But Mills felt neither honored nor thankful. Instead, resentment that had percolated within her for 50 years — over how she had, in fact, co-written those books but received no credit — boiled over into heated discussions of historical record, academic honesty and what can best be described as intellectual spousal abuse.  The controversy ended Wednesday with the organization, known as SABR (pronounced say-ber), telling Mills that she would be honored equally with Seymour. But only after she had relived a time in her life she can forgive even less than forget.  “Everyone assumed that he had done all that work by himself — that’s what he wanted them to assume, but we were equal partners,” said Mills, 81, working on her 26th book at her home in Naples, Fla. “All these things were done jointly. He just couldn’t share credit. And I didn’t say anything at the time, because at the time, wives just didn’t do that.”  Mills revealed the dynamic soon after her husband’s death in 1992, and described in her 2004 autobiography (“A Woman’s Work”) how she had served as the primary researcher and essentially a co-author of the three books: “Baseball: The Early Years,” “Baseball: The Golden Age” and “Baseball: The People’s Game,” all published by Oxford University Press as the first scholarly treatment of baseball history.  Given the trilogy’s renown among baseball historians, her claims created a minor stir that waned with a whiff of latent marital griping.  When SABR announced recipients of its Henry Chadwick Award on Monday, essentially choosing the Ruths and Mantles for its own Cooperstown, Seymour was an obvious choice among “The Glory of Their Times” author Lawrence S. Ritter, the statistical analyst Bill James and others. Mills received only glancing mention in Seymour’s citation. This so infuriated Mills and caused such an uprising among some of the 329 female members of SABR that the three-man selection committee reconsidered its stance, and the organization’s core purpose, over the next 48 hours.  “We had believed we would exceed our role in rendering a verdict on the controversy,” said John Thorn, a prominent baseball historian who is a member of the committee. “But it was in error because we weren’t aware at how making no decision was making a decision.”  He added that he was convinced Mills was the books’ full co-author.  “I do believe I have a heightened sense because of this unusual experience this week,” he said. “A heightened sense of responsibility — to correct historical error.”  Dorothy Zander grew up in Cleveland during the 1930s and ’40s wanting to become a writer, and while an English major at Fenn College — now Cleveland State University — worked for The Cleveland News as a copy boy. (“Not a copy girl, a copy boy,” she repeated curtly.) She volunteered to help her American history professor, Harold Seymour, type his lectures; she found they needed more than typing, and told him so.  They fell in love and married, and she became his primary research assistant for his Cornell doctoral dissertation on baseball history — reading through old newspapers at The Sporting News offices in St. Louis and scrolling through microfilm at the New York Public Library.  She cared nothing for baseball, only the scholarship — and the growing stature of her husband, 17 years her senior.  “He loved baseball,” Mills recalled in a telephone interview. “He was a bat boy for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1920s and he was the star of the neighborhood.  “I’m still not a fan of baseball. People can’t understand that. I think it’s a good idea to remain above that. You write a lot more objectively about a subject you’re not in love with.”  But she did love Seymour — whom she continued to address by last name until the day he died — and accepted his overbearing egotism as merely a wife’s burden. She gladly conducted research, devised outlines and rewrote sections when Oxford wanted to publish his dissertation as a book. She kept quiet when she received no credit on the cover and barely even in the acknowledgments in the first volume and its sequel, published in 1972.  “He should have put my name on the title page under his,” she said.  Asked why she did not object at the time, she paused and broke into tears.  “It was too easy not to,” she said. “I was just playing my role. I was just doing everything I had done before and continuing with it. I was comfortable with that role.”  As instant classics, the first two books begat a third — completed as Seymour developed Alzheimer’s disease. Mills said she wrote most of the final book herself and asked her husband in writing for co-author credit but was denied.  “He was just stony-faced — he refused to do anything about it,” she said.  Even though she had full control by this point, she declined to pursue the matter.  “I couldn’t do that to him,” she said. “I couldn’t change things. No. He felt they were his books. Even though I knew better, I couldn’t alter that.”  Only after Seymour died did Mills — who soon remarried — publicly acknowledge her role in the prominent Seymour trilogy. Her claims were verified by Steve Gietschier, then the chief researcher for The Sporting News.  “They were credible — more than credible,” Gietschier said in a telephone interview Thursday. “The Seymour note cards — a good number of them are in what I perceived to be in a woman’s handwriting. At least half. They clearly worked together. I think it was a very complex situation.”  As far as the writing of text, proof of Mills’s role is less clear. This is what gave Thorn pause this year when considering Mills for full honor with Seymour.  “It was easy for me to say, ‘Well, Harold’s not here to defend himself in this spousal fight; I’m not getting into it,’ ” Thorn said. “I don’t think it had anything to do with his and my being a man. It had everything to do with his being dead.”  Mills said that she was comfortable with her ultimate inclusion in the SABR honor, however clumsily it might have been handled.  “I’m glad to have the whole thing over with,” she said, adding that she can refocus on her latest book, a historical novel about, it turns out, baseball.  It is about a female ballplayer in Cleveland in the 1920s. She signs a contract with a minor league team but, like the real-life female stars of the day, finds her contract invalidated by Organized Baseball.  This time, though, the woman speaks up.
The Society for American Baseball Research changed course and recognized Dorothy Jane Mills as a co-author with Dr. Harold Seymour of a trilogy of the gameâs history.