John Thorn, one of the country's foremost baseball experts, wrote his first baseball book thirty years ago and since then has created a great many more, including. Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame and The Armchair Book of Baseball. He co-founded Total Baseball in 1989, has written for several periodicals and was Senior Creative Consultant to the Ken Burns documentary Baseball. Phil Birnbaum is editor of "By the Numbers", the statistical analysis newsletter of the Society for American Baseball Research. A native of Toronto, he currently resides in. Ottawa where he works as a software developer. Bill Deane is a freelance baseball researcher and writer who spent eight years as senior research Associate for the National Baseball Library and Archive. He has published seven books and more than 200 articles for a variety of publications, and was a recipient of the 1989 SABR-Macmillan Baseball Research Award.