Dow-Jones of Baseball

With the possible exception of the New York Stock Exchange, no U. S. occupation furnishes newspapers with more statistics than the game of baseball. Daily & weekly pitching, batting and fielding averages, compiled in elaborate, accurate and unintelligible code, form a regular feature of every U. S. sport page. To insure maximum attention, annual statistics are not released until the football season closes. By scanning charts, baseball addicts last week were able to find out exactly how every player in the National League performed during the summer of 1934. Leading batter was Pittsburgh's Paul Waner: 146 games; 217 hits; .362 average. Leading pitcher was not famed Jerome Herman ("Dizzy") Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals, who had equaled a 17-year-old record by winning 30 games, but New York's Carl Hubbell, whose "earned run average" was 2.30 per game.

According to legend, John A. Heydler, who last month retired as president of the National League, was the first man to keep batting, pitching and fielding averages. No. 1 contemporary baseball statistician is a one-legged, dyspeptic North Carolinian named Al Munro Elias. Started in 1917, the Al Munro Elias Baseball Bureau Inc. now supplies some 1,000 U. S. newspapers with daily & weekly statistics, releases yearly "unofficial" figures promptly at each season's close. The strange offices of the Al Munro Elias Bureau on Manhattan's 42nd Street contain the most elaborate baseball library in the world; a card index of every major league player for the last 20 years, with a lifetime record of his performances ; every box score kept since 1876. In the summer its eight clerks make a permanent record of every play in every major and most minor league games played in the U. S. In the winter, a staff of three checks figures, helps the National League compile "official" data such as was released last week.

A onetime shoe-clerk, dancing master and salad oil salesman, Al Munro Elias became a baseball statistician in 1914. Sick with indigestion, he took time off from work to watch ball games, amused himself by reducing them to figures. His first successful venture as a professional was a series of pamphlets sold in saloons, men's stores and hotels. The New York Evening Telegram soon began to buy his figures. In 1917, the National League made Al Munro Elias its statistician. Fourteen years ago he began to supply papers with his most famed daily feature : the leading batters in the major leagues. Since then the Al Munro Elias Bureau has become the Dow-Jones of the baseball industry.

Lean, dour, grey-haired, with black eyes, big ears and dark lines of concentration on his face, Al Munro Elias still spends all his spare time watching baseball games, marking each play nervously on a special pad. The Bureau office, where his brother Walter is general manager, is equipped with an adding machine. Al Munro Elias has his clerks operate it, uses their results to compile his own statistics in his head. He does most of his work at his apartment, except when visiting baseball training camps each spring. In 1928, when he was 56, Al Munro Elias lost his right leg in an auto accident. It interrupted the pursuit of his vocation for two months. Since then his Bureau has become a monopoly. His first competitor, George Moreland, long ago sent to prison for cashing bad checks, has since dropped out of sight. In addition to the age, birthday, batting average, professional ability and personal peculiarities of almost every big league baseball player, Al Munro Elias makes a habit of remembering his friends' middle names. He considers the "official" statistics released last week better than most, because they were identical with his own statistics, published just after the World Series.

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