Today is the second annual SABR Day, which is an occasion for celebrating the work of the fantastic Society for American Baseball Research. Project Cobb (the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball) had been counting down to this day for the past 10 weeks with a series of Cobbettes on BaseballGB that travelled backwards through the decades of the 20th Century. Today we have reached the 1890s, which was the first decade of structured domestic baseball on British soil.
The feature published today acknowledges the fundamental link that exists between keeping score and baseball’s historical record. Without the attention given to the former in baseball’s early days the latter would be very sparse indeed. In addition, it is worth noting that Project Cobb grew out of the Great Britain Baseball Scorers Association. History and scoring really do go hand in hand.
During 2010, my posts on BaseballGB have been a little fewer and further between than I would have liked, but there has been a good reason. For the past 14 months, I have been researching and writing a 100,000-word history of Britain’s pro baseball league of 1890. The result was my first book.