Customer Reviews

Minor League Baseball Standings : All North American Leagues, Through 1999

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Content-wise, this book is virtually identical to The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (Johnson & Wolff) at more than twice the price, though arranged a bit differently. This book is organized by league and includes cumulative summaries by team and major league parent (and best and worst seasons, for active leagues), while The Encyclopedia is by year and includes individual statistical leaders by league and notes of interest for each year; the former has various summaries in appendices, while the latter has a section on all-time minor league records and individual records by league; the former has an extensive alphabetical index, while the latter has sections organizing teams by league and state, and leagues by year; the former has no text, while the latter has several pages of text covering minor league history.
The guts of both books - minor league standings - are the same. Both exclude the standings of non-signatory leagues from the 19th century. Both contain some (the same?) inaccuracies where wins do not equal losses for some leagues - an appendix in this book includes a list of such instances, most of which are attributed to "unknown". I checked various editions of The Sporting News Baseball Guide and was able to find the correct standings in all cases since 1970 - while the errors in The Encyclopedia may have been typos, their recognition without resolution in this book clearly points to less than thorough research. In addition to the Guides, The Sporting News itself has carried minor league standings throughout much of its history, and is available on microfilm in large libraries and from SABR.
All in all, I was very disappointed in this book. I had hoped that it would fill in the data missing from The Encyclopedia, but instead ended up with an expensive copy. Though most of the data in this book is accurate and interesting, it adds little new material - get The Encyclopedia if it's still available, or wait for its next edition.

I came across this book in the new section at my local library and spent an inordinate amount of time looking it over. I'm not a baseball researcher, so the price is a little too steep, but the review above should not be the only word on this book. As a casual reader, I found myself looking up the towns I had lived in to see if they were once (if not presently) graced with a baseball club. The standings were of little interest to me, but the nicknames of all these teams are facsinating and there must be some wonderful stories behind all these numbers that run to page after page. I don't know the qualities of other books on this subject, but at the very least this one should be on the library shelves.