1908 Baseball Newspaper Guide: The Sporting News
Not quite The Bible of Baseball
1908 Baseball Newspaper Guide: The Sporting News
Many years ago, back before The Death Of Diamond Mind Baseball™, I used to be active on the old Diamond Mind Baseball forums.
We were all amazed in those days at the work that Tom Tippett had done with the game. We wanted to do what we could to contribute. In particular, we were interested in trying to get deadball era seasons to work with the game.
We weren’t interested in just accumulating statistics and feeding them through the game engine, however. We wanted to go all the way. We wanted to do research on the original transactions and lineups, and create a season disk to be proud of.
That’s when I first encountered The Sporting News archives over at Paper of Record. And, well, I was a bit disappointed.
Legibility?
I mean, just look at it. It’s hardly legible.
The worst part about all of this is that there’s really no remedy to these old and faded microfilm pictures.
Seriously — the poor quality of these scans is the biggest drawback. And this isn’t a new problem, either. That book on the history of The Sporting News I wrote about months ago used the same archival source for its images of old issues.
The worst part is that there are really no other sources out there for these old papers. I’ve never seen a pre-World War I issue of The Sporting News go on sale at any auction house. These papers simply weren’t made to last.
The Bible of Baseball
As was the case with Sporting Life, The Sporting News employed freelance reporters in every major league city, as well as a number of minor league towns.
It’s a good source for gossip, though I’m not convinced that it’s better than actually digging through the local daily papers.
That’s not always the case, by the way. The Sporting News started to turn into the true Bible of Baseball sometime around the end of World War I. By the time we hit the 1920s, you really need to pay attention to its reporting to get a full sense of what’s going on in the game.
Boxscores
The boxscores were always The Sporting News’ forte — well, until they were uncerimoniously removed in the 1980s, that is.
They’re just not quite the same in 1908, however. As you can see, there are no game summaries or descriptions. There’s nothing here but the bare bones boxscore, and even that is hard to make out.
You might be surprised to know that the minor league boxscores were largely confined to a few larger leagues in those days. Remember, this is back when The Sporting News was an 8-page broadsheet, not a tabloid. That old broadsheet format was great for anything that used columns and could conserve space — but it still can’t compare with the 48+ page issues that were common after World War II.
It’s fun — especially the old advertisements. Still, it wasn’t the same paper that we grew up with.