Sporting News microfiche on line

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Posted By: Todd (nolemmings)

Some may already know, but I found this site the other day, and subscribed today:

http://www.paperofrecord.com

The Sporting News microfiche on line, all the way back to 1886! The quality of the older pages is lacking somewhat, but is still legible.

I figure this can help place minor leaguers during certain, specific times. Also, I always wanted to chart the dates and particulars of every Harmon Killebrew Home Run. Of course, I'm not into re-inventing the wheel, if someone can point me to another source. Anyway, thought the site was cool.

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Posted By: jay behrens

I believe SABR memebers have a free subscription to this.

Just another reason to join SABR

Jay

I saw weird stuff in that place last night. Weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil stuff. And I want in.

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Posted By: Mark

I subscribed to this several months ago, and canceled right away. If you are interested in anything prior to 1915, it is illegible. I couldn't even make out the names in the box scores, and I knew what names I was looking for. To their credit, they were gracious and fast about giving a refund. If your interests are more recent, I am sure it would be a great resource. This is extremely disappointing, as my apparent only other option is to go to St. Louis! If anyone knows of any other way to access pre-1915 Sporting News, I'd sure like to know about it.

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Posted By: Jeff Sackmann

Paper of Record isn't available free to SABR members; POR does offer a substantial (25%?) discount to SABRites, though.

You don't have to go to St. Louis to see the older copies; The Sporting News on microfilm is available in quite a few major research libraries across the country. (Such as, I am very thankful, the Wisconsin Historical Society.) I would imagine that, because there are so many copies of the microfilm out there, you could probably get ahold of a reel through interlibrary loan if you wanted one. One nice thing for that purpose is that in the early years, 2 years or so fit on a reel.

In partial defense of POR, most if not all of the existing copies of TSN from the 19th century are not terribly legible. The microfilm available at the WI historical society is a copy of a microfilm that's in many libraries, and it's missing issues, missing chunks of pages, some of it is faded to the point of illegibility.

Face it, people didn't save copies of upstart sports newspapers (especially non-New York ones) in the 19th century the way they did traditional papers. Double or treble that for libraries. Nowadays, of course, libraries save everything in part because they realize they don't know what will be of historical interest in 100 years. But I would be willing to bet that most libraries didn't have a subscription to TSN or The Sporting Life in 1888, and by the time they realized they should have them, it was a struggle coming up with those early copies to put on film.

For those of you interested in researching contemporary papers, don't forget about The Sporting Life (based in Philadelphia, which started publication about 4 years before TSN did) and the New York Clipper, which was the primary sporting paper before TSL and TSN. Those two are tougher to find in libraries, and most of you would probably need to use ILL to get ahold of them, but they did have good baseball coverage in the pre-TSN era.

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Posted By: Todd

and it's mostly legible (including 1893), although it can't be good for the eyes in real long stretches. It's hard for me to get use to reading in this manner, where you basically blow up every column, especially when the columns were smaller anyway back then. There are some torn pages too.

I got mine at 25% discount just by accessing through TSN site. $12.95 a month. I figured it was worth a shot--read the 1919 World Series articles and found them quite interesting, especially the one a week or two after the series where the columnist reported that Commiskey was offering $10K to anyone who could come up with evidence that there had been a fix, and that columnist then boasted how it might just as well be a Million, since there will be no takers, and that if he offered $20K for anyone to accuse the ballplayers to their faces, there would be no takers either. RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!

And yes I know they are accessible at the library-I've done it that way, but the copies wer no better, and this is far more convenient.

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Posted By: Kevin Cummings

I just did a search for the name "Weyhing" and it yielded just 5 hits all of which were in 1886 (see below). Gus Weyhing was a starting pitcher who appeared in almost 550 games for several major league teams from 1887 through 1901.

Wouldn't you think there would be more hits for him than 5 and wouldn't they be in the years he was actually in the majors?

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@

We found 5 hits for weyhing on 5 pages between 1/1/1886 and 12/31/1891.

# Newspaper Hits Date

-----------------------------------------------------------------

1 The Sporting News 1 Monday, May 24, 1886
2 The Sporting News 1 Monday, June 7, 1886
3 The Sporting News 1 Monday, July 5, 1886
4 The Sporting News 1 Saturday, October 30, 1886
5 The Sporting News 1 Saturday, December 18, 1886

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Posted By: Scottopotamus

I've been using POR for research on my Amos Rusie bio and the 1890-1900 issues are somewhat hard to read, but worth the effort.

If anyone knows of a library around the Houston area that has The Sporting News on microfiche, please drop me an email.

(scottopotamus@earthlink.net)

Scottoptamus
My T206 Web Site

http://www.freewebs.com/scottopotamus