This is a quick post to direct Project COBB fans to some new bits and pieces I have added to the national champions archive. If you cast your eyes down the navigation panel on the left of the webpage you’ll come to a collection of links under the heading “Infographics”. This is a growing set of graphics that I am publishing to help make it easier to interpret the information contained in the archive.

“Infographics” might be a bit too fancy a term for the various tables of successful teams (those with most titles and most finals appearances, as well as those who defended their title), but I am quite pleased with the scatterplot showing latitudes of champions over time. I have added a 50-year moving average “trend line” to try to illustrate how the games power has shifted as the years have passed. This is a project I had been putting off (or “an idea I had been saving” might be more positive) for over 5 years, but I now have the right place to publish it.

In Part II of the four-part Project COBB series currently being run on the British Baseball Federation website, it is mentioned that I am “looking for one or more research associates who can travel to Colindale in North London on occasional Saturdays, particularly during the off-season, to collaborate […] on some exciting new projects.” I’d like to give some more details on that here.

A trip to Colindale is the quintessential newspaper research experience, and it is just like you see in films, with a choice between:

• microfiche pages scrolling in front of your eyes, perfect for a set-to-music research montage;
• or – pages of old newspapers in oversized binders to ever-so-carefully turn through, ideal for a crash zoom on a crucial headline.

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Between 1993 and 1998, the British Baseball Federation churned out 60 issues of an excellent newsletter known as Brit-Ball. The publication provided league standings, player stats, game-by-game results and highlights, news items, and plenty more.

I have been busy setting up a webpage to host digitized versions of the issues held by Project COBB, which comprise all but number 14 (if you happen to have a copy of that one, please leave a comment below).

So far, I have uploaded the last 20 issues, which were in an A5 format. You can access the online collection directly by clicking here or you can go click through from the full list of newsletters made available by Project COBB. The first 40 issues, all of which were A4, will be added in due course.

The Project COBB collection of Brit-Ball was built up through donations from duplicates held by BaseballSoftballUK and the personal collections of Brad Thompson and Jeff Elijah. I note with pleasure that contact was made with the last of these after he left a comment on BaseballGB in response to a post about another British publication, Baseball Mercury. From 1992 to 2001, Jeff edited International Baseball Rundown, which started out as a newsletter and grew to become a magazine that covered baseball as a worldwide sport. Through his association with international baseball, Jeff amassed a collection of baseball publications from many countries, including Britain.

So thanks must go to the generous donors, and also to the British Baseball Federation Board for granting permission for these to be published online.

Additional comment: I forgot to say in the original post that I’ve run optical character recognition on the PDFs to facilitate text searching.

As part of my plan to stand down from the role of Southern Scorers Commissioner and webmaster for the Great Britain Baseball Scorers Association (GBBSA) by the end of the current season, I’ve needed to tease Project COBB and the GBBSA apart. So I’ve given the British baseball history initiative a new typeface, a new colour scheme, and a new website (and I’ve capitalized the “COBB” bit of the name). As part of this, I’ve also freshened up other related webpages, most notably that of the British Baseball Hall of Fame.

To go to the home page for the new website, click here.

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