#Shortstops: Stop the presses

There’s a ground ball to Kris Bryant, who throws to Anthony Rizzo – and Joe Buck yells that sentence not spoken in 108 years: “The Cubs have won the World Series!” Wrigleyville goes wild, beginning the long awaited celebration that five generations of Cubs fans have been unable to enjoy.

Within minutes after the victory, articles are all over the web. If baseball fans are not watching the game, they are sure to receive notifications from ESPN to CNN. They can watch the highlights, listen to analysts break down the game, or read about the significance. This is quite different than the Cubs last World Series win, when there was not even such a thing as commercial radio.

But even with all these different types of media, Cubs’ fans are currently more interested in another type of news outlet, one where, as Senior Curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Tom Shieber puts it, they can acquire an “inexpensive and practical way of remembering the [historic victory]”.

These fans will be looking to grab the front page of a newspaper the following morning.

From the inception of baseball in the mid-1800s, newspapers taught fans the game. As MLB historian John Thorn wrote in his article “The Baseball Press Emerges”, The Clipper newspaper “fostered the incipient pastime, gave advice to clubs and players, and exerted [its] widespread influence to perpetuate it as a healthy and harmless amusement."

Without newspapers, baseball likely would have never reached the national spotlight to become America’s Pastime.

Each morning from Spring Training to the late fall, millions of baseball fans around the nation picked up their newspapers and checked the baseball section. They would find out the scores from the day before, stories of what happened in the games, and updated player and team statistics.

However, with new technology allowing for instant baseball access at one’s fingertips, the once primary spreaders of baseball are fading out. While the 1908 World Series was all over the newspapers, the Cubs’ victory in 2016 was mostly delivered to the public online.

Printing press plates from the Nov. 3, 2016, edition of the Chicago Tribune are now a part of the Hall of Fame collection.

The double significance of the plates is a big reason Shieber says the Hall of Fame accessioned the artifacts.