Baccellieri, Staples, VanDeMortel win 2020 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Awards
The 2020 winners of the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award, which honors the best articles on baseball history or biography completed or published during the preceding calendar year, are:
- Emma Baccellieri, “A Brief History of the Many Times Baseball Has Died,” Sports Illustrated, August 29, 2019.
- Bill Staples Jr., “Early Baseball Encounters in the West: The Yeddo Royal Japanese Troupe Play Ball in America, 1872,” International Pastime, July 18, 2019.
- Dan VanDeMortel, “White Circles Drawn in Crayon,” in The Polo Grounds: Essays and Memories of New York City’s Historic Ballpark, 1880-1963; ed. Stew Thornley (McFarland & Co.)
Baccellieri is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated and a 2018 winner of the SABR Analytics Conference Research Award. Her work has also appeared at Deadspin, Baseball Prospectus, Open Secrets, the Charlotte Observer, and other outlets.
Staples is the author of Gentle Black Giants: A History of Negro Leaguers in Japan (with Kazuo Sayama) and Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer, the co-chair of SABR’s Asian Baseball Research Committee, and serves on the board of the Nisei Baseball Research Project.
VanDeMortel became a Giants fan in upstate New York and moved to San Francisco to follow the team more closely. He has written extensively on Northern Ireland political and legal affairs, and his Giants-related writing has appeared in San Francisco’s Nob Hill Gazette and SABR’s The National Pastime.
The McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award honors the author(s) of the best articles or papers, published or unpublished, on baseball history or biography completed during the preceding calendar year. Eligible works include magazine and journal articles, previously unpublished chapters or articles in anthologies or other books with multiple authors, and unpublished research papers and written versions of oral presentations.
The selection committee consists of: Len Levin (chair), Phil Bergen, Warren Corbett, Chuck Hilty, Bill Humber, and Jan Finkel.
For a complete list of winners of the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award, click here.
Originally published: April 27, 2020. Last Updated: May 29, 2020.