Research
Primer
What follows are a few tips that might help get you started
on a research project. This
brief outline is not intended to replace SABR’s own 2000 publication, How
to Do Baseball Research, edited by Gerald Tomlinson. That fine work focuses
on all aspects of baseball research, and goes into much more detail than we
attempt here. This document is a start, something that might help you organize
the task ahead.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Mark Armour for providing the
bulk of this primer. Cary Smith (with some assistance from
Baseball
Reference
Access: www.baseball-reference.com
Managed by SABR member Sean Forman. The best encyclopedia-style site. Organized by player, team, year, etc.
Retrosheet
Access: www.retrosheet.org
Managed by SABR member David Smith. A tremendous resource with a surprisingly diverse number of statistics and breakdowns. Game-by-game information, including downloadable play-by-play. Anyone can join, and they have a member listserv.
Baseball Library
Access: Baseballlibrary.com (http://www.pubdim.net/baseballlibrary/)
Comment: Day-by-days, season rosters, on-line version of The Ballplayers, on-line version of the Baseball Chronology.
The Baseball Index
Access: http://www.baseballindex.org/
The Baseball Index (TBI) is a free catalog to baseball literature. It encompasses books, magazine articles, programs, pamphlets, films, recordings, songs, poems, cartoons, advertising, or anything else that may be of interest to the baseball fan or researcher. It is an ongoing project of the Bibliography Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) to catalog the entirety of baseball literature, from the earliest references to the present day. TBI is the creation of volunteers. Their hours of work and financial contributions have made your TBI research possible.
Remember, TBI is an index to baseball literature. It is a guide to what has been written about baseball subjects. It does not include the full-text of the sources referenced.
Ancestry.com
Access: http://www.Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com offers a large collection of government historical information. Most notably they provide U.S. Federal Census records, Birth, Marriage & Death records, and a Social Security Death Index.
US Deluxe
Annual Membership $12.95 month Billed in an annual payment of $155.40
US Deluxe Monthly Membership $29.95 month Billed in monthly payments
Other Useful Places to Surf
Google
Access: www.google.com.
Try a web search for player’s name. You might have to wade through some useless stuff, but it is often worthwhile.
Baseball Almanac
Access: www.baseball-almanac.com
Managed by SABR member Sean Holtz. Trivia style. Stories, jokes, lists, awards, etc.
Access:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bbhtml/bbhome.html
This web site has a large image
collection of old baseball cards.
Access:
http://www.baseballcardproject.com/
This site includes pictures of baseball cards from 1960-Current ranging from all different kinds of brands.
Cot's Baseball
Contracts
Access: http://mlbcontracts.blogspot.com/
This site tracks Major League baseball contracts, signing bonuses, service time and franchise values. The information is unofficial and has been collected from various published reports.
Historical
Newspapers Online
Proquest
Access: SABR Members Area (Until
January 1 2007). Also
SABR offering includes:
Historical
Historical
Historical
Historical
Historical
Historical New York Times
Historical
Library Access: Most public
libraries with remote access including,
Includes:
Historical New York Times
Proquest through Minneapolis Public Library: http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us
Click on Research Tools, then Online Databases. Click on link for Alphabetical List of Databases, and then click on the P link for Proquest. The direct link for this is at http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us/datasubs.asp#P. There are several choices for Proquest, including the New York Times from 1851 to 2001. To access this from home, a library card registered with the Minneapolis Public Library (does not have to be issued by the Minneapolis Library, just registered with them) is necessary.
For
http://www.hennepin.lib.mn.us
Click on Databases A-Z (http://www.hennepin.lib.mn.us/pub/search/SubjectGuides.cfm?Topic=Databases)
Go to Historical New York Times
ArchivesUSA
Access: Sabr Members Area
It looks like it helps find
Archives that are scattered all over the country. More information is needed about this
database.
Access: http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/eagle/
The Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper digitized from 1841-1902
Access: http://thestar.pagesofthepast.ca/Default.asp
Benefits of a Subscription Pages of the Past gives you access to millions of pages from The Toronto Star - pages that previously could be viewed only on a microfilm viewer. Pages of the Past is searchable by the text on the page, or by the date of publication. You can easily seek out birth, death and marriage notices; follow stories of international importance or local significance; view fashion trends, or check on the price of goods over the years. The value of the content is limitless. From front pages to crosswords; from comics to editorials; from news of disasters to birth notices - they are all there. Cost of Subscriptions Subscription costs are for single users. 1 Hour Subscription is $3.95 CDN; 24 Hour Subscription is $6.95 CDN; 72 Hour Subscription is $9.95 CDN 7 Day Subscription is $18.95 CDN; 1 Month Subscription is $29.95 CDN.
US News Archives on
the web
Access: http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/internet/archives.html
A site that provides links to
NewspaperARCHIVE.com
Access: http://newspaperarchive.com/
NewspaperARCHIVE.com, is the single largest historical newspaper database online, containing more newspaper pages from 1759 to present than any other service. SABR members receive a 50% discount on the annual subscription rate (regularly $7.95/mo)
Historical Magazines
and Periodicals
Paper of Record
Access: Paperofrecord.com
The Sporting News. Normal rate is
$99 a year with a discount from SABR it is $75 for two years. The Search engine
is not very good for the years from 1886 to about 1930 because it can not
recognize words due to the poor quality of newspaper scans. They are looking for cleaner copies of the
old sporting news editions that they can digitize.
Includes:
The Sporting News from 1886-2005
Afro-American
Many newspapers from
Many other newspapers from around
the world, old and new.
New Yorker Magazine
Archives
Access: http://www.thenewyorkerstore.com/books_completenewyorker_middle.asp?affiliate=TNYS06_TNYCN
Order the complete text of all New Yorker magazines from February 1925 to April 2006. The New Yorker had a number of baseball articles, in addition to many famous ones by Roger Angell.
DVD--$60; Portable hard disk--$300.
Amateur Athletic Foundation of
Access:
http://www.aafla.org/5va/serials_frmst.htm
Includes:
Baseball Magazine 1909-1918 (not
complete)
Sports in History 1993-2001
Journal of Sports History
1974-2002
Sport Management Review 1998-2004
And other Magazine and Journals
Access:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/spaldinghtml/spaldinghome.html
This web site has indoor base ball
guides from 1903-1926 and Spalding base ball guides from 1889-1939 Not every
year is there but many of them are.
HighBeam Research
Access: Highbeam.com
HighBeam Research provides one place where you can access the free Web, online services to which you subscribe (both for-pay services and free services requiring registration) and a proprietary Library archive of 35 million articles from 3,000 respected publishers.
HighBeam Research Offers Basic and Full Membership Options. Full Membership includes unlimited viewing of full-text articles, full use of personalization tools and the ability to export research to Microsoft Office. Unlimited access to 35-plus million full-text articles is available to subscribers for $19.95 a month or $99.95 a year.
Scholarly Sources
and Journals
JSTOR
Access:
http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us/database
Specializes in Historical
Scholarly Journals. Articles go back at
least to 1869.
Includes journals in the subjects
of:
Law
Religion
Business
Feminist and Women’s Studies
African American Studies
Geography
History
And More
Academic Search Premier (Ebscohost)
Access: Check your public library
web site for remote access.
Has a very strong search engine to
filter out publication, age, full text or citations.
Includes:
American Journal of Sports
Medicine 1/1/1992-Current (Citations)
Culture, Sport, Society
3/1/2000-12/31/2003 (Full Text)
International Sports Journal
1/1/2002-6/30/2004 (Full Text)
Journal of Sports Sciences
5/1/1996-Current (Citations)
Journal of Philosophy of Sport
5/1/2003-Current (Citations)
Newsweek 2/21/1983-Current
(Citations)
Nine: A Journal of Baseball
History & Culture 9/1/2005-Current (Citations)
WorldCat
Access: Check your public library
web site for remote access.
Do a search of
libraries all over the country for many things including books, Visuals,
Articles, Maps, almost anything a library would have in their collection. There are only citations so the best way to
use this database is for finding hard to get items and then using interlibrary
loan.
Access:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/ichihtml/cdnhome.html
Just about any player who played
for the Cubs or the White Sox from 1902-1933 is pictured in this
collection. Many of the photos are also
of visiting players from the same era.
Databases
Baseball1
Access: www.baseball1.com
Managed by SABR member Sean Lahman. Best feature is a downloadable encyclopedia database. (Access, or comma-delimited).
Baseball Player
Database
A CD available from Old-Time Data, Inc.,
Access: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/minor-league/
The current version 6.0 contains the entire professional records of all men who played professional baseball between 1922 and 2004. The data is limited -- ba, hr and rbi for position players, and w-l and era for pitchers, but it is invaluable for finding records of men who did not reach the major leagues. With the CD you can search for teams by year, league, farm system, etc., as well as looking for individual players.
Access: http://www.baseballrace.com/
BaseballRace.com is the creation Christopher J. Falvey. It is an online application that allows you to view any Major League Baseball season, split by league or division (even wild card races), as an animated, date-by-date race between the various teams you choose.
Jim Albert's home
page
Access: http://bayes.bgsu.edu/
Jim Albert is a SABR member who posts some of his sabermetric studies.
TangoTiger
Access: http://www.tangotiger.net/
If Linear Weights, Run Expectancy, and Runs Created mean something to you, if you are a fan of Pete Palmer or Bill James, then you've come to the right place. This is just a dumping ground for research or reports that I've done, and people might find interesting. One day, I will post all my research here.
John Jarvis
Access: http://knology.net/~johnfjarvis/baseball.html
In the world of professional team sports baseball is unique in several ways. The discrete nature of the game, enabling individual plays to be readily categorized with a modest number of possible outcomes, leads to a very complete statistical record. Likewise, the discrete nature of the game enables detailed simulations to be carried out. The game's statistical record provides accurate parametrization of the simulator and insight into the game can be obtained from these simulations. A number of statistical studies based on simulator results and full season play-by-play descriptions are linked to this page.
Baseball Prospectus
Access: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/
If you're not familiar with Baseball Prospectus, here's what we're all about: understanding the game better, and innovating in order to do it. Everyone at BP loves the game of baseball with a passion that most people just don't understand. We feel that this greatest of games is so compelling that we want to know everything about it. We always want to improve our understanding of the game; each player, each play, each pitch, each throw, each hit--what does it really mean? Those arguments that take place in bars about the relative merits of different players? We really want to know the definitive answer to those questions. But we don't want to kill the joy of the game while we're looking.
Baseball Think
Factory
Access: http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/
Baseball Think Factory and its family of affiliated sites is dedicated to providing unique baseball content (information, blogs, links, news, forums, chat) to thinking baseball fans.
Baseball Analysts
Access: http://www.baseballanalysts.com/
An excellent overall baseball site run by Rich Lederer.
Beyond the Boxscore
Access: http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/
An excellent site that includes research by Cy Morong
Hardball Times
Access: http://www.hardballtimes.com/
Another good statistical site
SABR Statistical
Analysis Committee
Access: http://www.philbirnbaum.com/
Phil Birnbaum's web site has all the past issues of "By The Numbers", the quarterly publication of SABR's statistical analysis committee.
Using Your SABR Membership
Most
of the books with Library of Congress classifications are now on the shelves on
the main floor. The books in the tall
shelves in the section closer to
Current
periodicals and newspapers are on the third floor. All the microfilm reels for the
Other newspapers—Washington Post, New York Times, are in the stacks area on the other side of the atrium on the third floor.
In this area are the periodicals A through O. P to Z are across the hall.
History and Social Services are on the fourth floor. The stacks contain reference books as well as circulation copies of annual books. Sports books are in the section GV 877 to GV 971. Books on the Olympics are at GV 721.5. Also, check out the oversized (folio) baseball books in the stacks at fGV 863 to fGV 878.
Other sports books with the Dewey Decimal System (797) are in the stacks, as well.
James K. Hosmer Special Collections Library—Fourth floor.
Open by appointment only on Mondays and Wednesdays (10 to 1 and 2 to 4:30) and the first and third Saturday of each month from 11 to 2.
To schedule an appointment, call or e-mail Heather Lawton, 612-630-6351, hblawton@mplib.org
Can come in without appointment during their hours but must contact Heather ahead of time if certain materials are needed.
o Putnam team histories. Published 1945-55, fairly comprehensive. Several have been reissued with indexes.
o Golenbock’s team oral histories (Yanks, Dodgers, Cubs, Red Sox, Cardinals, Mets)
o Post-1950 histories fairly sporadic but plentiful for the big market teams.
Note: This research primer is a product of the Research Committee of the Halsey Hall chapter of SABR.