Josh Gibson on a budget- let’s see your low cost alternatives
 

For many of us our collecting goals face an obstacle that is just outside our budget. For me my Trujillo Dragons collection was stopped with Josh Gibson. There are almost no career contemporary items for under $1000 ( and most are well over that number). Here is my current solution. It’s s page from Spot magazine from August of 1942.

Let’s see your creative solutions to fill a collection

My low cost alternative is to collect team scorebooks. Fortunately, for my sake, there isn't a lot of competition (unlike score cards where there is a lot of competition). I enjoy being able to relive the entirety of a game, inning by inning, in what is often the only complete recording of some of these games.

Here's a page with Josh Gibson batting clean up.

Rob M

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I think Rob is correct that scorebooks are tremendously undervalued. You can argue that they are not much to look at, but I think that’s a lazy view. If you really look at them they let you see the entire game

That's Super Cool - do you have other similar books? (lesser leagues?) Have you ever thought of digitizing them?! (I'm sure there isn't a ton out there). Despite LOVING to keep score, I have never thought of collecting these! You may end up getting some competition!

Hey Stefan - I’ve got about 15-20 of them and mostly concentrate on official team or official scorer’s scorebooks or sport’s reporter scorebooks. I find those the most accurate but if you open it up to fan’s scorebooks you’ll find more selections. Similar to you, I started keeping the scorebook at my son’s games when he was young and that opened my eyes to how to understand and translate a scorebook. They can often be a challenge though as scoring methods can very over time and between different scorers. Worth the challenge though as they can be very unique. You just have to find your niche. I know Jason works the Caribbean arena pretty hard, for the items he collects, and has found many negro league related gems going that route too. I recently went that route and came up with an affordable team scorebook for Caguas-Guayama of the Puerto Rican Winter league which contained several negro league players.

Rob M

Page from an 1867 scorebook -

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That's Really Cool- Thanks for sharing! Yea, I figured they would vary in how they were scored. I bet some are fairly hard to decipher! I will definitely start keeping an eye out!