The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) has awarded Steven Treder with the Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal, which honors the best book of baseball history or biography published during the preceding calendar year. Read the announcement here.
This is the biography of Horace C. Stoneham, who inherited ownership of the New York Giants in 1936, and remained owner of the franchise until 1976. His ownership tenure was one of the very longest in the history of major league baseball. Through those many decades, Stoneham built the team’s farm system into perhaps the most productive in the sport’s history. He racially and culturally integrated the organization to an extent unsurpassed at the time, and he also relocated the franchise across the continent, introducing (alongside Walter O’Malley’s Dodgers) major league baseball to the West coast.
Horace Stoneham wasn’t just the owner of the Giants; for nearly all of his tenure he served as his own General Manager. He built, and rebuilt, his teams using his own judgment and decision-making. Many of the sport’s most celebrated characters were his employees, including Hall of Famers Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Mel Ott, Johnny Mize, Leo Durocher, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, and Gaylord Perry. Stoneham’s experience within baseball, and his impact upon it, was epic – yet until now, his biography had never been written.
You probably don’t know much about Horace Stoneham. You should. His is a rich story about the competition of baseball as a sport, and also about the often-difficult business of it. It’s a story about the culture, economics, and racial dynamics of the United States through the mid-20th century, and a story about the developing cities of New York and San Francisco. Stoneham achieved much great success, and also suffered much frustration and disappointment, both within and beyond the realm of baseball.
This book is the product of years of extensive research, and bears the benefit of intimate insights from Stoneham’s granddaughters into his personal bearing and character. The story begins with his father, Charles A. Stoneham, a wild and notorious New Yorker, a self-made millionaire with highly questionable ethics, whose manic personality and behavior were very different from his son’s. The story includes John J. McGraw, whose genius built the New York Giants into the premier brand in professional sports. It also involves many other colorful parties such as Branch Rickey, Toots Shor, Larry MacPhail, Russ Hodges, Bill Veeck, Lefty O’Doul, Danny Kaye, Charlie Finley, and Sam McDowell.
Forty Years a Giant is a major new contribution to the literature of baseball history. It combines the fun and excitement of many dramatic games – yes, Bobby Thomson is here, and Vic Wertz and Bobby Richardson and John Roseboro – with the extraordinary growth and development of professional baseball as a business, intertwined with the extraordinary growth and development of the radio and television businesses. It’s also the difficult and inspiring story of racial and cultural bigotry and understanding. It’s the story of the many amazing things that one man saw and did, and of the many remarkable lives that one man touched.
Steven Treder has lived his entire life in and around Santa Clara, California. He was born into a family of devoted San Francisco Giants fans, and from earliest childhood was steeped in a soundscape of Giants’ games on radio station KSFO, in the voices of Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons. He attended his first major league games at Candlestick Park in 1966. A portrait of Willie Mays hangs on his office wall.
Treder’s proudest achievement in life came early: he was batboy for the Santa Clara University baseball team. He went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from Santa Clara, and a master’s from Stanford University, both in the field of Sociology. He has enjoyed a 40-year career in Silicon Valley, including decades as a management consultant.
Beyond his enduring fandom for the Giants, Treder has long been a noted baseball researcher and historian. Since the 1980s he has been a frequent presenter at Society for American Baseball Research meetings and other baseball scholarship conferences, and the author of numerous articles in various baseball publications. From 2004 to 2013, Treder contributed a weekly column on baseball history to The Hardball Times website.
Treder continues to enjoy life in Santa Clara with his wife, tending to his flower and vegetable gardens and pining for the next visits with the grandkids.
Meet Steven Treder at his official Book Launch event hosted at Sausalito Books by the Bay on Sunday, September 30th:
Listen to Steven's interview on the Good Seats Still Available podcast, in which he discusses the life and legacy of Horace Stoneham as well as his work in researching and writing the book:
Also, his interview on the Lovin' Baseball When We Were 12 and Innocent podcast with Ralph Tyko:
Listen to "Lovin' Baseball When We Were 12 and Innocent 5/14/21" on Spreaker.Watch Steven on the joint meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Area chapters of the Society for American Baseball Research:
