Home British baseballProject COBB Brit-Ball online collection

Brit-Ball online collection

by Joe Gray

Project COBB logoBetween 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.

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11 comments

Mark June 5, 2011 - 10:18 am

Alan Bloomfield’s at-bat against Ukraine is a must-read.
Issue 52, page four.

Reply
Joe Gray June 5, 2011 - 7:25 pm

Cheers Mark.

European baseball at its worst, for sure.

Reply
Joe Gray June 10, 2011 - 6:15 pm

Make that 42% complete.

Issues 1-5 now added:
http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/brit-ball.html

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Matt Smith June 11, 2011 - 9:46 am

Great news. Even just a quick flick through the most recent editions produces a whole host of gems. I’ll have to get around to writing about a few.

Reply
Joe Gray June 11, 2011 - 4:07 pm

Like Baseball Mercury, Brit-Ball was both unusual and of great chronicling value in publishing league tables, results, season reports, game reports, end-of-season leaders, and the like.

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Joe Gray June 11, 2011 - 4:08 pm

And both Brit-Ball and Baseball Mercury passed the half century mark in their innings of issues.

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Joe Gray June 14, 2011 - 5:58 pm

And now 70% complete:
http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/brit-ball.html

Some of the pages in the middle of issues are not opened up fully in the scans, but that’s because I didn’t want to damage the original stapling. If there are any sections you can’t read but want to know what is said, just let me know.

Everything has been OCRed — but with mixed success.

Joe

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Matt Smith June 14, 2011 - 9:22 pm

It’s growing by the day!

I’m intrigued by the BBF Hotline, goes to show how far communication and publicity has come!

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Mark June 15, 2011 - 1:12 pm

I remember that hotline well, calling it up on a tuesday morning to get the major scores, only to hear 1st round ko cup scores given first. Get on with it, it’s expensive!! i’d be shouting.

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Joe Gray June 15, 2011 - 4:52 pm

Classic comment, Mark. Love it.

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Joe Gray June 16, 2011 - 5:05 pm

And now 98% complete (i.e. as high as it will go, unless Issue 14 is found)

Reply

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