The Baseball Index

The Baseball Index (TBI) is a free catalog to baseball literature. It encompasses books, magazine articles, programs, pamphlets, films, recordings, songs, poems, cartoons, advertising, or anything else that may be of interest to the baseball fan or researcher. It is an ongoing project of the Bibliography Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) to catalog the entirety of baseball literature, from the earliest references to the present day. TBI is the creation of volunteers. Their hours of work and financial contributions have made your TBI research possible.

Remember, TBI is an index to baseball literature. It is a guide to what has been written about baseball subjects. It does not include the full-text of the sources referenced.

What's In the Database?

The Baseball Index currently encompasses over 200,000 index records (citations) to books, articles, song sheets, yearbooks, advertisements, media guides, cartoons, poems, media guides, cartoons, and more. It is by far the most extensive index/bibliography to baseball literature, its coverage many times that of existing paper indexes and bibliographies. Thousands of new entries are being added each year. We estimate the coverage of books to be nearly 90% of all baseball books published. The bulk of the database consists of articles, with good coverage of important publications such as:

Baseball Digest
Baseball Magazine
Inside Sport
International Baseball Rundown
Spirit of the Times
Sport
Sporting News
Sports Illustrated
USA Today Baseball Weekly

Started in 1990, The Baseball Index project is the product of dozens of volunteers who have indexed over 200,000 baseball sources in order to facilitate baseball research. The Baseball Index is part of the Society for American Baseball Research's commitment to advance and support baseball research.

The Baseball Index is a project of the Bibliography Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research. The index has been created through the work of dozens of volunteers over the years. And we always need more volunteers.

We need people to catalog articles from current publications, especially baseball publications, as they receive them.

We need people to go back to earlier years of various sports and general circulation publications and catalog the articles about baseball.

We need people to read and catalog new baseball books as they appear.

We need people to dig out copies of older baseball books and improve the information that we have.

The work can be done either on paper forms that we provide, through a commercial database program, or directly on the web. We provide a manual to guide you through the process.

If you are interested in helping with magazines, newspapers and other periodicals, contact Ted Hathaway at ted@baseballindex.org

If you are interested in helping with books, contact Andy McCue at andy@baseballindex.org