Poster authors will be with their posters during the poster session on Thursday, August 6th from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm.

P1: Ballpark foul territory dimensions may contribute to strikeout totals

Tom Tomsick

Ballpark foul territory has been suggested to contribute to offensive statistics, due to parks with large foul territory area increasing the number of catchable foul balls, decreasing hit opportunities. Tomsick explores whether the amount of foul territory also impacts strikeout rates. He digitally analyzes ballpark diagrams to determine the amount and location of foul ground, and his presentation will display that there is, in fact, a negative correlation between foul territory dimensions and strikeouts.

Tom Tomsick (tatomsick@msn.com) was bullpen catcher for the strikeout-record-setting Cleveland Indians pitching staff in 1964-66, attended St. Louis University School of Medicine, and is currently Professor of Radiology, Director of Neuroradiology at the University of Cincninnati. He is author of Strike 3!My Years in the 'Pen, in press.

P2: Putting a dollar sign on the muscle: What are baseball players worth?

J.C. Bradbury

In the 1970s, using team revenue and player performance data, Gerald Scully employed the standard marginal revenue product framework frequently used by labor economists to estimate the financial contributions of players. Bradbury’s study employs new information about baseball’s economic structure and sabermetric performance metrics in an updated Scully framework to estimate the dollar value of current major league baseball players. He compares player salaries and estimated worth by service class, presents a method for projecting player worth over the duration of long-term contracts, identifies some of baseball’s best and worst deals, and ranks teams according to their abilities to manage their budgets.

J.C. Bradbury (jcbradbury@gmail.com) is an economist and associate professor at Kennesaw State University in metropolitan Atlanta. He is the author of The Baseball Economist and he operates the weblog Sabernomics.com. His next book Hot Stove Economics: Understanding Baseball's Second Season (forthcoming October 2010) investigates the financial worth of players. He is a life-long Braves fan and lives in Marietta, Georgia with his wife and two daughters.

P3: (withdrawn)

This poster has been withdrawn.

P4: Baseball on the Loop

Kyle Banister

The early days of Colorado history were full of exploration, discovery and a search for wealth. Men came from the East looking to become prospectors, miners, or anything else that would fill their pockets. Using old photographs and newspaper articles Banister and his associates were able to survey and layout a long lost ball field now overgrown with over a thousand aspen trees. This presentation uses a mix of old and current photos as well as a number of artist conceptual drawings of those old games played on the field.

Kyle Banister (cuttinletters@msn.com) is an artist, concentrating on themes in baseball and history in media as divergent as enamel, plexiglass and chalk on sidewalks. Before committing himself to art, he ran a sign and lettering company for many years. He is a director of the SABR Rocky Mountain chapter and lives in Littleton, Colorado.

P5: The best vs. the best:W-L records of Hall of Fame pitchers against each other

J-P Caillault

Caillault presents for every pitcher in the Hall of Fame, their career won-lost totals in head-to-head match-ups with other members of the HoF. His results date back to the beginning of the National League in 1876 (when Al Spalding and Candy Cummings were 1-1 against each other) and extend up to and including 1987 (when Don Sutton beat Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro beat Sutton). There have been no such matchups since, although that will change as more pitchers are inducted.

J-P Caillault (jpc1957@msn.com) is a professor of astronomy at the University of Georgia, where he also teaches classes on the physics of baseball, the history of the major leagues, and sabermetrics. He is the author of A Tale of Four Cities (McFarland 2003), The Complete New York Clipper Baseball Biographies (McFarland, 2009), and has written articles for Baseball Digest and Baseball Research Journal. He lives in Winterville, Georgia.

P6: Baseball: A video-script index of Ken Burns’ documentary

Jeff Barto

Barto’s project indexes all 18.5-hours of Ken Burns’ BASEBALL documentary. His proposed Video-Script Index is computer searchable, DVD compatible, and can appear in book-form as a sequential index. Burns’ logs remained forgotten after they were donated to the University of North Carolina. This project rescues much of that information, with sample items focusing on Inning One: Our Game 1840s-1900. This project has also evolved into a searchable database. For example, instructors using the film in courses on baseball history may wish to show clips, photos or narration on a topic; with this reference tool they can input keywords to yield the location of interest.

Dr. Jeff Barto (jjbarto@uncc.edu), a SABR member since 1992, teaches a Baseball History class at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This course sparked his project indexing Ken Burns’ BASEBALL documentary. Dr. Barto planted his baseball roots in Pittsburgh as a Pirates fan in the late 1960s. His beer-vending exploits for the Bucs through the 70s and 80s funded the education that led him to his current position teaching at UNC-Charlotte since 1992.

P7: The extent of Organized Base Ball in 1868, on the eve of the professional era

Paul Wendt

Wendt’s project displays a “census of ballclubs” in the National Association for 1868, color shading by county, in a super-region from New England to Missouri. He also relates the distribution of those clubs to the distribution of population and to geographical properties of their county locations such as distance and neighborhood. Baseball historians know little about NA membership, as the organization itself was losing track of its members by exploding in numbers and, beginning in fall 1868, replacing direct club membership with something indirect, mediated by state associations. In addition, the detail is daunting, incomprehensible except by methods for handling data en masse, such as maps and statistical analyses.

Paul Wendt (pwendt.stat@gmail.com) is a former chair of SABR’s Nineteenth Century Committee and a founding member of the Boston Chapter of SABR. He is the author of the profile of Jimmy Barrett that appeared in Deadball Stars of the National League. Wendt resides in Watertown MA.

P8: Miracle in Pittsburgh: The 1960 champion Pirates visual timeline

Ken Cherven

It's been half a century since the Bucs won their last Forbes Field title (so how come many of us recall it like it was yesterday?). Tens of thousands of words have been written about Mazeroski's homer and the preposterous World Series victory over the Yankees, but much less attention has been paid to the 154 games that surprisingly got the Pirates into the postseason. In this poster, Cherven uses techniques old (newspaper accounts, box scores, photos) and new (graphs, timelines, mapping, data tables, statistical analysis) to take us through the 1960 season.

Ken Cherven (kkseminole@netscape.net) is a Detroit-based SABR member with a current focus on the visualization of baseball statistics and history. This has led Ken to develop a website (visual-baseball.com) where he can tinker with a variety of current methodologies, including statistical, ontological, timeline, and mapping visualizations, among others. Most of the work is done using open source tools and available baseball datasets like Retrosheet and Baseball-Databank. He is looking for others within SABR with similar interests to help in sharing ideas and developing visualizations. Ken lives in Detroit with his wife Karen, and their three children, Kellen, Kristopher, and Katie.

P9: Is 27 the optimum age for player performance?

John Burbridge, Andrew Sturm, James Etchells

In the early days of the Baseball Abstract, Bill James made a big splash by placing the age of peak baseball performance at 27. In succeeding decades, researchers (including James himself) have continued to study the issue, with some suggesting that James's original dataset may have been atypical while others have generally agreed with his original conclusion. Under the current CBA, many players reach free agency at about that age, so the issue has remained contentious for much more than just its research implications. Burbridge and colleagues take up the question in the contemporary milieu, studying a dataset of players in the just-completed first decade of the 21^st century.

John Burbridge (burbridg@elon.edu) is currently a professor of operations and supply chain management in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business at Elon University. Prior to joining the faculty, he served as dean of the Love School of Business. John has also been a member of the faculty at Loyola College in Maryland, Rutgers University, and Lehigh University. He earned a PhD in industrial engineering from Lehigh and has worked in industry as an operations research analyst and as a distribution executive. He currently resides in North Carolina with his wife, Mary. A SABR member since the 1970s, John is a native of Jersey City and a San Francisco Giants fan. Andrew Sturm and James Etchells were students in Dr. Burbridge's spring 2010 "Baseball and Statistics" course.

P10: Georgia Peach vs. Hoosier Comet: Settling the score between Ty Cobb and Oscar Charleston

Geri Strecker

Near contemporaries, Ty Cobb and Oscar Charleston were also similar types of players. Both were feared on the field for more than just their extraordinary batting, fielding, throwing, and running prowess. The two men never played in the same game, though Charleston played a number of exhibition games against teams whose rosters included Cobb. Using the coincidence that Charleston's first pro game in Indianapolis occurred on the same day in 1915 as a Tigers exhibition tilt in the same city, Strecker weaves together the careers and legacies of two of the greatest players with plaques in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

A devout Tigers fan, Geri Strecker (gstrecker@bsu.edu) is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University, teaching composition, American literature, sports studies, and writing in architecture. Next spring, she will teach a 15-credit immersive learning seminar on Black Baseball in Indiana, leading a group of select students in researching the subject, surviving living players, and producing a documentary film. She is currently writing a book-length biography of Oscar Charleston.

P11: Allocating to win:A financial recipe for success

Mark Hejduk

The interplay of talent, budget, contracts, and player availability makes the job of a major league GM extremely complex. Attempting to make sense of the GM's decision-making considerations, Hejduk has developed polynomial predictive equations for estimating the return on investment for each position on the field and for team subcategories such as "corner infielders" and "top two starting pitchers". He suggests that this approach can contribute to the evaluation of teams and their front offices with respect to their free agent contract decisions or the distribution of their payroll by position. Imagine, for example, a budget-based Pythagorean Win-Loss formula.

Mark Hejduk (mhejduk1@gmail.com) is a 2008 graduate of Ithaca College, with a degree in Sport Management. Since 2003, Mark has worked six seasons in Major League Baseball for the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves, as well as one season with FC Dallas of the MLS. Mark currently lives in his hometown of Cleveland, OH, and works for the Safety Division of Charter Steel.

P12: Is Billy Wagner the all-time best left-handed relief pitcher?

Steven Glassman

How does Wagner's career stack up against Lyle, Franco, Myers, McGraw?Glassman offers an exhaustive examination of southpaw relievers, even separating them by their roles. He considers set-up men and LOOGYs ("lefthanded one-out guys") as well as closers, showing how reliever roles have changed over the years. With analytic tables and graphs, with both traditional and sabermetric measures of pitching effectiveness and pitcher value, this poster might settle the question of Wagner's place in baseball history. Or not.

Steven Glassman (sportsphan@comcast.net) has been a SABR member since 1994 and regularly makes presentations for the Connie Mack Chapter. He is attending his 6^th convention and doing his 2^nd convention poster presentation. The Temple University graduate in Sport and Recreation Management has worked in the Sports Information field for Temple, West Chester University, Albright College, and Rutgers-Newark. He currently works as a full-time scoreboard operator for The Sports Network in Hatboro, PA and also as a part-time volunteer Assistant SID for Manor College in Jenkintown, PA. He has been attending Phillies games since the 1970s and a partial season-ticket holder since 2003. Steven is the part-time right fielder/first base coach/scorekeeper for his summer league softball team, and spent this past spring as a Census Enumerator. Born in Philadelphia, Steven currently resides in Warminster, PA.

P13: A digest of baseball and the law:The Supreme Court edition

Ross Davies, Mark DiGiovanni, Brendan Mullarkey, John Sandell

The American legal system and baseball are inextricably linked. It's not just that many of the Justices are loyal fans – Yankee fan Sotomayor replacing Red Sox fan Souter, Stevens of the Cubs to be supplanted by Mets backer Kagan – but there are numerous court precedents arising out of baseball's legal wrangles. The latter is the topic of this poster. After an exhaustive review, Davies and his colleagues identify over 200 baseball-related cases decided by the highest court in the land. The presentation categorizes these decisions according to several factors, including the nature of its linkage to baseball, the types of laws involved, the institutional level of baseball (amateur/professional, majors/minors, etc.). The presenters' goal is to develop a pamphlet showing the results of their effort of digesting and characterizing the cases.

Ross Davies (rdavies@gmu.edu) is a professor of law at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia, and editor-in-chief of the Green Bag, An Entertaining Journal of Law (www.greenbag.org), which recently published what he believes to be the first law-and-baseball themed almanac. He is a lifelong follower of the Cleveland Indians. Mark DiGiovanni (mdigiova1@gmail.com), Brendan Mullarkey (brendan.mullarkey@gmail.com), and John Sandell (johnd.sandell@gmail.com) are law students at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia, and Research Assistants for the Digest of Baseball Law (www.baseballlaw.com). DiGiovanni is a North Carolina native who grew up watching the Kinston Indians and Durham Bulls and Sandell is a Seattle native and Mariners/Seahawks devotee, while Mullarkey has recently embraced his new home team, the Washington Nationals.

P14: Base Ball grows to become the national game:Mapping three stages in the diffusion of the New York game

Larry McCray, Gregory Christiano, Craig Waff

In the beginning, there was the New York game. With this poster, McCray and his colleagues introduce the Origins Committee's Spread of Base Ball Project. Summarizing hundreds of evidentiary data points from newspapers, pamphlets, rulebooks, letters, and more, the project has identified three phases of spread of the New York rules as the framework of the game of base ball. The poster uses 21^st century cartographic and geographic information tools to illustrate these phases, and the Spread Project will be an integral component of the online, wiki-based SABR Encyclopedia.

Larry McCray (lmccray@mit.edu) is the chairman of SABR's Origins Committee and the engineer of the Protoball Project. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. Demon mapmaker and retired cartographer Gregory Christiano (gregoryjnc@hotmail.com) resides in Hopatcong, New Jersey. Craig Waff (cbwaff@sbcglobal.net) is a writer/editor who calls Beavercreek, Ohio home.