S1E14: Gary Gillette, Ted Knorr, and Sean Gibson of 42 for 21

Building the Ballot: The Baseball Hall of Fame’s Era Committees

Today we continue to explore the Negro Leagues and Negro League Hall of Fame candidates. We welcome Gary Gillette, Ted Knorr, and Sean Gibson to the podcast. Gillette, Knorr, and Gibson have joined together to form a new committee—named "42 for 21"—to publicize deserving Negro Leagues & Black Baseball candidates for upcoming Hall of Fame elections. We discuss their backgrounds, how the project started, the election that took place, and what comes next for the project. We specifically looked at a handful of candidates that performed very well in the election but don’t rank as highly with Eric Chalek’s Negro League MLEs: Rap Dixon, Newt Allen, Spottswood Poles, John Donaldson, Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, Oliver “The Ghost” Marcell, and Chet Brewer.

Gary Gillette is the founder and current chair of the Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium, a nonprofit that is working to restore the former Negro League ballpark near his home in Detroit. Gillette also served for a decade on the Tiger Stadium Conservancy’s board of directors. He has four decades of baseball research, writing, and editing experience, beginning with his work with Bill James and Project Scoresheet in the mid-1980s. A contributor to six editions of Total Baseball, Gillette later designed and co-edited with Pete Palmer the five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. Gillette also designed the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia and served as executive editor for both editions of that reference work. A former member of the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR) board of directors, Gillette is a past co-chair of two of SABR’s major research committees—the Business of Baseball Committee and the Ballparks Committee. He was the founder and president of SABR’s Detroit Chapter and is now the chair of SABR’s new Southern Michigan Chapter.

Ted Knorr has been a baseball fan since infancy, when his grandma gave him a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey. A few years later, an aunt introduced him to baseball via Ladies Nights at Forbes Field. Later still, a childhood friend—Martha—introduced him to the APBA Major League Baseball Game. Ted has been a SABR member since 1979 and, in 1998, founded and hosted the initial Jerry Malloy Negro League Research Conference.

Sean Gibson is the great-grandson of Negro Leagues legend and 1972 National Baseball Hall of Fame player Josh Gibson. Sean has dedicated his life to the preservation of Josh’s legacy and is the Executive Director of the Josh Gibson Foundation, a Pittsburgh-area non-profit organization. The Josh Gibson Foundation was established in 1994 in an effort to keep the memory of Pittsburgh’s beloved Josh Gibson and the entire Negro Leagues alive. The foundation partners with the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University and Carnegie Mellon University by matching up college students with elementary and middle school youth for tutoring. With a strong focus on education, the foundation currently serves roughly 300 children and plans to increase those numbers by starting new programs yearly. The foundation also sponsors the Josh Gibson Baseball Academy.

42 for 21: https://www.42for21.org/

The Josh Gibson Foundation: https://www.joshgibson.org/