coming soon
how do you know what you know about baseball history?
For the first time, get the whole story of how Retrosheet is unearthing every play from every major league game ever, all without charging a dime.
What's Inside
Every play. Every game. Every season. For the first time in baseball history, it all exists in one place—and it's free for anyone to use.In 1989, Dave Smith had 7,000 games in his Delaware basement, but over 130,000 more were scattered across the country—moldering in team archives, stacked in sportswriters' attics, at risk of being thrown away forever. No funding. No institutional support. Just one fan with an impossible vision: save baseball's history before it disappeared.What happened next changed how we understand the game. Smith recruited a volunteer army that tracked down scorebooks, decoded Allan Roth's revolutionary 1950s stat sheets, and digitized millions of plays—all while refusing to charge a dime. Their work now powers your favorite websites like Baseball Reference and Fangraphs.This is the story of Retrosheet: how baseball's greatest preservation challenge became its most democratic achievement—and connected you to every game ever played.
The Author
Wigley, not Wrigley, Jay first discovered Retrosheet in 1996 and wondered how such a thing was even possible. Now he knows. His earliest baseball memory is of the scoreboard animations at the Astrodome in the summer of 1972. Jay lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his wife and kids and dog and four cats, the only baseball fan among them.
Coming Soon
If you want to get an email when the book is published later in 2026, fill out the contact form below.
Thank you
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