David Neft

Last updated

David S. Neft (born January 9, 1937) is an American writer and historian who creates sports encyclopedias.

Contents

Early career

Neft was born in New York City, received a BA, MBA, and PhD (Statistics) from Columbia University, and worked as chief statistician for the polling company Louis Harris & Associates from 1963 to 1965.

Big Mac

In 1965, he was a founder of a company called Information Concepts, Inc. (ICI) and headed the first effort to compile a computerized database of baseball statistics. The task took more than three years, as Neft and a team of researchers travelled across the country to fill the gaping holes in baseball's statistical and biographical records. The resulting work was published in 1969 by the Macmillan Publishing Company. Although the official title was The Baseball Encyclopedia , the massive book was generally referred to as "Big Mac". It was a quantum leap from early baseball encyclopedias, with a breadth and depth that far exceeded anything that had come before it.

Sports Encyclopedia series

Neft left ICI in 1970, spending the next few years developing dice-based sports games for Sports Illustrated Enterprises. He returned to the sports reference field when he founded Sports Products, Inc. with partner Richard M. Cohen. The company produced a new baseball encyclopedia in 1974 called "The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball". [1] That same year, they published groundbreaking new encyclopedias for football (The Sports Encyclopedia: Pro Football) and basketball (The Sports Encyclopedia: Pro Basketball).

The baseball encyclopedia has been updated each spring, with the 27th edition appearing in 2007. Seventeen editions of the football encyclopedia were published (the last in 1998). The basketball encyclopedia was published until 1992, a total of five editions.

Beside this line of encyclopedias, Neft edited more than a dozen other sports books.

Pre-1933 football research

In 1978, Neft & Cohen published Pro Football: The Early Years, a startling new look at professional football before 1933. Because the National Football League hadn't kept official statistics in its first thirteen seasons, knowledge of the period was extremely limited. Neft led a team of researchers that meticulously reconstructed the statistical record using box scores, play-by-play accounts, and game stories from local newspapers. The result was a remarkable new look at the teams and players from the NFL's earliest seasons.

Gannett

Neft returned to Harris, then owned by Gannett, in 1977, serving as executive vice president. In 1985, he became Gannett's director of research, a position he held until his retirement in 2002. He is widely recognized within the newspaper industry as a market research expert.

Related Research Articles

Jim Thorpe American athlete (1887–1953)

James Francis Thorpe was an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics. Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics. He also played American football, professional baseball, and basketball.

<i>USA Today</i> American national daily newspaper

USA Today is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, USA Today operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters in Tysons, Virginia. Its newspaper is printed at 37 sites across the United States and at five additional sites internationally. The paper's dynamic design influenced the style of local, regional, and national newspapers worldwide through its use of concise reports, colorized images, informational graphics, and inclusion of popular culture stories, among other distinct features.

Phil Simms American football player and sportscaster (born 1955)

Phillip Martin Simms is a former American football quarterback who spent his entire 15-year professional career playing for the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL). He is currently a television sportscaster for the CBS network. After playing college football at Morehead State University, Simms was drafted in the first round by the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL) with the number seven selection overall in the 1979 NFL Draft. Simms was named Most Valuable Player (MVP) of Super Bowl XXI, after he led the Giants to a 39–20 victory over the Denver Broncos and set the record for highest completion percentage in a Super Bowl, completing 22 of 25 passes (88%), a record that still stands. He also was named to the Pro Bowl for his performances in the 1985 and 1993 seasons.

<i>USA Today Sports Weekly</i>

USA Today Sports Weekly is an American sports newsmagazine owned by the Gannett Company. A spin-off publication to Gannett's flagship newspaper USA Today, it focuses on coverage of baseball news from Major League Baseball (MLB), Minor League Baseball and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) from spring to early fall, as well as football coverage from the National Football League (NFL) during the fall and winter months. The magazine also features statistics for each covered league and interviews with players and staff members.

Pete Palmer is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, Palmer's book The Hidden Game of Baseball is often referred to as providing the foundation upon which the field of sabermetrics was built.

Sean Lahman is an author and journalist. He is currently a reporter for the USA Today Network and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and frequently makes public appearances to speak about database journalism, data mining and open-source databases.

Total Sports Publishing refers to a book publishing company based in Kingston, New York, that operated from 1998 to 2002. Prominent author John Thorn served as the division's publisher throughout its existence.

Philadelphia Quakers (AFL)

The Philadelphia Quakers were a professional American football team that competed in the first American Football League in 1926 and won the league's only championship.

The 1966 Buffalo Bills season was the team’s seventh season in the American Football League. It was the first season for head coach Joe Collier, who had been the Bills' defensive coordinator for the previous four seasons.

The 1974 Buffalo Bills season was the franchise's 5th season in the National Football League, and the 15th overall. Buffalo made the NFL playoffs for the first time and reached the postseason for the first time in eight seasons. In the playoffs, they lost to the eventual champions, the Pittsburgh Steelers, 32-14 in Pittsburgh. This was O. J. Simpson's only playoff game of his career, as the Bills did not have another playoff team with him on the team. Simpson would be traded to the 49ers in 1978, but the 49ers did not make the playoffs that season nor the 1979 season, Simpson's final season in the NFL. In the game, Simpson would only rush for 49 yards on 11 carries and did not score a touchdown. He did, however, catch a touchdown pass from quarterback Joe Ferguson late in the 3rd quarter.

The 1962 Buffalo Bills season was the team’s third season in the American Football League. The Bills finished the season with a 7–6–1 record, third place in the AFL East; it was the Bills' first-ever season finishing with a winning record.

The 1972 Buffalo Bills season was the franchise's 3rd season in the National Football League, and the 13th overall. It was also their last season at War Memorial Stadium which had been their home field since the franchise started in 1960.

The Newark Bears were a professional American football team that competed in the first American Football League in 1926 AFL season. Owned by the New Jersey Athletic Association, the Bears played their home games in Davids' Stadium. Coached by player-coach Hal Hansen, the majority of the team played their college football in Georgia and Florida.

The Cleveland Panthers were a professional American football team. They were an independent team founded in 1919 from the remains of the Youngstown Patricians. The Panthers played, with various degrees of success, continuously from 1919 and eventually, as fewer opponents played them each year after 1926, sputtered to a quiet folding in 1933.

The Chicago Bulls were a professional American football team that competed in the first American Football League in 1926. Owned by Joey Sternaman, the Bulls also had AFL founders C. C. Pyle and Red Grange as shareholders. Joey Sternaman was also the coach and blocking back for the Bulls throughout their brief existence.

The 1976 Buffalo Bills season was the franchise's 7th season in the National Football League, and the 17th overall.

Terrence Paul "Terry" Bross is a former Major League Baseball pitcher. He bats and throws right-handed.

William Joseph Gogolewski is a former Major League Baseball (MLB) pitcher who played a total of six seasons with the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers, Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox. Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Gogolewski was listed as 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) tall and 190 pounds (86 kg).

50–40–90 club Basketball - rare shooting proficiency

The 50–40–90 club is an informal statistic used to rate players as excellent shooters in the National Basketball Association (NBA), NBA G League, and Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). It requires a player to achieve the criteria of 50% field goal percentage, 40% three-point field goal percentage and 90% free throw percentage over the course of a regular season, while meeting the minimum thresholds to qualify as a league leader in each category.

<i>The Baseball Encyclopedia</i> Baseball reference book

The Baseball Encyclopedia is a baseball reference book first published by Macmillan in 1969. Nine further editions of the book were released between 1974 and 1996. The Baseball Encyclopedia features statistical summaries for Major League Baseball (MLB) players.

References

  1. ↑ "Henry Chadwick Award: David S. Neft – Society for American Baseball Research".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.