Tracy Press

One man's quest to record his son's playing days turns into a project to build the definitive Web site for Tracy High sports teams.

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Stu Jossey, who started his photography hobby by snapping shots at his son’s baseball games, now maintains a Web site devoted to all things Tracy High baseball. Bob Brownne / Tracy Press

 

He took his camera to baseball games, snapped some good photos of his son, Brandon, and then got some photos of other players in action and shared them with the other parents.

Last year, though, in the middle of the baseball season, Jossey had to come to grips with just how big that project had grown.

First it was the requests from All American Baseball Academy; then from District 67 Little League; and then from the Tracy High Bulldogs baseball team.

"It went from small to big real quick," Jossey said during the recent varsity-alumni game at Tracy High.

He spent the game shooting photos of all of the action so he could post them on his Web site, www.tracyhighbaseball.com, which has now become the definitive site for the Bulldogs baseball teams.

Jossey figures he puts in an hour or two each day on the Web site, but he often spends at least twice that on game days, when he has to sort through as many as 200 photos and pick out the best shots.

Tracy baseball coach Vic Alkire noticed that the score of the opening game at Patterson High was posted within an hour of the game’s end, and photos of the players were posted there, too.

Jossey credits Alkire with most of the research that contributes to the site. For example, the Bulldogs’ career and season leaders for batting and pitching are posted, as are team statistics for every year since 1977.

"If you’re a baseball fan, you’ve got to be a stats fan," Alkire said.

He said coaches often keep track of how their own teams do, as he’s done for the past 16 years, but archived records are hard to come by. Sometimes, the documentation is there, just waiting for someone who wants to sift through it.

"When I became coach, the athletic director handed me a cardboard box full of old scorebooks," Alkire said. "It was scorebooks from a 10-year period of time that had never been totaled up."

He spent one or two nights a week at the Tracy Press office sifting through back issues as far back as 1951 to find old statistics.

"It took days and days, game by game," he said. "Actually, I’m not through yet."

While Alkire was interested enough to do the work, he realized that he needed someone to put all of the information on a computer and possibly publish the records in book form, so that the next generation of Tracy baseball players could compare achievements with the older guys.

Jossey got involved last year after Alkire and his son, Steve, also a coach for the varsity team, double-checked the numbers.

"I knew with Excel I could crunch all of the numbers once I got it in there," Jossey said.

The historical records date back to 1977, with the years 1972, 1964 and 1951 also included, and they provide a reference point for how well today’s players match up against their predecessors.

For example, Steve Alkire, Class of 1992, has the school’s overall record for base hits, with 75 between 1990 and 1992. No. 5 on the list is Ryan Scornaienchi, a senior this year, with 59 hits in his first two years on the team. Scornaienchi has a .393 batting average in that same period, third highest on the all-time list.

Jossey also compiled profiles of each player on this year’s varsity team, including their athletic achievements in Little League and other high school sports and their grade-point averages and test scores.

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written by take this name its not registered , March 09, 2008

aFTER ALL THAT.... DID I MISS THE URL (WEB ADDRESS?)

Would be fun to look at!

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written by Kerberos , March 09, 2008

http://www.tracyhighbaseball.com/

This may be the website you were looking for. I just did a quick search...



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http://www.tracysportspark.com