Craig Waff
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Craig died suddenly of a stroke in 2012. The Protoball Games Tabulation, a major portion of the site's "PrePro Data Base," is now named in his honor.
Essays and Articles
Add an Article by Craig Waff== Contributions of Note ==
Craig had found and recorded over 2000 game accounts (Several hundred are slated for uploads in June 2016) . His topic checklist is the source of our standard format for early base ball games. You can search these games at EnhancedSearch
Submitted Entries: 2319
News
Craig Waff contributed two essays to the Special Protoball Issue of Base Ball the spring:
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"1856 -- The New York Game in 1856: Poised for a National Launch." Base Ball. 5(1): 114 - 117 (co-written with Larry McCray.
- "1860 -- Atlantics and Excelsiors Compete for the "Championship"." Base Ball. 5(1): 139 - 142.
Craig has compiled an initial table of known “base ball” games – including those played by New York and Massachusetts rules and town ball games in Philadelphia and Cincinnati – played in the 1845 to 1860 period. The table includes about 1000 games, about three times the number to be found in Peverelly (1866) and in Wright [2000], and incorporates generous samplings of text from newspaper accounts for many of them. See his Games Tabulation, which has links to lists for the greater New York area and 18 other regions. For each game Craig supplies the date, location, source, and any significant game account excerpts.
In the process of amassing the mega-table, Craig has found newspaper accounts of three early triple plays and what may be the first “over-the-fence” home run. Craig is now researching the 1860 tours of the Brooklyn Excelsiors and is preparing essays on the Atlantic, Star, and Enterprise teams of Brooklyn for the Pioneer Project.
Trained in the history of science, Craig is focusing for now on early ball in New York and Brooklyn, and on games played on ice skates in the mid-1800s. He has been using the online databases of the New York Times and Brooklyn Daily Eagle to not only track the development of interest in astronomy in New York City and Brooklyn in the late 19th century, but also to collect systematically, for the PROTOBALL archives, copies of all baseball-related articles that appeared in these newspapers up to 1860. During that search he discovered what may be the first recorded triple play (occurring on 16 April 1859). He is also researching the winter baseball games played with skates on ice from 1860 to 1887.