NORTHAMPTON — Packed in a small room in the upstairs of a Northampton house, millions of words reside.

About 2,500 books, to be exact — and they’re all about baseball. Biographies, statistical annuals, magazines, instructional manuals, encyclopedias and every other form of print media imaginable line the walls of the room from floor to ceiling. In the middle of the room, a desk with another bookcase sits, overflowing with history.

In the thin walkway between the desk and the bookcases on the walls, even more books are piled up. Hundreds more live outside in the hallway, and walking through the library must be done in single file. Realistically, there is only space for two people.

This is the baseball library of Doron “Duke” Goldman.

“For me, it’s a little slice of heaven,” Goldman said. “Sometimes I just come in here and take it in.”

Goldman is a lifelong baseball fan, and since stepping away from his marketing lecturer position at UMass, he’s devoted his retirement to chronicling baseball history. Goldman has always been passionate about uncovering overlooked players and telling history, and that passion has only grown in retirement.

He appears on WHMP for radio segments twice a month, in addition to adjunct work at UMass teaching summer and winter term classes on baseball history. In the past decade, Goldman has focused especially on the history of the Negro Leagues, where Black baseball thrived in the first half of the 20th century. He’s currently working on a book on overlooked Negro Leagues star Monte Irvin, pairing two lifelong passions — baseball and social justice.

“This league, and the Black players in it, were phenomenal and they had their own style of baseball,” Goldman said. “And this is the only option they had. It’s such an important story and it lives on in these players.”

The birth of fandom

Before studying Monte Irvin, before his retirement career and before his professional career, Goldman was a kid growing up in New York City, the son of a Canadian and an Israeli. Baseball wasn’t exactly in the family.

But just as the Mets defied expectations this fall to come back for wins in clinchers on the final day of the regular season, in the wildcard series and in the division series, their original comeback story came in September 1969, when Goldman was a scrawny 7-year-old starting fourth grade.

The “Amazin’ Mets,” as they would come to be known that season, were in first place for the first time ever that September, and kids at school were talking.

“I could tell at 7 years old, this was magic,” Goldman said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is but I want a part of it.’”

The Mets went on to win the pennant and knock off the Orioles in the World Series, still considered one of the sport’s greatest upsets. Goldman came home from school after the clinching fifth game of the series and watched the fans rip up the field on television. He was hooked.

Already a bit of a history buff with a knack for arithmetic, Goldman started diving into baseball books. “No-Hitter” by Phil Pepe and “The Story of Ty Cobb: Baseball’s Greatest Player” by Gene Schoor still reside in his collection.

He began reading baseball encyclopedias, picking out statistics and interesting bits of history. To this day, Goldman goes through each spring’s new edition line by line with a bookmark.

But he didn’t begin writing about baseball until many years later. Goldman joined the Society for American Baseball Research, known as SABR, in the early 1990s and published his first article in 2002 on an overlooked player, “Indian Bob” Johnson, whose statistics he had uncovered through studying the record books.

Johnson was one of baseball’s best outfielders in the 1930s and 1940s and earned his nickname because he was one-quarter Cherokee. By writing to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Goldman was actually able to correct Johnson’s date of birth in the encyclopedia.

Johnson hit 100 RBIs seven consecutive years and finished his career with a .296 batting average, 288 home runs and 1,283 RBIs — statistics Goldman pulled from memory — but he always played on losing teams and received only a couple of votes for the Baseball Hall of Fame despite a worthy resume.

The Double V campaign

Studying Johnson propelled Goldman into uncovering even more history. In 2012, he was approached to do a baseball history talk to a group of Westfield State teachers who were touring the Hall of Fame. Through a connection in the program, he was introduced to Ray Elliot, a veteran who served in the segregated military in World War II.

Shortly after the U.S. declared war in World War II, a 26-year-old cafeteria worker named James G. Thompson sent a letter to The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading Black papers of the day, writing that Black people in America needed to fight for a double victory — against fascism abroad and racism at home. Within weeks, The Courier added a double V to its masthead, women began weaving double Vs into their hair, and double victory clubs and double victory baseball games sprouted up across the country.

The double victory campaign was the larger theme in which baseball was integrated, but that connection largely hadn’t been reported on.

During a gallery exhibition of paintings of the Negro Leagues by Kadir Nelson at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Elliot spoke, and that’s where Goldman’s love for Negro Leagues history took off. Goldman had studied the Negro Leagues in the past, and he had a Negro Leagues section in his library, but the paintings made an impression on him that no statistic could.

“That’s when I started to recognize,” Goldman said, “this is the thing I want to study.

“I’ve always been interested in social justice. I’ve always felt strongly about America’s history of racism, antisemitism, you name it. So I think I had an affinity for this stuff, and then when I saw those paintings — I mean sure, I knew a lot about Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige — but those paintings brought it to life,” he continued.

“Looking at these larger-than-life figures, even though they were paintings, and realizing just how amazing these guys were and what a story of America this was. This is the whole concept of looking at American history through the lens of baseball.”

Goldman’s article “The Double Victory Campaign and the Campaign to Integrate Baseball” was published in SABR and two other books, in addition to SABR’s compilation “SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game.”

Monte was there

Through Goldman’s research into the double victory campaign, he spoke with Irvin, who played in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s and fought in Europe in World War II. While Irvin published an autobiography, “Nice Guys Finish First — The Autobiography of Monte Irvin,” no other biography was out there. Goldman set out to write it.

“The story about Monte Irvin is, he could’ve been Jackie Robinson,” Goldman said. “He didn’t get that chance.”

Negro League owners in the early 1940s thought Irvin would have been the best option to integrate professional baseball. He led the Negro Leagues in batting in 1940 and 1941, led the Mexican league in batting in 1942 and then spent three years in Europe in the U.S. military.

Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey, who had recently made the famous signing of Jackie Robinson, approached Irvin. But Irvin was recently out from a military hospital and was dealing with a form of PTSD. He told Rickey he wasn’t ready.

“He was a superstar — he was probably a better baseball player than Jackie was,” Goldman said. “But he left it all out on the field in Europe, and he always said he wasn’t anywhere near the same ballplayer when he came back, and yet he led the National League in RBIs in 1951 and some people think he should have been the MVP that year. He had a significant Major League career, but it was truncated.”

So Irvin returned to the Negro Leagues after the war, led it in batting again in 1946 and hit three home runs in the last Negro Leagues World Series before Robinson’s debut. He made his own debut with the New York Giants in 1949, and after returning briefly to the Negro Leagues and leading them in batting yet again, played seven more seasons in the majors.

Irvin died in 2016, but the previous year, Goldman met with him and interviewed him at his assisted living facility. It was then that he decided to write a book on Irvin.

The book is slated for release in 2026, titled “Monte Was There: The Societal Impact of Baseball’s Monte Irvin.” Each chapter follows a day in his life.

There’s Sept. 29, 1954, when Irvin was in left field for Willie Mays’ “The Catch” in center field, one of the most famous plays in baseball history. Irvin served as Mays’ roommate and mentor.

“He was like his older brother,” Goldman said. “Both on and off the field, Monte was a guide. Monte was that kind of a guy. What I’ve heard from everybody is, this guy Monte Irvin — nobody had a bad thing to say about him. He was one of those people that made the world a better place, because he mentored and helped everybody.”

There’s Oct. 3-4, 1951, when Giants teammate Bobby Thompson hit the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” a walk-off home run to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers and win the National League pennant in the deciding third game of a three-game playoff at the end of the regular season. Irvin made the only other out that inning, but he redeemed himself with a World Series Game 1 performance of four hits, a spectacular catch and a steal of home in the first inning, which Irvin said was his greatest thrill in baseball.

There’s Aug. 6, 1973, when Irvin and Roberto Clemente were inducted into the Hall of Fame. Clemente, the first Latin player inducted into the Hall, idolized Irvin while watching him play in the Puerto Rican winter league as a child.

And there’s April 8, 1974, when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record with No. 715 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in front of more than 50,000 fans. Irvin was there on behalf of the commissioner.

Through all the uncovered statistics, all the dusty magazines, all the history, one common thread ties it all together — education. As Goldman sits in the library and works on the biography of Irvin, the batting averages and win totals fade away. In their place, the history of America lies.

“Maybe we can get more and more people educated to the idea that people are people,” Goldman said. “And we don’t need to look at the color of their skin and judge them that way. And so that, in many ways, is what this is about at its core.”