About Past Time Ball

Past Time Ball is a hobby site. It reprints scanned newspaper clippings about old baseball and softball: game stories, ads, cartoons, feuds and the occasional great team name. Everything here was found in digitized public domain newspapers, mostly small-town papers whose sports coverage ran somewhere between literature and gossip. That was the golden age of the form and this site exists to pass it around.

The clippings are the attraction. The commentary just points at the good parts, and the paper's own words are always better than ours. When a story says a man umpired a ball game and refereed a fight at the same time, there is nothing to add.

The site is managed by the Bleacherite, who prefers the cheap seats and sees no reason to say more. Corrections, tips and great old clippings are welcome at hello@pasttimeball.com.

Sourcing and rights

The clippings on this site are drawn from public domain newspapers, chiefly through digitized archives such as Chronicling America at the Library of Congress. Every clipping page includes a citation to the original newspaper, with a link to the digitized source whenever one exists.

The scans themselves reproduce public domain material and are free to share. The commentary is ours. If you spot an error in a citation or believe something is credited incorrectly, write to hello@pasttimeball.com and it will be fixed.