Members Area News

Expanding our offerings

Members Area News

I’ve expanded the media offerings in the member’s area. I’m including a library of various things of interest to baseball replayers and others. Membership will remain at $5 per month or $50 per year — and I am deeply grateful to all of you who support this blog financially.

This collection will continue to expand as time goes on, though I likely won’t make many individual posts about how it has expanded. I received a generous donation of numerous original issues of the Strat-O-Matic Review and Strat Fan, and am planning on doing a high quality scanning project over time. I also have acquired a number of original APBA advertisements and catalogs, and will work on expanding those offerings as well.

As you probably already know, it’s not easy to find publications relevant to our hobby. Several old newsletters and other publications are either available only in an abbreviated format, or are completely missing from the online world.

There was an eBay auction a few months ago for a bunch of loose paperwork that I narrowly lost out on. The bidding went pretty high in the end, which is a sign of just how rare some of those publications really are. I hope that we can eventually get a lot of this documentation scanned, if for no other reason than to create a repository of knowledge about baseball simulations for the benefit of future generations.

Among the things I’m most interested in are:

• Any issues of Instant Replay, which was the Replay baseball newsletter

• The 1972 book Forty Years of APBA

• Scans or photocopies or anything from the 1977 to 1981 Bill James Baseball Abstracts (for context, there is a reprinted collection on eBay right now for $2,000)

• Any original publications from other board baseball sims

I’m also quite interested in what I consider the true holy grail: the original Seitz notebooks detailing the league he and his friends created with National Pastime back in the 1930s. I’m pretty sure those are part of an APBA collection somewhere.

Note that I’m not as interested in owning these items as I am in scanning and preserving them. An old and faded newsletter or piece of notebook paper in a closet is worthless; however, if we can preserve the ideas and thoughts contained within its writing, it might become something truly valuable.

Please contact me if you can help.