Dick Perez wins 2024 SABR Jefferson Burdick Award

Legendary baseball artist Dick Perez has been named the recipient of the 2024 SABR Jefferson Burdick Award.

March 30, 2024

Official SABR News Release

“It’s hard to properly articulate the full scope of Dick Perez’s influence. Every single one of us in this space owes him a huge debt of gratitude for what he’s contributed to the artform. To me, he was (and still is) the epitome of the word ‘prolific.’ And his love of the game and the devotion to his craft are only exceeded by the quality of his character.” — Graig Kreindler

***

The 2024 recipient of this committee’s highest honour is a name not simply familiar to collectors of 1980s and 1990s Donruss cards but absolutely synonymous with the sets’ most prized, anticipated, argued (and even sabermetrically analyzed!) subsets: the Diamond Kings.

This year, SABR Baseball Cards is pleased to award the SABR Jefferson Burdick Award to legendary artist Dick Perez.

While Dick is best known to many collectors for his 15-year run (1982-96) creating Donruss Diamond Kings, these cards only scratch the surface of Dick’s overall oeuvre, which also includes hundreds of Perez-Steele Hall of Fame postcards, other Donruss collaborations such as the 1983 Hall of Fame Heroes and 1984 Champions sets, later collaborations with Topps, and last year’s independently produced Diamond Immortals set.

Some of Dick Perez’s best-known work were the Diamond Kings cards that his art was featured on in Donruss sets in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fans of Dick Perez have quite the year ahead as we are just months away from the release of “The Diamond King,” an outstanding feature-length documentary from award-winning filmmaker Marq Evans. What’s more, attendees at SABR 52 in Minneapolis this summer will be treated to a private screening of the film and director Q&A, jointly hosted by our Baseball and the Arts and Baseball Cards research committees. Oh, and did we mention Mr. Perez himself will be joining us as well, not to mention a handful of gents he may have painted once or twice.

Congratulations to Dick Perez, our 2024 SABR Jefferson Burdick Award winner!