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(A.K.A. DOROTHY Z. SEYMOUR) At once glorious and ignominious: that characterizes my work with Dr. Harold Seymour, "The Gibbon of Baseball," the man who made the American national game a respectable subject for formal study by historians, the author of the first scholarly history of baseball. Glorious because I learned how to perform (and love) research; ignominious because my contribution to the work remained unrecognized until after his passing in 1992, although I spent forty-six years working closely with him, first on his dissertation and then on his three-volume series for Oxford University Press, now the standard reference on the subject. Dr. Harold Seymour, a professor of history as well as a lover of the game, has a well-deserved reputation as an innovator. He boldly opened the field of baseball as a subject for serious study. Before him, no other historian had dared to suggest that the word baseball might be uttered in the same phrase as the word history. Only sportswriters had ever tried their hand at writing baseball history, and the journalistic accounts they produced were so flawed that they earned no standing in the eyes of professional historians. Only one other scholar had previously ventured into the realm of sports history: John R. Betts, who produced a book that attempted to cover the history of all of sport. Before Seymour, no historian had tried to approach the American national game as a subject for serious study. Seymour got the idea for a study of baseball in the early 1940s while casting about for a topic for his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University. When he wrote the paper for his master's degree, he felt it necessary to choose a topic from his lead professor's field, which was land policy, but he found it deadly dull. He decided that the only topic that interested him deeply enough to write about it on the doctoral level was baseball. Seymour had always loved the game. As a child growing up near Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, he racked his brain to think of ways to get in to see his heroes. He was thrilled when he was selected to help pick up trash in the park or work on the scoreboard, and he exulted when he was chosen to be bat boy. Moreover, he played the game and coached other young men when he was in high school and continued coaching during college. Although he realized his skills weren't quite good enough for the professional level, he was able to help other young men become pros. When he began undergraduate work at Drew University in New Jersey in the 1930s, he thought he might become a physician, but the long afternoon laboratory courses in science interfered with his baseball play for the college, so he changed his major to history and decided to become a teacher, assuming that he would coach baseball on the side. Unexpectedly finding great pleasure in the study of history, he went on to Cornell for his master's degree and realized that, to teach at the college level, he needed a doctorate. One warm and sleepy afternoon at Cornell, during a class in which Seymour was to present and describe the topic he had chosen for his doctoral dissertation, nodding heads suddenly jerked up as he announced his topic as the history of American baseball to 1890 and explained how and where he planned to perform the research. Although eyebrows lifted among the committee of professors whose responsibility it was to direct doctoral work, Seymour managed to convince the group that he had a viable and suitable topic. Fortunately, at that time he had the New York Public Library at his fingertips and spent long hours there on the wonderful collections of early documents that the library still curates--although recently the administration has been thinking of selling them off to collectors, a sale that may make the collections unavailable to current scholars. At this point, I may have convinced the library's administration otherwise. … |
