Carle might also take the “B-ville” cake for his birth date, as the best-known December 29thers in major-league history are probably Richie Sexson and Devon White. Fortunately, Carle wasn’t short of inspiration. He recalls, “My grandfather was watching the Game of the Week on TV, some Saturday afternoon. I was reading, but I kept looking up at the television, and eventually I just tossed the book aside and watched the game.”

Young Bill was hooked, thanks to his grandfather, who upon his death left behind a treasured copy of The Fireside Book of Baseball. Or maybe Bill was always destined for his place in the game. His uncle had served as a batboy for the Iola Cubs in the old Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri League, and in 1947 Bill’s mom was crowned Iola’s Queen of the K-O-M League.

Carle attended the University of Tulsa before moving in 1978 to Kansas City, where he became a devoted fan of the dynastic Royals. Around the same time, Bill joined SABR, and attended his first national convention in 1979, in St. Louis. There, Carle attended the business meeting and was intrigued by Cliff Kachline’s report on the Biographical Committee’s activities. Bill contacted the committee; before long, researcher extraordinaire Joe Simenic sent Carle a list of leads in the Kansas City area. Bill was off and running.

Today, Carle’s favorite biographical find remains one of his first. Nobody had the death date or place for Ben Harris, who’d pitched for the Federal League’s Kansas City Packers 1914–15. Carle began his research with the local newspapers in 1914, and found a note about Harris’s little brother Ed pitching for a local high school. That seemed a dead end … until just a few days later, when a K.C. paper published a history of that same high school’s athletics, and mentioned that an Ed Harris had coached Kansas City (Kansas) High School’s basketball team in 1916. Bill went to the city directory for that year, found a teacher named Ed Harris, and followed him all the way up to 1981. One phone call later, Bill stood on Ed Harris’s doorstep, and soon had all the previously missing information about Ed’s big brother Ben. Before he left, though, Carle had something else: an actual Federal League baseball, presented to him by one proud, grateful little brother.

In 1988, Bill took over as chairman of the Biographical Committee, and he’s held the position ever since. There are, of course, always those elusive bits of information. Carle would love to know more about Hugh “One Arm” Daily, and about a lefty named George Crable (who started a game for the Dodgers in 1910 and later performed in a vaudeville group, “The Baseball Four”). At the top of Bill’s list, though? Nineteenth-century outfielder Harry Decker. “He led a life of crime,” Bill says, “and the last I have on him is when he was released from San Quentin Prison in 1915.”

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PAUL DICKSON (1939 – ) vaulted to the front rank of baseball researchers immediately following publication of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary in 1989. Lauded as “a staggering piece of scholarship” by the Wall Street Journal, the book won the 1989 Macmillan-SABR Baseball Research Award and quickly became a well-thumbed addition to baseball bookshelves everywhere. Dickson published a second edition in 1999, and in 2009 he produced a third edition (with Skip McAfee) that is twice as large as the first. With definitions for more than 10,000 baseball words and phrases, the book has its own website, baseballdictionary.com. A fourth edition is in the works.

Born in Yonkers, New York, Dickson graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1961 and served in the United States Navy where he began his writing career. “I always wanted to be a writer,” he said. “When I was thirteen, I was bedridden for a while after an accident. My mother brought me a ton of books, including one written by a man who drove around the country interviewing people in anachronistic professions, like a guy who raised oxen for plowing. I said to myself, ‘You can do this for a living?’ And so I did. I haven’t gotten a real paycheck from an employer since 1968.”

That’s when Dickson stopped working as a reporter for McGraw-Hill Publications to become a full-time freelance writer. He contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and a host of magazines, including Esquire, Smithsonian, and The Nation. He published his first book, Think Tanks, in 1971. His bibliography now contains more than sixty-six books and countless articles on a wide variety of subjects. Next on the docket is a book about sports and Jim Crow, why some sports desegregated a lot faster than others.

“I became a baseball fan in 1944 when I was five,” Dickson said. “My uncle — my hero — came home from the navy and took me from Yonkers to Yankee Stadium. He was in full uniform, so the ticket taker let us in for free and escorted us right to the Yankees’ clubhouse. Tommy Henrich was there. He was in the Coast Guard, and we watched the game from the owners’ box. I was hooked.”

The Dictionary was Dickson’s first baseball book. He took his boys to the ball park, and they were full of questions about the game and its vernacular. Dickson promised them a visit to the library to check out a book on baseball terminology, but there were none. “So I figured that this might be a good project,” he said, “with some legs.” Indeed, that is the case, thanks, in part, to the many SABR members who have contributed to each edition. “SABR is wonderful,” Dickson said. “The members are helpful, non-territorial, and non-competitive. They want to help and share.”

Besides the dictionary, Dickson has written several other baseball books, including The Unwritten Rules of Baseball, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, The Joy of Keeping Score, Baseball: The Presidents’ Game (with William B. Mead), and Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, winner of the 2012 Casey Award. “It’s amazing,” Dickson said, “that they are all still in print.”

Living in Garrett Park, Maryland, Dickson is close to two major league parks. “I like them both,” he said, “but going to Camden Yards is a real treat. The fans there are blue-collar. They love their team and are excited just to be there.”

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FRED LIEB (1888–1980) started writing for Baseball Magazine in 1909 and was still contributing to The Baseball Research Journal 67 years later. In between he was one of baseball’s top New York sportswriters and a key correspondent for The Sporting News. At mid-century Lieb packaged his extensive knowledge into a half-dozen team histories, invaluable to anyone researching the game behind the scenes over the first half of the twentieth century.

Lieb grew up in South Philadelphia with a love of both baseball and writing, and one year his parents gave him a small printing press for Christmas. He took a job as a clerk in the railroad office of Norfolk & Western, working at writing on the side. He contributed several player biographies to Baseball Magazine and wrote a couple of baseball short stories. Lieb’s first player interview was with Eddie Collins, who at the end convinced Lieb to give up his straight razor for a new safety razor. He moved to Clarence Barron’s Philadelphia News Bureau to advance his writing career, but when he saw an opening for a baseball writer at the New York Press he jumped at it.

With the Press Lieb joined what many consider the golden age of New York sportswriting, and Lieb became friends with many of America’s most famous sportswriters, including Damon Runyon, Heywood Broun, Grantland Rice, and Sid Mercer. Because the Press writer was also the official scorer for the Giants games, Lieb assumed that duty too as a 23-year-old rookie sportswriter. Over the next couple of decades Lieb covered baseball in New York for several papers and was president of the BBWAA from 1921 to 1924. Lieb is also credited for labeling Yankee Stadium “The House That Ruth Built.” Lieb became a friend and confidant of some of New York’s best known baseball personalities. He was one of only a handful of guests with a baseball connection at Gehrig’s wedding reception, and it was Lieb that Gehrig asked to convince his mother to come despite her dislike of the future Mrs. Gehrig. Lieb also had a strange fascination for the occult and spiritualism, authoring two books on the subject and taking seriously the results of Ouija boards.

In 1934 Lieb moved to St. Petersburg, Florida and began freelancing. The next year The Sporting News recruited him, and Lieb spent many summers over the next decade working in St. Louis, covering the All-Star game and World Series, writing obituaries for Hall of Famers and contributing weekly reports and features. Most importantly for baseball researchers, Lieb wrote ten invaluable books on baseball including seven team histories. In writing these Lieb was granted access to sources inaccessible to most researchers: he talked to key executives; he talked to players; he talked to the teams’ beat writers, presumably with the benefit of their scrapbooks and clippings; and he used The Sporting News archives. As a consequence his team histories offer stories and insights into baseball over the first half of the twentieth century unavailable elsewhere. His book Baseball as I Have Known It embraces a lifetime of memories and stories, many previously unexplored and revealing.

Lieb lived his two loves, baseball and writing. “There’s nothing else I would rather have done,” Lieb told Jerome Holtzman. “When I walked into the New York press box for the first time I couldn’t have been happier, not if I made it to the Oval Office in the White House.”

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FRANCIS C. RICHTER

In December 1887, Richter was among those baseball journalists who met in Cincinnati to form the Base Ball Reporters Association of America. Along with other sportswriters, like Henry Chadwick, he was a member of the rules committee that sought to strike a balance between offense and defense that would make the game exciting to spectators.

Richter had helped form the American Association in 1882, which included his hometown team, the Athletics. However, he was unhappy with the sale of liquor and Sunday baseball that was a major attraction of the Association, and a year later he helped put a National League team in Philadelphia. He played a prominent role in the salary wars of the late nineteenth century, and in 1892, he was influential in engineering the amalgamation of the American Association and the National League. He was also a financial backer of the 1884 Union Association and its Philadelphia team.

In 1902, Richter switched allegiance again when he helped the founders of the new American League. Nevertheless, in 1907 the National League offered him the presidency of the league. Richter declined the offer, saying he wanted instead to promote baseball “by lift(ing) the game up to the heights” of a national pastime.

Richter’s lasting contribution to baseball and baseball research came from his association with two publications: Sporting Life and the Reach Official Guide. He was the founder and editor of Sporting Life for its entire first incarnation, 1883 until 1917. Founded three years before The Sporting News, it was baseball’s most influential paper. For years, Richter used Sporting Life to warn against corruption and gambling in baseball. He also used Sporting Life to support the Player’s League in 1890. He disposed of it in 1917, during the First World War.

The Sporting News had been granted a subsidy by Major League Baseball, but Sporting Life had not.

Richter later became a columnist for The Sporting News, where his column “Casual Comment” ran from December 1921 to September 1925. For many years, he was one of the official scorers for the World’s Series games, sharing the honor with J.G. Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News.

In 1901, Richter, who promoted baseball all his life, was named the first Editor-In-Chief of the Reach Official Guide. He continued in that role until he died 25 years later, at the age of 71, the day after completing the 1926 edition of the Reach Guide.

His book Richter’s History and Records of Baseball, published in 1914, is one of the seminal works in baseball history. It is the first record book arranged topically rather than chronologically, and the first book to list the record-setting achievements of individuals and teams throughout professional baseball.

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JOHN THORN

Thorn was a child of Polish refugees who emigrated to the U.S. in 1949. Like the children from so many previous generations of immigrants, Thorn quickly developed a love for baseball. “I fell in love with the cards before I loved the game, when I discovered that baseball was something that all the kids on my street corner cared about. I was an immigrant kid and was looking for a way into America. With my background I saw myself as an underdog and so Brooklyn had to be my team. I began watching the game seriously when I was eight, in 1955, on my Admiral television, but I had already begun to follow their exploits in the daily newspapers my father brought home with him each night.”

After graduating from Beloit College in 1968, Thorn worked his way into the business of writing about baseball from modest beginnings, remembering, “I never wrote about the game for a newspaper and, odd as it may seem today, wrote a book about the game before I ever wrote an article,” dismissing that initial effort as “a rather wretched volume.” But Thorn’s famous partnership with sabermetrician Pete Palmer was wellstruck within moments of their first meeting at the opening reception for the 1981 SABR Convention. “We very soon afterwards began work on first, a proposal for a new kind of baseball encyclopedia,” Thorn recalled. “A publisher loved the proposal we crafted in 1982 and offered us what seemed like a king’s ransom, but with an unworkable deadline. We declined the offer and turned immediately to The Hidden Game. The encyclopedia would follow, in 1989, as Total Baseball.”

In concert with Palmer’s analysis, Thorn’s thoughtful scholarship and articulate insights made The Hidden Game one of the great classics of baseball analysis. Total Baseball followed up with a similar commitment to rigorous scholarship, taking up the challenge of providing not simply a complete factual record of the game’s statistical history, but one willing to include sabermetric analysis of player performance.

Achieving the role of baseball’s Official Historian reflects Thorn’s contributions to baseball history, previously recognized by SABR with the 2006 Bob Davids Award.

A contributor, editor, and author of many works, Thorn served as senior creative consultant to Ken Burns for the epic documentary Baseball, and his research into the origins of the game culminated in the elegant Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (2011), tracing baseball’s American origins back to the eighteenth century.

His current responsibilities as Official Historian come with specific duties, some of which reflect his expertise (“The Baseball Origins report, for example,” Thorn notes), but provides him with the freedom to pursue a number of projects, some self-directed, some on demand from the game itself. Thorn observes, “the latter would include media interviews and pants-pressed-while-u-wait research for divisions of MLB — legal, marketing, promotional, the MLB.TV network.”

Reflecting on his current gig, Thorn is clearly enjoying himself. “All of this job is fun,” he said, “but I could say that about the past forty years. The line that separates work from play is invisible. I can go hard at some baseball task all day and then, tired at last, back away from the keyboard, crack open a cold one, and go downstairs to watch a ballgame.”

Thorn reflects on baseball scholarship to come through the context of his personal commitment to creating good history, observing, “The new frontier is the old frontier: perspective and context. Great new finds are certain to come — they always do — but that alone does not make for the practice of baseball history. Analysis without synthesis is expertise, which is admirable, but history is something larger.”

For more information on the Henry Chadwick Award, click here.