About Shawn

Shawn Plank is a writer, author, and former newspaper reporter and columnist. His book, Old Man River & Me, written with Mark Knudsen, was named one of the 10 best literary travel books of the year by Booklist magazine. Shawn is a native Iowan and lives in Urbandale, Iowa.

His website, which includes some really spectacular writing (especially about himself in the third person) is at shawnplank.com.

Shawn was a baseball fan as a kid in the 1970s but lost interest in the game during the 1981 strike. When he returned to the game as an adult (oddly enough as baseball was going through an even more damaging strike in 1994), he had a hard time keeping track of the game and the players because he didn't have time to collect and study baseball cards and pore over statistics in The Sporting News like he did when he was a kid. So in 1995, he developed a shorthand way to keep track of the game and its players, which has resulted in this web site. Box-Toppers measures baseball's top players using daily box score statistics, like those that have been found for decades in agate type in your morning newspaper. (Viva newspapers!)

Follow Box-Toppers on Twitter.

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