For those of you who weren't Dodger Thoughts readers, last year in the comments on Jon's game chats, I had a feature called Random Dodger Game callback. I took all the years of the Dodgers existence (1884-2004 at the time) ran them through a program that mixed up the dates and then assigned each day to a game from that year. If the Dodgers didn't play the day that it was matched to, I took the next one in line and swapped positions. I ran into problems in that I had a 1994 game due for September, so I had to really move that around. Eerily, the 2001 date randomly fell on 9/12.

This year, with my own blog, the Random Game Callbacks have a home of their own. They will start tomorrow and run consecutively through August 27. They will cover all teams and they will go from 1871 (the first year of the National Association) through 2005.

I waited until April 15 to start because the majority of baseball seasons didn't start as early as they do today. Nevertheless, you are going to encounter quite a few Opening Day stories for the next few weeks.

My principal sources for this are the invaluable resources of baseball history Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference. I also use newspapers of the day that I can get through the ProQuest subscription that I get as a perk of my membership in SABR. One of the side effects of this is that the papers that have the longest runs are the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, so there may be a disproportionate number of games involving teams from those cities. Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Atlanta are also available to me, although the newspapers in those cities don't often have the depth I need. However, I intend to have all of the current 30 teams to get covered. However, if you're a big Diamondbacks or Devil Rays fan, you may end up disappointed.

I haven't had to write about a game from the NA years (1871-5) and some of the info from then could be a bit sketchy.

I hope you enjoy them. If you don't, you know it's something you can skip right off.