Oral History Research Committee
Welcome to the Oral History Committee!
The SABR Oral History Collection includes more than 500 audio files of interviews conducted with ballplayers (Major Leagues, Minor Leagues, Negro Leagues, AAGPBL), executives, scouts, authors, writers, broadcasters, and other figures of historical baseball significance. Listen to those players tell stories in their own voices at sabr.org/oralhistory.
Founded in 1986, SABR’s Oral History Committee has the primary purpose of preserving baseball history through recording interviews. Such interviews typically explore a player’s biography and involvement in notable games in depth, thus allowing for some of the most probing and authoritative accounts in existence. In many cases, the Oral History Committee recording may be the most comprehensive account of a player’s career in existence.
Over time, the Committee’s work has included lengthy interviews with well-known and lesser-known players and has helped to preserve the historical record and to provide for recollections of baseball history which exist in no other place. Many interviewers have found Interviews with so called cup-of-coffee players can be as illuminating as interviews with baseball’s biggest names.
Any member of SABR’s Oral History is invited to conduct interviews. Subjects typically are former players, but they can also include managers, umpires, executives, journalists or anyone with a connection to the game.
Guidelines for conducting and completing interviews are available from the Committee. Anyone interested in conducting original interviews or in donating collections of previously-conducted interviews should contact Committee Chair John McMurray. The committee offers guidelines for conducting effective oral history interviews, maintains a list of SABR’s oral history library, and also publishes an annual report detailing the activities of the members.
- Listen to Oral History interviews: Visit sabr.org/oralhistory to check out our collection of SABR Oral History interviews.
- Newsletters: For past committee newsletters, click here.
- Announcements: To sign up for email announcements from this committee, click the “Announcements” button above, then click “Join Group” (
). All SABR members are eligible to sign up for announcements from any committee.
Contacts:
- John McMurray (Chair)
- C. Paul Rogers (Vice Chair)
- Mark Pattison (Vice Chair)
- Mark Ruckhaus (Newsletter Editor)