These sites are the top of the order
A friend and faithful Boston Red Sox fan talks a lot about baseball in the summer of 1967, when a four-team pennant race in the American League kept him glued to his radio, hanging on the announcement of every pitch.
As a fan of both the playoff-contending St. Louis Cardinals and the Seattle Mariners, I find myself in a similar position this summer. Instead of a radio, however, I’m skimming the Web every night on a laptop placed strategically in the kitchen. I can check scores between after-dinner dishes and kids’ baths without attracting too much of the wrong kind of attention from my better half.
Predictably, my favorite place for up-to-the-minute scores is mlb.com. That site’s gameday update feature is tough to beat when trying to stay abreast of action on the diamond.
I probably wouldn’t describe that as my favorite baseball-related site, though. That title goes to hardballtimes.com. In addition to highlights, it has great think pieces about baseball’s past and present.
If you love the articles on a site like that, as do I, you’re dangerously close to becoming what my wife calls “a sports geek.” If you’re comfortable with that designation, as am I, embrace it and check out sabr.org. The Society For American Baseball Research Web site includes extensive statistical analysis and research on our national pastime, with contributions from members worldwide.
Candidly, though, if it’s straight stats I’m looking for, I frequently find myself at baseball-reference.org. It isn’t a pretty site, but it has baseball data on anything I’ve ever wanted to look up.
For several generations, writers have waxed poetic about baseball, often reminiscing about a long-gone era with a when-it-was-a-game tone. For nearly anything ever written about baseball, go to the SABR-sponsored baseballindex.org. It includes a directory of books, articles, programs, films, songs, poems, cartoons and anything else that might be of interest to a baseball fan.
You won’t find any articles at that site – it’s just an index – but for some good fiction and nonfiction works, look at efqreview.com. Elysian Fields Quarterly is a baseball literature journal that markets itself as being “short on hype and long on content.” I’d tend to agree with that assertion. Few articles in the current issue of Elysian Fields are published on the site, but some stories from back issues are available.
As a baseball lover, I also collect baseball cards, though with a 5-month-old baby boy at home, all of my card money now goes toward diapers and Desitin. I still like to keep up with what’s new in the hobby. Beckett.com is probably the most complete site, though it’s little more than an online store and price guide with some card manufacturer news releases.
To get a good sense for what other collectors are thinking and what they’re buying and collecting, there are a handful of card-trading forums. I prefer thebenchtrading.com. Generally speaking, the traders seem to be more mature – mature for a group of men partaking in a child’s activity, anyway.