If you’ve been following me and my Texas Rangers fandom for any length of time, you should know that uniform numbers fascinate me. I’m always looking up information on players, and it’s something I’ve been doing for awhile.
Some Background:
I grew up in Philadelphia, and when I was young, it was the era of Steve Carlton, Mike Schmidt, and Pete Rose. To this day I can still recall their numbers without looking it up (32, 20, 14). But it went further than that. Unless they retired someone’s number, I would always think “Hey, that’s so and so’s old number”. That mindset extended to when I moved to Texas in the early 90’s and because a fan of the Texas Rangers.
Back in 2006, I happened upon this book, which was a list of uniform numbers for every team. It was a goldmine! Yeah, the internet was around at this point, but things like Baseball Reference were not. This was an awesome book, I picked it up, and used the data on the Rangers as a starting point to launch uniform number history on my website. Back then it was far more spartan than what I have now, but I’ve spent over a decade working the numbers now. [Read more…]