World Series Diagrams
Want to know why The Sporting News was absolutely essential for baseball fans in the mid-1950s? Just look at the World Series previews.
Most newspapers across North America featured basic summaries and diagrams previewing the 1955 World Series. Here’s an example from Kansas:
Those two ballpark diagram images spread throughout the various North American news wires. But they looked embarrasingly simple compared to these two that were tucked in the middle of an issue of The Sporting News:
The difference in accuracy and detail between the two types of diagrams is actually really remarkable. And so, if you were a big baseball fan, you absolutely needed to have The Sporting News. There was simply no substitute.
The Sporting News was essential to we baseball fans in the late 1970s. Before the internet, before Baseball Reference, back when we only got one baseball game on TV per week, it was THE place to get detailed baseball stats. Even though the numbers were slightly out of date when they arrived in your mailbox, we felt lucky to have such a tremendous resource.
Started reading the Sporting News in 1961; that's where I saw the APBA ad in the spring of 1962. Got my own subscription to it for my bar mitzvah in September '63. Loved the minor league box scores; I can still tell you that Felix Maldonado led off for the El Paso Sun Kings (the Giants double-A affiliate) in center field -- he turned up 30 or 40 years later as manager of the Cuban national team -- and Kim Sawrey played second base and hit second. (I'm pretty sure neither of them ever got to triple-A, let alone the majors.) Larry (Moose) Stubing played first base and batted third or fourth; when El Paso moved from the Giants' farm system to the Angels', he stayed there, eventually played briefly for the Angels and then spent more than a decade in SoCal with them as a base coach. I'm pretty sure Arlo Engel, another outfielder, was the other hitter in the 3-4 batting spots; I think the closest he got to the bigs was a photo in spring training where one of the Giant sluggers was swinging five or six bats and the one closest to the camera had Engel's signature. Eventually I was able to buy the Guide and Register every year too; I think there was a package deal with a subscription renewal.