Gary Gillette has spent four decades contributing to a wide variety of baseball research areas, earning a national reputation as an expert across several disciplines. As founder and chair of the nonprofit Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium, he led the successful campaign to rehabilitate one of only five extant Negro League home ballparks.
Gillette has written for, edited, or contributed to dozens of baseball books, publications, and web sites, including to the seminal encyclopedia Total Baseball and ESPN.com. He was the creator and editor of the ESPN Baseball and ESPN Pro Football encyclopedias.
Gillette recently received a Henry Chadwick Award, “established to honor the game’s great researchers . . . for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America’s present with its past.” He has also received the Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation and the Negro Leagues Research Committee’s Tweed Webb Lifetime Achievement Award.