Joyce Sports Research Collection: Baseball

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What follows is a guide to some of the more significant baseball related materials held in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame. It does not include baseball materials held elsewhere in the Hesburgh Libraries, or in Notre Dame's University Archives. Its purpose is to provide researchers with a convenient overview of Special Collections' resources in this subject area; it does not aspire to be comprehensive. Items listed in these finding aids do not circulate; they may be requested and consulted in the Department of Special Collections, 102 Hesburgh Library, from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. weekdays. Researchers interested in materials specifically pertaining to baseball at Notre Dame should contact University Archives, 607 Hesburgh Library (email archives@nd.edu).

Title or collection descriptions on this page are linked to records, inventories, and other appropriate types of finding aid. The dates that follow many of the annual and periodical titles on this page indicate the span of years a given title was published; available holdings are indicated in the linked finding aid. Questions concerning the materials on the page may be directed to the curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection, George Rugg (email grugg@nd.edu; phone 574-631-6506).

Books

  • The Department's Rare Book Collections include all the Libraries' earlier and scarcer sports related titles, including those with a bearing on baseball. These may be searched in ALEPH, the Hesburgh Libraries' online catalog.

Annuals -- guide format

Annuals -- magazine format

Periodicals

Yearbooks and media guides

Programs and scorecards

Special Collections

  • A collection of sixty-four autographed baseballs, 1914-1996. Included are team-signed, group-signed, and single-signature balls; signatures of close to fifty Hall of Famers are represented. An illustrated on-line catalog of this collection has recently been added to this website. Gifts of John J. Evers, Jr; Emmit Jennings; Mike Ravine.

  • A collection of materials on the All-American Girls Baseball League, a women's professional league active in the Midwest from 1943 to 1954. The greater part of the collection consists of records preserved by Dr. Harold T. Dailey (1894-1971), a South Bend, Indiana oral surgeon who served the league’s South Bend Blue Sox franchise in various executive capacities. Much of the Dailey material is included in a set of ten loose-leaf notebooks totaling over 1100 leaves; these were apparently intended as a documentary history of the league, and perhaps as source material for a narrative history Dailey never found time to write. Included are minutes of the meetings of the AAGBBL Board of Directors, financial information, and player information and statistics, as well as correspondence, newspaper clippings, printed ephemera, and photographs. Notebooks are arranged chronologically, and cover the full span of the league's history, with an emphasis on the South Bend franchise. The AAGBBL Collection also incorporates other components, including papers of league manager D. C. “Chet” Grant; several groups of player questionnaires; and league-related printed matter. MSSP 0014‑1‑B to MSSP 0014‑255‑0.

  • A collection of 120 open reel audio tapes, most about forty-five minutes, of interviews conducted by Lawrence S. Ritter for his seminal oral history The Glory of Their Times (1966). From 1963 to 1965 Ritter sought out and interviewed players of the 1900-1930 era, editing the resulting tapes into one of the most entertaining and significant of all baseball books. These tapes are copies of the originals, which are now in Cooperstown. Gift of Lawrence S. Ritter.

  • An accumulation of scrapbooks on American baseball. These consist almost entirely of newspaper clippings from local dailies and sporting weeklies; content includes both off-field developments and game accounts and box scores, with a general emphasis on the professional game at its most elite level. Dates vary, but the greatest emphasis is on the years 1870-1885. Many of the scrapbooks are held only in microform, while in other cases only the paper originals are held.

  • Research notes and other materials accumulated by Marshall Smelser while writing his 1975 biography of Babe Ruth, The Life That Ruth Built. Included are 1) a file of approximately 1500 index cards, chronologically arranged, indicating the news and feature stories on Ruth that appeared in The New York Times, 1914-1969; 2) a file of approximately 6500 index cards of facts and observations pertaining to Ruth, with sources, arranged by chapter (i. e., in the sequence in which the relevant material appeared in the book); 3) a collection of 74 photographs relating to Ruth, most of which appeared in the book. Smelser was a long-time professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

  • A collection of materials on the Pete Rose gambling investigation of 1989. These materials, consisting primarily of photocopies of documents and clippings, were assembled in 1989 by journalist Jim Newton of the Fort Hamilton (OH) Press, and acquired by the University Libraries in 1990. Included are copies of the Dowd Report (Major League Baseball's investigation into Rose's activities) with its many attendant volumes of exhibits; legal documents pertaining to the Rose affair; and newspaper clippings tracking the case from March to September, 1989.

  • A small collection of books, scrapbooks, photographs, and personal effects belonging to Hall of Fame second baseman Johnny Evers (1883-1947). Much of the material relates to the exhibition series played in Europe in 1924 by the New York Giants and Chicago White Sox, a series in which Evers participated as White Sox manager. Gift of John J. Evers, Jr.