Henry Chadwick Award: Gary Gillette

GARY GILLETTE (1952– ) has spent four decades contributing to a wide variety of baseball research areas, inside and outside of SABR, earning a national reputation as an expert across several disciplines. From your favorite baseball encyclopedia to historic ballparks to the Negro Leagues, Gary’s fingerprints have been all over the baseball research landscape for the past 40 years.

Born and raised in northeastern Pennsylvania, Gary played Little League baseball on the same Honesdale ballfield where Christy Mathewson had played eight decades earlier. “I became a Detroit Tigers fan as soon as I started following baseball,” Gary recalls, “because my father had been a Tigers fan since World War II—even though he had never been to Michigan. My father became a Tigers fan because of a family friend.” More than sixty years later, Gary’s loyalty remains intact.

Gary’s first serious baseball research efforts were undertaken because he felt that the early baseball simulation games were flawed and needed improving. Craig Wright, an early sabermetrician, had helped Gary in his research and recommended he join SABR. In 1983, thankfully for all of us, Gary did so. A year later he was working with Bill James and helped found Project Scoresheet. His extensive improvements to the original play-by-play scoring system are credited by Retrosheet as fundamental to its current system. In the heyday of printed baseball record books, Gary was a contributor to four editions of Total Baseball and later the Editor-in-chief of The Baseball Encyclopedia (Barnes and Noble) and The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. He was also the executive editor of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia and wrote for several years for ESPN.com.

For SABR, Gary has served on the Board of Directors, and has (at various times) chaired the Business of Baseball Committee, the Ballparks Committee, the Detroit chapter (which he founded), and the Southern Michigan Chapter. He has written dozens of scholarly articles on many subjects in and out of SABR, helped edit several publications, served on myriad baseball panels, and presented at many SABR events. To provide a sense of the breadth of Gary’s work, his long list of baseball book contributions includes Big League Ballparks: The Complete Illustrated History (with Eric Enders), contributing to and editing Calling the Game: Baseball and Broadcasting from 1920 to the Present (by Stu Shea), and contributing to Black Baseball in Living Color: The Artwork of Graig Kreindler.

In 2008 Gary decided to visit every former MLB, MiLB and Negro League ballpark in greater Detroit. At the time everyone believed that Hamtramck Stadium, once home to the Detroit Stars and Detroit Wolves of the Negro Major Leagues, had been demolished, but Gary discovered that much of it remained. With the remaining portion in danger of being razed, Gary and two colleagues successfully applied to put the stadium onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. He founded the nonprofit Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium that same year, and led the effort to get a State of Michigan Historic Marker installed (2014). With the remains of the stadium saved, Gary next led an effort to restore and rechristen Turkey Stearnes Field and to rehabilitate the Hamtramck Stadium grandstand. The ballpark where Stearnes had once thrilled thousands has again become an important part of the community. It is now one of only five extant former home ballparks from the major Negro Leagues (1920–48). Gary and his group received Michigan’s Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation in 2023.

All of these efforts ignited yet another new research passion for Gary: the Negro Leagues. By coincidence, the Jerry Malloy Conference came to Detroit in 2014, and Gary got involved with the local planning group. “Learning more about the history of Black Baseball and the Negro Leagues was so fascinating I couldn’t turn away,” he says, “partly because of the grotesque historical injustices and partly because of the ongoing injustice where the Negro Leagues were still kept on the outside by MLB, just as they had been by so-called ‘Organized Baseball’ during the segregated era.”

Since then Gary has been a leading light in Negro Leagues research and in the fight to grant the Black leagues their rightful place at the center of baseball history where they always belonged. He co-chaired the Malloy Conference when it returned to Detroit in 2023, and played a leading role in SABR’s decisions to more formally recognize the Negro Leagues as major leagues (originally in 2021, expanded in 2024). He co-founded the “42 For 21 Committee” (2021–present), a group of prominent Black Baseball historians and Negro Leagues scholars who lobby for “Justice for Negro Leaguers”—especially more fair and robust consideration of many meritorious but overlooked Black candidates for the Hall of Fame from the segregated era. In 2021 Gary received the Tweed Webb Lifetime Achievement Award from SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee.

Gary makes his home in Detroit with his wife Vicki, still rooting for the Detroit Tigers, and still researching the history of Turkey Stearnes and the Detroit Stars. His contributions have been plenty, but we can’t wait to see what he does next.