Lyle Spatz

Lyle Spatz

• School Brooklyn College

• Born 1937

Biographical Information

Lyle Spatz is the author of several baseball books, including the following: The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers; Dixie Walker: A Life in Baseball; Bad Bill Dahlen: The Rollicking Life and Times of an Early Baseball Star and 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York (winner of the 2011 Seymour Medal). Spatz also contributed to Major League Baseball Profiles: 1871-1900 and chaired SABR's Baseball Records Committee for over 20 years.

Growing up in Brooklyn, NY as a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Spatz served in the United States Navy before attending Brooklyn College. He moved to Maryland in 1961 to work as an economist with the US Department of Commerce. With the Dodgers' move to the West coast and his own move, he became a fan of the Baltimore Orioles. He joined SABR in 1973, only two years after its founding, when it was still a very small organization. After befriending founder Bob Davids, he was given the task of surveying members to determine retroactive winners of the Rookie of the Year Award, a project he later extended to the Cy Young Award. In 1991, he was named chaired of the Records Committee, whose mission is to try to correct and complete the official records of past major league baseball season. This led in some cases to modifying well-known records, but his philosophy always was that the truth of what happened on the field trumped any sentimental attachment to old records. In 2016, he was succeeded to the job by Trent McCotter.

Spatz won the L. Robert Davids Award from SABR in 2000 and was a winner of the Henry Chadwick Award in 2017.

Further Reading

• Mark Armour: "Lyle Spatz (1937-)", Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Vol. 46, Nr. 1 (Spring 2017), p. 105.
• Lyle Spatz: New York Yankee Openers : An Opening Day History of Baseball's Most Famous Team, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 1997. ISBN 978-0786403684
• Lyle Spatz: Yankees Coming, Yankees Going: New York Yankees Player Transactions, 1903 Through 1999, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2000.
• Lyle Spatz: Bad Bill Dahlen: The Rollicking Life and Times of an Early Baseball Star, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2004. ISBN 978-0786419784
• Lyle Spatz, ed.: The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2012. ISBN 978-0803239920
• Lyle Spatz and : 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2010. ISBN 978-0803239999
• Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz: The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership that Transformed the New York Yankees, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2015. ISBN 978-0803248656
• David Vincent, Lyle Spatz and David W. Smith: The Mid-Summer Classic: The Complete History of Baseball's All-Star Game, Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2001. ISBN 978-0803292734