SABR announces 2025 Henry Chadwick Award recipients
FEBRUARY 26, 2025 — SABR is pleased to announce the 2025 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 2025 recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award are:
- Rob Fitts is the author of numerous articles and 10 books on Japanese baseball and Japanese baseball cards. An award-winning author and speaker, he is the founder of SABR’s Asian Baseball Committee and a recipient of the society’s Seymour Medal; Doug Pappas Award; two McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Awards; and three Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Awards. A former archaeologist with a Ph.d from Brown University, he left academics behind to follow his passion for Japanese baseball. While living in Tokyo in 1993-94, Fitts began collecting Japanese baseball cards and he is now recognized as one of the leading experts in the field.
- Gary Gillette is a nationally known baseball author and expert on Hall of Famer Turkey Stearnes, the Detroit Stars, and the history of the Negro Leagues in Detroit. He is founder and chair of the nonprofit Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium, leading the campaign to restore the historic ballpark site. He served on SABR’s Board of Directors from 2009 to 2012, helped lead two special Negro Leagues Task Force committees from 2021 to 2024, was the editor of SABR’s Emerald Guide to Baseball, and past chair of SABR’s Ballparks Committee, Business of Baseball Committee, and Southern Michigan Chapter. He was also the editor of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, executive editor of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia, and a contributor to six editions of Total Baseball.
- Richard Malatzky, a lifelong resident of the Bronx, New York, was a key contributor to SABR’s Biographical Research Committee for nearly 40 years, a “supersleuth in genealogical research,” according to MLB Official Historian John Thorn. Malatzky first joined SABR in 1975 and worked closely with founding member Bill Haber to fill in the gaps of missing biographical information for baseball players of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Peter Morris, Malatzky’s frequent collaborator and co-conspirator in solving baseball mysteries, once wrote, “There is a very long list of major league players whose identity and/or final resting place stumped generations of legendary baseball researchers, but who are now correctly identified in the baseball encyclopedias because of Richard Malatzky’s resourcefulness at ferreting information from the sporting presses, city directories, censuses, vital records, military records, websites, and a wide range of other documents and sources.” Malatzky contributed to thousands of articles and books, and generously assisted on the work of many researchers, but his name rarely appeared in print outside of the Acknowledgments section. The first book with his name on the cover, Base Ball Pioneers, 1850-1870: The Clubs and Players Who Spread the Sport Nationwide, won a SABR Baseball Research Award in 2013. He was buried with a copy of it.
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, 2025. Last Updated: February 27, 2025.