Newsletter #91 — 2024 SABR Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award
October 1, 2024
Newsletter #91 — 2024 SABR Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award
SABR Lifetime Achievement Award — I am deeply honored to have received the 2024 SABR Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award for my research and writing on women in baseball history. You can read more about this here.
I have been a member of the Society for American Baseball Research for nearly forty years, and back in the 1980s, when I was researching the book that would become Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, I published a plea for information in the SABR newsletter. The result was that I received many envelopes in the mail, each of them containing a bit of information on a female ballplayer from the past. Or a box score. Or a tape recording of a radio program from long ago, one that mentioned female players. The generosity of SABR members helped make my task easier . . . and led me down interesting paths.
Submitting Exit Velocity for Awards — And speaking of awards, ever since Exit Velocity was published in June I've been submitting it for literary awards aimed at indie books. There are dozens of such awards. I read about them and decided there are seven I would like to submit to. So I've been submitting to one award a month.
One thing I'm discovering is that although most awards have dozens of categories one can submit to, I'm never sure I've selected the right one. It costs all over again for each category you submit to, so I've restricted myself to one category per award. Political Fiction is never a category, nor is Women Fight Back (or anything like it), so I've been choosing Science Fiction.
In September I submitted to the Next Generation Indie Awards and was very pleased by two things. First, because I submitted before September 30, I could submit to two categories for the price of one. This is a real deal! Second, the categories themselves were very well thought-out. I was going to choose Science Fiction as my first category, but when I scrolled down the list I saw that I had to choose between Science Fiction (on Earth) and Science Fiction (off Earth). So cool! Having two such classifications not only doubles the awards (two people receive an award instead of one), but it gives authors' books a better chance of being judged within the proper framework. A sci-fi book set on Earth is very different from a sci-fi book set on another planet, in another millennium, etc.
I didn't know what my second category would be, and wasn't even sure I could find one given that only one previous awards program I submitted to had categories I thought appropriate. But as I continued down the list I saw the category Social Justice. Cool and cooler! I can tell you, I was very happy filling out the forms, paying the entry fee, and wrapping up the three books (one for general judging; one for Science Fiction on Earth judging; one for Social Justice judging).
Design, Luck, and the Rockford Peaches: All Things Are Connected — And speaking of women in baseball, I will be giving a presentation on my baseball research at Rockford University on Wednesday, October 23 at 7 pm in the Fisher Chapel at Rockford University, Rockford, IL. My talk is part of the Rockford University Forum Series.
Another Review — Here's the ending of a review of Exit Velocity from Charles Raclis.
This is a story of reclaiming one's humanity after being knocked down, the personal is clearly political and the struggle for individual healing is integrated into social struggle for all humanity to take up our duty to the universe!
Setting — In my October 1 blog I talk about selling at fairs and conferences.