Quote:
Originally Posted by Amazin69
Where does one find spring rosters? Seems as though everyone has them, save me.
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I think that's a bit of an overstatement. Unless I've missed something, I think that Merkle923 and I are the only two who have been routinely citing spring rosters.
To my knowledge, there is no publicly available source on the Internet for spring rosters at the current time. As a SABR member, I'm able to access that organization's subscription to Paper of Record, which gets me to old copies of The Sporting News. Various editions of The Sporting News had spring training rosters going back in time as far as 1925. The rosters tended to be spread out across January through March a few teams at a time, rather than all in one issue. I was only successful in getting back to 1928, because of legibility problems in the quality of the scans via Paper of Record.
I also used a number of paper documents in building a file of spring roster players who never made the majors during regular season play. Those paper documents were annuals like Street and Smiths, the Sporting News Yearbook, Athlon, etc., plus the annual April issue of Baseball Digest. All of those publications contained spring rosters at one point or another.
Perhaps Merkle found a different way to acquire the spring rosters.