John Thorn
| John Thorn | |
|---|---|
John Thorn, August 2010
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| Born |
April 17, 1947 Stuttgart, Germany |
| Occupation | Author, historian, publisher |
| Language | English |
| Alma mater | Beloit College |
| Genres | Sports, history, film, cultural affairs |
| Subjects | Baseball, football, basketball, New York, history |
John Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball.
Thorn was born in Stuttgart, Germany, where his Polish Jewish parents had come as refugees. Less than two years after Thorn was born, his family emigrated to the United States, and settled in the Bronx, New York. “I fell in love with [baseball] cards before I loved the game, when I discovered that baseball was something that all the kids on my street corner cared about," Thorn said in a 2013 profile. "I was an immigrant kid and was looking for a way into America. With my background I saw myself as an underdog, and so Brooklyn had to be my team. I began watching the game seriously when I was eight, in 1955, on my Admiral television, but I had already begun to follow their exploits in the daily newspapers my father brought home with him each night.”
As a teen he played baseball and basketball. However, at age 19 he suffered a stroke. "It was severe," he said, "knocking out my left-side function for months as well as patches of personal memory—though not the powerful visual memory I retain for images and facts and statistics." The stroke left him with a limp and precluded his further participation in athletic activities.
Thorn graduated from Beloit College in 1968. He is married to Erica Freudenberger, director of the Red Hook, New York, Public Library. He and his wife live in Catskill, New York, where they moved in 2010. He claims to have been drawn to the town because of its "slow pace," which suits him because, Thorn asserts, "I pride myself on being the world’s most boring man."
Thorn has three sons from two previous marriages.
Thorn is the author and editor of numerous books, including Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball,Total Football: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Football, Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame, The Hidden Game of Baseball,The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947–1957, and The Armchair Book of Baseball. His 2011 book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, published by Simon & Schuster, was an in-depth chronicle of the seminal development and pioneers of the sport. A New York Times review of the latter book referred to Thorn as "a researcher of colossal diligence."
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