The Vine: April 4, 2008
Hi Sars,
I’m a librarian, and I’m trying to help a patron find 1941 baseball box scores — all of them, for all teams, including batting orders. I can’t find it online anywhere. Other than going through every issue of the New York Times, any ideas?
Thanks!
L
Dear L,
I don’t know that the Times would have them all anyway; you’d have to comb all the local papers for every team extant at that time (although on the plus side, you had fewer teams back then).
Contacting either the Baseball Hall Of Fame’s research center or a sabremetrics/research organization like Baseball Prospectus is probably your patron’s best bet. The information isn’t likely to be either already gathered or free, but at the very least someone from one of those places will be able to point your client in the right direction.
Readers?
Tags: Ask The Readers workplace
Baseball Almanac, I think, will still do this for a fee. The problem is the fee is $10 per box score. For this project, that qualifies as a “no fucking way” fee. But they do ask that people contact them if they need more than 10 box scores, presumably for shipping/pricing options. It can’t hurt to contact them just to see what’s what.
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/feedmenu.shtml
Maybe try the Society for American Baseball Research site (http://www.sabr.org/)?
Retrosheet.org should have everything they need. Truly one of the great internet resources for baseball fans.
Dan, sadly, retrosheet.org doesn’t go far enough back. I think this is going to be either a very labor-intensive or money-intensive problem.
She could try contacting Stats, Inc. (www.stats.com) to see if they can sell the info. I’m guessing they’ve got that compiled, too. And I think that the Baseball Almanac suggestion is a good one, if they have some sort of bulk pricing.
Freakishly, the archives where I work just received a reference request from someone at Retrosheet–so I was going to suggest them, but I see Dan beat me to it. Unfortunately, the researcher’s email says that Retrosheet’s box scores only cover back to 1954.
Sars, you didn’t know about Retrosheet? For shame! Not only do they have more data that you can waggle a bat at, they have lots of fun reading regarding weird baseball occurrences (click ‘noteworthy events’ in the left-hand nav column).
Thanks, all, for the suggestions. I will try them. And for the record, I am a librarian. If it were as easy as retrosheet.org, I would have already found it :)
I would say check with Sean Foreman at baseballreference.com, but I think their box scores only go back to the late ’50s.
I wanted to add…there are line scores going back that early at Retrosheet. I checked and Baseballreference.com has the data, but not in a form that they have ready to post on the website. Eventually, you’ll be able to find it on baseballreference.com.