At any given time during the baseball season, there are 750 Major League Baseball players on active rosters.  Writing biographies on all 750 of them would be a daunting task.  However, that would not even come close in comparison to the task of writing biographies on every major leaguer who ever lived.  That would be a near impossible feat.

That is the ultimate goal, though, of SABR’s BioProject, and SABR member Mark Armour is leading the way.  While he does not believe that the goal will be achieved over night, having several members chipping away at it will at least will allow progress to be made. 

“Back about five years ago or so, when I first brought up the idea, I thought it would be great for SABR, a unifying project where a lot of members could get involved,” he said. 

“Writing a biography about every player in major league history, which is the way I originally presented it, is an extraordinarily daunting task, but each of those bite-sized chunks, a story about one person, is not a daunting task.  It is an impossible task made up of a very large number of possible tasks.”

While leading the project and writing several of the biographies himself, it seems as though all Armour ever does is write.  He is also the co-author (along with fellow SABR member Dan Levitt) of the well-respected Paths to Glory, a book published in 2003 about how World Series winning teams built themselves into champions.  However, he remembers that when he first joined SABR, he did not do much writing. 

“I think I joined SABR because I thought that’s where all the serious writing and research was going on, and I was hoping that some day I could do something like that,” he said.  “For the most part, I was more of a reader for quite a few years after I joined.  I didn’t really write that much until the 90s when I had a computer and the Internet, and I was able to hone my writing and my ideas by writing long notes or posts to SABR-L.  I became more comfortable writing the more I wrote.”

Armour said that many of the biographies that he is currently working on pertain to his next big undertaking, a book on the life story of former Red Sox player and manager Joe Cronin, who also later became president of the American League.

“I’ve been delving into Cronin’s life in a way that I haven’t ever done for a person before,” Armour said.  “I visited his boyhood home in San Francisco.  I’ve talked to his daughter and sons.  There are 12 people alive who played for Cronin, and I have talked to seven of them.”

Armour admits that, since Cronin had such a long and successful career in baseball, the book on Cronin will be a gradual process.

“Cronin was a manager when he was 26, so he had almost 45 years where he was a manager or above,” he said.  “There’s just a lot there, in terms of how to manage a team, build a team, and the issues he dealt with as president.  I’m finding that I really like the story and hope I can do it justice.”

Evidenced by his work on Paths to Glory and leading SABR’s BioProject, Armour surely will be able to do just that.