HI260 - History of Baseball: Helpful Websites

The Archive and Collection at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum preserves relics of the game, the great stories they tell, and a trove of historic information. The items within the Archive and Collection come in a variety of shapes and sizes – ranging from large three-dimensional artifacts to photographic slides and everything in between.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has tens of thousands of three-dimensional artifacts, all of which represent a particular moment in baseball history. Whether it is a uniform shirt that Cy Young or Honus Wagner wore, or it is a bat used by Ted Williams, Willie Mays, or Derek Jeter, the National Baseball Hall of Fame maintains these items in a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled environment to ensure its preservation for future generations of baseball fans.

The Lahman Baseball Database, created by Sean Lahman and updated by SABR, is a free database that contains statistics for Major League Baseball teams, players, and seasons from 1871 to the present. The database requires Microsoft Access or a similar relational database application to be viewed.

Baseball endures because of its historical reference points, and Baseball Almanac has dedicated itself to preserving the history of our national pastime. The website has rapidly grown into an interactive baseball encyclopedia filled with nearly 500,000 pages of in-depth baseball facts, original baseball research and baseball statistics not found anywhere on the Internet. Repeatedly recognized as THE online source for baseball related information, Baseball Almanac has something for everyone.

The Society for American Baseball Research had its beginnings in Cooperstown, New York. It was the brainchild of L. Robert Davids, who in August 1971 gathered 15 other baseball researchers at the National Baseball Hall of Fame to form the organization.

From this modest start, SABR membership has broadened steadily. A decade later, it had reached 1,500; today, it totals more than 6,000 worldwide. Who belongs to SABR? Many major and minor league baseball officials, broadcasters and writers, as well as numerous former players. Primarily, the membership consists of "just plain fans" — anyone interested in baseball can join. While the original purpose of SABR was to band together baseball historians, statisticians and researchers, it is not necessary to engage in research to become a member.

Retrosheet was founded in 1989 for the purpose of computerizing play-by-play accounts of as many pre-1984 major league games as possible.

The history of baseball players, their biographies and their relationship both on and off the field in respect to our national pastime is a very diverse and wonderful field of research. Join Baseball Almanac as we salute independent researchers who have explored and written about different baseball biographies. The Baseball Biographies section has simple goals: to foster the study of baseball through biographical studies, stimulate interest in players yet unexplored by our site or elsewhere, and provide a forum for independent researchers to publish their research.

The Baseball Biography Project is an ongoing effort to research and write comprehensive biographical articles on people who played or managed in the major leagues, or otherwise made a significant contribution to the sport. The project is run by SABR's BioProject Committee.

All biographies are written by members of SABR and all have been peer-reviewed for style and accuracy.

MISSION STATEMENT: The Negro League Baseball Players Association (NLBPA) exists to honor and celebrate the significant contribution of Negro Leagues players to baseball and American history, to collect and preserve that history, to educate others so that Negro League players may be a source of pride and inspiration for generations to come, and to support and promote the general and financial well being of former Negro Leagues players.

Among the Negro League Baseball Museum's accomplishments has been a partnership forged with the College of Education at Kansas State University (KSU), which has focused on developing materials for teaching social studies. Since 1998, the NLBM-KSU partnership has produced a number of initiatives and products to assist students and teachers to better understand the social studies themes found in Negro Leagues history.