Hitting the Books with Gary Thorne: Baseball trilogy by Harold Seymour

A great treat to share the Hitting the Books page with a fellow play-by-play announcer - in this case, Bob Carpenter, the television voice of the Nationals on MASN.

As Bob says, the baseball history books by Harold Seymour that Bob presents were indeed on the shelf in the broadcast booth. I had told Bob the night before I wanted to do a segment with him and he came back the next day and said the books he wanted to talk about were right behind him.

From the obituary for Harold Seymour in the New York Times in 1992, here is some information on the author.

"Harold Seymour, a one-time bat boy for the Brooklyn Dodgers who turned his childhood passion for baseball into an academic specialty as one of the first recognized historians of the national pastime ...."

A former college teacher who left academia in 1969 to devote full time to research and writing about baseball, Seymour was the author of a three-volume history that many regard as the seminal work in establishing baseball as a subject for serious scholarly inquiry.

Seymour, who was born in Manhattan in 1910, grew up in Brooklyn. As a child, he served as a Dodgers bat boy in the Wilbert Robinson era and in the 1920s, he played baseball in high school and coached amateur and semipro teams.

Four years later, an expanded and completely rewritten version of the work was published by Oxford University Press as "Baseball: The Early Years," the first of what became the three-volume history of the sport, also including "Baseball: The Golden Age" (1971) and "Baseball: The People's Game" (1991).

Now Bob tells us why he regards the books so highly.

"If you have a strong purpose in life, you don't have to be pushed. Your passion will drive you there." ― Roy T. Bennett, "The Light in the Heart"

Gary Thorne is the play-by-play voice of the Orioles on MASN, and the 2017 season is his 11th with the club and 32nd covering Major League Baseball. His blog will appear regularly throughout the season. The Orioles and Sarasota County have partnered on the Big League Reader Program, which rewarded kids who read three books in February with tickets to a Grapefruit League game at Ed Smith Stadium in March.

* Hitting the Books with Gary Thorne. © Copyright 2017 Gary F. Thorne. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog's author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Gary F. Thorne and MASNsports.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.