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Has anyone done any baseball research?

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Topnotchsy

Featured Contributor, The best players in history?
Aug 7, 2008
9,446
168
Hey all,

I've been thinking of starting a project doing some research on the ***** Leagues (Cannonball Redding's life and career, and the barnstorming tours that Jackie Robinson did).

I was hoping to get any advice on the best way to go about research. I assume that the first place would be old newspapers that were for the black community.

I know newspapers.com has a database of scanned newspapers that is searchable, but was wondering if there are other, better places to look?

I was also wondering what other approaches would be helpful in working on this project?
 
Jul 22, 2016
187
18
Loved the book After Jackie. I know it deals with players after Jackie like Doby and Aaron, it has stories of the ***** leagues and the life of the player. I found it fascinating to read. I just wish there was more info and especially cards. It sucks that these great players are only known to the hardcore baseball enthusiast.

Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk
 

gracecollector

Well-known member
Aug 7, 2008
6,559
215
Lake in the Hills, IL
I'd pursue SABR for Dick Redding and Cannonball Redding material: http://sabr.org/search/node/redding - here's one great article: http://research.sabr.org/journals/cannonball

There's some anecdotes about Redding in the book "Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues" - verbal accounts from players.

Search the Center for ***** League Baseball Research: http://www.cnlbr.org/ especially this article: http://www.cnlbr.org/Portals/0/Hero/Dick-Cannonbal-Redding.pdf

***** League Baseball eMuseum: http://coe.k-state.edu/annex/nlbemuseum/reslib/research.html
 

smapdi

Well-known member
Aug 7, 2008
4,397
221
I haven't done any baseball research but I had a history class in college that was basically a class in biography. We were asked to go to the National Portrait Museum (this was during a semester abroad in London) and pick out someone. Naturally I picked out someone fairly obscure, Sir Henry Lee. He was the "Queen's Champion," someone who would go to jousting tournaments and tilt for his sovereign, Queen Elizabeth I. Her father, King Henry VIII, was an avid outdoorsman, hunter, and jouster himself, and as a lady QEI couldn't do it herself, though I'm sure she would have if she could. Anyway, while he was kind of a star in the Queen's court, and had been knighted, he wasn't an actual nobleman so there wasn't a whole lot of primary source material, although I did have some help in the form of one biography my professor had unearthed (by searching "Henry Lee" in the library card catalog, which I somehow failed to do). This was about 25 years ago, but as I recall I did find some good data in smaller libraries cross-referencing the biographies of his better known contemporaries and the royals of the day, and searching generally for the history of jousting and martial combat. I never did find out what the little ring he was holding in his portrait was to signify, but he was an interesting dude.
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With today's technology, finding big data points should be a lot easier than digging through all that paper, but original, primary sources sound like your best bet. That means newspapers, biographies of other players, and seeing if you can trace birth and death dates through state records. You might also check something like ancestry.com, maybe you can find living relatives.
 

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