Sandomir: Harvey Frommer, historian of sports and New York, dies at 83
From Richard Sandomir at the New York Times on August 6, 2019, on longtime SABR member Harvey Frommer:
Harvey Frommer, a sports historian who wrote extensively about the Yankees and collaborated with his wife on lively oral histories of Brooklyn, the Catskills and Broadway, died on Aug. 1 at his home in Lyme, N.H. He was 83.
His son Frederic said the cause was metastatic lung cancer.
Mr. Frommer’s fascination with baseball began in Brooklyn during the 1940s and ’50s, when the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants dazzled New York City with star players like Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays. In his book “New York City Baseball: The Last Golden Age, 1947-1957” (1980), Mr. Frommer described a three-team universe captured by radio.
“Radio was always on, always ritual,” he wrote. “Followers of the New York City teams could go to a butcher shop, a candy store, a laundromat, moving from one to another virtually without missing a pitch.”
Mr. Frommer (pronounced FROME-er) maintained a torrid pace of writing for 40 years. His dozens of books include an exploration of Robinson’s breaking baseball’s modern color barrier in 1947 and Shoeless Joe Jackson’s banishment from baseball for his supposed role in fixing the 1919 World Series with seven Chicago White Sox teammates.
Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/harvey-frommer-dead.html
Originally published: August 7, 2019. Last Updated: August 7, 2019.