Warsinskey: SABR co-founder Joe Simenic was ‘one of the true giants’ of baseball research
From Tim Warsinskey at The Plain Dealer on February 18, 2015, on SABR founding member Joe Simenic:
Baseball loves history, and nearly every major-league player has had his biography researched by those who love the game as much as anyone.
But what of the historians? Longtime Clevelander Joe Simenic toiled in relative obscurity, except among baseball researchers and writers, who revered him, and now mourn his passing. Simenic died Feb. 7 in Westerville, Ohio. He was 91.
He was “one of the true giants of baseball research,” baseball historian Peter Morris wrote in a biographical essay.
Simenic was among the 16 co-founders of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), which was formed at the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971 and was based in Cleveland for many years.
His passion for baseball research predated SABR by a quarter century and he would spend parts of seven decades in the research trenches. The main trench, in this case, was a full basement library he built in his Euclid ranch home, complete with a microfilm machine and baseball yearbooks that dated back to the 1800s, as well as hundreds of books.
Read the full article here: http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2015/02/sabr_co-founder_joe_simenic_wa.html
- In Memoriam: Read the SABR.org obituary of founding member Joe Simenic
- BioProject: Read Peter Morris’ profile of Joe Simenic for the SABR Baseball Biography Project
- About the founders: Learn more about the “Cooperstown 16”, SABR’s founding members
Originally published: February 18, 2015. Last Updated: February 18, 2015.