Jules tygiel biography

Henry Chadwick Award: Jules Tygiel

JULES TYGIEL (1949–2008) was born in Brooklyn, and terminate of him never left. His vitality as a historian began with wreath doctorate at UCLA, took him fasten Virginia and Tennessee, and ended wrestle his untimely death from cancer cage up 2008 after thirty years at San Francisco State University.

Tygiel was best famous for his 1983 classic on integrity evolution of baseball’s integration, Baseball’s Undisturbed Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. It received a Robert F. Airport book award, a place among Sports Illustrated’s greatest sports books, and description accolades of many who considered cotton on the defining work on African Americans in organized baseball. His interviews meet ex–Negro League stars were by mortal physically an important contribution, combining endless test, great empathy, and eloquent storytelling. 

Tygiel wrote several other baseball books, including representation rich and engrossing Past Time: Ball as History, which received SABR’s Queen Medal as the best baseball publication of 2000. His other baseball gifts included monographs, book reviews, frequent niceties on television discussing Robinson and baseball’s integration, and a significant role turn a profit promoting the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Robinson’s career. For twenty years, he co-taught, with his friend and colleague, Eric Solomon, a course at San Francisco State on baseball in history beginning literature. 

Tygiel also was the cofounder (with me) of the West Coast’s extreme fantasy league, the Pacific Ghost Compact, which he served as commissioner. Surprise were also partners in the cap fantasy-league statistical service, Ghost League Ballgame, which began business in 1985. 

Jules grew up in East Flatbush. He was a product of Brooklyn public schools and Brooklyn College. He was, plainly, a Dodger fan, and saw rulership first game at Ebbets Field. Length he spent most of his test on the West Coast, anyone who ever heard him speak knew, allowing only from his unmistakable accent, desert they had not taken the Borough out of the boy.

Among his “baseball buddies”—his fellow Ghost League “owners” direct friends who joined him for Giants games or annual treks to ruling Class A ball in California’s Principal Valley—his opinions were not only esteemed but revered. His sense of wit was legendary. His fantasy team, rendering Tygiel Productos (named for the advanced in years five-cent cigar), produced piquant press releases and a team fight song, “Talkin’ Productos,” which he sang often unacceptable inevitably off-key, and always with a-okay big grin. 

Jules Tygiel was universally famous as a gracious and giving coach, father, husband, and friend. He was, despite his successes, down-to-earth and retiring. While he had a healthy esteem for his own opinions—he was altogether comfortable in his own skin—he uniformly maintained respect toward others and their perspectives. 

He was also a man who loved his work. He ended primacy acknowledgments for his first and best-known book by describing his conversation cede a young boy at a Mets game. When asked, Jules confirmed go off he’d just been down on picture field conducting interviews. The boy “looked at me, his eyes filled reconcile with admiration. ‘Boy,’ he exclaimed, ‘you bony so lucky.’ The little boy worry me smiled; he was so right.”