Cleveland, OH – The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is happy to announce that Negro League Baseball: The Rise and the Ruin of a Black Institution (University of Pennsylvania) by Neil Lanctot has been unanimously chosen to receive the Seymour Medal for 2004, which honors the best book of baseball history or biography from the preceding year. 

"Literature regarding the Negro Leagues has flourished since Robert Peterson's Only The Ball Was White and Lanctot's Negro League Baseball raises the bar a great distance in its treatment of the subject.  Lanctot's book is a detailed look at the inner workings of the Negro Leagues and offers new insights into the rise, fall, highs and lows of the enterprise.  Many of the books about the Negro Leagues are encyclopedia-style publications or collections of stories.  As a narrative covering more than 30 years of baseball history, Lanctot's Negro League Baseball stands by itself as a scholarly study of the Negro Leagues from the 1930s into the 1960s," said Morris Eckhouse, Chair of the Seymour Medal Award Committee. 

Lanctot will receive the medal at the Seventh Annual Seymour Conference, which will be held at the Radisson Gateway in Cleveland on May 13-15 and is sponsored by the Cleveland Indians. 

Negro League Baseball was selected from one of three finalists for the Seymour Medal Award.  The remaining finalists included (in no particular order):

• The Golden Game:  The Story of California Baseball by Kevin Nelson and Hank Greenwald (Heyday Books)
• The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz (Thomas Dunne)

At the conference, Red Sox Vs. Yankees co-author Harvey Frommer will deliver the keynote speech at the conference, which is in its seventh year.  Mr. Frommer, who co-authored Red Sox Vs. Yankees with his son, Fredric J. Frommer, is the author of 34 other sports books, including:

• The New York Yankee Encyclopedia
• New York City Baseball
• Rickey and Robinson:  The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Line
• A Yank Century:  A Celebration of the First Hundred Years of Baseball’s Greatest Team

The Seymour Medal, named in honor of Dr. Harold Seymour and Dorothy Jane Mills (formerly Seymour), is awarded to the book judged the best work of baseball history or biography in the preceding year.  The Seymour Medal Conference, held annually, attempts to continue the promotion of baseball scholarship begun by its namesakes, and to celebrate fine baseball writing in all forms. 

Online registration for the conference is available through the SABR store.  For more information or to have a conference registration form sent to you, contact the SABR office at info@sabr.org.