Baseball fans have a chance to explore the game’s present and revisit its past on Tuesday, May 9, when the Gibson House Museum, in conjunction with the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and the Boston Braves Historical Association (BBHA), presents “Boston Baseball’s Colorful Characters.”
This is your chance to meet other baseball history fans while hearing about some of the local scene’s most colorful players from years long past. The evening will highlight entertaining baseball stories as seen through the eyes (and pens) of Boston’s early 20th-century cartoonists Festivities begin at 5:30 p.m. in the courtyard of the Gibson House Museum at 137 Beacon St., with a “Ballpark Cocktail Hour” featuring beer, hot dogs and crackerjacks. The program, hosted by Bill Nowlin, Joanne Hulbert, and Donna Halper, gets underway at 6:30 p.m. at the Trustees Reading Room at Fisher College (across the street at 118 Beacon St.)
Nowlin has written or edited approximately 50 books, almost all on Boston-related baseball. A co-founder of Rounder Records music label, he also works occasionally as a professor of political science. His most recent works include co-editing “The SABR Book of Umpires and Umpiring” and editing “The Miracle Braves of 1914: Boston’s Original Worst-to-First World Series Champions.” His full-length biography of Tom Yawkey will appear in fall 2017.
Hulbert (“Bats Right, Throws Left”) is co-chair of SABR’s Music and Poetry Committee. She is a distant cousin of William A. Hulbert, one of the founders of the National League.
Halper is an associate professor of Communication at Lesley University in Cambridge. A media historian who specializes in the history of broadcasting, she is the author of six books and many articles, including chapters for several SABR volumes. She will discuss how cartoonists of the period were a colorful, and vital, part of early 20th century baseball.
Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 at the door, with a special $25 admission for members of the Gibson House Museum, SABR, BBHS, the Boston Preservation Alliance, the Ayer Mansion, the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay and the Victorian Society.
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.thegibsonhouse.org/events.html, e-mail [email protected], or call 617-267-6338.