SABRcast with Rob Neyer

Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer. SABRcast features insights and analysis of what’s happening in modern baseball on and off the field, plus compelling interviews with figures from around the game — and music from The Baseball Project.

Subscribe to SABRcast on your favorite podcast networks, including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, or Stitcher, and listen to each episode as soon as it’s released.

Neyer is a longtime baseball writer and editor for ESPN.com, SB Nation, and FoxSports.com. He began his career as a research assistant for groundbreaking baseball author Bill James and later worked for STATS, Inc. He has also written or co-written seven baseball books, including The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (with Bill James), winner of the Sporting News/SABR Baseball Research Award, and most recently Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game, winner of the 2019 CASEY Award.

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Current Episode

Episode #162: May 16, 2022

James E. Brunson IIIThis week’s guest is James E. Brunson III, a historian, artist, and art historian who has contributed much to the study of baseball. He was a 2022 recipient of SABR’s Henry Chadwick Award. In the mid-1980s, he began his decades-long study of the history and imagery of African Americans in baseball. This work led to the 2019 publication of his three-volume magnum opus, Black Baseball, 1858-1900: A Comprehensive Record of the Teams, Players, Managers, Owners and Umpires, which won the Robert Peterson Award from SABR’s Negro Leagues Research Committee and was selected as one of SABR’s top 50 baseball books of the past half-century. He is the assistant vice president for Diversity & Equity in Student Affairs & Enrollment Management at Northern Illinois University.

Click here or press play below to listen to Episode #162:

What’s Rob Reading?

Beauty at Short: Dave Bancroft, the Most Unlikely Hall of Famer and His Wild Times in Baseball's First Century, by Tom AlesiaBeauty at Short: Dave Bancroft, the Most Unlikely Hall of Famer and His Wild Times in Baseball’s First Century
By Tom Alesia

Dave Bancroft should not be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He emerged from his Iowa hometown as an undersized shortstop without batting skills. Signed by one of the 300-plus minor league teams at age 17 in 1909, he lasted only three weeks before being cut, then joined another team and was released again. His rise to become enshrined in Cooperstown as one of baseball’s all-time greats was unfathomable. More importantly, baseball placed Bancroft at the game’s best vantage point across nearly one century. This view allowed him to observe the modern evolution of the game through international travel, the fallout of two world wars, racism, women’s rights and the Great Depression. He met practically every renowned person connected to pro baseball … and countless others with astounding backgrounds and fates. He greeted royalty and presidents, film stars and music sensations, boxing champs and snake oil chumps, needy kids and spoiled moguls.

Archived Episodes

Episode #161: Rich Waltz (May 9, 2022)

Episode #160: Kostya Kennedy (May 2, 2022)

Episode #159: Jim Kaat (April 25, 2022)

Episode #158: Jim Allen (April 18, 2022)

Episode #157: Tyler Kepner (April 11, 2022)

Episode #156: Andy McCue (April 4, 2022)

Episode #155: Dale Scott (March 28, 2022)

Episode #154: Alan Nathan (March 21, 2022)

Episode #153: Pedro Moura (March 14, 2022)

Episode #152: Jeff Katz (March 7, 2022)

Episode #151: Will Carroll (February 28, 2022)

Episode #150: Gary Cieradkowski (February 21, 2022)

Episode #149: Allen Barra (February 14, 2022)

Episode #148: Katherine Walden (February 7, 2022)

Episode #147: Jake Stone (January 31, 2022)

Episode #146: Terry Pluto (January 24, 2022)

Episode #145: Zack Hample (January 17, 2022)

Episode #144: Eno Sarris (January 10, 2022)

Episode #143: Jeff Neuman (January 3, 2022)