2025 Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award winners announced
The 2025 Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Awards, which honor outstanding research projects completed during the preceding calendar year that have significantly expanded our knowledge or understanding of baseball, have been awarded to:
- Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz, Mike Donlin: A Rough and Rowdy Life from New York Baseball Idol to Stage and Screen (University of Nebraska Press)
- Mitchell Nathanson, Under Jackie’s Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leagues Baseball Left Behind (University of Nebraska Press)
- Derek Bain and John Racanelli, Hardball Retro’s Compendium of Baseball Video Games and Electronic Handhelds (Self-published)
The Steinberg/Spatz partnership previously won the Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award in 2022 for Comeback Pitchers: The Remarkable Careers of Howard Ehmke and Jack Quinn and in 2016 for The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees. Steinberg also won the award in 2018 for Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball’s Golden Age, while Spatz won it in 2002 (with David Vincent and David W. Smith) for The Mid-Summer Classic. Their first book together, 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, won SABR’s Seymour Medal.
Nathanson is is a professor of law in the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at the Villanova University School of Law. His biographies on Dick Allen and Jim Bouton were both selected as finalists for SABR’s Seymour Medal.
Bain is the author of five baseball books and co-chair of SABR’s Games and Simulations Committee. Racanelli is the membership director for SABR’s Emil Rothe Chicago Chapter, founder and co-chair of the Baseball Landmarks Research Committee, and a regular contributor to the Baseball Cards Research Committee blog.
The Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award is designed to honor projects that do not fit the criteria for the Seymour Medal or the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. The selection committee included Pete Cottrell (chair), Mike Bates, Bill Pearch, and Rich Arpi.
To see a complete list of Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award winners, click here.
Originally published: April 3, 2025. Last Updated: April 2, 2025.