Play Ball! Resources and Databases for the Baseball Fan

Resources of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
A bit of self-indulgence from your ResourceShelf deputy editor this time around…but I know I’m not the only one whose heart is beating a little bit faster this week because Major League Baseball spring training is underway. So here are a couple of excellent baseball resources for all you fans out there.
1) Baseball–History
Source: MLB.com
History of the Game: Doubleday to Present Day
Every fan knows that the MLB.com site runs deep with rich content; we direct your attention here to the Baseball History section. Resources here include:
+ Historical statistics: Settle that barroom wager right here, right now. Forms with a variety of options — radio buttons, dropdown menus — allow you to extract such information as Historical Player Stats, Historical Leaders (e.g., hitting, pitching), Historical Team Stats, and Earlier Franchises (e.g., defunct teams and leagues).
+ This Week in Baseball History: Check the bottom half of the page for links to archives for each week of the year.
+ Individual team histories
+ Awards and Honors: “A listing of past winners of the various MLB annual awards, including MVP, Cy Young and Rookie of the Year.”
+ Negro Leagues Legacy: “…features on popular players, team histories, photo galleries, multimedia and more.”
+ Milestone Tracker: “…uses a player’s season and career production in various statistical categories to project when they will achieve career and historical milestones.”
+ 100 Years of the World Series

The navigation menu on the left side of each page contains some hidden treasures. Click the “Rare Feats” link and find out such things as which players have hit for the cycle or pitched a perfect game. Read bios of all the baseball commissioners, from Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to Allan H. “Bud” Selig. Explore the history of interleague play.

2) Baseball–History
Source: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
Baseball History
You’ll find less focus on statistics here and more detailed profiles of historical baseball notables, lists and trivia, and cool photos of archives from the venerable museum. Every time you reload the page, a new photo appears; click on the link provided to learn about it. Also, with each page reload, you get a new “Hall of Fame Quote.” And yes, the expected daily feature, This Day in Baseball History.

Browse through a wealth of feature articles and columns here, including articles by researchers at the Hall of Fame’s Library and Giamatti Research Center. Other interesting things here — scroll and click — include an archive of trivia quizzes, Hall of Fame game capsules, Baseball Writers’ Association of America Hall of Fame Vote Totals from 1936 through 2004, and a link to highlights of and information about Baseball As America, “the first traveling exhibit featuring artifacts from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.”

Comments are closed.