John Thorn

John Thorn

• School Washington University in Saint Louis

• Born April 17, 1947 in Stuttgart, Germany

Biographical Information

John Thorn has served as the long-time editor and author of Total Baseball (with Pete Palmer, Mike Gershman, and David Pietrusza) and many other outstanding baseball books including: The Hidden Game of Baseball (with Pete Palmer, 1984), The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball (2004), Treasures from the Baseball Hall of Fame: The Official Companion to the Collection at Cooperstown, The Whole Baseball Catalogue (with Bob Carroll), A Century of Baseball Lore, Baseball's 10 Greatest Games, and The Relief Pitcher.

In addition to baseball topics he co-authored The Hidden Game of Football with Pete Palmer and Bob Carroll.

He is also credited with finding the earliest reference to baseball in the United States in documents found in the city archives in Pittsfield, MA.

He was profiled in the book Baseball: The Writers' Game by Mike Shannon.

In the book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, published by Simon and Schuster in March 2011, Thorn addresses the issue of the origins of baseball and dispels some of the myths about the role of Alexander Cartwright in laying down the rules of the modern game.

Thorn writes two columns for the Woodstock Times: "Play's the Thing" (largely sports) and "Wake the Echoes" (arts and letters). He is also a columnist for Voices, the publication of the New York Folklore Society.

In June 2006, SABR awarded Thorn its highest award, the Bob Davids Award. The award honors those whose contributions to SABR and baseball reflect the ingenuity, integrity, and self-sacrifice of the founder and past president of SABR, L. Robert "Bob" Davids. On March 1, 2011, he was appointed as Major League Baseball's official historian, replacing the late Jerome Holtzman, who held the position from its creation by Commissioner Bud Selig in 1999 until his passing in 2008.

On March 15, 2011, Selig appointed him to head a new 12-person Baseball Origins Committee created to study the origins of baseball. In 2013, he was honored by SABR with the Henry Chadwick Award. In 2020, he was appointed by Commissioner Rob Manfred to head the Negro League Statistical Review Committee to study the impact on the official record of the decision to recognized the principal Negro Leagues as having been major leagues; the committee presented its first set of findings on May 29, 2024.

He was born in Germany in a displaced persons camp from Jewish parents who from Poland who had been conscripted into forced labor during World War II. The family was admitted for resettlement in the U.S. in 1949, when he was only 2 years old, and he grew up first in the Bronx, NY, and then in Queens, NY. He rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers as a kid even though most people in his neighborhood supported the New York Yankees, because of his admiration for Jackie Robinson. He first studied literary history and was planning to write a PhD thesis on 17th Century poet George Herbert when he turned his attention to American social history, with a focus on baseball, because, as he put it "I realized that I cared more about baseball than about metaphysical poetry". That led to a gig as an editor for the magazine New Leader, and piloting the new edition of the book A Century of Baseball Lore, which had first been published in 1950. That led him to pursue deeper historical studies into baseball, as well as working with some of the pioneers of advances statistical analysis - what would later be called sabermetrics.

Further Reading

• "First set of findings from the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee", mlb.com, May 29, 2024. [1]
• Frederic J. Frommer: "How Baseball’s Official Historian Dug Up the Game’s Unknown Origins", Smithsonian Magazine, April/May 2024. [2]

Related Sites

• Article from mlb.com
• SABR tribute page