Category Archives: Project COBB

News and information relating to the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball

Three NBL players have a chance of joining elite group with four or more national titles to their name

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Among the players on teams who have qualified for the NBL postseason, there are three who will be hoping to win a national title for a fourth time, those being Michael Osborn of the Flames, and Jason Holowaty and Will Lintern of the Southern Nationals (if you think I have missed anyone, please leave a comment).

Osborn (centre below) won it in 2000 with the Warriors and 2006 and 2010 with his current Richmond team. Holowaty (right below) won three straight titles between 2006 and 2008, the first with the Flames in 2006 and the last two with the London Mets, in 2007 and 2008. Lintern (left below) won it all with Brighton in 2001 and 2002 and with the Mets in 2008.

Going for four

The all-time list currently has nine members, and it is headed by long-time Warriors team-mates Brad Thompson (with nine) and Alan Smith (seven).

Two weeks left to submit your photos for the 2011 British Baseball Photography Competition

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bbpcThere are 2 weeks left until the 12 September deadline for submitting photos to the 2011 British Baseball Photography Competition (BBPC), which is the day after the senior National Baseball Championship finals in Hemel.

Entrants are invited to submit up to 24 photos during the contest, an increase of four on last year. A more significant change to the format is that the judging panel will determine only a shortlist, rather than adjudicating on the overall winner. The winning photo for 2011 will, instead, be determined by an online vote among members of the British baseball community. The winner’s prize will once again be a £100 gift card for a photography shop, donated by BaseballSoftballUK.

Some of this year’s entrants have also had their photos featured in BSUK’s fortnightly British baseball and softball e-newsletter Hot Corner, which you can sign up to receive via this link if you are not already getting it.

So far, 10 photographers have submitted a combined total of 84 images. Last year, at the close of the competition, there had been 129 photos submitted by 22 individuals.

For a reminder of how to submit your shots, visit the BBPC 2011 area on the Project COBB website. Be sure to read the full competition rules first. These are also available through the link earlier in this paragraph.

Harvey Sahker turns triple-play of 19th Century British baseball history items

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Project COBB logoThe 1890s section of the national champions archive is now looking more robust after three excellent discoveries by Harvey Sahker:

  1. The box score for the 1894 final (and thus a roster for the champs too).
  2. The championship-winning roster for 1895.
  3. And the line score for the 1897 final.

These are three very important additions to the archive.

How today’s NBL games affect the play-offs and individual titles

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StatisticsI was at Hemel Hempstead today, where the Falcons were beaten twice by the Nationals, and have spoken to people present at the double-headers between Essex and Croydon, which the teams split (although Croydon are due another win from an outstanding game that they will claim as a forfeit over the Arrows), and between Lakenheath and Bracknell, which the Diamondbacks swept. And this is how I think the play-offs and individual titles will shape up as a result (but this needs to be confirmed by a league official in the case of the former, and by me — once I have all the stats in — in the case of the latter).

Play-offs
Going by the ruling in the 2010 BBF League Handbook that states that teams finishing tied in the standings, using games back for the ranking, are split by their head-to-head record, unless one has forfeited more than the other, then I believe teams should finish Richmond #1, Lakenheath #2, Southampton #3, London #4, Nationals #5, and Croydon #6. If this is indeed correct then Croydon will travel to Southampton this coming Saturday to play for a place against Lakenheath in the first semi-final at the National Baseball Championships the following weekend. Likewise, the Nationals will play London at Finsbury in a showdown for the semi-final spot against Richmond.

Individual titles
The major titles that were still to be sealed were the batting crown and the home run championship. Edwin Alcantara went 2-for-5 on the day, with one home run, and his team-mates Maikel Azcuy and Jose Perez were both without a home run. So Alcantara will have secured the NBL triple crown, the first since 2005, unless something very strange happened in Croydon or Bracknell.

The Lance Todd Trophy: One of the many connections between rugby league and baseball in Britain

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Today, New Zelander Jeff Lima was named as the 2011 winner of one of the most prestigious awards a rugby league player can receive, the Lance Todd Trophy. The trophy is given to the man of the match in rugby league’s Challenge Cup Final — won by Lima’s team Wigan this year — and it was named after a “New Zealand-born player and administrator, who was killed in a road accident during the Second World War,” as stated on the Rugby Football League’s website.

There are many links between rugby league and baseball in Britain, and the subject would make an excellent choice for a future article, but the connection that forms the focus of this short piece is Lance Todd himself: he served as chairman of Salford’s rugby league and baseball clubs.

Graham Rumble, British Baseball Hall of Fame Regional Expert for the north of England, spotted that Todd also managed a Lancashire select baseball team in 1935 against Yorkshire. The Lancashire line-up is shown below, and the full programme for the contest can be found in Project COBB’s digitized Anthony Taylor Collection.

1935-Lancs-line-up

Collection of 1963-1966 British baseball memorabilia kindly donated to Project COBB by Jon Prescott

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Yesterday’s mail contained a wonderfully generous donation to Project COBB from Jon Prescott, who umpired many British baseball games during the years after World War II when the sport was slowly regaining its feet. The donation comprised a number of programmes and other artefacts dating from 1963 to 1966. I have just finished adding these 1963-Stretford-Saints-progritems to the Project COBB online archives so that others can benefit from Jon’s generosity:

To view other artefacts from the 1960s held by Project COBB, click here.

    Feats accomplished and milestones reached so far in the 2011 NBL season

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    StatisticsIt’s that time in the season where individual statistical category races begin to get really interesting, and so I’ve been busily getting Project COBB’s National Baseball League stats for 2011 in good order. Full statistics can now be viewed as an Excel spreadsheet available from the Project COBB top-tier stats archive, and a summary of leaders in the main categories is scheduled to be published on the British Baseball Federation’s website on Friday. [UPDATE: Here is the link to that piece.]

    As a result of the update, I’ve also been able to bring milestones and records of feats up to date, as described below. Continue reading →

    Ordnance Survey, British baseball, and a disappearing diamond

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    During yesterday’s glorious late afternoon sun, I was enjoying an after-work cycle around the country lanes of Bedfordshire. Before setting off I had studied my Ordnance Survey map (Explorer 193) on what I thought was a sufficient number of occasions for the twists and contours to have been etched into the inside layer of my skull. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that heading a football countless times, drinking beer on a barely countable number of occasions, and other crimes against my cranium had deprived me of a memory that had allowed me in childhood to recite capitals of the Polynesian archipelago and number of balls faced for each of the leading 50 scores in Test cricket (or something similarly repulsive in its precociousness). Continue reading →

    Full pre-Christmas schedule for Project COBB Research Days

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    PCRDBelow is a full list of dates for pre-Christmas Project COBB Research Days:

    • Saturday 15 October;
    • Saturday 5 November;
    • Saturday 26 November;
    • Saturday 17 December.

    Full details of the planned Research Days can be found in the original article on BaseballGB.

    To sign up for any of these dates, please get in touch by leaving a comment (your email address will come through to me) or using the contact form here.