Batting

In 2012, SABR named F.C. Lane as an honoree of the Henry Chadwick Award, given to baseball's greatest researchers.

Lane (1896-1984) was the editor and a prolific writer for Baseball Magazine from 1912 through 1937, and then served as editor of the Little Red Book of Major League Baseballthrough 1948. The author of hundreds of editorials, interviews and articles about how the game was or should be played, Lane wrote forward-thinking pieces about, for example, how batting average could be misleading, opining that different batting outcomes should have different weights. It would be a few more generations before his wisdom began to win the day.

Lane authored several books in his day, but Batting was the only one on baseball. First printed in 1925 and republished by SABR as a paperback in 2001, Batting collects the wisdom and insights of over 250 hitters and baseball figures. Lane interviewed extensively and compiled tips and advice on everything from batting stances to beanballs. Legendary baseball figures such as Ty Cobb, Casey Stengel, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Rogers Hornsby, and Babe Ruth reveal the secrets of such integral and interesting parts of the game as how to choose a bat, the ways to beat a slump, common baseball player superstitions, how to outguess the pitcher, even the best way to deal with unhappy fans and the press.

The e-book edition includes all the text of the original classic (along with accompanying advertisements), and the biographical introduction written by Frederick Ivor-Campbell for the 2001 paperback edition. The index of names by Leverett T. Smith Jr. is also included in the e-book edition, sans page numbers of course (e-books do not have fixed page lengths.)