It will be a year ago next week that I launched the Great Britain Baseball Scorers Association website. Initially, my plans were to have a place to keep the stats that the GBBSA scorers were recording each week in the National Baseball League, and to supplement that with extra materials for scorers, such as blank scoresheets. Continue reading
Biographies for Great Britain Seniors players, past and present, can now be found here. The large majority of the research was carried out by Josh Chetwynd, and I am very grateful to him for supplying me with the information so that I could work it into the website.
During the independent breakaway league of 1992-1994, a fanzine titled Linedrive was edited by London Warriors supporter Phil Ross, with contributions from Rex Phillips (including cartoons offering British baseball humour). A selection of the cartoons has been made available as part of Project Cobb. The fanzines were kindly supplied by Project Cobb collaborator Mark Tobin (who runs the British Baseball Data website, where you can find the most definitive set of league standings for British baseball that exists on the internet).
You can either access the cartoons via the Miscellaneous section of the Project Cobb webpage or go to them directly by clicking here.
The past week has seen a couple of developments for Project Cobb (the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball).
Back on Thursday, I met up with John Thomas, who was starting catcher for Great Britain in the game against The Netherlands in 1965. We were looking through some of his old photos together and as he turned the page in his scrapbook to reveal a number of colour pictures from the game in 1965 I became very excited, in part because these are the earliest colour action shots of baseball in Britain that I am aware of. They are now scanned in and added to the 1965 chapter of the official Great Britain baseball team history, which can be downloaded here.
Then, on Saturday, I received a Christmas card from British baseball historian and Baseball Mercury editor William Morgan in an envelope also containing five of the nine missing issues of the publication (numbers 8, 24, 30, 32, and 34), which he had kindly managed to dig out of storage. These have just been added to the web archive.
The British baseball publication Baseball Mercury was edited by baseball historian William Morgan from 1972 until 1989. Fifty-one issues were produced in all, and the publication’s scope covers both domestic and international baseball, as well as softball.
Its coverage includes articles on baseball in Britian going back to the 19th Century (it is William Morgan’s records of National Champions that today’s official list is based on), and there are few more valuable resources for people carrying out research into the history of the game in Britain.
One project that has drawn extensively on the Baseball Mercury is the Great Britain National Team year-by-year history, available here.
William Morgan has kindly agreed to let Project Cobb make Baseball Mercury freely available on the internet. The archive can be found here. There are a handful of issues missing from the archive, but every effort will be made to obtain these and make them available as well.Â
It’s less than a week since the launch of Project Cobb, and already the lists of collaborators and their research projects have begun to grow. This growth has resulted from investigation of several existing leads, as well as an email in the Baseball on Five mailbox that was kindly passed on by Jonny and Josh. Here’s a look at some projects being carried out by the four new collaborators. The Project Cobb webpage has details of how you can help, should you have information. Continue reading
The just-launched Project Cobb (or the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball) encourages the recording of baseball in Britain as it happens as well as the exploration and publishing of its history. To this end, Project Cobb publishes a central registry of research projects as well as a list of collaborators. Continue reading
I like to think that the very presence of BaseballGB helps to debunk the myth that Britain and baseball don’t go together. Yes we might be the minority on this island of ours, but there are Brits who passionately follow the MLB season and/or who play for one of the many domestic baseball teams (or who play roles as umpires, official scorers etc). And on top of this current interest in the sport, Britain has deep historic links with baseball. A recent discovery by a local historian in Surrey has provided some exciting new evidence of just how far back Britain’s relationship with baseball stretches. Continue reading