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Electronic Highways
Play ball on the World Wide Web
Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but when springtime comes around, diamonds also are on the minds of millions of baseball fans. And baseball buffs looking for Web sites on their beloved game will certainly have an easy time of it—for they exist by the thousands.
Close to home, the Buffalo Bisons http://www.bisons.com will begin their 118th season of professional baseball in Buffalo on Opening Day, April 3. Major league baseball fans can find the schedules and roster of players for their favorite teams at the Official Site of Major League Baseball, http://www.MLB.com.
If baseball trivia and the history of the game is your thing, then you must pay a visit to BaseballLibrary.com http://www.pubdim.net/baseballlibrary/, a site The New York Times describes as a "hulking colossus of online baseball arcana...that can serve up ample portions of the most obscure baseball history." Also worth a visit is Baseball-Reference.com http://baseball-reference.com/, where you can find baseball statistics browsable by player, teams, leagues, leaders, awards and managers; a "Baseball Travel Guide" feature allows you to enter a city or zip code and receive information on nearby baseball attractions. The Baseball Index (TBI) http://www.baseballindex.org/ is a searchable index of more than 175,000 baseball "books, magazine articles, programs, pamphlets, films, recordings, songs, poems, cartoons, advertising or anything else that may be of interest to the baseball fan or researcher" (the database provides bibliographic citations only). Anyone may search The Baseball Index and view up to 50 source references for free, but unlimited access to search results must be purchased.
Are you a fan of American presidential history as well as baseball? Then, test your knowledge at Presidential Baseball http://www.prezbaseball.org/. This site has a multiple-choice quiz in which players are asked to identify the baseball personality whose career most closely parallels the performance in office of each of the nation's presidents. If you try playing "Presidential Baseball" and find you really like it, then take a stab at Oyez Baseball http://baseball.oyez.org/, a game that challenges visitors to draw parallels between baseball players and United States Supreme Court justices! (both Oyez Baseball and Presidential Baseball require Macromedia Flash Player).
Fantasy baseball, Little League baseball, collegiate baseball, baseball cards, baseball movies, baseball collectibles, baseball newsgroups, ballparks—the list goes on and on, and you can find links to all of these baseball topics and more at John Skilton's Baseball Links http://www.baseball-links.com/. The Skilton site should keep even the most die-hard baseball fan busy; there are enough links there to keep one busy to, say, September—the month when football season begins!
-Don Hartman and Cynthia Tysick, University Libraries