Larry Ritter Book Award (Deadball)

Each year, SABR’s Deadball Era Committee presents the Larry Ritter Book Award to recognize the best new baseball book primarily set in the Deadball Era that was published during the previous calendar year. The Ritter Award is presented during the Deadball Committee’s meeting at the annual SABR convention.

All Larry Ritter Award-winning books can be purchased at the SABR Bookstore.

2014 award nominations

To submit a nomination for the 2014 Larry Ritter Book Award (2013 publication date), contact Gail Rowe at growes36@comcast.net by December 31, 2012. Deadline for receipt of nominated books by the committee is January 2014.

Larry Ritter Award winners

2013

Daniel R. Levitt's The Battle That Forged Modern Baseball: The Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy (Ivan R. Dee)

2012

Glenn Stout's Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

2011

Kate Buford's Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Alfred A. Knopf)

2010

Robert Peyton Wiggins’s The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs: The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914—1915 (McFarland)

2009

Ronald M. Selter’s Ballparks of the Deadball Era: A Comprehensive Study of Their Dimension, Configurations and Effects on Batting, 1901-1919 (McFarland)

2008

Norman L. Macht’s Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball (University of Nebraska Press)

2007

Gene Carney’s Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (Potomac)

2006

Richard Bak’s Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours (Sports Media Group)

2005

Jeffrey Powers-Beck’s The American Indian Integration of Baseball (University of Nebraska Press)

2004

James E. Elfers’s The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball’s 1913—1914 World Tour (Bison Books)

2003

Jim Reisler’s Before They Were the Bombers: The New York Yankees’ Early Years, 1903—1915 (McFarland)

2002

Martin Donell Kohout’s Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball’s Biggest Crook (McFarland)

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