Dick Perez selected as winner of 2024 SABR Jefferson Burdick Award
Acclaimed artist Dick Perez was selected as the winner of the 2024 Jefferson Burdick Award, which honors individuals who have made significant contributions to the baseball card hobby, by SABR’s Baseball Cards Research Committee.
Perez is a name most familiar to collectors of 1980s and ’90s Donruss baseball cards, synonymous with the sets’ most prized, anticipated, argued (and even sabermetrically analyzed!) subsets: the Diamond Kings. However, these cards only scratch the surface of Perez’s overall oeuvre, which also includes hundreds of Perez-Steele Hall of Fame postcards, other Donruss collaborations such as the 1983 Hall of Fame Heroes and 1984 Champions sets, later collaborations with Topps, and last year’s independently produced Diamond Immortals set.
Perez plans to accept his award during the SABR Baseball Cards meeting this summer at SABR 52 in Minneapolis. The meeting will include a special screening of The Diamond King, a new documentary from award-winning filmmaker Marq Evans.
Click here to read more about Dick Perez at the SABR Baseball Cards Blog.
Jefferson R. Burdick (1900–63) was a pioneer card collector whose invented classifications still govern the hobby; he donated his enormous collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it remains one of the most popular destinations for researchers. He created The American Card Catalog, the bible of the hobby, and tribute is paid to his lifelong work whenever anyone brings up T-206 or N-162 or other codes common in card collecting. To learn more about his life and legacy, click here.
To learn more about the Burdick Award, click here.
Originally published: March 5, 2024. Last Updated: March 5, 2024.