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BaseballChronology.com: Seymour Medal Honorees for 2001

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 2001, 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		Past Time: Baseball as History by Jules Tygiel "Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of the game, Tygiel uses the game as his doorway for entry into--and airing out--several rooms of the American past. Though the nine essays that make up Past Time reflect the game's nine innings and are presented chronologically, they are each entities unto themselves and can be read in any order. Rarely stepping onto the playing field, they avoid the mushiness and rhapsodizing that baseball tends to evoke. Instead, they take provocative looks at the often overlooked--like why statistics hold the game together, and why holding the game together was crucial to an America emerging from the Civil War--and fresh looks at old warhorses like baseball and the Depression era, baseball and civil rights, and baseball and America's post-World War II geographical shift. The final "inning" examines such recent obsessions as rotisserie leagues and fantasy camps, and the chapter on Bobby Thompson's famed home run and how the ways we would experience the game in the early years of the Cold War would change is thoroughly absorbing. But, then, so is the rest of Past Time. It has you wishing for extra 'innings.'" Read more...
RUNNER- UP		Cy Young: A Baseball Life by Reed Browning "He was the winner of 511 major league baseball games, nearly a hundred more than any other pitcher. He threw three no-hitters, including the first perfect game in the new American League. He was among the original twelve players inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame, and his name is now attached to the game's most prestigious pitching award. Yet for all his accomplishments, Cy Young remains to many baseball fans a legendary but little-known figure. This book re-creates the life of Denton True "Cyclone" Young and places his story in the context of a rapidly changing turn-of-the-century America." Read more...
FINALIST		More than Merkle: A History of the Best and Most Exciting Baseball Season in Human History by David W. Anderson A look back at the 1908 season.
FINALIST		Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer "Scrupulously researched and elegantly written, The Hero's Life is filled with stories and reminiscences, both on and off the field, from others--not surprisingly, DiMaggio offered no cooperation--that both illumine the man and, more fascinatingly, explain our very need for him. Amid all the success and adulation, there was little joy in DiMaggio's life, and few moments--beyond the real heartache he felt over Monroe--of connection with others beyond Joe's personal need for others to serve him. "No one really knew what it meant to have spent a half-century being precisely and distinctly DiMaggio," Cramer writes, "what we required Joe DiMaggio to be. No one knew, as he did, what it cost to live the hero's life. And no one knew, as he did, precisely what it was worth." It seems our nation turned its lonely eyes to a proud, but empty shell; Cramer's superb book helps us understand why we did, and how DiMaggio was able to take all the good will extended him and give so little back." Read more...
FINALIST		Lefty Grove: American Original by Jim Kaplan
FINALIST		Sunday at the Ballpark: Billy Sunday's Professional Baseball Career, 1883-1890 by Wendy Knickerbocker "In this work, Wendy Knickerbocker explores Sunday's professional baseball career to examine the coming of age of an interesting and important character in American sports history. Detail is given to the entirety of his career as well as his playing style. She includes his struggles and accomplishments in his professional career as well as his religious one." Read more...
FINALIST		Victory Faust: The Rube Who Saved McGraw's Giants by Gabriel Schechter "This book of historical nonfiction chronicles the bizarre adventures of Victory Faust and the 1911 New York Giants. Despite a lack of baseball skills, Faust joined the Giants, became their good-luck mascot, helped them win the pennant, and got his reward by pitching in two games. The book details the trials of John McGraw's vintage Giants that made them so susceptible to the positive influence of Faust, a Kansas farmer so determined to pitch the Giants to the pennant that nothing could stop him." Read more...
FINALIST		Red Sox Century: One Hundred Years of Red Sox Baseball by Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson "From Cy Young to Cy Young award winner Pedro Martinez, this is a franchise full of myth and history--the first to win a World Series and the last to cross the color line--and, contend authors Glenn Stout, the series editor of the annual Best American Sportswriting volume, and Richard A. Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England, the most interesting franchise in the history of the game. Their splendid, fully illustrated chronicle, rich with anecdotes, of the club from 1901 to the present makes it hard to argue with the assessment. The Sox have always been interesting--as well as frustrating, enigmatic, contradictory, and thrilling, and Red Sox Century touches all of those bases. This is an exhaustively researched history, but it's also a fan's book, filled with affection and exasperation. Stout and Johnson effectively pepper their narrative with personal reflections and observations from writers such as Peter Gammons, Dan Shaughnessy, and Elizabeth Dooley. They also pick a Red Sox all-century team, make a fine case for Pedro's '99 season as the best ever for a pitcher, compile some requisite stats, and assemble the most complete Sox bibliography ever. About the only thing they don't supply is a good parking place near Fenway." Read more...
BEST BASEBALL BOOKS OF EACH YEAR ACCORDING TO SABR