The Directors

Bob Barney

Bob Barney is still involved as a university professor after 45 years at Western (London, Ontario) and 10 at four different American universities. An expert in physical education and intercollegiate athletics, he teaches and supervises master’s and doctorate students, researching and writing sports history. His diverse interests include the German-American Turnverein Movement in the United States, American and British American history, and baseball.

A visit to the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles inspired him to establish a research centre to provide serious scholarship into the games. The Centre for Olympic Studies was created at Western and remains the only independent research facility in the world focused solely on the Olympics. In 2010, he received the Pierre de Coubertin Award of the International Society of Olympic Historians for “lifelong and dedicated historical work on behalf of the Olympic Movement”.

Bob was a long-time editorial review board member of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Social Policy Perspectives. He became a member of the board of governors of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, for a time chairing the Hall’s Selection Committee. A Boston Red Sox fan from the days of Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove, he is the author of countless baseball-related abstracts and journal articles. His contributions to the understanding of baseball’s development in Canada include the groundbreaking research, with his former graduate student Nancy Bouchier, into the seminal Canadian baseball episode—Beachville in 1838.

William Humber

William “Bill” Humber is Director, Office of Eco-Seneca initiatives (OESi), and Energy Training Ontario, at Seneca College in Toronto. He has a Masters in Environmental Studies from York University (1975) and is author of a dozen books.

In co-authorship with his son Darryl, Bill wrote Let It Snow: Keeping Canada’s Winter Sports Alive (2009) covering Canada’s winter sports heritage and how climate change threatens its survival. Other works include Freewheeling, an overview of bicycling in Canada, from Boston Mills Press (1986); Diamonds of the North: A Concise History of Baseball in Canada from Oxford University Press (1995); and one on the urban challenges of a GTA community, Bowmanville: A Small Town at the Edge, from Natural Heritage (1997). He has written on African Canadian sports history (2004), and on hockey and soccer. His other publishers have included Dundurn, the University of Toronto Press, and Lester and Orpen Dennys.

A noted lecturer on environmental and energy topics, particularly resiliency and urban sustainability, Bill is also a staged playwright and continues his songwriting practice. He has been listed annually in the Canadian Who’s Who for 25 years.

Bill is recognized as a leading authority on the history of baseball in Canada, and is a selector for Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame. He was a selector as well for Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame from 2004 through 2008. He has presented papers at annual conferences of the British Society of Sports History, the North American Society for Sport History and the Canadian Baseball History Symposium in St. Marys, Ontario. In recognition of his contributions to our understanding of baseball’s historical development in Canada, Bill was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018, and named to the Order of Canada in 2022.

Martin Lacoste

Martin Lacoste recently completed 31 years as a music educator, and is excited to have more time to devote to some of his interests, including baseball. Once an avid Montreal Expos fan, since their relocation he has refocused his passion for the sport towards its history, notably 19th-century Canadian baseball. He has presented papers at the Canadian Baseball History Conference, written biographies for SABR, and contributed articles for the 2022 SABR publication on the development of Canadian baseball, entitled Our Game, Too.

When not poring through microfilm or digital newspaper files, he continues to engage in his musical interests, either as a performer or director, and enjoys keeping active by playing squash, hockey, slo-pitch or cycling.

Brian Martin

Brian “Chip” Martin, a Western University Journalism graduate, is a former reporter and columnist at the London Free Press, covering city hall, the courts, politics, and doing investigative work.

In addition to several works of non-fiction, he is the author of these baseball books:

Baseball’s Creation Myth: Adam Ford, Abner Graves and the Cooperstown Story, describing how the legend of Cooperstown, N.Y.’s being the birthplace of baseball was likely borrowed from the story of an 1838 game in Southwestern Ontario (2013)
The Tecumsehs of the International Association: Canada’s First Major League Baseball Champions, the story of the famous London baseball club, invited at one point to join the National League (2015)
Pud Galvin: Baseball’s First 300-game Winner (2016)
The Detroit Wolverines: The Rise and Wreck of a National League Champion, 1881-1888 (2017)
He Made Babe Ruth: Brother Matthias of St. Mary’s School (2020)
Barney Dreyfuss: Pittsburgh’s Baseball Titan (2021)

Chip is a member of SABR, and of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee.

David Matchett

David Matchett was born and raised in the Montreal suburb of Lachine, Quebec. He had his sixth birthday a few weeks before the Expos played their first game and he has followed baseball ever since. David continued to root for “Nos Amours” even after he moved to Toronto to pursue his career but he has been an avid Blue Jays fan since the Loria/Selig/MLB cabal robbed his hometown of their team.

David discovered the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) when he bought a few of their publications on his first trip to Cooperstown in 1981 and he has been a member of that organization for over 25 years. David’s research interests are focused on baseball in Canada and Canadians who have made contributions to the game. He has written papers that have appeared in numerous research publications and he has presented at various symposia including the inaugural Canadian Baseball History Conference.

David lives in Toronto with his collection of baseball cards and bobble heads and when he is not immersed in the game he works as a financial planner for one of Canada’s largest banks.

Andrew North

Andrew North is a retired software developer and statistician living in St. Marys, Ontario, home of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. A Giants fan for all of their San Francisco existence, he grew up in Ottawa, and was thrilled to see former opponent Doug Frobel make the major leagues with Pittsburgh. In the spring of 1983 he answered an ad in the SABR bulletin, and was one of 25 finalists for a position as research and editorial assistant to Bill James.

Andrew is a baseball book collector, and long-time volunteer at the Hall of Fame, serving as a Museum tour guide and on the Hall’s Selection Committee. At the 2017 Induction Ceremony, he was given the Randy Echlin Lifetime Volunteer Achievement Award, a distinction granted intermittently in recognition of outstanding contribution to the Hall.

A SABR member since 1982, Andrew has attended numerous SABR National Conventions and Analytics Conferences. He’s a regular attendee at SABR’s Frederick Ivor-Campbell 19^th Century Base Ball Conference held in Cooperstown every spring. He was lead editor for the SABR book Our Game, Too, published in 2022. He currently serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Canadian Baseball, and maintains the Research Library at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame on a volunteer basis.