SABR announces 2024 Henry Chadwick Award recipients
SABR is pleased to announce the 2024 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 2024 recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award are:
Larry Gerlach opened up the world of umpires as a source of baseball scholarship with the publication of The Men in Blue: Conversations With Umpires, named one of SABR’s top 50 baseball books of the past 50 years in 2021. A SABR member since 1979, he served one term as a Board president, was the founder and longtime chair of the Umpires and Rules Committee, and co-editor of The SABR Book of Umpires and Umpiring. He is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Utah, where he taught from 1968 to 2013 and also wrote extensively on the American Revolution.
Leslie Heaphy has been a recognized authority on the Negro Leagues and women in baseball for more than three decades. She has led SABR’s Women in Baseball Committee since 1995 and has helped organize the annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference since 1998. She is the founding editor of the journal Black Ball, editor of The Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball, and author of The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960.
Sarah Langs is an educator, a historian, a true fan of the game as she has launched her career as a baseball researcher at ESPN and Major League Baseball. Her trademark phrase, “Baseball is the best,” is an all-encompassing maxim highlighting every aspect of the game. ALS has robbed Sarah of her ability to run and walk but not fly, as her passion and eternal optimism on social media and frequent appearances on MLB platforms continue to inspire fans worldwide.
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 28, 2024. Last Updated: February 28, 2024.