Retrosheet and Baseball Almanac

Guys remember different things. The first time they drove a car. The first time they bought one. The first time they kissed a girl and didn’t go “eeeeew!” And the first major-league baseball game they saw in person.

Mine was the opener of a Sunday doubleheader at Tiger Stadium on August 4, 1963. The Indians were in town, and Hank Aguirre shut them out. In the nightcap, the Tigers had the lead but gave it up in the ninth inning (some things never change), and Jim Bunning, former twenty game winner and future Hall of Famer and U.S. senator, pitched in relief. I have the yellowed game stories from Monday’s sports sections in a scrapbook. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to have fresh printed copies of those box scores, in larger type, maybe framed with the ticket stubs?

Two Internet compendia of baseball information, Retrosheet and Baseball Almanac, now make this possible.

Retrosheet

Retrosheet is the more scholarly of the two. Founded in 1989, its goal is compiling play-by-play narratives of pre-1984 major league games from primary sources; usually newspaper game stories or scoresheets. Many of its contributors are members of the Society for American Baseball Research. Familiar names appear on its web site. The work of John Tattersall, whose collection of newspaper accounts of early 20th century games provided the foundation for the first Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, is cited. SABR members Bob McConnell, who maintained the Home Run Log Tattersall started, and David Vincent, who later took it over, are also credited.

Very few documents compress as much information into as small a space as a baseball box score. Author Stanley Cohen called the box score "the catechism of baseball, ready to surrender its truth to the knowing eye." Any fan, with a little practice, can study a box score, regardless of its age, and come up with a pretty good mental picture of what happened that day.