The free Baseball Digest archives: Down memory lane

The nearly eighty-year-old ‘Baseball Digest’ is allowing readers access to their archives, providing baseball history fans with a treasure trove.

The morning of Apr. 9 brought some good news for baseball fans for a change. It was slightly melancholy good news, but welcome nonetheless. Because of the pandemic, Baseball Digest is opening up its archives for 3½ months for free.

This news came to me in my extraordinarily overpriced morning paper, in the form of an article by Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune. It touted the Digest’s decision as a great thing for Boomers, and began with the sort of light insults to later generations that led to the current usage, “OK, Boomer.”

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Otherwise, it was a useful piece and led me to easily sign up for this temporarily free service, and very quickly access their archives. This will surely lead to emails until I’m dead from the publication urging me to pay actual money later for the publication.

Maybe I will. I was a subscriber in the past.

However that turns out, once I was into the “electronic stacks” that are now the history of Baseball Digest, I scrolled down until I hit a magazine cover featuring a player on the Philadelphia Phillies. (The archive pages are nothing if not colorful, and I just scrolled until I hit a Phillies uniform.)

It turned out that the cover I chose led to an article about Cliff Lee, and once inside the magazine, in the Baseball Digest document, I realized the piece was about something I had also written about back in 2010. That was the year the holidays started on Dec. 14 in Philadelphia, the date the Phillies signed Lee for the second time in his career.

I decided to see if Bruce R. Wells and I saw that signing in the same light.

It turned out we did, largely, although I can’t provide a link to prove that because I believe I wrote my piece for a now largely forgotten (and dark) website that was bought by Yahoo! but I’m not entirely sure I didn’t write the piece for Yahoo Sports as part of another defunct entity, the so-called Yahoo Contributor Network. Pieces done for that site have also gone dark.

(Side thought here: Remember when it was a commonplace observation that nothing will ever really disappear from internet? Well, in fact, some things do. Or at least they do for all practical purposes. I often think of some pieces I wrote about 10-12 years ago as existing on a server that’s no longer plugged in – in a basement in the dark.)

Anyhow, Wells had this to say about the Four Aces the Phillies had assembled for 2011: “Not even the Braves classic trio of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz (with help from the likes of Steve Avery and Denny Neagle) could match this Quintessential Quartet for depth and ability.”

I put it this way: “Not since the Baltimore Orioles sent out Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Pat Dobson, and Mike Cueller, all 20-game winners in 1971, have opposing hitters looked forward to facing a more difficult staff.”

Anyway, that’s all past now, but readers interested in baseball history now have a very nice resource free of charge for the next few months at least. Sullivan’s piece – linked above – has the information needed for readers to reach the Baseball Digest treasure trove.

Take a look at the May/June of 2011 issue if you forget who the other three Phillies aces were in 2011. They helped set the franchise record of 102 wins that year.