Special Features

Here are links to some items that do not fit nicely elsewhere on the site. There also may be links to them from other pages where you might not think to look for them.

• Rules History. An overview of changes in the playing rules and scoring rules of baseball over the past 150+ years. Compiled by Stew Thornley.
• Regional/City Series. An extensive section about postseason series sanctioned by organized baseball played from 1905-42, mostly in Chicago. There are boxscores for all 190 of the games in the 32 series, and the vast majority have play-by-play accounts, some deduced. Over 20 years of research by Mike Cantor is the basis of this section about an overlooked part of baseball's history. Also, there are descriptions of other series dating back to 1882 in article by the late Fred Ivor-Campbell.
• Sabermetric Bibliography. Charlie Pavitt has compiled a bibliography with over 4,000 entries of sabermetric research papers, articles, and books (updated in November 2023).
• Honoring Jackie Robinson in the year of the 60th anniversary of his major league debut. We show an incredible amount of data about his playing performance.
• History of nicknames of current teams. We have made a data file with the history of the current franchises: where they play, their leagues and divisions, and their most common nicknames.
• Walter LeConte has developed a list of exhibition games played by major league teams during the regular season. He has generously provided us with the fruits of his efforts. His articles and lists were first on our research page. Since then several others have revised the 1871-1920 list.
  1. In Season Exhibition Games (2/11/2008)
  2. ISEG preface (3/4/2013)
  3. ISEG Update 2013 (3/4/2013)
  4. Detailed List of In Season Exhibition Games 1871-1920 (6/26/2021)
  5. Detailed List of In Season Exhibition Games 1921-2012 (3/4/2013)
• Game details of the first Major League game ever played!
• 1871 Rules are a companion to the first Major League game (Word document)
• Ongoing historical examination of "pre-baseball" games, dating back hundreds of years. Protoball project
• Brief Retrosheet scoring system history and example scoresheet.
• Great picture of Coors Field being built. We have used it for "under construction" pages.
• Strange and Unusual. [Last updated: Jan. 2002; since we no longer publish a newsletter, this list may be updated very infrequently if at all] There is no end to the unbelievable plays that can happen in a game or during a season. As we process scoresheets, we run across many of them. How about a strikeout with the batter being out 767? It actually happened, and you can read about it here. These plays are compiled from newsletter starting with Vol. 3, No. 3. The earlier newsletters also have some incredible plays, and orginally we called them Odd and Cute. Choose the News link to visit the page with the newsletters if you want to browse them.