

If it hasn’t been clear enough yet, I’ll spell it out for you. I think that Clifford Van Beek kept careful track of boxscores as the season went on.

I mean, the evidence that he did this is simply overwhelming. The lineups for the following teams are exactly right:

• Philadelphia Athletics

• Washington Senators

• St. Louis Browns

• St. Louis Cardinals

• Pittsburgh Pirates

• Cincinnati Reds

The lineups for the following teams are extremely close:

• New York Yankees (the only error is that Rice didn’t play in right field)

• Detroit Tigers (the lineup was never used, but Van Beek got the players in the batting order positions they most frequently appeared in)

• Cleveland Indians (Luke Sewell and Jonah Goldman were transposed)

• Boston Red Sox (Charlie Berry went off to coach football in early September)

• Philadelphia Phillies (technically right once you understand how Van Beek handled in-season trades)

• Boston Braves (you could argue that Van Beek’s lineup is the best of all possible options facing him)

• Brooklyn Dodgers (Del Bissonette and Glenn Wright should be swapped)

• New York Giants (Freddy Leach and Wally Roettger need to have their positions swapped)

That leaves the Chicago Cubs, who were off because George Kelly received a card instead of Clyde Beck, and the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox are a complicated case, and will receive a post of their own.

In both of the problematic cases, Van Beek’s lineups were off chiefly because of the players he chose to card — not because he made laughable errors with his lineups, or because he was simply guessing. He got too much right for it to just be a lucky guess.

How did Van Beek do it? With dozens of lineups used by each team, how did he figure out which ones were the most commonly used? How did he get things like the outfield positions exactly right?

Baseball Guide

I’ll clue you in on a little secret: Van Beek didn’t get this information from any baseball guides.

There’s no batting order information in the 1931 Reach Guide, or in the 1930 Spalding Guide (sadly, I don’t have access to the 1931 Spalding Guide; if you do, please contact me). I mean, there’s nothing even close to it.

I’ve shown you this before, but I might as well show it to you again. If Van Beek had used either one of those guides, he would have worked with something like this for the batting stats:

He could have supplemented this information with information from another page:

However, this graph that listed the walks, strikeouts, and times hit by pitch only included players with at least 10 RBIs.

You’ll note, of course, that there was no fielding information listed. Van Beek would have had to reconstruct that from pages like this:

Again, there is simply no information here about which player started most frequently at which position, much less anything about batting orders.

I simply don’t see how he could have done this with the baseball guide.

Boxscore Coverage

I simply have to conclude that Van Beek used original boxscores.

And, honestly, I think he used The Sporting News.

I came to this conclusion when I looked at a random sports page in the Green Bay Press-Gazette:

From Green Bay Press-Gazette, June 10, 1930

Do you know what’s missing here? Easy: the boxscores. There isn’t a single one to be found in these pages.

Now, it is possible that Van Beek could have used The Chicago Tribune:

From Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1930, page 21

I don’t know how easy it would have been to buy a Chicago newspaper in Green Bay, Wisconsin every single day, however.

I think it’s more likely that Clifford Van Beek simply used The Sporting News:

From The Sporting News, June 12, 1930, page 5

It’s not much to look at today, with less-than-ideal microfilm scans and type that is difficult to make out. However, I think this is the simplest answer to the problem.

Van Beek would have had to create a pretty intense ledger to keep track of all the lineups through 1,200+ games. The evidence that he did this is strong, however. I’m unaware of any other contemporary source that compiled the most common lineups for every single team.

But, of course, it wasn’t perfect. Next time we’re going to look into what I think was his biggest roster mistake.