Dan Levitt reflects on winning the SABR Bob Davids Award
From SABR member Dan Levitt at the University of Nebraska Press on July 7, 2015:
Daniel R. Levitt recently won the Bob Davids Award from the Society for American Baseball Research, the Society’s highest honor. In recognition of that award, Dan discusses some of his writing career below.
Recently winning the Bob Davids Award from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) has made me think back on how my passion for baseball research in general and SABR in particular evolved. I have always been interested in baseball and history and the interactions among all the various actors and forces in shaping outcomes. My reading and research has often veered toward trying to gain a better of understanding of why things turn out the way they do—an impossible undertaking in the broadest sense, yet gratifying when one comes across some small but meaningful nuggets. For example, for nonfiction, non-baseball reading I gravitate toward books that synthesize portions of history, either long story arcs or shorter episodes. Two books I particularly like that fit the former are William McNeil’s The Pursuit of Power and David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.
I first became acquainted with SABR and its journals when I purchased a copy of the Baseball Research Journal (the society’s flagship publication) while a teenager on a family visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I joined SABR several years later in 1983 as a college student—I’m fairly certain mine was the only fraternity house in Madison that had the SABR newsletter and BRJ coming in the mail. For a number of years I was simply a happy consumer of the baseball research SABR published. Several years after moving back home to Minneapolis I joined SABR’s local chapter.
Read the full article here: http://unpblog.com/2015/07/07/from-the-desk-of-daniel-r-levitt/
Originally published: July 7, 2015. Last Updated: July 7, 2015.