Born March 9, 1949, in Brooklyn, N.Y., Tygiel was surrounded by sports while growing up. He played stickball and street football, and he watched the Dodgers and later the Mets, Jets and Giants.
"So much of my time revolved around sports that it was a perfectly natural process to want to study and teach it and to see it was a major phenomenon," he wrote in "Baseball's Great Experiment."
Tygiel earned a bachelor's degree in history at Brooklyn College in 1969. At UCLA, he earned a master's degree in 1973 and four years later a doctorate, both in history.
While working on his dissertation at UCLA, Tygiel chanced upon a 1947 issue of Time magazine that included an article about Jackie Robinson. The article rekindled interest in his childhood hero and set him on a path to becoming a baseball scholar.
Tygiel married Luise Custer in 1983 and the couple had two children, Charles and Samuel. In addition to his wife and sons, Tygiel is survived by his mother, a sister and a brother.
Tygiel and his wife helped establish Camphill Communities California, a residential care community for adults with developmental disabilities, where their son Charles lives.
A public remembrance is expected to be scheduled at San Francisco State.
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jocelyn.stewart@latimes.com
