Rob Fitts

Robert K. Fitts

• School University of Pennsylvania, Brown University

• Born 1965

Biographical Information

An expert on Japanese baseball, Rob Fitts is the author of Remembering Japanese Baseball (2005). He has also published Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball (2008) and Banzai Babe Ruth (2012), a book on the 1934 Major League tour of Asia, which won the 2013 Seymour Medal as the best baseball book published in the previous year. He also wrote Mashi (2015), about the first Japanese major leaguer, Masanori Murakami. He is also one of the leading experts on Japanese baseball cards and has published a book on the subject.

He is the chair of the Society for American Baseball Research's Asian Baseball Research Committee. He was named a recipient of the Chadwick Award for his lifetime contribution to baseball research in 2025. He was originally trained as an archaeologist but left academia to pursue his passion for baseball research.

Bibliography

• Robert K. Fitts: Remembering Japanese Baseball, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, 2005
• Robert K. Fitts: "The Evolution of Japanese Baseball Strategy", in The Baseball Research Journal, Number 36 (2007), SABR, Cleveland, OH, pp. 61-67.
• Robert K. Fitts: Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2008.
• Robert K. Fitts: Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, & Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2012.
• Robert K. Fitts: Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8032-5521-0
• Robert K. Fitts: Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4962-1348-8
• Robert K. Fitts: An Illustrated Introduction to Japanese Baseball Cards, self published, 2020. ISBN 9780972508827

Related Sites

• SABR tribute page