SABR Media Committee is seeking your help: historical database of baseball writers
By Chuck Hildebrandt
SABR’s Baseball and the Media Committee is undertaking the formation of a new database: a comprehensive listing of historical baseball writers. The goal is to catalog the baseball writers for every team as far back as we can possibly manage.
This is an important first step toward the creation of the Committee’s first publication, in conjunction with the SABR BioProject Committee, featuring the history of major-league baseball writing through the years, as well as biographies of the great baseball writers in big-league history.
But first things first: We need your help in putting together the database itself. Thanks to several generous SABR members, we have obtained access to every Baseball Blue Book from 1910 through the mid-2000s, all of which feature lists of baseball writers by city and team through the years. We have digitized these Blue Books into PDF form and we will make these available to any SABR member who is interested in helping us flesh out the database.
For this first part of the project, there will no need for you to schlep to the local library and go through mounds of microfilm to find out who the baseball writers in a particular city were. We will instead provide you a link which will allow you to access the Blue Book baseball writer information from within the comfort of your own home, at any time you choose that’s convenient to you.
If you are interested in helping us with this project, please e-mail ch@sabrmedia.org and we can answer whatever questions you have and give you more details if you like; and if you would like to dive right in, we’ll give you your choice of available decades to work on, provide you an Excel spreadsheet to start filling in, and supply clear instructions as well as tips to make the project go as quickly and smoothly as possible.
We hope to hear from you soon. Thank you for your consideration!
CHUCK HILDEBRANDT is the chair of SABR’s Baseball and the Media Committee. Check out the committee website at sabrmedia.org or follow him on Twitter: @MediaSABR.
Originally published: September 24, 2015. Last Updated: September 24, 2015.