A few neat links

So, I’ve been slacking with updates this past week due to “real world concerns”. So to make up for it, here are three neat links:

First off, there’s Clem’s Baseball. It has a giant array of diagrams showing how ballparks have changed over the years, including how they’ve adapted for other sports like football.

Want to stay up to date on Japanese baseball? Jim Allen has been in Japan for decades and once worked the sports desk of Japan’s biggest English-language paper. Now, he writes about Nippon Pro Baseball on his blog.

Going back to ballparks to wrap it up: Stadium Page. This is, not surprisingly, a webpage about baseball stadiums, but the real treat comes in its page of “Unrealized Concepts” such as the Brooklyn Dodger Dome and the thankfully-abandoned plan to demolish most of Fenway Park and replace it with a new stadium.

And there you go- three neat links. Here’s hoping it won’t take me almost a week for my next post.

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Neat Site: CPBL Stats

Taiwan AKA Chinese Taipei AKA Formosa isn’t in this year’s Olympic tournament, but their league remains one of the best in Asia. And while during some research ahead of this Olympics, I came across CPBL Stats.

While not updated daily, it has a good constant stream of news from Taiwan’s top baseball league, as well as (of course) stats and info on how you can watch CPBL baseball online.

Check it out here.

Neat Site: Digital Ballparks

Today’s neat site to check out is Digital Ballparks. It’s a site filled with slideshows of images of baseball stadiums past and present from around the country and even in some cases the world. It isn’t just limited to the pros, either: the Pastores (who run the site) also have plenty of amateur and semi-pro fields, as well as ballparks that once hosted professional baseball decades ago. In some cases where ballfields no longer have their traditional form (for example, abandoned fields or fields that may have been converted to another sport), they’ll even sometimes include Photoshop work to give an idea of what it may have looked like back in the day.

While it looks like they haven’t updated the site yet for the 2021 season, it remains a fascinating way to spend time for anyone interested in baseball stadiums.

Check it out.

Neat site to check out: “Threads of Our Game”

Some of you may be familiar with the Dressed to the Nines uniform database run by the Hall of Fame. On it, you can look up what each team wore uniform-wise from 1900 to today.

But what if you wanted to know what teams looked like before 1900? Enter Threads of Our Game, a website run by SABR member Craig Brown that focuses on the first few decades of baseball. To make up for the fact that photography of those days was not as common and essentially never in color, the site uses research of newspaper accounts, contemporary drawings, and other sources to get an idea of what the uniforms of the era looked like.

What’s more, the site doesn’t just have the Major Leagues. In fact, it doesn’t just stop at professional teams in general. They also have semi-pro and amateur teams of the era. No team, seemingly, is too small for inclusion. Nor is no team too vile: among the teams with a uniform on digital display is that of the 1874 baseball team run by the Klu Klux Klan chapter of Oneida, N.Y. Somewhat surprisingly, the uniforms does not contain any white.

Among the interesting highlights of the page are polka-dotted ballcaps, the first ballcap with a graphic on it (an Oriole wing), the year that some teams had a different-colored uniform for each position on the field, and also some of examples of 19th-century teams from the proto-Negro Leagues.

Check it out.

The Hall of Very Good has added four, and I helped by honoring Jose Canseco’s Bizarre Baseball Cultural Life

The Hall of Very Good has added four new members: Bill Buckner, Jose Canseco, Russ Grimsley and celebrity inductee Thomas Ian Nicholas (AKA Henry Rowengartner), with the Glenn Burke Memorial Courage Award set to be revealed on Friday.

As part of the celebration of this eclectic group, I did a rundown of Jose Canseco’s many bizarre appearances in Pop Culture, from Reading Rainbow to the upcoming movie Slamma Jamma. Check it out.