2019 Larry Ritter Book Award nominees announced

February 4, 2019/in /by admin

Each year, SABR’s Deadball Era Committee presents the Larry Ritter Book Award to recognize the best new baseball book primarily set in the Deadball Era that was published during the previous calendar year. The Ritter Award is presented during the Deadball Committee’s meeting at the annual SABR convention.

Here is the list of Ritter Award nominees for 2019:

• A Franchise on the Rise: The First Twenty Years of the New York Yankees, by Dom Amore (Skyhorse Publishing);
• September 1918: War, Plague, and the World Series, by Skip Desjardin (Regnery History)
• Game Faces: Early Baseball Cards from the Library of Congress, by Peter Devereaux (Smithsonian Books)
• Manager of the Giants: The Tactics, Temper and True Record of John McGraw, by Lou Hernandez (McFarland & Co.)
• The 1914 Boston Braves: A Miracle in Beantown, by Matthew Hock (self-published)
• The Days of Rube, Matty, Honus and Ty: Scenes from the Early Deadball Era, 1904-1907, by Chuck Kimberly (McFarland & Co.)
• Gettysburg Eddie: The Story of Eddie Plank, by Lawrence Knorr (Sunbury Press)
• Take Nothing for Granted in Baseball: The Harry Pulliam Story, by Mark Peavy (CreateSpace)
• Tinker, Evers, Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America, by David Rapp (University of Chicago Press)
• Ty Cobb Unleashed: The Definitive Counter-Biography of the Chastened Racist, by Howard W. Rosenberg (Tile Books)
• America’s Game: A History of Major League Baseball through World War II, by Bryan Soderholm-Difatte (Rowman & Littlefield)
• The World Series in the Deadball Era: A History in the Words and Pictures of the Writers and Photographers, edited by Steve Steinberg (SABR and St. Johann Press)
• Charles Ebbets: The Man Behind the Dodgers and Brooklyn’s Beloved Ballpark, by John G. Zinn (McFarland & Co.)

First presented in 2002, the Larry Ritter Award is the centerpiece of the Deadball Era Committee’s endeavors and is bestowed annually upon the best work set primarily in the Deadball Era published during the preceding year. The award is named in honor of late SABR member Lawrence S. Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times, the work that revived interest in the Deadball Era and often cited as the greatest baseball book ever written.

The task of reviewing this year’s nominees is assigned to an awards committee chaired by Doug Skipper, with John McMurray, Mark Dugo, David Fleitz, Craig Lammers, Mark Pattison, and Ben Klein as the other judges. The nominees’ list will be pared down to four finalists in early March, with the 2019 Larry Ritter Award to be publicly announced the following month.

For a list of past Ritter Award winners, click here.

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Originally published: February 4, 2019. Last Updated: February 4, 2019.