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Why was The Baseball Encyclopedia important to early sabermetric research?

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Green retro manual baseball scoreboard beyond an empty, neatly mowed baseball field with brown infield dirt and striped grass outfield. — Sabermetrics A scoreboard provides some – but not necessarily the most useful – data on player and team performances in baseball.

Published in 1969, The Baseball Encyclopedia was a foundational resource for early sabermetrics because it provided the first comprehensive compendium of major-league baseball statistics dating back to 1871.1

While the encyclopedia itself was not a work of sabermetrics, it served as an essential data source for researchers. Amateurs and analysts, most notably Bill James, mined its wealth of historical information to conduct original studies. James utilized data gleaned from the encyclopedia, alongside box scores from The Sporting News, to create his influential Baseball Abstract, which introduced key concepts such as "runs created," the "Pythagorean winning percentage," and the "defensive spectrum". By making decades of historical performance data accessible, the encyclopedia empowered a new generation of analysts to move beyond conventional wisdom and pursue objective knowledge about the game.123