Thursday, June 14, 2007

We Interrupt This Blog....

Just a note that if you hunt and peck around here, you'll find linescores for most of the games of the 1946 and 1953 Western International League seasons. There are game stories for some, but not all, matches.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to all the material that would provide stories (or box scores) on all the games. Newspapers I can get my hands on provided inconsistent coverage; one paper has published line scores but in checking against another newspaper, I've found they didn't publish all of them. That same paper, not in a WIL city, sometimes published one-line game stories, but most of the time it didn't. Another paper in a WIL city was equally inconsistent and didn't even print information on games if it didn't publish the next day (so there would no info on a Sunday game if it had a Tuesday paper but didn't publish Monday). Still another paper had a reporter who was great at thinking up colourful phrases, but rarely said much about the game itself other than what a reader could have gleaned from the box score anyway. "He of the swarthy complexion whose hurtling speed would give jackrabbits a greenish tinge"; that sort of stuff that passed for writing in one era.
On top of that, in 1946, the final standings are correct, but some of the mid-season numbers you'll see here don't add up. (wire services compile their own standings and there have been times where someone at the service has put a win or loss in the wrong column. Getting that someone to fix things is a chore, as I can attest through experience.)

So this means a lot of work in just doing the bare-bones highlights that you can read here as I have to park myself at the library and make notes.

1953 was picked arbitrarily; 1946 is here because it's the first year of resumption after the war and because of the horrible Spokane bus crash, printed in stories across the continent, thanks to full coverage by the two major wire services.

Because some of the coverage is from wire services, names are not spelled consistently. This will be corrected over time. And some material came from .pdf files so there will be the occasional scanning error.

I hope you've found the information here at least mildly interesting.

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