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BaseballChronology.com: Seymour Medal Honorees for 2005

By Patrick Mondout

SABR (Society For American Baseball Research) annually awards the Seymour Medal to the best book of baseball history or biography published in the previous year. Below are the finalists and winners for 2005, including links to the book at Amazon.com for your convenience. We also have a list of all winners and finalists from 1996-2006.

SEYMOUR MEDAL FINALISTS & WINNERS
WINNER		Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution by Neil Lanctot "Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution presents the extraordinary history of a great African American achievement, from its lowest ebb during the Depression, through its golden age and World War II, until its gradual disappearance during the early years of the civil rights era. Faced with only a limited amount of official league documents and correspondence, Lanctot consulted virtually every sports page of every black newspaper located in a league city. He then conducted interviews with former players and scrutinized existing financial, court, and federal records. Through his efforts, Lanctot has painstakingly reconstructed the institutional history of black professional baseball, locating the players, teams, owners, and fans in the wider context of the league's administration. In addition, Lanctot provides valuable insight into the changing attitudes of African Americans toward the need for separate institutions." Read more...
FINALIST		The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball by Kevin Nelson and Hank Greenwald "Baseball and the Gold Rush, Ernest Thayer and "Casey at the Bat," baseball crook Hal Chase, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson and integration, crusty Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Hollywood baseball movies, Satchel Paige versus Dizzy Dean, Kenichi Zenimura and the Japanese American experience, Sparky Anderson, Gene Autry, Willie Mays, Tommy Lasorda, and the rise of the baby boom generation of players—all of these people and stories are part of the incredible saga of California baseball and how it has shaped the national pastime." Read more...
FINALIST		The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz "In this unprecedented new book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls "one of today's best baseball journalists" - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Inc. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more." Read more...
BEST BASEBALL BOOKS OF EACH YEAR ACCORDING TO SABR