Fifth in a new series
Geoffrey C. Ward, with whom I worked happily on Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary Baseball, said in later years that “Working on the film and book taught me [that] … while most Americans care too little about their history, the baseball community is different. The real meaning of all those apparently impenetrable stats is that the past matters. Without them no player would know where he stood, no fan could measure his or her heroes against those who have gone before. That fact alone should endear the game to any historian.”
That it had not, until Harold Seymour’s PhD thesis at Cornell in 1956, is puzzling. Baseball’s past — what binds and sustains, or heritage — had been honored often enough in the reminiscences of journalists and players, but its history had not been treated as a national enterprise. The three-volume opus titled Baseball, which is today credited not only to Harold Seymour but also to his wife, Dorothy, is both the first of its kind and the best. It showed that our game was filled with heroism and hypocrisy, nobility and greed — in short, all of the things that we love about our contradictory experience of America.
Lest you suspect that Harold learned baseball in an ivory tower, he had been a batboy for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1920s, a ballplayer at Drew University, and had done some scouting for the Boston Red Sox. He earned his M.A. in American History from Cornell in 1940. After interrupting his doctoral studies because of World War II and having to take control of the family business, he was appointed an assistant professor in history at Fenn College, now part of Cleveland State University, in 1947, the year that he declared his thesis in List of Doctoral Dissertations Now in Progress.
He loved baseball; Dorothy, his student and secretary, did not. But she loved him … and was a meticulous researcher and typist, which he was not. Twice her age, he married her in 1949, the day after his divorce, while she was still enrolled at Fenn. The couple moved on to Cornell, with detours to the nation’s libraries and even the archives of The Sporting News, taking notes in preparation for the thesis and, as they could not have known at the time, the three books to come.
The first volume of the series, published in 1960 by Oxford University Press, was subtitled The Early Years. To an extent not understood until long after his death, it was the product of Harold’s collaboration with his wife, in a not unfamiliar tale of male domination and female subservience.
The book was based on his thesis, The Rise of Major League Baseball to 1891. Under the guidance of Oxford editor Sheldon Meyer, the first volume of the history was extended by a dozen years, to 1903. Meyer also insisted that the author eliminate the abundant footnotes of his dissertation. Decades later, when I was writing Baseball in the Garden of Eden, I would find these invaluable.
I believe the Seymours’ great contribution to the game in the years to come was to convince other serious-minded individuals that there was a lot left undone … that baseball history could be more than a grab-bag of anecdotes. Their work may also have inspired, if indirectly, the creation of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in the same year as the Seymours’ second volume, Baseball: The Golden Age, which brought their history up to 1930.
So much of what once passed muster as history was created as public-relations patter or simple cheerleading, from the fibs of Henry Chadwick and Albert Spalding to the heart-rending tale of the Babe and hospitalized Johnny Sylvester. This is the sort of history that Henry Ford described in 1916. “History is more or less bunk,” he wrote. “It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present….” You may imagine my view of such present centrism.
The perspective of the Seymours was a revelation to many of us, whether hobbyist researchers or trained historians. But the true nature of their collaboration was not widely clear until 2004, when she published A Woman’s Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour. How did she characterize her work with her late husband (she had remarried in the mid-1990s and published that book as Dorothy Seymour Mills)? “At once glorious and ignominious.”
Harold gave her scant credit, let alone co-authorship of the first two volumes of their work. Alan Schwarz asked her, in a 2010 story for the New York Times, why she did not object at the time, or over the ensuing decades while he was still alive.
“It was too easy not to,” she said. “I was just playing my role. I was just doing everything I had done before and continuing with it. I was comfortable with that role.”
Harold continued to write articles into the 1980s, including “Books Before Baseball,” which I solicited for the debut issue of SABR’s The National Pastime in 1982. But Alzheimer’s disease would soon take its course; for much of what became The People’s Game, published by Oxford in 1990 as the third volume of the trilogy, Dorothy had been his ghostwriter.
In 1991, when SABR established the annual Seymour Medal for best book of baseball history or biography published in the previous year, the award was named for both. Yet in 2010, when the organization launched its Chadwick Award for lifetime achievement, Harold and not Dorothy was announced as one of the original nine recipients. After objections from many SABR members, the selection committee quickly reversed itself. Dorothy and Harold would be honored jointly.
Steve Gietschier, at that time managing editor of research for The Sporting News, had reviewed 71 boxes of the Seymours’ notes, archived at Cornell, and concluded that her role in research had been equal to that of her husband. He and I took up her cause with Oxford University Press. Executive Editor Timothy Bent had been there for 18 years, but it was the first time Dorothy’s claim had crossed his desk.
He confirmed that Dorothy had worked on all three books. And in August, Oxford added her name to the three book jackets. And her name appears above that of her late husband on Baseball: The People’s Game.
Into her eighties, Dorothy continued to write books for both children and adults, including a novel about the game that had once left her cold. Now that she and Harold are both gone — he in 1992, she in 2019 — what endures is The Work.
PIONEERS: The Seymours was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.