Baseball History
Spring training is upon us, ushering in the first notes of spring in the midst of the last long month of winter, as it has for over a century. The history of baseball is as integral to the fiber of the sport as is the annual trip to warmer weather and the reporting of pitchers and catchers, and no history of the game is complete without reference to one of its first serious historians. Dr. Harold Seymour’s PhD was the first awarded based on baseball research, and his book (referenced above in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler, who was considering sports antitrust legislation during the 85th Congress) influenced generations of sports historians. Modern baseball historians such as John Thorn have rightly identified his wife, Dorothy Seymour Mills, as equally essential to the scholarship presented in the three seminal Seymour tomes (Baseball: The Early Years; Baseball: The Golden Age; Baseball: The People’s Game), and regularly cite the two as major contributors to our understanding of the game.
Letter to Emanuel Celler and Copy of Article, 10/26/1957; Committee Papers (HR85A-F11.16); Committee on the Judiciary; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, RG 233.
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