Arizona Republic Teams with Play Ball Project to Share News Coverage of the Cactus League
For more than one hundred years, journalists reporting for the Arizona Republic, and before that the Phoenix Gazette, have been covering the story of professional baseball in Arizona. When Horace Stoneham and Bill Veeck gave birth to the Cactus League in the 1940’s, the writers and photographers of the paper were there. And now thanks to a unique research partnership with the Arizona Republic and the Peoria Diamond Club, future generations of baseball fans will be able to relive those moments through stories and images captured as spring training news was being made.
Starting in late June, a team of volunteers from the Peoria service group, known for their good work at Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres spring training games, will descend on the newspaper’s archives in downtown Phoenix, looking for everything written or photographed about spring training. The materials then will be developed into a special show within the Play Ball exhibition. Due to the various archive methods used by the Republic over the decades, it is hard to predict how long it will take to find stories and photos relevant to Arizona’s spring training history. But organizers hope volunteers will find enough material to share as a first installment when the third season of “Play Ball” opens in February 2011.
