Baseball Records

Well, first things first, Manny finally made a deal with the Dodgers today. That's great news, because it means that we can finally start talking about real, honest-to-goodness baseball. I'm excited about that. I do plan on having a post up about Manny and his free agency-tendencies either sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. It should be interesting, I think.

In the meantime, I thought I'd point this out (even though I'm probably the last person in the world to find this out). Playing around on the baseball-reference.com site earlier, I noticed something hiding in the corner. Normally, when I go to their homepage, I know exactly what I'm looking for, so I don't usually see all the other things they might link to. But I noticed this, and I thought it needed to be pointed out.

The Complete Baseball Record Book that Sporting News publishes every year has been available as a free PDF download for the last two years. Currently, you can find the 2007 Baseball Record Book and the 2008 Baseball Record Book online. It's hard to say if there will be a 2009 version since TSN was taken over last year, but I suspect there will be. If and when that happens, I'll be sure to post a link to it. In the meantime, go take a look.

I remember, as the 1998 season was going along, I decided that getting the 1999 version of this book would be great, since it'd have all of these new records in it. I was excited when I finally saw it on the shelves and I bought it right away. Of course, three years later half of those 1998 records were obsolete. I still have the book, I'm pretty sure, but it did put me off from buying it year-in and year-out. It's nice to see it online, and I hope to see the 2009 version soon.