Tom Ruane Obituary – Death: Society for American Baseball Research Member, Tom Ruane Passes Away
Tom Ruane Obituary – Death: Society for American Baseball Research Member, Tom Ruane Passes Away
Tom Ruane Obituary News; The Bob Davids Award winner and a longstanding member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), Tom Ruane lost suddenly tragically. On Friday, July 21, 2023, his passing was declared.
Who was Tom Ruane?
Tom Ruane, who was born in 1954, spent more than 25 years as a cherished member of the SABR family. He was able to participate to numerous committees thanks to his diverse knowledge and interests, particularly the Baseball Records, Statistical Analysis, Biographical Research, and the Biography Project committees.
Tom received the Bob Davids Award in 2009, which is the highest honor given by SABR to a single recipient. Tom has long been a devoted member of Retrosheet and a member of the board. He has worked on several of the organization’s most significant initiatives, including creating and launching its website.
Retrosheet was already a helpful tool for scholars, but Tom’s site, which had many of links, attracted more users. He oversaw a team of volunteers who compiled box scores from reports in the official daily and newspapers. Retrosheet now has a complete collection of box scores from the early 1900s after a lot of perseverance and hard work.
Tom has spent practically his entire life in Poughkeepsie, New York, a charming town in the Hudson River Valley. Playing baseball as a child taught him to love the game, and he continued to play even after his skills deteriorated, as they always do. Tom graduated from SUNY New Paltz with a BA in English (Creative Writing) in 1976, but he was smart enough to also earn a BS in Computer Science from Union College in 1980.
Tom was employed by IBM in 1980 to work as a computer programmer, and despite the company’s extreme instability, he has remained there ever since.
Tom kept writing. His short stories were published in magazines and journals all through the 1980s, and he even tried to sell a novel. But he finally gave up on this dream to start a family. He married Eileen Travis in 1988, and they have two sons, Joe and Pat, who are both very tall and often go to SABR conventions.
