Nationality American Role Author Name Peter Bjarkman | Website www.bjarkman.com Education Ph.D. Linguistics Alma mater University of Florida | |
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Born May 19, 1941 ( 1941-05-19 ) Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. Occupation author, sports historian Books A History of Cuban Baseball, The New York Mets Encyclopedia, The biographical history of, Diamonds around the Globe, Baseball with a Latin beat | ||
American baseball historian and author Peter C Bjarkman Died at 77
Peter C. Bjarkman (born May 19, 1941) is a baseball historian, freelance author, and commentator on the baseball played in Cuba after the 1959 Communist revolution. He currently provides regular internet commentary on Cuban League baseball as a contributing writer for LaVidaBaseball.com and as Senior Writer for the US-based internet website BaseballdeCuba.com and has appeared frequently on radio and television sports talk shows as an observer and analyst of the Cuban national sport. He has also published more than three dozen books ranging in scope from Major League Baseball history and college and professional basketball history to sports biographies for young adult readers. In spring 2017 Bjarkman was honored with a SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) Henry Chadwick Award, the society’s highest research recognition established in 2009 “to honor baseball's great researchers – historians, statisticians, annalists, and archivists – for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America’s present with its past.”
Contents
- American baseball historian and author Peter C Bjarkman Died at 77
- Biography
- Writing career
- Works
- Awards and recognition
- References
Biography
Bjarkman was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from the East Hartford Public School system in 1959. He attend the University of Hartford as an undergraduate where he captained the varsity cross country team, played freshman basketball and varsity baseball, and graduated in 1963 with a degree in English Education. He later earned two master's degrees from the University of Hartford (Education, 1970), and Hartford’s Trinity College (English, 1972), plus a Ph.D. (1976) in linguistics from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
In the 1960s and early 1970s Bjarkman served as secondary school English teacher and track and field coach in Connecticut (Wethersfield High School), as well as teaching English at American bi-national schools in Bucaramanga, Colombia (1968-1969) and Guayaquil, Ecuador (1971-1972). After completing his doctorate (with a specialization in Spanish linguistics) he pursued a university teaching career that stretched from 1976 to 1987 and included faculty positions at George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia), Butler University (Indianapolis), Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana), the University of Colorado (Boulder) and Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana).
Since the early 1980s Bjarkman has resided in Lafayette, Indiana. His extensive travels during the past three decades have involved numerous visits and extended stays in Eastern Europe (especially Croatia) and Cuba (more than three dozen visits since 1997), plus travels in Asia (Japan), Latin American (especially the Caribbean), and much of Western and Eastern Europe.
Writing career
Beginning a freelance writing career in the late 1980s, Bjarkman authored more than twenty books on baseball and basketball history, including Major League Baseball team histories, young adult sports biographies, baseball and basketball coffee table picture books, and several ground-breaking academic histories of baseball played in Latin America and Cuba. Since June 2007 he has provided on-line essays and analysis of Cuban League games, plus regular on-line and print coverage of the Cuban national team during its numerous international baseball tournament appearances.
Bjarkman’s acceptance as an acknowledged authority on post-1962 Cuban baseball has led to numerous electronic and print media appearances and interviews. Notable among these have been several featured interviews on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” with Bob Ley, an appearance in the ESPN Films award-winning “30 for 30” documentary “Brothers in Exile”, as well as in the MLB Network 2016 documentary "Cuba: Island of Baseball", and a central on-camera role in the Travel Channel airing of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations Cuba” (first shown in July 2011). Bjarkman’s extensive connections with Cuban baseball and his unique access on the Communist island nation have been highlighted in a November 2010 front-page feature story by the Wall Street Journal.
His most recent book, Cuba's Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) details the history of top Cuban league stars abandoning their homeland for the riches of North American professional baseball and also recounts a darker side of the phenomenon that includes issue of Major League Baseball's involvements with human trafficking surrounding a recent generation of Cuban big league stars. That book received a Society for American Baseball Research Award for 2016.
Works
Bjarkman’s works include: