Tom Melville Awarded Seymour Medal for 2002
CLEVELAND, OH – The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) announces that Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League by Tom Melville has been awarded the Seymour Medal for 2002. Awarded annually, the medal is given to the book judged the best work of baseball history or biography published in the preceding year.
CLEVELAND, OH – The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) announces that Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League by Tom Melville has been awarded the Seymour Medal for 2002. Awarded annually, the medal is given to the book judged the best work of baseball history or biography published in the preceding year.
In Early Baseball, Melville assesses the events and forces that carried baseball from its formal beginnings with the Knickerbocker Club of New York through its development into organized national sport and later to the founding of the National League. Contemporary press accounts and correspondence-especially that of National League founder and early president William Hulbert-give Early Baseball insight and analysis that challenges many of our assumptions about baseball’s early history.
McFarland Publishers Assistant Editor Gary Mitchem noted that ” . . . we hope that it reaches the growing number of academics trying to make baseball a part of the academic curriculum. Melville’s work plants baseball firmly in the context of American culture.” The Seymour Medal is named for the late Harold and Dorothy Seymour, both instrumental in the field of baseball research. This is the seventh annual award and will be presented to Tom Melville by SABR Vice President and Seymour Medal Committee Chair Frederick Ivor-Campbell in a ceremony on Saturday, May 4 at the Radisson Hotel at Gateway in Cleveland, Ohio. The presentation is part of the annual Seymour Medal Conference, which also includes a keynote address by Bill James, presentations on baseball poetry and a book signing on Friday evening, May 3 at the Baseball Heritage Museum.
Tom Melville is a resident of Cedarburg, Wisconsin. He is an educator and the author of numerous popular and scholarly articles on early American baseball. Melville also wrote one book on the history of American cricket.
For further information about the conference, please contact the SABR office at 216.575.0500.
Originally published: April 9, 2002. Last Updated: April 9, 2002.