NEGRO LEAGUES MATTER WEBINARS
The Josh Gibson Foundation’s Negro Leagues Matter webinars feature engaging presentations by baseball historians, researchers, and award-winning authors on a variety of topics relating to Negro League Baseball.
You can watch videos of our past webinars below.
Get the details on our upcoming webinars in our Events calendar at the bottom of this page. All webinars are free, but registration is required.
August 2025: Josh Gibson: Bambino of the Caribbean
Speaker: Thomas Van Hyning
Bio: Nine-year-old Tom Van Hyning became a fan of the 1963-64 Santurce Crabbers—a franchise with 21 eventual Cooperstown inductees—while living at 1419 Estrella Street in Santurce. He has authored several books: Puerto Rico’s Winter League, The Santurce Crabbers, and The Caribbean Series, 1949-2024: Latin America’s Annual Baseball Tournament.
June 2025: Retire the Names, Install the Plaques, and Fly the Flags
Speaker: Paul Julión
Bio: Paul Julion is a 32-year-old Physical Education and Health teacher in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. His journey to the discovery to Negro League Baseball started while in library class at Lionel Hampton Fine and Performing Arts Magnet school, while reading Michael J.Sullivans “Baseball Top Ten Pitchers”. It featured the one and only Satchel Paige. He became entangled daily with Negro League baseball. Years later while attending Northern Illinois University, he developed relationships with Dr. James E. Brunson (Ford C. Frick Award winner) and Coach Walter Owens (former Negro Leaguer for the Detriot Stars). Julion has been a member of the SABR Chicago Chapter since 2021. Now he currently serves on the Negro League committee for SABR member. Julion is also a Bronze member of the Negro League Family Alliance.
February 2025: Ten Negro League Hall of Fame Candidates
Speaker: Ted Knorr
Bio: Ted is leading off this wonderful webinar series for the 4th year in a row … Ted has been a longtime SABR member (1979) and Negro League Committee member (1984) … he is the founder of the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference which will meet for the 25th time in August in Louisville, Kentucky
December 2024: Who Were the Negro Leaguers? Avenues of Investigation in Biographical Research
Speaker: Gary Ashwill
Bio: Gary Ashwill is an author, researcher, and historian, primarily of Negro leagues and Latin American baseball. He is the co-founder and lead researcher for the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, which was recently cited by Major League Baseball as a contributing factor in their recognition of the segregated Black baseball circuits. Formerly a journalist and freelance editor, Ashwill lives in North Carolina, where he has written the baseball research blog Agate Type (agatetype.typepad.com) since 2006. He has won several awards, including the Society for American Baseball Research’s Henry Chadwick Award.
October 2024: The Home Runs of Josh Gibson
Speaker: Alan Cohen
Bio: Alan Cohen’s quest to document Josh’s round-trippers has yielded nearly 400 and counting. His most recent research identified in a relatively short span in 1938 (July 23 – July 30) that Josh blasted 10 homers in nine games against the Memphis Red Sox, including four at Zanesville, Ohio on July 28.
Alan chairs the SABR Bio-Project fact-checking committee and contributes to the Retrosheet Negro Leagues project. His essays have appeared in over 70 baseball-related publications.
August 2024: Black Stats Matter
Speaker: Philip Lee
Bio: Philip Lee is a member of SABR’s Special Negro Leagues and Teams Committee. His book Black Stats Matter has received positive notices from Adam Darowski, Kevin Johnson, Larry Lester, Todd Peterson, and Rob Neyer. Lee, who worked for 23 years in special-needs education in the US and the UK, is currently working on a new book on the Negro Leagues
June 2024: The Rise of Wendell Smith
Speaker: Mike Marsh
Bio: Michael Marsh is a paralegal and a freelance writer based in Chicago, Illinois.
April 2024: The History of The Negro Leagues
Speaker: Phil S. Dixon
Bio: Phil S. Dixon is a road warrior, a veracious interviewer, a tireless researcher, and writer who has interviewed over 500 players, wives, and their offspring for a unique perspective of the American and Negro League baseball experience, works for which he won a SABR MacMillan Award (Society of American Baseball Researchers) for his excellence in historical research.
February 2024: Justice in Cooperstown
Speaker: Ted Knorr
Bio: Ted founded the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference and hosted it four times in Harrisburg; he also founded annual Negro League celebrations in Harrisburg, Lancaster, and York, Pennsylvania. Ted was inducted into the APBA Game Company HOF in June 2022 and on August 20th Ted’s Trivia team captured the title at SABRcon50 in Baltimore.
December 2023: Negro Leagues Family Alliance
Speakers: Family members of: Bill Foster and Rube Foster, Josh Gibson, Pete Hill, and Norman Thomas “Turkey” Stearnes
Bio: Comprised of and organized by family members of Negro Leagues players, the Negro Leagues Family Alliance is an organization dedicated to collectively preserving the legacies, history, and intellectual properties of the Negro Leagues while contributing to the education and uplift of baseball and sports. For additional information, please visit https://www.negroleaguesfamilyalliance.com
October 2023: The top 100 Negro League Players of all Time!
Speaker: Todd Peterson
Bio: Todd Peterson is a Kansas City-based visual artist, educator, and historian. He received Yoseloff-SABR Baseball Research Grants in 2006 and 2010; and was a winner of the Norman “Tweed” Webb Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 and 2013. Peterson has written several articles about the Negro Leagues, as well as Early Black Baseball in Minnesota (2010), and The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues (2019).
June 2023: Beyond the Negro Leagues: Outsider Baseball Outside the United States
Speaker: Adam Darowski
Bio: Adam Darowski is the Product Director for Sports Reference, makers of Baseball Reference and Stathead. Adam has been a SABR member since 2013 and serves as co-chair of the 19th Century Overlooked Legends Committee. He created the Hall of Stats in 2012 and is the host of two podcasts: Building the Ballot (about the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Era Committees) and The Outsider Baseball Notebook (about baseball outside of the major leagues before integration). Adam tweets about baseball history at @baseballtwit.
April 2023: A Sneak Preview of the 2023 Malloy Conference
Speaker: Lisa Alexander
Bio: Lisa Doris Alexander is a professor in the department of African American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of three books including When Baseball Isn’t White Straight and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime; Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre Across Six Decades; and an entry in Wayne State University Press’ TV Milestone series on the show Homicide: Life on the Street.
She earned a B.A. in Political Science from Grinnell College, an M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University. Her work has appeared in Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, The Journal of American History, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, and The American Historian. Dr. Alexander grew up in Chicago.
February 2023: Rap's Rap, Episode 43
Speaker: Ted Knorr
Bio: Ted founded the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference and hosted it four times in Harrisburg; he also founded annual Negro League celebrations in Harrisburg, Lancaster, and York, Pennsylvania. Ted was inducted into the APBA Game Company HOF in June 2022 and on August 20th Ted’s Trivia team captured the title at SABRcon50 in Baltimore.
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December 2022: The Life of Posey
Speaker: Jim Overmyer
Bio: James Overmyer is a baseball history author specializing in the Negro leagues. His current books are a new edition of Queen of the Negro Leagues, a biography of Effa Manley, the only woman member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and Cum Posey of the Homestead Grays, one of only two people in two American professional sports halls of fame. He is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and belongs to its Negro Leagues, Nineteen Century, Deadball, and Business of Baseball committees. He was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2006 special committee that voted to induct seventeen persons from the Negro leagues and the black baseball period before the leagues were formed as members of the Hall. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
November 2022: Before Jackie Robinson
Before Jackie Robinson: Baseball’s Civil Rights Movement
Speaker: Peter Dreier
Bio: Peter Dreier is the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago and his B.A. in journalism and sociology from Syracuse. His baseball writings include the SABR biography of Joe Black, who was Dreier’s baseball coach in Plainfield, N.J. in the 1960s. Coauthored with Robert Elias he has recently Published Baseball Rebels: The Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America, and Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles Over Workers’ Rights and American Empire.
May 2022: 1926 Negro League World Series
1926 Negro League World Series: Atlantic City Bacharach Giants versus Chicago American Giants
Speaker: Dominic Denaro
Bio: Dominick Denaro won the Trivia Contest at the 2004 Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference in Cleveland becoming the only person to beat the late great Dick Clark at the final table. He is the author of A Centennial Field Scrapbook and co-author of the Eastern Colored League APBA card set and accompanying monograph. In his other life, he is an expert and collector of 1964-65 New York World’s Fair trivia and ephemera.
February 2022: East West All Star Game
Black Baseball’s National Showcase: The East-West All-Star Game
Speaker: Larry Lester
Bio: Larry Lester, author of multiple books on the Negro Leagues, was co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, serving for a time as its Research Director and Treasurer. He partnered with the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum, from 2000 to 2004, co-chairing a comprehensive study of African American baseball from the Civil War through the mid-fifties. In 2006, he served on the Special Negro Leagues Committee for the Hall, selecting 17 new Negro League players, executives, and managers
March 2021: Judy Johnson: Negro League Exemplar
Judy Johnson: Negro League Exemplar
By Thomas E. Kern
Thomas E. Kern was born and raised in Southwest Pennsylvania. Listening to the mellifluous voices of Bob Prince and Jim Woods, how could one not become a lifelong Pirates fan? Tom has been a SABR member dating back to the mid-1980s and most recently has become committed to sharing the stories of Negro League greats, both through SABR’s Bio Project and in support of the work of the Josh Gibson Foundation.
Kevin Johnson will speak about Negro League Ballparks, and how they impacted the statistics of various teams and players
