The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Baseball-Reference.com has been a favorite web site of mine to look up all things baseball. It went online in April of 2000 and has information on professional baseball players and teams going back to 1888. Several years ago it added box scores and complete play by play information for all MLB games dating back to 1956. Recently the site updated its data and now has this information going all the way back to 1918 so I’m betting it has your first major league baseball game as well. Years ago I used this site to look up the first game my father took me to. It was the New York Yankees against the Minnesota Twins in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I remember several things about the game that were useful in locating it on the website. The year was 1979, I was on summer break from school, the pitcher who got the save for Minnesota was Mike Marshall and that my favorite player, Reggie Jackson, had struck out four times. It turned out that the only thing I remembered incorrectly was Reggie striking out four times. He actually went 1-3 with a walk in the game. I was so hoping he would hit a home run, anything less seemed like a let down. When you couple that with the Yankees losing the game it caused me to alter the memory.

So how do you use the site to find your first major league game? A few months ago Vicki Sternfeld-Rossi took out two scorecards that she kept from games she went to with her father. Looking through the scorecard yielded some useful pieces of information to help with the search. First, Vicki had recorded the final scores of both games. She also wrote down the complete lineups and kept score for both games. Looking through the scoring I noticed that Elston Howard of the Yankees had hit a home run in each of the two games. Using the site I looked up the starting pitcher from her score card that I didn’t recognize, Ted Bowsfield.

Ted Bowsfield played from 1958-1964 according to the site and scrolling down there was a “pitching home run log”. Clicking on the link brought up a summary of all 63 home runs that Bowsfield had allowed during his career. Looking through the list I found the only home run he had allowed against Elston Howard and there was Vicki’s game, a September 3rd 1962 game two of a double header against New York. The score of the first game matched her other scorecard so it confirmed that these were the two games she had attended. Like me Vicki had misremembered how players she liked had performed during the games. Vicki mentioned to me that Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hadn’t done anything in either of the games. Before going to the games she had watched both of them in a home run derby on television so when neither homered in the games she attended it changed the memory. Roger Maris went 2-4 with a double and 2 RBI in the first game and Mantle went 3-5 with a double and 2 RBI in the second game.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of a game log on Baseball-Reference you will see a link called BackToBaseball.com Game Playback. Since Baseball-reference.com provides such a complete game log they have partnered with another site called BackToBaseball.com that does a complete visual or audio playback of any game. The audio playback is very simplistic and computer generated but there are no commercials and an entire game takes about twenty minutes to listen to. So again if you are a baseball fan this is a great site with a ton of information.