Lyle Spatz and Steven Steinberg, authors of 1921, received the Seymour Medal Award over the weekend. The award, named for baseball historians Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills, is awarded each year by the Society for American Baseball Research to authors of the best book on baseball history published during the preceding year. Dorothy Seymour Mills spoke at the awards ceremony over the weekend and had the following to say about 1921:

"In their book, 1921, Steinberg and Spatz have given us a snapshot of professional baseball as it was changing from the pitching-dominated game to one with much more emphasis on hitting. At the same time, baseball was mutating from an organization led only by the owners to one in which an outsider hired by those owners imposed his will on both the owners and the professional players.

"These two authors are experienced writers and researchers. They based their book on extensive study of the sources as well as careful evaluation of what they learned so that they could interpret events for us. The result is a solid study immersing us in a season of dramatic events featuring characters colorful enough for a modern novel and ending with an unusual World Series that thrilled and intrigued baseball fans while setting the stage for the era of Yankee predominance that was to come.

"Many apt quotations from contemporary sources and fifty vintage photos add to the appeal of 1921, a book that deserves recognition as the winner of the Seymour Medal for 2011. Congratulations, Lyle and Steve."

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, 1921 captures this crucial moment in the history of baseball, telling the story of a season that pitted the New York Yankees against their Polo Grounds landlords and hated rivals, John McGraw’s Giants, in the first all–New York Series and resulted in the first American League pennant for the now-storied Yankees’ franchise. Read more about the book here.