Congratulations to Erik Sherman, author of Daybreak at Chavez Ravine, and Steven P. Gietschier, author of Baseball! They are finalists for the 2022 CASEY Award.

According to Spitball Editor Mike Shannon, “Great baseball books are nominated as Finalists for the CASEY Award every year, but this year’s list is truly outstanding, one of the strongest fields ever assembled in the history of the Award. In fact, it is the strength of the field that compelled us to include 11 books. We hated to increase the Judges’ workload (from the usual 10 books), but we simply found it impossible to leave out any of the 11 Nominated titles. Thus, just being included in this list is a great honor, as several other top-notch baseball books for 2023 regrettably did not make the cut, and I do not envy the task the Judges have in front of them, of trying to determine which of these 11 books deserves a little more than the others to win the CASEY. Congratulations to all the Nominated authors and publishers for their impressive contributions to the field of baseball literature.”

The 41^st annual CASEY Awards will take place in Cincinnati, Ohio, in March of 2024. More details about the event will be posted on the Spitball website in the coming months.

Daybreak at Chavez Ravine retells Fernando Valenzuela’s arrival and permanent influence on Dodgers history while bringing redemption to the organization’s controversial beginnings in LA. Through interviews with players, coaches, broadcasters, and media, Erik Sherman reveals a new side of this intensely private man and brings fresh insight to the ways he transformed the Dodgers and started a phenomenon that radically altered the country’s cultural and sporting landscape.

Erik Sherman is a baseball historian and the New York Times best-selling author of Kings of Queens: Life beyond Baseball with the ’86 Mets and Two Sides of Glory: The 1986 Boston Red Sox in Their Own Words (Nebraska, 2021). He is the coauthor of five other highly acclaimed baseball-themed books. Sherman is a 2023 inductee to the New York State Baseball Hall of Fame for his baseball writing and hosts the Erik Sherman Show podcast. Visit ErikShermanBaseball.com.

Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures—among them Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Hank Greenberg, Ford Frick, and several others—whose stories figure prominently in baseball’s past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness.

Steven P. Gietschier is an archival consultant for The Sporting News. He taught American history, sport history, and the history and culture of baseball at a midwestern university before retiring in 2020, and prior to that he served in several roles for The Sporting News. He is the editor of Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports and a 2023 recipient of the Society for American Baseball Research’s Henry Chadwick Award.

Congrats to all of the other finalists!