"Baseball Analyst" archives now available
In 1982, Bill James created the "Baseball Analyst," a bimonthly amateur sabermetrics journal that relied on contributions from readers. It ran 40 issues, dying in early 1989.
Last weekend, with Bill's permission, I scanned all my issues and sent them to Jacob Pomrenke of SABR. Stephen Roney contributed some pages I was missing. Jacob reformatted everything. Rob Neyer, who was responsible for the Analyst's last few issues, wrote an introduction.
Finally, Jacob put it all online at the SABR website. All 40 issues are now publicly available for download.
Great stuff ... thanks to Jacob, Stephen, Rob, and especially Bill!
Labels: Baseball Analyst
posted by Phil Birnbaum @ 11/02/2011 03:35:00 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
I was just looking at my bookshelf last night and thinking I should re-read some of those...
Phil, thanks for making this happen. There's a lot of great material in those 40 issues.
Thank you, Phil. I've been enjoying reading the Analysts for the first time. Should have subscribed when I had the chance....
Phil,
Let me add my thanks, too. Just out of curiosity, was Bill the only one you needed permission from? What about the individual authors?
Hank,
I assume that the authors gave Bill full permissions when submitting. But, if any authors complain, we can always remove their pages.
Actually, it's funny you should ask that. I was going to do this six years ago, and I got Bill's permission back then and everything. But then I asked your question on a forum, and someone suggested I should at least try to contact the authors. I planned to do that, but, six years later, I was still planning. So I figured, time to just do it.
I wonder if Bill would ever give permission for someone to scan the self-published Baseball Abstracts? I only heard about them once he got a publisher, so I've never seen the early ones.
I doubt it ... the Analysts were always meant to be freely distributed (the $12 subscription cost was for copying and postage). But his Abstracts were his own work that he sold.
I asked him once on his site, and he replied (IIRC) that he should eventually find a way to make them available again somehow. You can ask him again if you like ...
If it helps, tell him I'll do the scanning for free. :)
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