SABR announces 2023 Henry Chadwick Award recipients
SABR is pleased to announce the 2023 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 2023 recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award are:
Steve Gietschier (1948 – ) spent 22 years at The Sporting News, serving as the editor for many of their annual publications and developing The Sporting News Research Center into an important destination for baseball researchers. He has written or edited many baseball history articles, taught courses on American sport and baseball, and his newest book Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2023. He is also the editor of Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports (2017).
Mark Rucker (1949 – ) is a photographic historian who has edited or provided photos for dozens of articles and books on baseball over the past 40 years. He is the founder of Transcendental Graphics and The Rucker Archive, which provide access to rare sports images from the past two centuries. He served as the Visual Consultant for Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary series and collaborated notably with Peter C. Bjarkman on Smoke: The Romance And Lore Of Cuban Baseball, with David Nemec on The Beer and Whisky League: The Illustrated History of the American Association — Baseball’s Renegade Major League, and with Lawrence Ritter on The Babe: A Life in Pictures.
Robert Whiting (1942 – ) has been a writer and journalist for many decades, with a primary focus on Japanese culture. He has written three books on Japanese baseball: The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: The Game Japanese Play (1977), You Gotta Have Wa: When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond (1989), and The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Wave from Japan and the Transformation of Our National Pastime (2004) — each groundbreaking in the field.
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 13, 2023. Last Updated: February 10, 2023.