Toronto, Ontario – David W. Smith, a Newark, Delaware resident, was this year’s winner of the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR) highest honor, The Bob Davids Awards.

Presented at SABR’s annual convention in Toronto, this award honors members whose contributions to SABR and baseball reflect the ingenuity, integrity, and self-sacrifice of the founder and past president of SABR, L. Robert “Bob” Davids.  Voluntary activities in the area of administration and research are among those contributions considered.

A SABR member since 1977, Mr. Smith is the founder of Retrosheet (www.Retrosheet.org), a volunteer effort he has chiefly coordinated.  Their mission is to collect information from all major league games from 1901 to 1983.  Of the estimated 115,000 that were played during that time period, Retrosheet has compiled full play-by-play statistics for 70,000 of them.

“David W. Smith is a winner in every sense of the word, certainly according to the qualities our founder, Bob Davids, exemplified,” said Evelyn Begley, the 2002 award winner in her introduction speech. “He is generous in sharing freely his knowledge, literally. He is modest…and is described by the media as a man of brilliance and character, whose can-do approach has overcome obstacles toward achieving a so-called impossible quest.”

“Every game is important to someone,” Smith has been quoted as saying. 

In addition to his overwhelming contribution to baseball research, Mr. Smith is an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Delaware.