How Retrosheet Saved Baseball History

by Jay Wigley

You have favorite baseball memories, games that live forever in your mind, ones you can still see perfectly. But could you recall every play? The exact sequence that made those moments possible? Now you can. Every play. Every game. Every season since 1871. For the first time in baseball history, it all exists in one place, and it's free for anyone to use. All thanks to Retrosheet.In 1989, Dave Smith had a problem. He'd gathered 7,000 games in his Delaware basement, but over 130,000 more were scattered across the moldering in team archives, stacked in sportswriters' attics, at risk of being thrown away forever. No funding. No institutional support. Just one fan with an impossible save baseball's history before it disappeared.What happened next changed how we understand the game. Smith recruited a volunteer army that tracked down scorebooks, decoded Allan Roth's revolutionary scoresheets, and digitized millions of plays. All that while refusing to charge a dime. Their work now powers your favorite websites like Baseball Reference and Fangraphs.This is the story of how baseball's greatest preservation challenge became its most democratic achievement, and connected you to every game ever played.

228 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2026

Reviews

[Sean Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book

A look at how the incredible project of Retrosheet came to be. The amount of work done by an all volunteer group is staggering.

[Nathan Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Retrosheet currently exists as a very cool and very niche project for a very select group of people that think about baseball a little too much. I have loved the Retrosheet project as a an exemplar of a group of people doing something very well just because they love it. And I think you could learn about Retrosheet and come to love it in the same way through this book.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent history of Retrosheet and a wonderful homage to David Smith and his organization. I had scored and entered some games in the early days of Retrosheet & Project Scoresheet, so it was a nostalgic trip for me.