We plan to release i9s in sets covering different periods of baseball history. The first of these, which we’re calling The Early Years, covers players whose debut year occurred before 1910.
There will, ultimately, be about 150 of these. You can always look at an alphabetical list, or the most recent players we’ve published.
Like all distinctions, it’s a little artificial, and we’ve made some judgement calls. So, Pelayo Chacón, Bill Pierce, and Bingo DeMoss, while potentially making their i9s debut before 1910, will appear in the second set, while Pop Lloyd, Smokey Joe Williams, and José Méndez are part of The Early Years, despite careers that extend well into the 1920s.
The years from the 1880s through 1909 are erratic in baseball. The rules are still settling down, teams and leagues are still pretty unstable, and the quality of play is highly variable. In general, teams still carry very few pitchers, and offenses–while running hot in the 1890s–settle into deadball level misery from 1904 or so on. Homeruns are rare, as are strikeouts, making the game even more foreign to contemporary analysis.