As a reporter with the Sun from 1994 to 1996, Snyder covered the Baltimore Orioles, as well as Baltimore city crime and Capitol Hill. He wrote a fourteen-part series on Cal Ripken, Jr., during the season Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive games streak. He also wrote several articles on Leon Day, an ace Negro league pitcher for the Newark Eagles who lived in Baltimore and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame six days before his death.
Beyond the Shadow of the Senators stems from Snyder's senior honors thesis at Duke University about the Homestead Grays and the black community of Washington, D.C., which won the William P. Laprade Prize from the Duke history department. Before and after writing the thesis, Snyder conducted numerous interviews with key players in this story: four with Buck Leonard, who died in 1997; three with Buck's 86-year-old sister Lena Cox; two with Sam Lacy; one with Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich, who died in 1998; and a two-day interview session with Calvin Griffith, Clark Griffith's nephew and successor, before Calvin's death in 1999. Snyder also discovered a treasure trove of archival material about the Grays' decade in D.C. in the Art Carter Papers at Howard University.
While at Duke University, Snyder covered the men's basketball team for the Washington Post. During college, he published articles about college basketball in Basketball America and the Raleigh News and Observer. He also covered Tampa cops and courts for a summer at the St. Petersburg Times. Snyder worked as a research assistant on two of best-selling author John Feinstein's sports books: Hard Courts, about a year on the professional tennis circuit, and Play Ball, about a season inside major league baseball. Recently, he has published law review articles in the Yale Law Journal, Rutgers Law Review, and Vermont Law Review on the death penalty, libel and defamation law, and the Supreme Court's famous Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision.
Snyder is a 1999 graduate of Yale Law School and a 1994 graduate of Duke University. Snyder's next book, A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports, will be published by Viking/Penguin in October 2006.
Photo Credit: Art Carter Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.