Baseball in The New Yorker

Most on-line editions of print magazines have a search component. Some offer full-text versions of their articles, while others (the mean ones) only post abstracts, requiring the curious to either pay for a subscription (either full or “web-only”) or the individual item.

I’ve done some preliminary research and will be posting the results from time to time.

The New Yorker, which launched in 1925, has been a repository of baseball items. An collection of their cartoons was published in 2003 and serves as a marvelous time capsule, not only of baseball, but of the changing nature of humor.

Roger Angell, one of the greatest baseball writers of the 20th (and now 21st) century, has made his “home” in the pages of The New Yorker. Like the cartoons, Angell is a repository of not only how the game on the field ahs changed, but on how it is reported.

The magazine’s editors have provided a wonderful service, releasing the entire run of the magazine (up until Fall 2005) on The Complete New Yorker, an 8-DVD set. The viewer can plug in the topic of his/his choice — in this case “baseball” — and come up with thousands of items, all faithfully reproduced from the original printed page. Of course, some are just passing references, but others are gold mines from the Golden Age. It’s available from Amazon for $63 new (RSP is $100), and about $40 for “like new” used.

A source at Sports Illustrated said they had plans for putting their entire run on DVD as well.

In the meantime, here’s the link for the on-line search for “baseball,” which yields “only” 1,000 hits. I’m sure there are more, but perhaps that’s the search engine’s limitation. Happy hunting.