I’m blue over Green and Red

April 19, 2016 · 1 comment

Overlooked this from a couple of months ago.

From “Sports Money” on Forbes.com, dated March 3, 2016:

Major League Baseball has discontinued publishing the Green and Red Books, two media guides that provided scores of data on teams for a given season, plus historical information.

According to the article by Maury Brown, the powers that be decided all the information contained there in were available from other sources, so why go through the trouble and expense?

https://i0.wp.com/blogs-images.forbes.com/maurybrown/files/2016/03/RedGreen.jpg?resize=463%2C288

Brown, owner of Bizball.biz, a research and analytics company, as well a member of the BBWAA. noted that first the books were discontinued in print form and,  now they’re no longer going to do them as PDFs.

If you haven’t seen these, they were sooooo cool. Not terribly big, but full of factoids, including a name pronunciation table for each team. I remember when I found out you could request them — for free — just by writing a note to the American and National League offices. Of course, this goes back about 40 years ago…

Waaaaah.

https://i0.wp.com/i.ebayimg.com/images/g/teEAAOSwgQ9V0RH-/s-l300.jpgWhen I arrived at the Shea Stadium press box to do my first game for STATS, I found it quite intimidating. I did have my own spot all set aside, thankfully, but knowing proper etiquette? I felt like the rookie I was, not sure to whom I could talk, even just to shoot the breeze. The fact that I’m naturally introverted didn’t help.

I noticed that just about everyone had a media guide for both teams, the Mets and whoever there opponent was that day. I summoned up my courage and asked the late Shannon Forde, the PB liaison,i f I could possibly get a copy of the Mets book. Sure, she said. Did I want one for the other team, too? Sure, I said, trying to be cool.

https://i2.wp.com/thumbs.ebaystatic.com/images/g/XFkAAOxyTyBSUyq9/s-l225.jpgThat’s when I felt, at least a little bit, like I was part of the club. After all, this was in the day when such treasures weren’t available to mere fans. As I worked more games, I steadily built up my collection. And when I became the sports editor for the New Jersey Jewish News, I became emboldened and contact all the teams, requesting copies of their guides.

But now, those, too, are increasingly made available as PDFs, putting the onus on the users to print out individual pages or the entirety. As an old-school guide, I don’t like reading large volumes on my computer or even a Kindle; there’s something about the physicality of the book that’s a literary comfort food-deal.

But I guess that’s progress for ya.

 

0Shares

{ 1 comment }

1 Gary Gillette April 19, 2016 at 9:38 pm

I don't know what Maury was smoking, but I just saw his Forbes piece (courtesy of your link). The Red Book was discontinued two years ago, but the Green Book was published in 2015 and again this year in PDF format, as it has been in recent years.

True, it's only a shadow of its former self (46-48 pages the last two years), so it's not nearly as useful as it once was, but it's still available.

If you want to see a copy, I can email one.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post:

script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-5496371-4']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();