What is currently going on

Currently, a few things are in the works:


Esta Day, my UKy researcher, is pulling 1898 Louisville Times play-by-play for nearly 60 games.  The play-by-play is exact play-by-play as each game has innings where it might say "(team) went down in order", but the Times hopefully should enable to find more batter k refrerences.  I will be having Ms. Day pull the 1897 and 1899 Times once that is done.   If she is still able to assist beyond that, I hope to have her pull 1897-1903 Cincinnati Enqurier missing game accounts.  The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune has been great for its home box scores, but its game accounts are inferior to the Enquirer.

I have started in on 1910 AL, currently documenting all Chicago White Sox games from the Chicago Tribune, which has bk's (batter strikeouts) in home and away games.   I am awaiting play-by-play info from Dave Smith of Retrosheet (unverified play-by-play, it should be noted) which should help fill a big chunk - with 1909, it had NY and Boston (home).  

I should note here, that I use retrosheet's lineup files to help create my MS Access databases for my data entry.  Each season 1897-1909, NL and AL, I have databases with each game's lineup and the documented strikeouts for each hitter that struck out in that games - as I have found the info.  For seasons after 1899, I have also added a note at the team level noting which newspaper I was able to get a "full" game strikeout listing from.  For those games where I have "partial" bk totals, from reading game accounts, I document the newspaper (and inning if I can determine it) at the player level in the lineups.


I worked on the Washington Post this morning and had bk's in the home box scores up until July 2nd when they went away.  I took a break from the WP for now - will go back when I see what DC games I do not have documented from other sources.   This mid-season discontinuation of bk's has hit me before - 1904 Detroit Free Press, 1901 Baltimore Sun.  I actually had the opposite happen with the 1898 St. Louis Globe Democrat as they started bk coverage late in the season.

As you can see from the previous post, coverage can come and go with a given paper year to year. 
The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune had bk's in their home boxes in 1897, then discontinued them for 2 years, only to return in 1900.  The Washington Post has them for the NL DC team in 1897-1899, but with the introduction of the AL Senators/Nationals, the bk's in home games disappears until 1907 (and looks like they go away again in 1910).

The most interesting occurrence of coverage as noted at the bottom of the previous post was 1905 (or 1906) Chicago Tribune coverage - the bk coverage in the box scores followed the writer and in this year, the writers, Charles Dryden and I.E. Sanborn traded team coverage at both home and away.  Fortunately, Chicago had other good papers for coverage - Daily News (w/ play-by-play) as well as the (Record-)Herald to fill in the missing games for me  (special thanks to Walt Wilson for pulling all of that info for me).


Anyway, I have a few other folks helping me on stuff currently - Dwayne Ispring on 1901-2 St. Louis Globe Democrat; Ed Morton - 1910 A's, Peter Garver - 1908 Cleveland Leader, and Keith Carlson on 1909 St. Louis Globe-Democrat.



Next post, I will have some stats.