SABR announces 2013 Chadwick Award recipients
The Society for American Baseball Research is pleased to announce the 2013 recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award, established to honor the game’s great researchers—historians, statisticians, annalists, and archivists—for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America’s present with its past.
The 2013 recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award are:
Bill Carle (1955- ) has been a SABR member since 1977 and has served as chairman of SABR’s Biographical Research Committee since 1988. Carle has attended every National Convention since 1979, when he was inspired by Cliff Kachline’s and Joe Simenic’s discussion of tracking down accurate birth and death data for major league players. Carle grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and has been a diehard Royals fan for many years. His work on biographical data continues, and the Biographical Research Committee regularly announces new discoveries.
Paul Dickson (1939- ), the author of more than 55 books, is best known in the baseball research community for The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, now in its third edition. First published in 1989 when it won the Macmillan-SABR Baseball Research Award, the dictionary has grown to nearly a thousand pages, and it has its own website at baseballdictionary.com. Dickson has also written several other key baseball books, including The Unwritten Rules of Baseball, The Hidden Language of Baseball, The Joy of Keeping Score, Baseball: The Presidents’ Game (with William B. Mead), and most recently, Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick.
Fred Lieb (1888-1980) started writing for Baseball Magazine in 1909 and was still contributing to The Baseball Research Journal 67 years later. In between he was one of baseball’s top New York sportswriters and a key correspondent for The Sporting News. At mid-century Lieb packaged his extensive knowledge into a half-dozen team histories, bolstered with input from front office executives, players, other sportswriters and The Sporting News archives. Lieb’s books are invaluable to anyone researching the game behind the scenes over the first half of the twentieth century.
Francis C. Richter (1854-1926) was the founder and editor of Sporting Life for its entire existence, from 1883 until 1917. He was also the first editor of the American League Reach Guide, which he edited until he died 25 years later. His book Richter’s History and Records of Baseball, published in 1914, is one of the seminal works in baseball history. It is the first record book arranged topically rather than chronologically, and the first book to list the record-setting achievements of individuals and teams throughout professional baseball. Richter was a longtime sportswriter, who helped form the Base Ball Reporters Association of America.
John Thorn (1947- ) is the Official Historian of Major League Baseball, an honor that reflects his incomparable contributions to baseball history. In partnership with Pete Palmer, he created The Hidden Game of Baseball and Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, not only a complete record of the game’s statistical history, but one that included sabermetric analysis. Thorn served as senior creative consultant to Ken Burns’s Baseball, and in 2011, he published Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, tracing baseball’s American origins back to the 18th century.
By honoring individuals for the length and breadth of their contribution to the study and enjoyment of baseball, the Chadwick Award will educate the baseball community about sometimes little known but vastly important contributions from the game’s past and thus encourage the next generation of researchers.
The criteria for the award reads in part: The contributions of nominees must have had public impact. This may be demonstrated by publication of research in any of a variety of formats: books, magazine articles, websites, etc. The compilation of a significant database or archive that has facilitated the published research of others will also be considered in the realm of public impact.
For a complete list of Chadwick Award winners, click here.
Originally published: February 26, 2013. Last Updated: February 26, 2013.