SABRcast with Rob Neyer: Paul Dickson (Episode #20)

August 12, 2019/by Jason Best

Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a new weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer. SABRcast will feature 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, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play, 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 this year’s CASEY Award.

Current Episode

Episode #20: August 12, 2019

Our guest this week is Paul Dickson, acclaimed author and baseball historian whose newest book is The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign-Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime. Paul is best known in the baseball research community for The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, now in its third edition. First published in 1989 when it won the Macmillan-SABR Baseball Research Award, the dictionary has grown to nearly a thousand pages, and it has its own website at baseballdictionary.com. Dickson, who was honored with SABR’s Henry Chadwick Award in 2013, has also written dozens of other baseball books, including The Unwritten Rules of Baseball, The Hidden Language of Baseball, The Joy of Keeping Score, Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, and Leo Durocher: Baseball’s Prodigal Son.

Click here or press play below to listen to Episode #20:

What’s Rob reading this week?

The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign-Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime
By Paul Dickson

Baseball is set apart from other sports by many things, but few are more distinctive than the intricate systems of coded language that govern action on the field and give baseball its unique appeal. During a nine‑inning game, more than one thousand silent instructions are given—from catcher to pitcher, coach to batter, fielder to fielder, umpire to umpire—and without this speechless communication the game would simply not be the same. Baseball historian Paul Dickson examines the rich legacy of baseball’s hidden language, offering fans everywhere a smorgasbord of history and anecdote.