This Winter, the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers all of baseball before 1950. The ballot will consider players from the White major leagues and the Black major leagues as well as pioneers, managers, umpires, and executives. How will the committee distill over 100 years of baseball into just ten names? To complicate matters, this committee won’t meet again for ten years.

This episode covers the pioneers of the game, from its origins into the 20th century. SABR member Joe Williams joins the podcast. We talk about baseball’s origins (candidates like Doc Adams and Will Wheaton), Black Baseball (Bud Fowler, Grant Johnson, George Stovey, Octavius Catto, etc.), Amateur Era players (Jim Creighton, Joe Leggett, Joe Sprague, etc.), National Association Era players (Ross Barnes, Dickey Pearce, Joe Start, etc.), and more (Al Reach, Chris Von der Ahe, John Gaffney, Lefty O’Doul, etc.). 

Joe Williams on Twitter: http://twitter.com/lheadsgridiron

SABR Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legends: https://sabr.org/sabr-overlooked-19th-century-baseball-legends

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