Name David Smith | Role Baseball historian | |
David W. Smith (born March 17, 1948) is an American baseball historian and statistician. He is best known as the founder of Retrosheet, an organization whose mission is to collect, digitize, and distribute play-by-play accounts from every game in Major League Baseball history. Smith's work has been widely praised as a huge boon to baseball research and he has received a number of awards for his work, most notably the SABR Bob Davids Award in 2005.
Smith was a contributor to Total Baseball and was co-author of the book The Midsummer Classic: The Complete History of Baseball's All-Star Game (with David W. Vincent and Lyle Spatz). That book received The Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award in 2001.
Since 1975, Smith has been a professor of biology at the University of Delaware, and is director of the Department of Biological Sciences undergraduate program. He won the University's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1977. Smith did his undergraduate work at the University of California, San Diego and received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Smith is a recipient of the 2012 Henry Chadwick Award from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).