Baseball research

It's a small world. I think what happened this weekend is pure coincidence but I thought it was pretty funny and since I'm still working on the editing of this baseball book, I haven't taken the time to do any baseball research of my own for this week's post.

I received an e-mail over the weekend from a fellow writing a history of the Marie Katzenbach School of the Deaf. He was trying to track down information on a deaf baseball player who had graduated from there. He contacted a historical society near one of the teams for which the player had played. The historical society said, "Sorry, we can't help you but contact this baseball guy" and they gave him my e-mail.

The funny part of this, to me, is that I had recently applied for a position with this historical society. Had they gone and hired me, they could have just eliminated the middle man. I don't think the person who forwarded my address knew I had applied. I just thought it was funny. Heck, maybe the referring person was the one they hired for the role.

I did some quick work and discovered a publication called The Silent Worker that had a mere 130 articles on the player and a half dozen on his wife. Plus, the entire publication has been digitized and is available online. Contains photos, which the researcher was especially interested in. It was nice being able to hit the mother lode like that. Found some other things, too, but it's rare to come across as much information in one place as I did.

In the past I have talked with an audiologist friend of mine about us doing some baseball research on deaf players. Maybe this is an omen.

Regardless, it started my week off nicely. I get such a thrill out of helping people with their research. It's my favorite part of working at the library and has been a great part of my role as minor league committee chair of SABR. Don't mean to be tooting my horn and all. Just feel good and wanted to post something today.