SABR Membership Profile Tips
Here are some tips to help you get the most out of the SABR website:
SABR’s members-only area
SABR’s members-only area can be found at members.sabr.org.
The new system, powered by YourMembership.com, includes an upgraded search directory, more streamlined event registration, a simpler process for renewing your membership and a “single sign-on” functionality, as well as a more reliable communication system for chapter and committee leaders.
All SABR members can access the new functions by signing in now at members.sabr.org.
You can find out more about the features in the new system by clicking here: SABR.org/latest/sabr-launches-new-membership-profile-system
So if you’ve had trouble logging in or accessing the Directory over the past year, we hope you’ll give this new system a try. We’re pleased to report that hundreds of members have already logged in to update their profile information since Wednesday.
Thanks go to Peter Garver, Deb Jayne and Jeff Schatzki for helping to fully implement this new system, and a special thanks to all the chapter and committee leaders who provided valuable input during beta-testing over the past few weeks. We appreciate your patience as we’ve transitioned to the new back-end membership system.
If you have any questions, we’ve prepared a Frequently Asked Questions page at SABR.org/about/faqs. If you can’t find your answer there, please contact the SABR office.
How to use the SABR Directory
For your convenience, the online SABR membership directory can be found at SABR.org/directory. Most of you will probably access it by clicking the “Directory” button on the Members-Only page at members.sabr.org, but links to the Directory can also be found throughout the SABR website (including in the bottom footer of every page.)
The SABR Directory includes contact information for all of our 6,000+ active members, and it’s searchable by name, location, chapter, committee or research interests/expertise. Lapsed members and non-active members are not included in the Directory, so if you can’t find someone who you know used to be a SABR member that could be the reason why.
Here are some quick tips on using the SABR Directory so you can easily find who you’re searching for:
- Use last names only: If you are just trying to look up a phone number or e-mail address for a single member, by far the easiest way to find that person is to enter in their last name in the Name field. First names do work, too, but if you’re searching for “Joe Jackson” and he has registered under the name “Joseph Jackson”, the Directory is going to look for someone with the name “Joe”, not “Jos—“. So just search for “Jackson” instead and then scroll down to the J’s to find him. (For the record, Shoeless Joe has never been a SABR member … but you will find the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library.)
- To cross-reference a search: Say you are looking for anyone in the Baseball Records Committee who lives in California or is a member of a California-based chapter. In the Location field, select “United States” then “California”. In the Groups field, check the box for the “Baseball Records Committee”. Scroll down to the bottom and select the green Continue button. That will give you a list of people who are in both groups. Note: Checking two or more boxes in the Groups field will not work. You must use two separate fields. So you might also try the Location field for “California” and the Research Interests/Expertise field for “baseball records” or “statistics” to get a similar result.)
- To search for Research Interests/Expertise: Type in any team name (“Red Sox”), year (“1968”) or topic (“Negro Leagues”) in the Research Interests and Expertise field, then select the green Continue button. An important function of the SABR Directory is that members can find others who share their interests or who are knowledgeable about a particular subject. SABR members are often a great resource, and someone can usually point you in the right direction to help your research. We encourage all of you to add your own research interests or subjects of expertise to your profile by clicking on the “Profile” button at members.sabr.org.
- Enter in only what you know for sure: If you are not sure of a name or spelling, just enter in what you know. For instance, if you are looking for Mike Smith but aren’t sure if his first name is registered under Mike or Michael, just type in “Smith” under the “Name” field and scroll down to the M’s. The Directory can only search for what you enter — but it’s also going to search for exactly what you enter. In most cases, typing in only a person’s last name should pull up the result you’re looking for.
Oh, and here’s one more tip: In order to make yourself easier to find in the Directory, we encourage you to edit your own profile to reflect the name that you are commonly called. So if your name is “Stephen” but everyone knows you (and more important: will search for you) as “Steve”, please consider listing yourself that way instead. You can edit your profile at any time by going to profile.sabr.org/members/edit.asp or clicking the “Profile” button on the Members-Only page and then selecting one of the “Edit” buttons.
SABR Tips: Research Committee newsletters
We want to highlight a feature that’s one of our favorite benefits of SABR membership: research committee newsletters.
SABR members have a variety of interests, and this is reflected in the diversity of our more than 30 research committees — from Baseball and the Arts, to Statistical Analysis, to the Deadball Era, to Women in Baseball.
All SABR members are eligible to sign up for — or contribute to — newsletters from any research committee. Committee newsletters are another outlet SABR offers for publication of your research articles, and also a repository for news and notes, pertinent announcements, and updates about committee goings-on.
The publication schedule varies by committee. Some newsletters come out once a month while most are published quarterly or bi-annually. So while you’re waiting for the next Baseball Research Journal or SABR Digital Library publication to drop, these newsletters are a great source to read new baseball research from SABR members.
Here are some examples of original articles from our committee newsletters:
- “Discovery of a ‘New’ Major-League Player: Frank Shaffer/Schiffhauer,” by Peter Morris (Biographical Research, June 2017)
- “Pinch Running: Each Era Tells a Different Story,” by Samuel P. Anthony (Statistical Analysis, July 2017)
- “College Baseball Games in MLB Parks,” by Alan Reifman (Collegiate Baseball, June 2017)
- “Jay Hughes: An Exercise in Biographical Review and Revision,” by Bill Lamb (Deadball Era, June 2017)
- “An Opening Day Ovation for the Exiled Eddie Cicotte in Detroit,” by Jacob Pomrenke (Black Sox Scandal, June 2017)
- “Nineteenth Century Sabermetrics: Range Factor,” by Richard Hershberger (Official Scoring, June 2017)
- “The Unkindest Cut: Taking a Knife to Your Words before Your Editor Does, by Andrea Long (BioProject, June 2017)
- “Chris Von der Ahe and the St. Louis Browns,” by J. Thomas Hetrick (Nineteenth Century, Summer 2017)
You can view all past committee newsletters by going to any Research Committee page here and selecting “Newsletters.”
To sign up to receive a committee’s newsletter, just go to members.sabr.org and select the “Join a committee” button.
And most importantly: To contribute an article to any committee newsletter, because none of these newsletters could be published without your efforts, contact a committee leader to discuss your ideas and learn how to submit a story.
SABR Tips: Research Resources
Periodically, we like to offer some helpful hints on how to get the most out of the SABR.org website. Today, we’re highlighting our Research Resources page, which includes many online resources that can help you do better baseball research.
The Research Resources page at SABR.org includes a variety of tools and information sources from around the Internet. Some of these sources, including the resources page itself, are only available with a SABR membership — such as our partnership with Paper of Record which gives you complete access to The Sporting News archives dating back to 1886 — while many others are available online to the general public — such as the Baseball Magazine and Sporting Life archives that we collaborated on with LA84 Foundation and the Baseball Hall of Fame. This follows SABR’s longstanding mission to facilitate the dissemination of baseball research information.
Our most popular tools for research can be found on the resources page, starting with How to Do Baseball Research, an ongoing project with tips on research techniques, interviewing, geneaology, finding images, and using libraries. You can also find links on the resources pages to other SABR tools such as The Baseball Index, a catalog of 250,000 citations on baseball literature; four decades of articles from the SABR Baseball Research Journal; more than 500 audio interviews in the SABR Oral History Collection; Protoball, on the evolution of early baseball games; our Guide to Sabermetric Research; Bob McConnell’s Going for the Fences: The Minor League Home Run Record Book; the SABR Triple Plays Database; and the SABR Spring Training Database; and the SABR/Baseball-Reference Encyclopedia.
Some members have made their specialized research available on the resources page, as well. This includes Bill James’ Baseball Analyst archives from 1982-89; the Business of Baseball Committee’s 1915 Federal League case files; Chuck McGill’s comprehensive list of Minor League No-Hitters; Bill Hickman’s research on Near Major Leaguers; Ken Mars’s guide to the 1887 National Colored League, a precursor to the Negro Leagues; Gene Carney’s Black Sox “Notes” columns; and Chuck Hildebrandt’s Little League Home Runs Database.
The resources page also includes links to non-SABR tools and websites that serve as invaluable sources for every baseball researcher, including the popular statistical websites Baseball Prospectus, Baseball-Reference.com, BrooksBaseball.net, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, Retrosheet, and more. You can also find subscription newspaper archive sites such as Newspapers.com, Chronicling America, Ancestry.com, Fulton History, and Genealogy Bank; as well as tools such as the Lahman Baseball Database, the Index of Online Baseball Guides (1860-2014), the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, and the Dressed to the Nines MLB uniform database.
Whatever baseball-related subject you have an interest in, we have a helpful resource for you on the Research Resources page. We hope you’ll check it out! If there’s a tool not listed there that you like to use in your own research, e-mail jpomrenke@sabr.org to let us know so we can add it to the page.
SABR Tips: Subscribing to the SABR-L listserv
There are many benefits and tools available to you as a SABR member, and here’s another that you may or may not be aware of: SABR-L.
SABR-L is a free, daily e-mail listserv that all SABR members are encouraged to participate in. Moderated by a rotating group of volunteers, SABR-L’s purpose is to encourage and facilitate research and information exchange among SABR members. Since its founding in 1995, the list’s subscriber rolls have grown steadily in number, and today more than 1,400 members are subscribed. On a typical day, your SABR-L e-mail will include 10-20 posts on a wide variety of baseball topics. We’ve been told by some members that SABR-L is worth the price of membership by all itself. You can learn something new every day from your one SABR-L e-mail.
Some of the topics we’ve discussed recently on SABR-L include the new name for the Chicago White Sox’s home ballpark, the minor-league record for consecutive strikeouts by a pitcher, the San Diego Chicken and other mascots, and the founding of the Detroit Tigers.
It’s easy to sign up for SABR-L. Just send an e-mail to this address: LISTSERV@APPLE.EASE.LSOFT.COM. And in your e-mail, type this in the subject line: SUBSCRIBE FIRSTNAME LASTNAME. So if your name is Bob Smith, this is what your subject line would look like: Subscribe Bob Smith
That’s all it takes. You’ll start receiving your daily SABR-L e-mail the next day, and then you can jump into the conversation whenever you’d like. By default, the list comes in “digest” form — which means one e-mail a day — but you can choose to receive each post immediately if you’d like. (Click here for details on how to do that.)
To post a new message to the SABR-L listserv, just compose an e-mail with a regular subject line and your message, and send it to this address: SABR-L@APPLE.EASE.LSOFT.COM. It will be posted in the next digest. Please use a specific subject line that reflects the content of your message and remember to sign your name at the bottom. And please, for the sake of brevity, take a second to delete all the previous messages from the bottom of your message, along with any excessive or boilerplate signature lines in your e-mail.
Simple, right? SABR-L is a fantastic resource for asking research questions or discussing other baseball topics with SABR members. One of the great traits about SABR members is that somebody, somewhere, knows the answer to just about any baseball research question you can ask. SABR-L is often the best way to find those answers, or to share those answers with others. Our daily listserv has a reputation for high-quality discussion — and yes, we’ve established a couple basic ground rules for posting etiquette, which you can find in the SABR-L Moderator’s Note, to ensure the listserv remains that way — and we’re proud of how it’s evolved over the last 20-plus years.
The SABR-L Archives are also a useful resource if you’ve looked everywhere else for an answer to your question with no luck. Search the archives to see if your question has been brought up on the listserv before; chances are, it has.
For longtime members or those who have recently joined, we hope you’ll all subscribe to SABR-L and join the discussion!