SABR announces Seymour Award winner

From SABR.org

Cleveland, Ohio – The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is happy to announce that the multi-volume Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball (Ivan R. Dee) by Peter Morris was selected to receive this year’s Seymour Medal, which honors the best book of baseball history or biography from the preceding year.  Mr. Morris will receive the medal at the Ninth Annual Seymour Conference, which will be held at the Baseball Heritage Museum in Cleveland on April 27-29 and is sponsored by the Cleveland Indians.

Game of Inches was selected from one of five finalists for the Seymour Medal Award. The judging remarks about the multi-volume work included: “The scope of these books evoke the spirit of the Seymour’s books…comprehensive, well researched, exhaustive.”

The remaining finalists included (in alphabetical order by author):

<ul type=”disc” style=”MARGIN-TOP: 0in; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in”><li class=”MsoNormal” style=”COLOR: black”>"When to Stop The Cheering?: The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball  by Brian Carroll  (Routledge) – Judges’ comments: “This is a groundbreaking volume on an important and hitherto, largely ignored aspect of baseball history.” </li>

<li class=”MsoNormal” style=”COLOR: black”>The Origins and History of The All American Girls Professional Baseball League  by Merrie Fidler (McFarland & Co.) – Judges’ comments: “This book is both a great narrative tale as well as an important reference book on the women’s league. The section on the women following their baseball days is touching and informative.” </li>

<li class=”MsoNormal” style=”COLOR: black”>Spalding’s World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe – And Made It America’s Game  by Mark Lamster (PublicAffairs) -  Judges’ comments: “This book reads like a great novel with Spalding reigning as baseball’s Barnum and Elmer Gantry rolled into one.  This book is as much a ‘tale of the Republic’ as Kashatus’s sad story of Albert Bender.” </li>

<li class=”MsoNormal” style=”COLOR: black”>A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports by Brad Snyder (Viking) </li></ul>

Members of the Seymour Medal judging committee were Richard Johnson (chair), Jon Daniels and Ron Kaplan. John Thorn will deliver the keynote speech at the conference, which is in its ninth year.  Mr. Thorn is the author of countless articles on baseball history and has written, co-written, and edited more than two dozen books, including The Hidden Game of Baseball, Total Baseball, and The Armchair Book of Baseball. He was founding editor of SABR’s The National Pastime and founding publisher of Total Sports Publishing in 1998. Currently, he is editor of BASE BALL: A Journal of the Early Game, a new McFarland & Co. scholarly semiannual launching in Spring 2007, and serves as curatorial consultant to the Museum of the City of New York for an upcoming baseball exhibit.

The Seymour Medal, named in honor of Dr. Harold Seymour and Dorothy Jane Mills (formerly Seymour), is awarded to the book judged the best work of baseball history or biography in the preceding year.  The Seymour Medal Conference, held annually, attempts to continue the promotion of baseball scholarship begun by its namesakes, and to celebrate fine baseball writing in all forms.