Bringing the Storied ’27 Yankees to Life With Precise Historical Content

As historical storytelling served as the foundation of the project, creator Douglas Alden required a tremendous amount of archival information. NYTLicensing provided access to TimesMachine, a browser-based digital replica of every edition of The New York Times published between 1851 and 1980. Through contemporaneous accounts from The Times archive, we helped ESPN contextualize the fictional storytelling components with precise historical detail of events both on and off the field.

"Thanks to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the New York Public Library and stunning online archives, like the New York Times’s TimesMachine, our research for this project has accessed a treasure trove of contemporaneous accounts of the 1927 season." — ESPN

About ESPN

NYTLicensing helped ESPN combine historical fiction and factual content sources from The Times archive for a groundbreaking retelling of the 1927 Yankees season. Via Twitter, Medium and ESPN Digital, this historical novel was published along the same timeline as actual events that unfolded decades ago. The end result was allowing audiences to ‘follow’ the on-field exploits of one of the most famous teams in baseball history over the course of a 154-game season.