The baseball-statistics community lost one of its best on Sunday. Retrosheet researcher, Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) member and longtime Nationals official scorer David Vincent died at age 67 after a two-and-a-half-year battle with stomach cancer, Retrosheet confirmed in a statement Monday.
Vincent was an expert on home runs -- known as "The Sultan of Swat Stats" -- and umpire history. He helped computerize and maintain Retrosheet's home run database and publish SABR's Home Run Encyclopedia, as well as books about umpires.
"His contributions to this organization are legion and extraordinarily diverse," Retrosheet founder and president David W. Smith said in the statement. "He left his imprint on literally every aspect of Retrosheet's operation. His loss is an enormous blow."

Thanks largely to Vincent's work on the home run database, records of every Major League homer hit since 1871 are now available online on baseball-reference.com.
He was a member of Retrosheet's founding board of directors and served as secretary, the only one to ever fill the position. In 1999, Vincent received SABR's Bob Davids Award, the organization's highest honor.

Vincent was an official scorer for the Nationals since their first season in Washington in 2005. He was also a scorer for their Carolina League affiliate, the Potomac Nationals, and worked for the Carolina League for two decades.