Bits and Pieces, July 30, 2025

♦ Adding to the previous B&P item about gathering Hall of Fame induction speeches: you would expect writers to be more comfortable with the process than the players. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell was the 2025 winner of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s Career Excellence Award. Here is his acceptance speech. Side note: According to the HOF website, “This award was originally named for J.G. Taylor Spink, the longtime editor and publisher of the Sporting News. Weeks before his death in 1962, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America created the award in his honor, naming him the first recipient. It is issued annually to select writers for “meritorious contributions to baseball writing.” Due to Spink’s troubled history in supporting segregated baseball, the BBWAA voted to remove his name from the award in 2021. It remains the most prestigious prize in baseball journalism.”

Boswell honored by BBWAA after half a century of writing excellence | Baseball Hall of Fame

♦ Former Texas jurist Thomas N. Wolff recently published The Elysian Fields of Baseball: The Spiritual Evolution of America’s Game. Here’s a profile of the writer via the San Antonio Express-News (paywall).

♦ Speaking of law and baseball, Louis H. Schiff, a retired Florida county court judge and an adjunct professor of law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Robert M. Jarvis, a professor of law at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, collaborated as editors on Attorneys in the Baseball Hall of Fame: A Collection of Biographical Essays, which explores the legal careers of the 11 members of the Baseball Hall of Fame who are attorneys, including players, managers, executives, and commissioners who used their legal acumen to influence key moments in baseball history. This is the second time Schiff and Jarvis collaborated on a baseball law book: Baseball and the Law: Cases and Materials received a 2017 SABR Research Award. I touched briefly on that one back in the day.

♦ Roy Carlson wrote a series of articles on the boxes baseball cards and other items used to come in for the Sports Collectors Daily website. Fascinating stuff on an otherwised ignored topic.