After a stint in the US Navy and four years at Brooklyn College, Lyle moved to Maryland in 1961 and forged a career as an economist for the US Department of Commerce. He married Marilyn in 1960, and they raised two sons (Dana and Glenn) who have given them four grandchildren. Lyle’s devotion to the Dodgers ended with the team’s move west, but he adopted the Orioles in Maryland and has stuck with them through thick and thin.

An avid reader of baseball history, Lyle joined SABR in 1973, just two years after its founding. SABR was a smaller and tighter organization in those days, and Lyle became friends with many of its best researchers, including Bob Davids. In the early 1980s, Davids asked Lyle to conduct a survey of SABR members to select “retroactive” Rookies of the Year from 1900 through 1946, before the writers’ award began, and for ’47 and ’48 when there was only one award for both leagues. Over a period of several years, the SABR newsletter contained a ballot for a group of seasons along with Lyle’s candidates. Finally, SABR’s choices were unveiled in 1986. Flush off this success, a few years later Lyle conducted the same exercise for the Cy Young Award.

Arguably Lyle’s greatest contribution to baseball research began in 1991 with his 26-year run as chairman of SABR’s Records Committee. While baseball records can be a contentious matter, often involving competing advocates and commercial interests, Lyle and his committee earned a reputation as dogged seekers of the truth. At no time was Lyle’s philosophy more on display than when voices suggested adjusting the record books for players who used performance-enhancing drugs. The Records Committee’s role, Lyle maintained, was to record what happened on the field. Others were free to interpret the facts as they wished.

In 1993, Lyle edited Baseball Records Update — 1993, which offered corrections to numerous baseball records, including those of some of the greats of the game — Walter Johnson, Lou Gehrig, and many others. Changing baseball records is never without its opponents. “As Aristotle said of his mentor, ‘Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth,’” Lyle says. The Records Committee has continued on this path ever since. “He did an excellent job of making everyone on the committee feel valued,” adds Retrosheet founder David Smith, “and as a result the committee’s decisions on record changes are widely respected.”

Trent McCotter replaced Lyle as Chairman in 2016. “It’s impossible to please everyone,” says Trent, “especially in the context of baseball records, which have incredible significance to baseball history and its allure as a numbers game. But Lyle’s integrity and commitment to remaining level-headed have helped maintain the Committee’s reputation across the stats world for the last quarter century.”

In the meantime, Lyle carved out his own path as a top-rank baseball researcher and historian. He began contributing articles to SABR publications in the 1980s, and has been a prolific author ever since. He long had an interest in baseball’s Opening Days, and he devoted his first book to a study of New York Yankee Openers through 1996. He has regularly tackled biography, penning numerous biographical articles and full-length biographies on four Dodgers: Bill Dahlen, Willie Keeler, Hugh Casey, and his childhood hero Dixie Walker. He has edited two books of biographies covering the 1947 Dodgers and the 1947 Yankees. A book on baseball’s All-Star Game, co-written by Lyle, David Smith, and David Vincent, won the Sporting News-SABR Research Award. He edited The SABR Baseball List and Record Book, a delightful compendium of baseball facts, in 2007.

In recent years Lyle has partnered with Steve Steinberg on two award-winning books: 1921: The Yankees, the Giants and Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York; and The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees. The former won the prestigious Seymour Medal.

Beyond his impressive accomplishments, Lyle is one of SABR’s best-liked and respected people. He has been a regular at local meetings since the 1970s and national meetings since the 1980s. He has made dozens of friends in the baseball research community, and he has helped many a younger SABR member feel welcome and valued. It surprised no one when Lyle won the Bob Davids Award in 2000, just as it surprised no one when he won the Chadwick Award in 2017. The baseball community looks forward to what he will work on next.

Click here to learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award.

Enlisting the efforts of scores of other “diggers,” as they are termed on the site, Protoball Project has provided a data-driven view of how baseball in North America evolved and spread beyond predecessor games played in Europe. Larry served as Guest Editor of the landmark special Protoball issue of Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, featuring more than thirty articles on this long neglected and little understood area. Larry has served on the editorial board of Base Ball since its inception in 2007.

Though McCray was named to MLB’s Special Origins Committee in 2011, his work has continued apace outside the confines of that group as well as within. Likewise, he has chaired SABR’s Origins Research Committee for many years, and attracted new diggers as well as interested readers. Truly, however, Protoball (mirrored in more primitive form at MLB.com) stands alone as one of our game’s great research feats.

Larry founded and edited the site’s newsletter, “Next Destin’d Post.” If you get the reference in the title, and somehow are not a regular congregant, get thee posthaste to Protoball.org.

Larry’s more conventional baseball credentials include his days as a self-described left fielder and banjo hitter at Ithaca High School, followed by three years as leadoff hitter for the Union College Club of Schenectady, NY. He has been a Boston Red Sox fan since the painful season of 1986.

And despite the suspicions of many who are reading this, there is more to life than baseball. “There comes a time in every man’s life,” Casey Stengel said, “and I’ve had plenty of ’em.” So has Larry McCray. After graduating from Union College with a BA and BEE (1965) and being awarded a Fulbright scholarship for 1967–68 in India, he received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. His dissertation, “The Politics of Regulation,” was awarded the APSA’s E.E. Schattschneider Prize as the best dissertation in American government and politics for 1974. He now helps teach a graduate course in science policy at MIT.

In what may be titled “real life,” he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with his estimable wife Alexa, no academic slouch herself. She is Director of the Informatics Training Program, Department of Biomedical Informatics as a professor at Harvard Medical School.

From 1981 to 1998 Larry was project director and program director of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council. As project director, he conducted many evaluative studies, primarily reviewing policy programs of the U.S government that have significant scientific content. As study director, he drafted significant portions of committee reports on the decision-making on carcinogens, risk assessment and risk communications, science and national security, national science policy, and graduate education. The 1983 report, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process, is often credited as the source of a new paradigm for federal risk regulation.

His later academic and policy accomplishments are too numerous to cite in the present context but Larry epitomizes, in this writer’s view, the perfect profile of a top baseball researcher: one who makes his mark elsewhere, and then continues to inform his baseball studies with the intellectual curiosity and perspective he has gathered along the way.

As long as I have known Larry, he has had the “guilty pleasure” of conducting informal research on everyday life in the year 1827. Why? one might ask. SABR members will be quick to respond, Why not?

Click here to learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award.

Dan has lived nearly all of his life in Minneapolis. He was playing baseball by the second grade and kept at it through high school. Along the way, he spent many an afternoon at old Metropolitan Stadium, watching Rod Carew and his hometown Twins.

Dan departed home long enough to earn a BS in Industrial Engineering and an MS in business, both from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He returned to Minneapolis to forge a career in commercial real estate (he is currently a Senior Vice President at Ryan Companies, where he has worked for 25 years). More importantly, he married Suzanne in 1995, and they have raised two sons: Charlie, and Joey.

Dan’s love and appreciation for baseball, already strong, grew considerably in 1982 when he read the first mass-marketed Bill James Baseball Abstract. A devoted reader of baseball history, Dan began to think more about how teams should value players and create rosters and organizations. He joined SABR in 1983, while still in college, and continued to read and learn.

Around 1995 Dan came across an entry in a decades-old sports encyclopedia claiming that Ferdie Schupp held the all-time record for lowest season ERA, with his 0.90 in 1916. Most record books showed Dutch Leonard’s 0.96 in 1914 as the record (since the modern pitching distance). After some digging, Dan wrote an article for the Baseball Research Journal advocating for Schupp as the record holder based on his meeting the contemporary criterion for innings pitched. This was Dan’s first published research paper, and he has hardly stopped in the 22 years since.

Dan’s research contributions have been remarkably diverse. He has done work in statistical analysis, publishing papers on such topics as clutch hitting and the relationship of team speed and opposition errors. He has written several biographies for SABR’s Biography Project, edited a journal on Minnesota baseball history for the 2012 SABR convention, wrote an article on the changing criteria for qualifying for the ERA title, and more.

In 2003, Dan and Mark Armour published their first book, Paths to Glory, which won the Sporting News-SABR Research Award. Largely a survey of 14 teams from history, focusing on how they were built, the book also included Dan’s original metrics on Win Probability Added and Wins Above Replacement, both concepts that were just entering the research community at the time.

Dan’s business background strengthens his interest in the financial history of the game. His research into the finances of Harry Frazee led to a SABR cover story (co-written with Mark Armour and Matthew Levitt) on Frazee’s finances, debunking recent attempts to revise his controversial tenure owning the Red Sox. Dan’s financial research into the business history of baseball has contributed to each of his books.

In 2008 Dan published Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty, a finalist for the Seymour Medal, the first serious biography on one of history’s team-building giants. In 2012 he followed up with The Battle that Forged Modern Baseball: The Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy, which won the Larry Ritter Award for the best book on the Deadball Era. Both books will long serve as definitive works on their subjects.

Dan’s fourth book, also written with Mark Armour, came in 2015: In Pursuit of Pennants — Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball. Conceived as a follow-up to their first book, In Pursuit of Pennants went much further, exploring the full history of baseball operations, all of the major rules changes that have affected team building, and presented common threads that run through the successful teams of history. A finalist for the Seymour Medal, the book introduced new research on the origins of the farm system, the integration of the game, free agency, and more.

In 2015 Dan and Mark teamed up again to research the history of the Major League Baseball Players Association, an effort funded by the MLBPA for their fiftieth anniversary publication and its revamped website.

Besides his own lengthy resume, Dan has been a valued member of the SABR family for more than 30 years, contributing to many research committees and serving several times on the board of his local chapter. He is a frequent presenter at local and national meetings, and a good friend to many people in the society. His contributions were recognized in 2015 when he won the Bob Davids Award.

Dan’s contributions to baseball biography, records, business, statistical analysis, and history have been vast, and we all look forward to finding out what he is going to tackle next.

Click here to learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award.

Bjarkman has enjoyed a notable career in baseball but still has the enthusiasm and drive of a rookie. At 76 he has just published a typically erudite and pointed book, Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story, and he gives no sign of slowing down. In the works are The Baseball Biography of Fidel Castro and The Yanqui in Cuba’s Dugout: Travels Inside Fidel Castro’s Baseball Empire.

Omar Minaya has said of him, “Nobody knows more about the intertwining of politics and baseball in Cuba than Peter Bjarkman.” He has had to wend a serpentine path between the two on his way to becoming the great expert on Cuban baseball yesterday and today. Though Peter is an outstanding researcher, his greatest feat has been to take his expertise from the archives to the dugouts and ballparks of Cuba today.

Peter Bjarkman grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. After graduating from the University of Hartford — where he played varsity basketball and baseball — he stayed in town to teach high-school English. Going on to teach in Ecuador and Colombia, he became fluent in Spanish and went on to earn a doctorate in linguistics, with a specialty in Cuban Spanish. His collegiate teaching career included positions at George Mason, Butler, Ball State, the University of Colorado, and Purdue. He still resides in West Lafayette, Indiana, with his wife, Purdue University linguistics professor Ronnie B. Wilbur, a leading researcher and authority on deaf sign languages.

But a siren song pulled Peter away from academia to baseball and a second, improbable career — that of baseball historian and writer for hire (much as happened to this writer once upon a time). Retiring from linguistics and its constant comparisons between cultures, he brought that unique perspective to baseball. In America everyone fancies himself a baseball expert; perhaps in Cuba too. But no American has joined the past, present, and future of each nation’s view of the game as Bjarkman has.

Given the frigid political relations between Cuba and the US, it was no easy matter for him to combine with picture archivist Mark Rucker to seek the cooperation of the Castro government to produce a visual history of the Cuban game. The pair traveled to Cuba in the late 1990s and produced a beautiful book (designed by Todd Radom) that I was proud to publish with Total Sports Illustrated — Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball.

In the Wall Street Journal profile of Bjarkman in November 2010, he recalled that the Cuban government reception to the book was chilly because he had included images of two notable defectors. “We never would have put them in there if the publisher hadn’t requested it,” he told the WSJ. I had thrown a boulder in Peter’s path. But slowly Cubans passionate about the game began circulating the book and Peter returned to a state of cordial relations with Cuban officials.

“Pete has to walk a tightrope to do that job,” Rucker observed. This has led some to say that his relationship with the Cuban government has been too cozy for their tastes. Yet his unique ability to tell the story of Cuban baseball without fear or favor has been the hallmark of his career, and what has brought him one of this year’s Chadwick Awards.

Bjarkman has appeared frequently on radio and television sports talk shows as an observer and analyst of Cuban baseball. His articles appear in a wide range of publications. In a field of baseball research that will blossom with the expected reduction of tensions between our two baseball-loving nations, Peter Bjarkman has a unique contribution still to make, and a legacy that will inspire others to build upon his landmark body of work.

Click here to learn more about the Henry Chadwick Award.