Jimmy Keenan Bio




Jimmy Keenan has been a member of the Society For American Baseball Research (SABR) since 2001. His grandfather, Jimmy Lyston, and four other family members, were all professional baseball players.

A contributor to over 20 SABR publications, Keenan is the author of the following books; The Lystons: A Story of One Baltimore Family & Our National Pastime, The Life, Times and Tragic Death of Pitcher Win Mercer, The Lyston Brothers: A Journey Through 19th Century Baseball, Banned For Life: The Benny Kauff Story.

Keenan is a 2010 inductee into the Oldtimers Baseball Association of Maryland's Hall of Fame and a 2012 inductee into the Baltimore's Boys of Summer Hall of Fame.

Keenan is the author of a combined 40 biographies and game articles that have been published by SABR’s Baseball Biography Project. As of September 2021 he is credited with being the author or coauthor of 26 books.

As a member of SABR’s Biographical Research Committee, Keenan has made 34 corrections-additions to the official baseball records. One of his more notable finds involved correcting “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s middle name, which has been acknowledged by Baseball Reference.

If you would like to read the complete story of this discovery, and the subsequent controversy surrounding this find, please see this link.

As a member of SABR’s Pictorial History Committee Keenan discovered six previously undocumented images for the “Major League Identification Project.” The goal of this project was to locate a picture of every major-league player since 1871.