Ernest Lanigan

Who was Ernest Lanigan?

Ernest John Lanigan was an American sportswriter and historian on the subject of baseball. He was considered the premier baseball statistician and historian of his day. He was a pioneer at gathering information about baseball statistics and about the players themselves, and was the author of the first encyclopedia of the subject.

In addition to having parents who were both writers and editors, Lanigan was the nephew, on his mother's side, of The Sporting News founders Al Spink and Charles Spink, and one of five men in his family, including J. G. Taylor Spink and C.C. Johnson Spink, to gain acclaim as a newspaperman.

Shortly after The Sporting News was launched in the mid-1880s, 15-year-old Lanigan went to work for his uncles. He served three years at the paper, then made a career change and became a bank clerk for the next eight years. His knowledge of baseball and writing, and his passion for numbers, accrued from those two jobs, would serve him well in the future. However, he also came down with a lung infection, possibly pneumonia, which affected his health for the remainder of his long life.

During a two-year convalescene in the Adirondack Mountains, he continued his baseball stat gathering for The Sporting News, as he had during his banking career, and began inventing new statistics. The best known of these were the RBI and the CS, which he researched and catalogued, and which were eventually adopted as official major league statistics. He also developed a more comprehensive list of Winning Pitcher and Losing Pitcher compilations.