SABR’s BioProject: Latest News, and Group Projects
Posted by Mark Armour on February 18, 2011
In my last post I introduced SABR's Baseball Biography Project. Since then, we have have published 14 more articles, 13 of them true biographies and one the story of the Cuban League by the venerable Peter Bjarkman. You can always see the latest biographies here.
This is a fairly typical haul for us, but even that undersells the production of the project.
We began in the wake of SABR's two wonderful books on the Deadball Era, mainly biographical collections devoted to the stars of the two major leagues. As we were beginning in 2002, we hoped that individuals would come along and create their own projects revolving around an era, or a team, or a region, using our guidelines and process. Such a project, we realized, would require one or two people to lead and organize it, get all of the words collected and edited, find a publisher, and work with them to get the book completed.
This has happened. The first book was focused on the 1975 Red Sox, and came out in late 2005. On the heals of that effort many similar projects have been formed, the results of which, so far, are nine books:
You might notice a heavy concentration of Red Sox related books. Much like with the biographies themselves, the projects get formed based on the interests of the person or people willing to do the work. Bill Nowlin, who has written dozens of books about the Red Sox, has helped shepherd five of these nine books, and there are more coming. We have more than 10 book projects ongoing at the moment (most having nothing to do with the Red Sox). At least three will be published in the next year: the 1984 Tigers, the 1947 Dodgers, and the 1970 Orioles.
All of these biographies eventually wind up on our site, depending on the deal SABR strikes with the publisher. Generally it is one year after publication.
There is a lot going on. If you are interested in joining SABR and our project, please let me know. We could use the help. Similarly, if you have suggestions about how to make the project better or more interesting to you, please let me know that as well.
Mark Armour
February 18th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
I see that Jim Brosnan is one of the latest subjects. During my childhood in the early 1960s, I read a book that he wrote about his life in baseball. I was aware that he had written more than one such book. Several years later, when I saw a new baseball book by a pitcher with the first name of Jim and a last name that starts with "B" and ends with "n", I got confused and thought that this one was yet another one from him. But "Ball Four" turned out to be quite a different book by quite a different pitcher.
I had hoped to read what appeared to be an already-posted biography of Barry Latman, a late 1950s/early 1960s pitcher with a last name somewhat similar to mine, but while there's a link to it, it doesn't appear on the web site because it's in one of their books. I see now that this may eventually appear, so I'll look forward to seeing it on the web site. Latman's biography was done by Ralph Berger, who appears to specialize in Jewish players and Whiz Kid-era Phillies, two areas in which I have a special interest.
February 19th, 2011 at 1:37 am
The Latman bio will be on the site in a few weeks. That book came with a two-year exclusive, and the two years in up in April. I will post here when that book is on-line.
February 24th, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Spot on with this write-up, I actually assume this web site needs way more consideration. I’ll most likely be again to learn far more, thanks for that info.
February 27th, 2011 at 7:54 pm
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