Arkansas Travelers Baseball Museum

Phil Elson, play-by-play announcer for the Arkansas Travelers, has written a nice piece on the Travelers Baseball Museum at their new ballpark, Dickey-Stephens Park, in Little Rock, AR. I remember visiting Ray Winder Field in 1999 and walking into the business office and meeting longtime GM Bill Valentine. As Mr. Elson describes, it and a small display on the concourse served as the Travs' museum for many years. The wood-paneled office was adorned with lots of historic photos of past teams hung rather haphazardly on the walls. More teams should have their own museums for fans to visit.

Volunteers Needed for Minor League Ballpark Data

Ted Turocy, technical coordinator for the SABR Minor League Encyclopedia, is seeking volunteers to work on minor league ballpark data for the Encyclopedia. He writes:

"Gord Brown has generously donated his extensive research (joint with Ted Lukacs and others) on minor league ballparks to the project. I'd like to get going on integrating this into the database. To this end, I could use a couple volunteers to take his original Word documents and produce a spreadsheet version of them.

It's pretty straightforward work, not terribly exciting, but requires a little bit of comfort with using a spreadsheet (since using the "fill handle" is very helpful for this task).

If you're interested in helping out, please contact me here."

Minor League Committee Meeting at SABR 38

The Minor League Committee will meet at the SABR 38 Convention in Cleveland, OH on Friday, June 27 from 12:00-1:00 p.m. If anyone would like to make a research presentation or share details about a research project, please contact me at this e-mail.

Minor Trips (18th Issue) Now Available

Bob Carson, committee member and publisher of Minor Trips, writes that the 18th issue is now available for purchase.

Minor Trips is an 18-page newsletter with happenings in the world of independent and Minor League baseball (including history, trivia, humor, news, information) and a 50 page guidebook with all the teams and home schedules for the 2008 baseball season. Bob is always looking for "minor" writers and readers. It's basically a non-profit, paper only, publication (only $10). Anyone interested e-mail Bob at Minortrips@aol.com

Updates to SABR Minor League Encyclopedia (March 10)

The SABR Minor League Encyclopedia was updated on March 10.

Ted Turocy, technical coordinator for the Encyclopedia, shares what's been added:

* We've built out 19th century rosters for players with last names starting in "Y" and "Z", based on Reed Howard's lists, and through Cliff Blau's efforts.

* Ed and I (well, Ed gets most of the credit here) have been able to develop a process to synchronize changes from his database to the main one. We tested this out last week with players with last name "A," so we've added a bunch of updates for those players.

* I'm now in receipt of all Paul Porter's statistics spreadsheets. I have added additional statistical columns based on these to the 1903 AA and EL, by way of testing things out.

* Between Paul's spreadsheets, data entry I had already done a few years ago, and data entry by a few volunteers, we will have expanded statistical coverage of most of the AAA and AA leagues in 1981, as well as whatever other leagues from the 1970s I manage to get done today.

* Further work on identifying managers from Jerry Jackson's data with players in the database. We've been able to match up about 40% of the managers so far. The rest will go much more slowly, because Jerry's data lacks birth and death dates for most of these guys -- so we either need to look for player-managers (of which we are finding a lot), or use other resources to match up former players with their managerial careers.

Southern Association Conference

The 2008 Southern Association Conference will be held in Nashville, TN on Saturday, April 12th. It is an annual gathering of writers, historians, fans and former players of the Southern Association teams. The first conference was held at Rickwood Field in Birmingham in 2004 and the event has grown steadily every year. The conference has a new website at: www.southernassociationbaseball.com.

Presentations will be given by Derby Gisclair, Kevin McCann, Skip Nipper, and Bill Traughber on Nashville baseball and the Southern Association.

For details about the conference, contact Skip Nipper.