John Thorn Named Official Baseball Historian

Bud Selig has named John Thorn the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. Thorn's books are too numerous to list but include the Total Baseball series Baseball: Our Game (1995), The Game for All America (1990), and a forthcoming book called Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game which looks like something I would like. The one of this book that in my collection is, The National Pastime (1987). Thorn also served as a consultant for Ken Burns' documentary, Baseball. Thorn succeeds Jerome Holtzman who passed away in July of 2008. Holtzman has been called, "Baseball's Hemingway."

Here are some of my favorite John Thorn Quotes:

Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.

For many of us, sport has provided the continuity in our lives, the alternative family to the one we left behind. It gives us something to talk about, to preen about, to care about.

One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.