David Vincent

Renowned baseball researcher ‘the Sultan of Swat Stats’

David Vincent, a renowned baseball researcher whose vast knowledge of home run history earned him the nickname the Sultan of Swat Stats, died on Sunday in Centreville, Virginia. He was 67. His wife, Jolynne, said the cause was cancer.

Home runs have been a major attraction in baseball since Babe Ruth slugged 54 in 1920, his first season with the New York Yankees.

“In most sporting events, fans are attracted to the athlete who can run the fastest or jump the highest or throw a piece of equipment the farthest,” Vincent wrote in his book “Home Run: The Definitive History of Baseball’s Ultimate Weapon” (2007). “In baseball, this maximum event is hitting the ball out of the park.”

Vincent, who grew up near Boston rooting for the Red Sox and their slugger Ted Williams (career home run total: 521), was a computer systems engineer with a love of baseball who led the digitisation of the handwritten home run log of the Society for American Baseball Research, known as SABR.

He then maintained the log and regularly updated it.

The results of his work are found in two primary places: in “SABR Presents the Home Run Encyclopedia” (1996), a 1,310-page compendium of all major leaguers’ dingers through 1995 (it was edited by Vincent and Bob Mcconnell, who had previously overseen the log), and on the Baseballreference website, where every home run whacked (and surrendered) is meticulously detailed.

“He had the passion and real-world computer skills to make an impact on a project like that,” Jacob Pomrenke, director of editorial content at SABR, said. With home run history at his fingers, Vincent could discover nearly anything in the records and manufacture his own trivia.

“I’m that weirdo behind the home run,” Vincent said.

Jay son stark, a baseball writer who gave Vincent his Ruth ian nickname, said: “It’s one thing to say, ‘I’m the only person in America who has every home run hit on my computer,’ but another to be so willing to share it and make sure all that incredible research was used in a way that helped people appreciate and love baseball the way he loved it.”

Stark added: “He would research anything, no matter how wacky, offbeat or esoteric it was. He would drop everything, interrupt his day. He had a real job. But this was his passion.”

David William Vincent was born on 26 July, 1949, in Waltham, Massachusetts, to William Vincent, a firefighter, and the former Jean Busby, a homemaker. As a youngster, he was not a particularly adept Little Leaguer, but he learned how to score a game from the wife of the man who ran the league. Years later, he became an official scorer, first in the minor leagues and then with the Washington Nationals, for whom he had worked since 2005, when they moved from Montreal.

Vincent’s formal education focused on music, in which he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts and a doctorate from the University of Miami. He played drums and timpani and was a band director at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, but switched to computer work to support his family.

For many years, he worked for Electronic Data Systems, where he trained to be a computer systems engineer. He stayed at the company after it was acquired by Hewlettpackard in 2008.

Home runs were only one part of Vincent’s baseball research. For Retrosheet, the volunteer organisation that archives historical playby-play data, he created a log that recorded the number of games umpires called during their major league careers and where they were positioned for each game.

And he took over the work of another researcher, who had died, to list every player and manager ejected by an umpire, and why.

For his final project at Retrosheet, Vincent detailed the reasons games had been postponed or cancelled dating back to 1877; among them, rain, snow, darkness and the 9/11 attacks.

Like many stat geeks, David Smith, founder and president of Retrosheet, said, Vincent was obsessed.

“His computer skills were a necessary entry point,” he said, “but unless this subject drives you, you won’t spend time doing it.”

In addition to his wife Jolynne, he is survived by his son, Timothy, from his marriage to Shelley Holcomb, which ended in divorce.

“He had the passion and real-world computer skills to make an impact on a project like that”