The envelope, please

Since this is award season (Grammys, Ocars, etc.), I thought it would be a good time to mention some recent baseball book recipients.

Kostya Kennedy received Spitball Magazine‘s CASEY Award for True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson.

From the Spitball website: “Kennedy … not only becomes the first three-time winner of the CASEY, but he is also a perfect three-for-three; in that every baseball book he has written has won a CASEY Award!”

“Kostya Kennedy has proven once again that he is one of the giants of baseball literature,” said Spitball Editor-in-Chief Mike Shannon…. His unprecedented achievement in winning CASEY Awards with three consecutive books would be mind-blowing if not for the fact that his graceful, eloquent, and insightful writing never fails to astonish the reader and provide him with great pleasure. As the Judges have indicated, we all thought we knew Jackie Robinson pretty well, but now because of True, we know him more intimately than ever before. As with Kostya’s previous CASEY winners, True is a perfect pairing of author and subject, and the book is a most deserving representative of the historic 40th Anniversary of the CASEY Awards.”

The 40th annual CASEY Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 12, 2023 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Here’s my Bookshelf Conversation with Kennedy for his latest winner.

As sort of a “lifetime achievement award,” from SABR, here are your winners of the 2023 Henry Chadwick Award, established to honor the game’s great researchers — historians, statisticians, annalists, and archivists — for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America’s present with its past.

They include:

Steve Gietschier who spent 22 years at The Sporting News, serving as the editor for many of their annual publications and developing The Sporting News Research Center into an important destination for baseball researchers. He has written or edited many baseball history articles, taught courses on American sport and baseball, and his newest book Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2023. He is also the editor of Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports (2017).
Mark Rucker who is a photographic historian who has edited or provided photos for dozens of articles and books on baseball over the past 40 years. He is the founder of Transcendental Graphics and The Rucker Archive, which provide access to rare sports images from the past two centuries. He served as the Visual Consultant for Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary series and collaborated notably with Peter C. Bjarkman on Smoke: The Romance And Lore Of Cuban Baseball, with David Nemec on The Beer and Whisky League: The Illustrated History of the American Association — Baseball’s Renegade Major League, and with Lawrence Ritter on The Babe: A Life in Pictures.
Robert Whiting who has been a writer and journalist for many decades, with a primary focus on Japanese culture. He has written three books on Japanese baseball: The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: The Game Japanese Play (1977), You Gotta Have Wa: When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond (1989), and The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Wave from Japan and the Transformation of Our National Pastime (2004) — each groundbreaking in the field.

From the SABR press release:

By honoring individuals for the length and breadth of their contribution to the study and enjoyment of baseball, the Chadwick Award will educate the baseball community about sometimes little known but vastly important contributions from the game’s past and thus encourage the next generation of researchers.

The criteria for the award reads in part: The contributions of nominees must have had public impact. This may be demonstrated by publication of research in any of a variety of formats: books, magazine articles, websites, etc. The compilation of a significant database or archive that has facilitated the published research of others will also be considered in the realm of public impact.

The Seymour Medal – Society for American Baseball Research Also from SABR, Daniel Levitt and Mark Armour won the 2023 Seymour Medal, which “honors the best book of baseball history or biography published during the preceding calendar year” for Intentional Balk: Baseball’s Thin Line between Innovation and Cheating. (My convo with Armour.)