Item: Free Newspaper Game Accounts, 1897-1912

The Society for American Baseball Research has announced today that, owing to the diligence of one Mr. Jonathan Frankel, anyone with a cursory knowledge of the internet can access all manner of scanned game accounts from the earliest days of base-and-ball.

Frankel has uploaded to Google Docs scans of newspapers from 1897 to 1912 from the following cities: Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

As you might expect — and decidedly through no fault of Frankel’s own — the quality of the papers is sometimes compromised, nor does every article scale the heights of Prose Mountain (a mountain that doesn’t exist, but which I have just invented for the purposes of a shit metaphor).

As you might also expect, there are some excellent moments, such as this excerpt from what appears to be the August 12th, 1911, edition of the Cleveland Leader — a passage that it is literally impossible to read aloud except in a Mid-Atlantic accent and while drinking scotch in Bert Sugar’s den.

The real test of a pitcher is his work in pinches. Barney Pelty stood the test. Three times Cleveland batters had the chance to put the spectators in a happy frame of mind and three times these batters ignominiously whiffed.

Below is an image of the paper from which that excerpt is taken. (Note: if clicking doesn’t lead to ample embiggening, attempt to right-click for the purposes of opening in a new window.)

Finder’s fee owed to Mr. Larry Granillo.