A Chicago newspaper archive loaded with baseball history

The Chicago History Museum is digitizing thousands of images from the Chicago Sun-Times photo archive that was lost for a while and resurfaced in 1917 in a storage locker in Dixon, Illinois. An estimated 5 million images are in the collection. When I learned about this new resource, the first thing I searched for was […]

Missing baseball? Check out these old radio broadcasts

Baseball on the radio forms the soundtrack to much of my life, and I miss hearing live games. Fortunately, the Internet Archive has a trove of old broadcasts that can scratch your audio itch. The broadcasts, free of copyright restrictions, run from the 1934 All-Star game through the 1973 World Series. I’ve sampled several games […]

A visit to Shibe Park (sort of)

I live not far from Philadelphia, and yesterday I finally decided to seek out the site of old Shibe Park, a.k.a. Connie Mack Stadium, where the Phillies and Athletics played for the better part of the 20th century. I drove through north Philadelphia and expected to walk around the site a bit, anticipating that I’d be […]

Pass the hotdogs — and my change

It’s impossible to discuss the economics of Major League Baseball without discussing the “major market” and “small market” divide so eloquently illustrated in the movie “Moneyball.” Yet even the smallest of markets today is exponentially larger than the hundreds of small towns where baseball developed in its early decades. A nice perspective on baseball’s rural […]

From the old Coast League: The story of Spider Baum

Here’s a gem of a slideshow about Charles “Spider” Baum, a member of the Pacific Coast League Hall of Fame who spent his best years pitching for the Sacramento Senators (a.k.a. Solons) and San Francisco Seals. The piece is by my McClatchy Co. colleague Mark Morris, multimedia director of The Sacramento Bee. The presentation is […]