Only now can I come out from behind a veil of secrecy and tell you about my experience as a beta tester for the new SABR Encyclopedia. It was that terrible kind of experience in which you both have fun and learn some things at the same time.

Among the things I learned while inputting information from various publications such as the South Atlantic League Player Index, 1964 or various online college baseball media guides were:

• Mary Lou Retton’s dad played minor league baseball, and was also a basketball teammate of Jerry West at West Virginia.
• Gale Tyndall was a high school switch pitcher in Michigan.
• Bobby Shantz was selected in both expansion drafts in the 1960s.*
• Forrest Twogood was a pretty amazing guy.

Some of these things I learned because I am lucky enough to have a part of the late John Pardon’s collection of media guides in the office, but just as much has been learned from selective searches at Paper of Record and Google.

*I didn't learn about Bobby Shantz through my own research, but through the collective editing that the Encyclopedia makes possible – but I will save that story for a later blog post here.

I learned how to make the edits in the SABR Encyclopedia by copying and pasting either old, successful formatting from previous entries I made or from the samples in the documentation (mostly the page on Citing Sources). I now have a pretty good idea what I am doing and will often type out citations without copying and pasting – which, of course, can create a while new set of problems when you don’t type over the information that needs replacing.

I hope that you’ll decide to join in the fun. Sometimes I just click on the "Random Page" link and see what comes up. If it is a unique enough looking name, maybe you can Google it (+baseball) and see if you get hits (other than Baseball-Reference.com). If it is a unique name, a career minor leaguer, and a birthdate 75+ years ago, maybe you’ll want to check the Social Security Index to see if he has passed away. But be careful – you’ll need to figure out a way to still make sure that it is likely the ballplayer and not someone else with the same name (cross-referencing date of birth or searching for an obituary can work here).

I’ve also done a lot of grabbing a college media guide online and updating the college data for players; that’s fun to do. Washington State has an excellent baseball media guide that I am only about half the way through.

Now that we have The Sporting News back online, opening up an old issue and checking out "Caught on the Fly" or "Tabbing the Kids" for interesting information is a blast. Last week I found one of Rocky Marciano’s brothers, Louis Marchegiano.

I’ve learned a lot, and I get a charge out of being on the ground floor of something that I know is going to be great sometime soon. Think about spending five minutes giving it a try and adding one piece of information.