Award-winning writer Daniel R. Levitt is the author of multiple books and numerous well-respected and well-received articles. As Executive Vice President for Ryan Companies US, he’s overseen more than $10 billion of capital transactions in the past five years.
Dan is also one of the nation’s most astute baseball commentators on ownership, general managers, business strategies, and the ethics that surround the sport. Dan is an occasional MLB Network TV guest commentator and an experienced radio guest. He is a regular speaker at SABR’s annual convention and has presented at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. He is a recipient of the highest award of the Society for American Baseball Research, the prestigious Bob Davids Award. In 2017, he won SABR’s Chadwick Award, a lifetime achievement award honoring baseball’s great researchers.
Most recently, Dan authored Intentional Balk: Baseball’s Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating (with Mark Armour). The book won the 2023 Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal, which honors the best book of baseball history or biography published during the preceding calendar year. When interviewed for an article in The Athletic, Dan was dubbed “our historian of wrongdoing — our Sultan of Not.”
In 2016, for the 50th anniversary of Major League Baseball Players Association, Dan and Mark Armour were commissioned by the union to compile the history of the MLBPA in timeline fashion, much of which the union included in its 50th anniversary publication and is available at its website.
Dan also collaborated with Mark on In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball, which was released in 2015 to strong reviews. It was one of “This week’s must-read books” in the New York Post, and J. J. Cooper at Baseball America wrote: “Armour and Levitt’s book is an extremely exhaustive and still easily read survey of how front offices have evolved, changed and adapted to the changing conditions of the game.”
Dan authored The Battle That Forged Modern Baseball: The Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy, winner of the 2013 Larry Ritter Award. In the Dallas Morning News Allen Barra wrote: “The Battle That Forged Modern Baseball is one of the most important historical baseball works so far this century.”
In 2008, Dan wrote Ed Barrow: The Bulldog who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty, which was favorably reviewed in both the New York Post and the Boston Globe and was a finalist for the Seymour Medal.
Levitt was the editor of SABR’s 2012 book Short but Wondrous Summers: Baseball in the North Star State, a journal of Minnesota baseball history issued in conjunction with the 2012 national convention. He has also written dozens of articles for publication on topics ranging from baseball history to statistics. Dan collaborated with Mark Armour on several of these, including “History versus Harry Frazee: Re-revising the Story,” the cover story in SABR’s 2008 Baseball Research Journal–recently recognized as one of the fifty best articles SABR has published–and several groundbreaking studies of ethnicity in baseball.
Dan’s first book Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way, (coauthored with Mark Armour) was published in 2003 and won the Sporting News-SABR Research Award. The book also received many excellent reviews, including from Sports Illustrated’s Joe Sheehan (“The best baseball book I have read this spring…It’s simply an excellent book, one that can be both enjoyed and studied”).
At his day job Dan Levitt brings more than 30 years of real estate experience and capital investment expertise to his role as Executive Vice President at Ryan Companies US. He oversees capital transactions in all of Ryan’s geographic markets, focusing on many property types and working closely with other Ryan service leaders. The work of Levitt’s Capital Markets team includes the analysis, organization and structuring of debt, equity and joint ventures as well as directing the funding process from inception to closing. Over the last five years, his team has managed dispositions, financings, acquisitions, and joint ventures valued at more than $3 billion.
