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How To Get Old Player Portraits...


DylanBradbury

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The other day I was looking at websites, and what they used to look like using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. For those of you who don't know the Internet Archive/The Wayback Machine is, click here.

While browsing, an idea hit me: I wonder if the Wayback machine saved old baseball player portraits? It turns out a large number of portraits were saved. Here's how to get your own...

Go to the Wayback Machine, and type in a sports website. Here are a few examples:

cbs.sportsline.com

www.majorleaguebaseball.com

espn.com

www.cnnsi.com (This one is my favourite. It has the highest resolution out of all the sites I browsed. 115x175)

I'll use CNNSI.com for the example.

step1du.jpg

Click "Take Me Back."

Next you'll see a page with a bunch of dates on it. Each date represents an archived version of the page. Click the date you want.

step1.jpg

This will load the site. If the date you chose doesn't work, try another date. Navigate your way to a page where they have baseball rosters. Each site and date combination differs, but it's usually something like Baseball>Players>(Team you want). Once there click on the player you want the portrait for.

step1q.jpg

Sometimes an image will load...

step1k.jpg

and sometimes it doesn't... (Try another date/player/website combination)

step1cf.jpg

If the image loads, right click it, and (in Firefox) click "Save image as..." and save your image to where you want it.

Enjoy!

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I used this a bunch a couple years ago, but as more and more minor league websites become a part of milb.com, it's tough to do.

Hey KG, you don't have to use MILB.com to get to a team's old website. Just use their old url.

For example: The old Syracuse SkyChiefs is http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.skychiefs.com.

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July 7, 1997 Headline reads "Starting pitchers Greg Maddux (NL) and Randy Johnson (AL) will meet tomorrow at the 68th All-Star Game in Cleveland. See the biggest and best Midsummer Classic Web site!"

DAYUUMMM!

lol

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  • 1 month later...

not sure if it will be useful for portrait makers either, but if you could ever get all the old full size pressboxes...well there's nothing i could say that would be nice enough to thank you for doing that.

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not sure if it will be useful for portrait makers either, but if you could ever get all the old full size pressboxes...well there's nothing i could say that would be nice enough to thank you for doing that.

Hahah, believe me I tried and tried to get those PressBox photos. MLB knew what they were doing when they blocked it from the Internet Archive.

As well, I used these photos to get rid of every player who had an modern-day Toronto Blue Jays portrait, and replaced them with the less modern (better) ones, so there's definitely some usefulness there.

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