The first post-promotion Cobbette is historical only in the sense that it is not the present or the future. At a mere 18 years old, this anecdote just got its A-level results, and it involves someone who has posted a comment on BaseballGB. In comment #7 here, George Kurtzer refers to a game in which his “local BBF team lost by a measly 3-2 score” to the GB national team. What George didn’t mention about that afternoon game in 1992 is what happened during the morning.

The anecdote is taken verbatim from the GB year-by-year history:

“Back at the start of the season, on 18 April, Great Britain played against the Bury Saints (from Bury St Edmunds) in Peterborough, winning a close contest 3−2. Of note, Saints catcher George Kurtzer, an American stationed at RAF Lakenheath, got married that morning (in his baseball uniform) before playing the game in the afternoon.”

If you have an interesting history snippet to share with a link to Britain then please send a message to Joe Gray through the Get in contact page.

The overall winner (announced after the competition closes at the end of September) will receive £100 in photography vouchers. For full rules and instructions click here.

The Hull resident HJ Sanderson followed the 1938 baseball season on his bicycle. He clocked up mile after mile on his way to and from games, and his arrival at the national cup final in Rochdale marked his completion of 800 miles in the saddle that season. In one report on that final, he is described as the “No 1 baseball fan,” and it is hard to argue with this title.

His efforts that day were rewarded with a gem of a game. The only run was plated in the top of the 16th frame, and it handed the Rochdale Greys a 1-0 victory over the Oldham Greyhounds.

If you have an interesting history snippet to share with a link to Britain then please send a message to Joe Gray through the Get in contact page.

The overall winner (announced after the competition closes at the end of September) will receive £100 in photography vouchers. For full rules and instructions click here.

To help illustrate the wealth of ways that already exist to help the project, the following list contains ten examples of how you can get involved or lend a hand.

Serve as a link with non-internet users at your club

This is listed first as it is arguably the most valuable way of all in which you can provide help… The only means for a predominantly online collaboration of this nature to be truly effective is if contacts exist between internet users and non-internet users. If you can put Project Cobb in touch with someone with information to share but who is not an internet user, email the address in the top-right corner of the webpage accessed by clicking here. Perhaps a long-time member of your baseball club is sitting on a treasure trove of old materials. Start up your own research project

If you are interested in carrying out your own research project into an area of British baseball history that has a particular fascination for you but are not sure how to start or how you might disseminate your findings, Project Cobb can provide help with both aspects. To discuss an idea or request assistance, please do not hesitate to email the address in the top-right corner of the webpage accessed by clicking here. Check the attic for old programmes and other materials to digitize

Project Cobb has already made available dozens of old programmes and other baseball materials, such as newsletters, in a digitized format on the site. Should you have anything to add, Project Cobb would be very grateful to be able to add digitized versions to the online archives. If this is the case, please email the address in the top-right corner of the webpage accessed by clicking here. Register as a scorer or league statistician with the GBBSA

You can assist with the efforts to chronicle British baseball as it happens by either registering as a scorer with the Great Britain Baseball Scorers Association or becoming a league statistician to aid with the collation of statistics. In either case you will be contributing to the preservation of a very important aspect of our game for the future. Look for end-of-season statistics or old game reports containing feats

The Great Britain Baseball Scorers Association maintains an archive of individual champions across the years as well as feats that have been accomplished in top-tier play. If you have any information at all that could be used to expand the existing archive, please email the address in the top-right corner of the webpage accessed by clicking here. Submit photos to the British Baseball Photography Competition

The annual British Baseball Photography Competition will be accepting entries for the 2010 season until the end of September. Each photographer is invited to submit up to 20 photos over the course of the competition. The overall winner will receive £100 in photography vouchers.

Look for materials you have that might plug gaps on British Baseball Data

British Baseball Data is Mark Tobin’s unique effort to restore the historical record of league standings, championship rosters, and post-season results. If you can plug any gaps on the site – perhaps you have a missing end-of-season league table in an old league handbook – please contact Mark here. Share any stories you know behind the names of British baseball teams

An archive was recently established for Project Cobb to catalogue the stories behind the names of British baseball teams, both past and present. You can see the stories that have already been supplied by clicking here. If you are able to share a story for any other team, please email team.names@gmail.com.

Send details of British league players with North American pro experience

One of the pieces of Project Cobb’s ongoing research is an attempt to produce an archive of all players who have competed in the British baseball league at any point its history and also played professional baseball in North America (be it for a major league side, a minor league affiliate, or an independent team). If you can supply any details, please email the address in the top-right corner of the webpage accessed by clicking here. Suggest another potential area of focus for Project Cobb

If you have any thoughts on initiatives that would fall under the remit of Project Cobb, particularly if it is something you would be interested in providing assistance with, please get in touch. To discuss an idea, please email the address in the top-right corner of the webpage accessed by clicking here.

The overall winner (announced after the competition closes at the end of September) will receive £100 in photography vouchers. For full rules and instructions click here.

What he is less well-known for, though, is championing baseball in Britain (as mentioned in British Baseball and the West Ham Club). On 28 October 1924, in a month during which the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants toured Britain, Conan Doyle was quoted in the New York Times for his support of the game:

This game needs no expensive levelling of the field, as the outfit is within the reach of any village club. It takes only two or three hours in playing, it is independent of wet wickets and the player is on his toes all the time and not sitting on a pavilion bench while another man makes his century. If it were taken up by our different association teams as a Summer pastime I believe it would sweep this country as it has done America. At the same time it would not more interfere with cricket than lawn tennis has done.

The visit to Britain in 1924 of two major league teams was not the first exposure to baseball for Conan Doyle. In an article from 1993 published in Manitoba History, Michael W Homer notes that while on a spiritualism-related tour of the USA and Canada in 1923, Conan Doyle’s activities were not limited to just the occult.

On the day following his arrival [in Winnipeg] he took his family to a baseball game which was played at Wesley Park between the Winnipeg Arenas and the Minneapolis All-Stars. Although he was a sports enthusiast and had excelled in cricket as a young man, [he] frankly admitted that “I have all the prejudices of an old [cricketer], and yet I cannot get away from the fact that baseball is the better game.”

There is even a picture of Conan Doyle playing baseball in Jasper National Park, while on another North American tour in June 1914, which can be found here (source: Western Canada Pictorial Index).

If you have an interesting history snippet to share with a link to Britain (tenuous or otherwise) then please send a message to Joe Gray through the Get in contact page.

Therefore, I was very grateful indeed to receive three programmes from ex-British baseballer Dave Smith this week that fell into the period between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Dave competed for the Crawley Giants and the London Warriors during the late 1980s and also played in Preston for a couple of years.

The programmes that Dave kindly donated to Project Cobb were from: the 1986 national final between the Hull Mets and the Cobham Yankees (see below for the cover); the game in 1989 between the GB Seniors and a squad of famous MLB ”alumni” (this one includes autographs from the major leaguers); and the 1992 European Cup of Cups (B-Pool), which was a European club competition that was hosted by the Humberside Mets that year. The items have been digitized and added to the Other artefacts section of the Project Cobb “Historical materials” page.

There is some material with great historical value in the collection, and my favourite item is probably the team photo below for the Bushy Park Cardinals from 1962. Barry Whiting, who is described in one cutting in the collection as “probably the best Britisher in baseball,” is standing at the far right of the back row.

However, it does neatly describe a new BaseballGB feature that I’ve been planning to get going for some time. Simply put, a “Cobbette” is a baseball “history snippet” with some link to Britain, strong or tenuous. They’re provided by Project Cobb (the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball), which is a SABR Chartered Community.

If anyone has any ideas they want to suggest or even write up themselves, please share them in the comments below or contact me through this link.

To kick it off, and just to prove that tenuous is perfectly acceptable, I’ve got something from a man with a very special name.

Ty Cobb, according to the 26 July 1924 issue of the New York Times, was an advocate for baseball’s globalization and looked forward to the day when England would take up the game (we’d been playing it here since 1889, of course, but we’ll forgive him that). The Georgia Peach was quoted as saying that the “English are especially suited to it.” Unfortunately, he didn’t elaborate on his reasons for feeling this way, or at least if he did, the journalist wasn’t sufficiently enthralled to waste any characters on a telegram from Toronto, the city which Cobb’s Detroit Tigers were visiting at the time. Later in 1924, the New York Giants and Chicago White Sox would visit England, which suggests that Cobb’s comment had some kind of prompt behind it.

My favourite thing about the story is that only after reporting Cobb’s support for baseball in England did the journalist mention the little fact that Cobb had also that day confirmed his plans to retire from playing the game full time at the end of that season. Cobb said that he would “play a few odd games” after 1924. It is not surprising that a “few odd games” for one of the sport’s most famously fierce competitors actually worked out as 428 contests. And 525 hits. And 303 runs. Perhaps the journalist put the England quote above the “few odd games” announcement because it seemed less far-fetched.