Harry Simmons

Who was Harry Simmons?

Harry Simmons was a baseball executive, writer and historian.

His early interest in baseball derived from the Sunday afternoon games he attended with his father. After graduating from Morris High School in the Bronx, he worked in several jobs while developing a deep interest in baseball history, rules, and statistics. By the 1930s he was spending a lot of his free time in the New York Public Library researching old newspapers about the early accounts of matches. At that time, he developed a friendship with Ernest Lanigan, a baseball historian and Information Director of the International League.

Simmons worked for the International League from 1945 until 1966, first in New York then in Montreal. He then worked in the Baseball Commissioner's office until his retirement in 1982. He developed the playing schedules for the Majors and various minor leagues for over 20 years. Known as a historian and writer, he did much original research into 19th Century baseball. He developed and wrote the weekly feature "So You Think You Know Baseball," which ran in the Saturday Evening Post from 1949 to 1961. His book of the same name was a best-seller. For many years he wrote the entry for baseball in the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1951, Simmons testified as an expert witness to the Celler Committee hearings on the history of the reserve clause. At the 1979 baseball winter meeting in Toronto, he was honored as "King of Baseball".