Greetings. You've probably arrived here from the Ernie Koob page on baseball-reference.com... If not, check it out; it's a complete statistical record of Ernie's major league baseball career.
So why Ernie Koob? Well, I have friends with the last name of Koob. They pronounce it with a long O, like "lobe". When you spell-check a file with "Koob" in it, some programs suggest "kook". In any case, it caught my eye when Bill James, in his Historical Abstracts, cited Ernie Koob as one of the two "worst hitting pitchers" of the 1910's. It was just a quickie reference in his Decades boxes, but reasonable in view of Ernie's batting average of .070 (compiled over his four-year career).
However, Ernie's career was not without highlights... how many pitchers with 23 career wins can claim a no-hitter as one of those wins? From "Major-League No-Hitters of the 20th Century" by Stew Thornly:
No-hitters are always interesting, but here's a few that stand out: 5/5/17 Influence of official scorers: In Ernie Koob's no-hitter, Buck Weaver of the White Sox was credited with a hit in the first inning. The hit was later changed to an error, after the game, by official scorer J. B. Sheridan. (The headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read KOOB TAMES SOX IN ONE HIT GAME.) There are other examples of no-hitters that were resurrected after a change on a hit-or-error call by the official scorer. Keep in mind there were times when a team's hit total, nor a scoring decision, was not posted on the scoreboard and fans were probably often watching a no-hitter without even knowing it.
If the name of Buck Weaver sounds familiar to you, perhaps you've read Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out", the story of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, or are remembering John Sayles' movie version with John Cusack as Weaver.
It's interesting to see how many things you come up with if you perform a Google search on "Ernie Koob". Amongst them:
All of this -- and this page too -- I think, is just a manifestation of something that Bill James wrote about in his 1982 Baseball Abstract... from page 25:
In my childhood I knew a master story teller who had lived his
life as a rodeo cowboy. A professional athlete, a man who did his
work in front of the cheering or indifferent crowds, exactly at the
time as did Bob Meusal and Gene Robertson and Alex Ferguson, he
retired and did rope tricks at rodeos and retired and delivered
milk to us and delivered milk to us and retired and committed
suicide at 83, two years ago, and nobody knows or cares anything
about him because he has no numbers. When I am dead, Wade will
be forgotten because he has no autobiography in Macmillan, and Alex
Ferguson will be remembered as long as there is baseball because he
is a part of it.
Bill's essay was about the power and the language of baseball numbers, and that section said best why the Baseball Encyclopedia is more than just a big book of stats. It's OK to celebrate the Alex Fergusons -- and the Ernie Koobs -- of the world. Or, as I like to say, Ernie was a lot better baseball player than Michael Jordan ever was.