Jack Bales, Simpson Library’s Reference and Humanities Librarian, has finished researching and writing his book on the Chicago Cubs baseball team, tentatively titled Before They Were the Cubs: The Early Years of Chicago’s First Professional Baseball Team. Bales uses–and cites–more than 2,000 sources, including newspaper articles, memoirs, and archival records, to chronicle a history of the team from its nineteenth-century planning stages to 1902, when a sportswriter referred to the young players as Cubs in the March 27 issue of the Chicago Daily News. The book will include 30 photographs and other illustrations, some of which Bales found by poring over numerous reels of microfilm. His history will be published next year by McFarland & Company, a leading publisher of baseball books and academic nonfiction.