Book Reviews Book Awards BC Book of the Month Essential Books

BaseballChronology.com: Seymour Medal Honorees for 2004

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. A list of 29 candidate books was paired down to the winner and four finalists by SABR members Gail S. Rowe, Morris Eckhouse, and Paul Adomites. Below are the finalists and winners for 2004, 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		Baseball Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan by Peter Morris "In this well-researched study of Michigan baseball from the 1830s to the 1870s, baseball scholar Peter Morris offers many answers. Drawing on such sources as personal memoirs, period photographs, and an extensive, often hilarious variety of newspaper accounts, he paints a vivid portrait of a game that was widely--if erratically--played well before the Civil War and gradually evolved from an informal amusement into an activity for local groups of young men and finally into a serious, organized sport." Read more...
FINALIST		1924: Baseball’s Greatest Season by Reed Browning "In alternating chapters of narrative and analysis, Reed Browning explains how the 1924 season marked the last time a team playing old-fashioned "inside" baseball won the championship. Along the way, the season featured two taut September pennant races and a variety of compelling human interest stories: George Sisler failing to recover his once incomparable batting eye after a sinus infection; Rogers Hornsby batting .424, a figure no player has matched since; Babe Ruth overcoming injuries in the opening and closing phases of the season to win his only batting crown; Dazzy Vance registering one of the greatest seasons that any post-dead-ball pitcher has ever chalked up; and the revered Walter Johnson, presumed over the hill, returning to glory in the regular season and then, after two disappointing Series starts, winning the seventh game in relief." Read more...
FINALIST		The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball’s 1913-1914 World Tour by James E. Elfers "This book follows the two teams, whose members include Christy Mathewson, Jim Thorpe, and half a dozen other future Hall-of-Famers, as they barnstorm across the United States and sail the seas to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, finishing with a game before twenty thousand fans and King George V. Along the way, baseball’s envoys meet such dignitaries as Pope Pius X, tea magnate Thomas Lipton, and the last khedive of Egypt. They play the tables of Monaco, survive a near-shipwreck, and cram a lifetime’s worth of adventures into six months. Their story, told here for the first time, gives readers a glimpse into baseball history and the innocence and spirit of a long-gone era." Read more...
FINALIST		Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal by Daniel Nathan "The story of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and his teammates purportedly conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds has lingered in our collective consciousness for more than eighty years. Daniel A. Nathan's wide-ranging, interdisciplinary cultural history is less concerned with the details of the scandal than with how it has been represented and remembered by journalists, historians, novelists, filmmakers, and baseball fans. Saying It's So offers a series of astute reflections on what these different cultural narratives reveal about their creators and the eras in which they were created, producing a complex study of cultural values, memory, and the ways people make meaning." Read more...
FINALIST		Beyond the Shadow of the Senators by Brad Snyder "In a time when the country was divided into black and white, our soldier boys battled against the evils in Europe, and war-weary Americans gathered around green fields to forget their troubles in the joys of our national pastime, the greatest baseball dynasty you've probably never heard of electrified the game and set an unstoppable revolution in motion. So begins the fascinating and often surprising story of the Homestead Grays, the Negro League's most successful franchise, and how the fight to integrate baseball began not in Brooklyn with Jackie Robinson but in our nation's capital." Read more...
BEST BASEBALL BOOKS OF EACH YEAR ACCORDING TO SABR