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. The clippings also make the rounds on Instagram at @pasttimeball, and the RSS feed carries every new one. Corrections, tips and great old clippings are welcome at hello@pasttimeball.com.

Who is the Bleacherite?

Who are you?
Somebody in the cheap seats with a library card.

Why anonymous?
The clippings are the attraction. Besides, this site has already published what happened to the last fellow who made himself conspicuous around Jesse Burkett.

Where do you sit?
Sunny side, near the top. The boy in the tree had the right idea, but somebody has to buy the hot dogs.

What makes a clipping worth posting?
A great team name, a score settled in print or a sentence no modern editor would allow. Any two of the three and it goes in the file.

Can I send you one?
Please. hello@pasttimeball.com, citation included if you have it. Backing out later would be understandable, but the 1905 Mountain Echo had a word for that.

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.