Replay Research Tips

A few resources that might help you

Replay Research Tips

If you’re interested in doing one of these crazy past season replay projects, you might be wondering what you can do to really immerse yourself into your project.

It’s actually not all that hard to sit down and just play one game after another. However, there is something kind of empty and somewhat unfulfilling about that approach.

A little over a decade ago, back when we were living in northeast China, I started a 1924 MLB replay using Bill Staffa’s Skeetersoft NPIII. This was a card and dice replay, and I was planning on using the old BallScore / BallStat program to input my play by play accounts and keep the statistics and standings.

I soon found myself falling far behind in terms of stat keeping. Additionally, even though I was able to use Retrosheet to follow the day by day lineups, I found myself bewildered by players that I didn’t know. There were a lot of guys in 1924, after all, and I didn’t know who in the world half of these guys were or whether they were important or not.

And so, while I could have told you at the time that the Washington Senators had a third baseman named Doc Prothro, I couldn’t tell you anything about him. I didn’t know anything about his history, whether he was good or not, which games he should have played in, when he was on and off the roster, and so on.

Things are a little bit better these days. There are a few resources you can use to learn about relatively obscure players like Prothro, some of which are free, and others of which might require a bit of an investment on your part.

Here’s what I recommend using to enhance your replay:

SABR Biographies. This really should be your first stop. You can find biographies like the one for Doc Prothro linked on the player’s Baseball Reference page.

The “B-R Bullpen” is another resource, though it usually isn’t as well researched as the SABR biographies. You should also note that there aren’t SABR biographies out there for every single player. The really obscure guys tend to be missing, and the focus seems to have been on the older players. Still, this can at least let you know who was who.

The Sporting News. Now that we’ve got this excellent Sporting News archive, there really isn’t much of an excuse for you not to use it.

The Sporting News was the most important source of baseball news and information for decades. It rose to prominence with the end of World War II, and its height was really between the early 1930s and the early 1980s.

Note that some of the older issues are very difficult to read. When you get to early deadball era issues (around 1900 to 1909 or so), it can be almost impossible to make anything out. In that case, you might want to consult the archives of The Sporting Life, which are also available for free. The Sporting Life is much more legible, and you’ll notice a different political bent if you compare both newspapers. However, The Sporting Life archive only goes through 1916.

Newspapers.com. My favorite resource is newspapers.com, which offers thousands of newspapers and a really powerful search tool. This is particularly useful for reading through game by game accounts while you play your replay, which can give you a good feel for what people cared about in whatever year you are replaying.

Keep in mind that not everything is archived. You’ll discover that most cities only have a single newspaper, and there are some cities with no newspapers at all for certain years. And, yeah, this can be frustrating when it comes to doing research.

??? There are a few other resources out there that I won’t say too much about. I will say, though, that there are ways to find scans of old issues of popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek if you know where to look, in addition to Sports Illustrated, Baseball Weekly, and so on.