OUR COLUMNISTS

Sam Abady earned his B.A. in philosophy at Colgate University and J.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Law at the City College Urban Legal Studies Program in Harlem. He was a trial and appellate lawyer for twenty-five years, appearing in cases all over the United States, including the U.S. Supreme Court, and his work focused primarily on criminal defense, medico-legal and civil rights matters, including the defense of athletes in anti-doping cases. He is now teaching and writing, including a textbook on narcotics law, history and policy. He was a catcher and cleanup batter throughout his youth, and travels mostly on two wheels via a 1972 Harley-Davidson Sportster and 2001 Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad.

Gene Carney has been writing about baseball since 1989. He is the author of two well-received books: Romancing the Horsehide: Baseball Poems on Players and the Game(McFarland, 1993) and Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (Potomac, 2006), winner of the SABR Ritter Award for top book of the year on the deadball era, and a finalist for the Dave Moore Award (Elysian Field Quarterly) as the Most Important Baseball Book of 2006.

Gene has written Notes from the Shadows of Cooperstown since 1993 and has appeared online since 1999. He also has written for USA Today’s Baseball Weekly plus the baseball literary magazines Spitball, Fan, and Elysian Field Quarterly. He currently is applying the finishing touches to a book on Cooperstown, a collection of fiction, a novella and a full-length musical. Burying the Black Sox is available in paperback. Gene is busy planning it’s sequel, which he hopes to turn into a screenplay. He has been a SABR member since 1991.

Over the past 25 years, Richard Lally, our hard-eyed editor-in-chief and the author of nine popular baseball books, has interviewed over 400 baseball personalities while gathering material for nine books on the national pastime including the best-selling The Wrong Stuff(coauthored with Bill Lee) and Bombers, an oral history of the New York Yankees. In 2002, Princeton University named Bombers to its prestigious Dixon Collection, a collection of books reflecting contemporary American thought. In this exclusive column, he will share portions of his past and most recent conversations with many of baseball’s leading figures, his musings over the current baseball scene and he will present the occasional special Baseball Library feature from other contributors, including material from our archives.

BaseballLibrary.com is happy to have John Shiffert contributing his column.

We know from our mail that we’re lucky to have a knowledgable following, thousands of experts who know as much about the greatest game ever created as any of the writers who grace this site. Those of you who have visited the Baseball Library from its inception know that we used to regularly feature articles from our our reader-writers. We’ve decided to continue that practice with our Readers’ Submissions Vault, the place where we will archive articles from the people who make this site so worthwhile.

Most baseball fans love numbers, from the traditional “counting” stats like RBI and home runs, to the more complex sabermetric calculations, such as OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging) and Runs Created. In this section of the library, we will present various lists from our own analysts, various baseball periodicals past and present, other topflight baseball sites and our readers