1902 HBP's & Online Newspaper Resources

As I wrapped up my batter strikeout research, Pete Palmer asked me if I might be able to help him on some stuff he had been working on  - filling in the hit batters in the early 1900's.   His records had cases where the pitcher was identified (via ICI), but no batter had been identified.   He had filled in a bunch already through his own research as well as help from others such as the late John Schwartz, Walt Wilson, Lyle Spatz, Bob Tiemann.

So, I started helping him fill in a few that were still missing - so far, I have helped him with 1907 NL, 1906 AL, and I am currently finishing up 1902 AL.

Due to my scanning of many of the era's papers for my batter k research, I had access to papers that are not yet online, plus I went through some "newer" online resources (e.g. NY Evening World had scans in the LofC site for the 1901-1910 timeframe that were new as of the past year or two).   For 1907 NL, I was able to assist Pete in getting above 95%.



I was able to find some of the "missing" batters hit through couple methods:

1.  Of course, an explicit mention in the game account, play-by-play, or box score.
Recently, while working on 1906 AL, I discovered that the Detroit Free Press have explicit mentions of the batter hit in their home game boxes - though it looks like they started doing this midway through the season.

2.  Process of elimination - looking at the boxscore, I listed each batter's at-bats.  Then I looked in the box for mentions of sac hits and base on balls.   Most of the time, the batter specific walks were not there, but I would make note of the opposing pitcher's walk total.   Then, in the latter case, I would go through the game write-up and make note of any mentions of walks.  After I gathered all of this info, I added up all of the plate appearances for each player, taking into account the listed at-bats, sac hits, any documented walks, and any other documented hit by pitchers.  Then it was a matter of looking for the missing plate appearances.  In a number of cases, I was only able to narrow down the potential batter hit to 2 or 3 players, but I relayed that info onto Pete anyways.



This leads me to the main crux of my post, online newspaper resources.   Many of these are known by researchers, but I am always running across new ones as they are added.  Sometimes they are documented, other times they are not (or I don't know it!).

Anyway, here are the main sites of newspapers w/ lists of papers that I have used for my batter k & hbp research:

L of Congress Chronicling America - http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/
1.  NY Evening World
2.  St. Louis Republic (1901-06)
3.  Washington Times/Evening Times
4.  Washington Herald

GeneologyBank.com (subscription):  http://www.genealogybank.com/gbnk/keyword.html


1.  Cleveland Plain Dealer
2.  Cleveland Leader (this is a very new add & a great complement to the PD)
3.  Boston Herald
4.  St. Louis Republic (before 1901)
5.  Rockford Morning Star (I used in some games for 1911 that the Chi Trib had inadequate coverage)
6.  Baltimore Sun


Google Newspaper Archives (not adding any new content): http://news.google.com/newspapers#M


1. Baltimore American
2. Baltimore Morning Herald
3. Milwaukee Journal
4. Philadelphia Record
5. Pittsburgh Commercial/Gazette/Commercial Gazette
6. Pittsburgh Press
7. Reading Eagle (Philly play-by-play on certain Sundays)


FultonHistory.com (search tool is poor):  http://www.fultonhistory.com/my%20photo%20albums/all%20newspapers/Page3.html

1. New York Evening Telegram (great play-by-play)
2. Brooklyn Eagle (Eagle has its own site too, but that site ends its coverage at 1902, this one is more extensive)
3.  Bunch of other good resources (Spirit of the Times) that I did not use.

Next post I will add info on the scans that I have stored in at my Google docs site.