Baseball Research Links

The Internet has been a boon to baseball researchers, providing a wealth of opportunities to locate information that once was very difficult to track down. This page, while not trying to be comprehensive, provides links to some of the more useful baseball web sites, many of which are provided through the efforts of members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Some sites request donations from users to help offset the (not insignificant) costs of keeping the sites up and providing the data. I encourage you to help these worthy efforts whenever possible.

Official Sites

Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). This organization has done much to improve the quality and quantity of baseball data available. Every baseball fan owes SABR a debt of gratitude.

The Official Site of Major League Baseball. As one would expect, this is a rich source of information about Major League baseball, particularly the current season.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The Hall of Fame web site has lots of excellent information on Hall of Fame players and the history of the game in general.

MLBplayers.com is the Major League Baseball Players Association official web site.

Minor Leagues. The official site for Minor League Baseball.

Reference Sources

General Analysis

• Baseball Think Factory
• The Hardball Times

Opinion

• The Diamond Angle
• Baseball Musings
• Mike's Baseball Rants
• Most Valuable Network : A collection of blogs devoted to baseball (and other sports), of varying usefulness. A subset of the MVN baseball blogs can be found at all-baseball.com.
• The major sports media sites have columnists (some of them quite good) who offer opinions on the game. Some of the best content requires a subscription, but there is a lot of freely available content that is quite well done also. Some of the better media sites for baseball are ESPN, CBS Sportsline, The Sporting News, and Fox Sports.

Historical Research

• The Library of Congress' American Memory Project has three nice baseball-related collections: Baseball & Jackie Robinson, Baseball Cards, and Baseball Guides and Spalding - 1889-1939.
• The Baseball Almanac. A very fine baseball history site.
• TheDeadballEra.com. "Dedicated to deceased Major League ballplayers." Obituaries and tributes to deceased players. Not limited to what is commonly known as "the Deadball Era" (pre-1920).
• Historic Baseball
• Ballparks

Biographical Research

• The Baseball Biography Project. SABR BioProject Committee. "The purpose of this project is to solicit, write, edit, and maintain high quality journal-length biographies of every player who ever played in the major leagues, as well as any other person connected with baseball in a significant way."
• Baseball Library. Based on two published works, The Ballplayers and The Baseball Chronology and with some added features, the Baseball Library is a good source for looking up information on specific players and teams and finding dates of significant baseball feats.

Statistical Sources

• The Baseball Archive. Sean Lahman's site provides access to a downloadable database of statistics on individual players. Very useful for serious number crunching.
• Baseball Prospectus. Analysis of today's game and players.
• Baseball-Reference.com. Provides data on players, teams, seasons, awards. One of the best places to go to get baseball statistics.
• By the Numbers. The Newsletter of SABR's Statistical Analysis Committee.
• Retrosheet. A project to digitize play-by-play accounts of as many Major League games as possible. This is a good place to get box scores, game narratives, and the like.

Baseball as a Cultural Institution

• Best Baseball Movies. Evaluative listing of what the author considers the "best" baseball movies, broken down by time period.
• Filmography - Baseball in Film, 1898-2002. Covers over 400 films. Includes not just those primarily about baseball, but any film that incorporate one or more elements of baseball into the film's plot.

Business of Baseball

• The Business of Baseball. Provides excellent articles and data on the business side of the sport: team finances, salaries, ticket prices, etc.

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For finding more baseball links, I suggest Skilton's Baseball Links as the most comprehensive site.

Baseball in Print

These links will take you to good places to find written works about baseball.

National Baseball Hall of Fame Online Library Catalog (ABNER). Search the holdings of the premier baseball library in the world.

The Baseball Index. A searchable database of baseball writings, which includes both monographs and periodicals. From SABR's Bibliography Committee.

Baseball Magazine (1909-1918). Digitized version posted online by the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles.

Spalding Baseball Guides, 1889-1939. Digitized versions of the historic guides. Online at the Library of Congress' American Memory project. Very good resource for researching the early history of baseball.

A good starting point for any research project is to see what is available at your local library. Libweb: Library WWW Servers is a good place to search for any library's web-based catalog. Worldcat is a union catalog with which you can search the holdings of libraries throughout North America.