The First Historian Of Baseball
In a trip to visit the National Baseball Library at Cooperstown in 1994 I delivered Seymour’s ashes to Tom Heitz, then the Library’s Director, in the hope that he could arrange for interment in Cooperstown. Tom planned a ceremony to take place during the annual Cooperstown Symposium on American Culture, which attracts about a hundred scholars each year to the Otesaga, a beautiful resort hotel on Lake Otsego in the heart of Cooperstown.
As a boy Seymour not only played sandlot ball every chance he got, he read everything he could find about baseball techniques. He wanted not only to play high-class ball, he desired to help other boys play it well, too.
Continue reading “The Kid Teams Of Brooklyn”
In his will Seymour arranged to honor Cornell, which was first to recognize baseball as a legitimate subject for academic inquiry and awarded him the Ph.D. degree for his dissertation on the early history of baseball. His bequest took several forms. He set up a fellowship in American history for a graduate student to study sports history. He also planned an annual invitational lecture on sports history at Cornell, called the Harold “Cy” Seymour lectureship in Sports History.
Harold Seymour’s proteges wrote to him when they entered organized baseball to tell their mentor about their exciting experiences, especially their successes, as young professionals. You can tell that these boys gloried in their chance to make it in the bigs. And if you’ve read Ring Lardner’s A Busher’s Letters and You Know Me Al, you’ll be amazed at the similarity between the way these fellows expressed themselves and Lardner’s supposed fiction.
Continue reading “Echoes of Ring Lardner”
Seymour had always received fan mail, but when he was in his final years I determined that he would receive even more. Through the SABR newsletter I announced that because of poor health he was receiving therapy at the McKerley Center in Keene, New Hampshire, and asked that people write him. A flood of mail came in, mostly appreciative letters from readers but some also from other authors. In my daily visits to Seymour at the Center, I took these letters with me and read them to him, hoping that, as well as giving him pleasure, they would keep his mental faculties functioning.
by Herbert Johnson
In the late twenties my family lived right on the edge of the historic Parade Grounds. I must have been about eight or nine when I found myself utterly fascinated with the top team of those days, the Argyles.
Continue reading “Parade Grounds Memories”