Friday, January 23, 2009

Quick Notes: Being Commissioner and the Vault

A couple of quick links on an early Friday evening...

1. Jason over at It Is About the Money, Stupid... asked for people's suggestions last week on what they would do if they were Commissioner for a Day. I decided to put in my two cents and so I sent him some (atypically) brief thoughts on stadium financing and the World Baseball Classic. He posted my submission earlier today; go check it out.

2. It was only this past Sunday that I put up a link detailing The Sporting News Vault. Sadly, though, I found out today that Paper of Record, the company that was handling the Vault, has been taken over by Google News and that the TSN vault is no longer available. If you do an Advanced Search with "Sporting News" as the Source, you can find some issues from about 1999 and on. It's nowhere near as complete or detailed as what it was in the past, though.

Over at the Baseball Think Factory thread where I discovered this, user Howard Megdal posted a note he received from the POR webmaster. This seems to be the only real word we can find about what has happened. Hopefully things will get resolved in the future, but I doubt it'll be anytime soon. Here's the note Howard received:
Howard -- Thanks for your note. It's been re-directed to Google as they acquired our content in 2006. I spoke at length with SABR to no avail. The Sporting News database was not moved over a Google could not come to a deal with TSN. However all the data is there and could be made available if we could find someone to pay for it. It's frustrating, but we've attempted to secure SABR for two years now--Best---Bob Huggins
I'll update the reference pages soon...

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