• Listen: Click here to listen to Rob Ruck’s remarks during the Henry Chadwick Award presentation at SABR 54 (MP3; 6:00)

It’s pretty humbling to be included and honored along with Brian Kenny, Eugene Murdock, and Allan Simpson. When Scott Bush emailed me several months ago about this, it was my Chico Escuela moment: Baseball really has been very, very good to me.

It’s taken me places I never thought I would go — into Nicaragua during the conflict with the Contras, Sammy Sosa’s 38th birthday party, Vera Clemente’s kitchen, and the opportunity to write for Allan Simpson’s Baseball America.

Most of all, baseball has brought me into contact with wonderful people. People like Leslie Heaphy, Gerald Early, Larry Lester, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Tom Shieber and that incomparable crew of people at the Baseball Hall of Fame. By far, some of the best experiences I’ve had as an historian over the last 50 years have been working with those people on projects which I think really mattered. The older I get, the more I value having had that opportunity.

So, like Chico, baseball’s been very, very good to me. But it’s not so good for kids these days.

In the not too distant past, youth controlled their own sporting lives. I suspect that’s how most of the people in this room grew up with baseball. It was your game. It wasn’t a huge commercial market. Boys and girls figured out how to play on their own. If there weren’t enough kids, you had imaginary baserunners, you called your own balls and strikes. Everything to right field was a foul ball.

Baseball and sport prompted us to get stronger, faster, and more skilled at what we needed to learn to be good at the game. We learned how to argue and stay on good terms despite who won. Most of all, I think baseball taught anybody who ever struck out, dropped a ball, or lost how to recover from defeat. It taught us resilience.

That’s not how kids play anymore, though. Baseball has been taken out of their hands. Increasingly, it’s run by by corporate interests who see youth baseball as business. Private equity moving down the food chain is the biggest force in youth sport today. Perfect Game wants the kids in its program to become influencers who attract sponsors. They want to make them brands.

When corporate forces get involved, kids become consumers in a pay-to-play game. And if they’re good, they become commodities who, if they don’t make it, are easily disposed of. Both contribute to that $50 billion a year youth sport industry in the United States.

Meanwhile, there are a whole lot of families who can’t afford the game for their kids. Travel teams, expensive equipment, individualized coaching tournaments. And a lot of the kids whose families can’t afford to shell out a couple thousand bucks a year get burned out by the time they’re 12 or 13. And the reason they give is clear: It’s not fun anymore.

Others suffer from an epidemic of overuse injuries because they’re specializing in one sport at an early age, not giving their bodies and minds the rest. Recovery and variety of athletic competition that’s optimal for young athletes.

I think and hope I’m preaching to the choir. I think you’ve got skin in the game. I think everybody in this room has skin in the game. We’re among those who care about baseball, and I think we’re the ones who need to work a little harder to make it what it’s capable of being.

I don’t think it’s too late to turn things around. Every kid grows up playing for the love of play, not to show me the money. So let’s help them regain the sort of control over their sporting lives that we were lucky to have growing up and make baseball very, very good again for kids.

Thank you very much.

• Listen: Click here to listen to Brian Kenny’s remarks during the Henry Chadwick Award presentation at SABR 54 (MP3; 4:22)

I’m honored to be honored here by SABR, of course, along with Eugene Murdock, Allan Simpson, and Rob Ruck, to be included in this class. It’s fantastic.

The main thing, of course, is the journey. I’m sure most of you understand that in following baseball … these awards are important only for those you can share them with.

I share them with my wife, Coco. She’s right there taking a video. … She drove from Hall of Fame induction weekend from Cooperstown out here to Cleveland. She doesn’t like to be acknowledged, but the journey also for nearly four decades is with her. To be able to accept this award in front of her means everything to me. So thank you.

I have a real debt of gratitude to those from SABR. Even as a kid reading about baseball, I always thought baseball writing was better than everybody else’s writing. And I was right. I also found that it was not just a way of thinking about baseball, but those who were in the Society for American Baseball Research taught me not just how to think about baseball, but how to think, how to use critical thinking, how to use Socratic method. Those who led the way through this society really changed the way I think. And it was my honor and pleasure to to drive it home to a national audience once I got that opportunity, which I continue to this day.

So, again, I’m honored to be here. I have two notes that I can pass along. One is from Joey Votto, who texted me this week when I told him I was not coming in, couldn’t do his segment this week. He said, “Why are they giving you awards? Are you dying?” I’m not.

And this — “Congratulations on winning the Chadwick Award from SABR. That’s great. So many of the awards that are given out anymore are, ‘Come give a speech in a casino, please’ awards. This one is real. It’s a sincere acknowledgement of meaningful work. Well deserved.”

That was from Bill James. I’ll leave on that note. Thank you very much.

• Listen: Click here to listen to Allan Simpson’s remarks during the Henry Chadwick Award presentation at SABR 54 (MP3; 9:58)

There are a lot of twists and turns in my baseball story, and I’ll try and reflect on some of the more noteworthy developments in the allotted time that I’ve been given. I can’t help but harken back to the start of my very unlikely baseball journey. Growing up in British Columbia, Canada, at the age of 11, my parents conveniently took me on a trip to California, and I happened to see my first big league game on TV.

I got to listen to Vin Scully describing Dodger games from spring training. Obviously, when I got back from California, I was hooked on baseball. But upon returning from California, I soon recognized the challenge it would be just to become a baseball fan — to say nothing of the challenge it was going to be later in life, when I decided to make baseball a career.

You’ve got to recognize we’re talking about the 1960s. There was no Internet. There were no Expos. There were no Blue Jays. The closest big league team I had to where I grew up was 1,000 miles away. The closest minor league teams were Spokane and Vancouver, 300 miles away. If I was lucky, I might get to listen to a couple of big-league games on radio, if the (San Francisco) Giants were at home and playing at night. We never had cable, so I rarely got to see the baseball game of the week.

I also went to an English private school, with a strong curriculum in … English. I played cricket, not baseball.

I mean, who would have ever thought, from my very primitive exposure to the game, that I might one day have the inclination and wherewithal to start a publication like Baseball America that eventually may have rivaled The Sporting News for its impact on the game? Or who would have ever thought I might be standing here tonight accepting this very humbling honor ?

The Sporting News turned things around for me. I just happened to stumble upon it a year or two after I got interested in baseball. And I read The Sporting News weekly, cover to cover. I devoured two-week-old box scores which I’d never been exposed to. I soon discovered by reading The Sporting News that there was a big baseball world out there, like the minor leagues. I took a particular interest in all developments leading up to the very first draft in 1965. From there I began thinking about a career in the game. And I learned that the hard way.

I took a job during the summer of my college days with the national semipro champion Alaska Goldpanners, only to go to Alaska and have my work visa rescinded within the first three weeks. I had to stoop to some creative ways to sneak across borders to go back up to Alaska for a couple years thereafter, just to pursue that interest.

As luck would have it, the Montreal Expos created a farm club in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1975. I was able to land a position as the general manager of the team. I thought that might have been my first career break. But when you’re making $700 a month for seven months of the year, that’s not much of a career and no real way to make a living.

With the realization there were no other pro teams in Canada west of Montreal, and immigration regulations as they were restricting me from ever taking a job in the U.S., my dream of a career in baseball basically ended. And I stood with that decision for the better part of five years. I finished school and took a job in public accounting. But the baseball itch never subsided.

Along the way I continued to read The Sporting News. This was 1980 and it was no longer the publication that it was in in the 1960s when it was a magnificent baseball magazine. It got to the point where I said, “Nobody else is replacing this coverage that used to be there,” covering the minor leagues and some of the grassroots levels of the game. So I thought, “Well, if nobody else is going to do it, maybe I’ll take a chance.”

I was seriously under-capitalized. I had no publishing experience. Everywhere imaginable, I was in over my head. And perhaps most daunting, I had to create Baseball America as a one-man operation out of my unheated garage in Canada and pass it off as an American product. I would have never gotten to first base if anybody south of the border ever had a suspicion this was a Canadian product or the product of some crazy Canadian.

The first issue of Baseball America was published in February of 1981. It was not a masterpiece, and not surprisingly, the magazine struggled in its first year. But through my own perseverance and some incredible timing, it survived that first year mainly by covering the minor leagues, colleges, prospects, and the draft — some of the core coverage that still exists today.

If you remember 1981, that was the year of the major league strike. Unusual attention was showered on the minor leagues at the time, and that played right into our hands. The magazine continued to struggle the following year, but as luck would have it, to my good fortune, I managed to join forces with Durham Bulls owner Miles Wolff. We know the Bulls five years later as being the linchpin for the movie (Bull Durham). That enabled me to go along with the magazine to its rightful place in the US specifically, and into North Carolina.

At the time it was relocated, Baseball America‘s circulation was a modest 6,000. But over the next decade, the magazine’s readership grew to 10 times that, and its influence in the game soon rivaled that of The Sporting News.

Some 45 years after its humble beginnings, the magazine still impacts the baseball industry in substantial ways. I don’t think it’s any coincidence as Baseball America came of age, the interest in some of the grassroots areas of the game grew right along with it.

If you can think back to where minor league baseball was 40 years ago, or the draft, or college baseball, it’s changed substantially. With my deep-rooted interest in the draft, it naturally became a substantial component of Baseball America‘s coverage. Now in something of a full-circle moment, I am currently in the process of putting the finishing touches on a comprehensive historical database on the draft and its rich, often obscure history. To me, it’s been the ultimate baseball research project, and the work that has gone into it has come to the attention of Scott (Bush) and the SABR board.

I believe that’s no small reason why I am standing here today as a proud recipient of SABR’s prestigious Henry Chadwick Award. Thank you.

On Saturday, August 1, 2026, the MLB Players Association 60th Anniversary Panel was held at SABR 54 at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.

Panelists included award-winning historians Mark Armour, Dan Levitt, and Michael Haupert, along with Ezra Frankel, Director of Baseball Economics for the MLB Players Association. The panel was moderated by Katie Krall, SABR Director and a professor at Northwestern University.

• Audio: Click here to listen to the MLB Players Association 60th Anniversary Panel at SABR 54 (54:15; MP3)

Here are some highlights:

On the early origins of the MLB Players Association

• Armour: “The union started in 1954 and it was more or less a house union. Marvin Miller was pretty disdainful about it in his book, and I think (he was) justified. The owners essentially paid for the office, which is illegal in New York. And they more or less approved (and) actually hired the people that worked for the union. There was a judge, (Robert) Cannon, who worked for them for a while. Basically his job in practice was to essentially collect the various grievances that players had — which would be things like the showers aren’t working in the clubhouse in Milwaukee or I didn’t get paid for the spring training money they owed me — and he would just go to the owners and say, ‘Here is what we need.’ And the owners would say, yes, no, yes, no. Then he’d go back to the players and he’d say, ‘OK, here’s what you get.’ And that’s really all it was. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that some of the stronger union people (among) the players, which included Robin Roberts, Bob Friend, Jim Bunning — they were not liberals by any means, but they were people that thought the system was inefficient and didn’t work well for the players, and they needed stronger pensions and whatnot. So they worked on hiring a real labor person, which ended up being Marvin Miller. That was in 1966, 60 years ago. Over the years, they’ve more or less considered 1966 to be the beginning of the union, even though technically it was not. But I think it really at that point acted like what you would think of as a true partnership and with collective bargaining and all the rest.”
• Levitt: “The reason the union is called the Players Association, that was super intentional in terms of the syntax and the way that the organization was structured. This was the heyday of the steelworkers union and the Teamsters and the auto workers union. But clearly the players didn’t consider themselves in the same category as those sort of unionized employees. And they also weren’t. Their key issue was the pension fund. Sure, they would have liked more money (salaries) and they thought the reserve clause was probably unfair, but that was not what they were thinking about at that time. That was sort of the consciousness that Marvin Miller took a long time to help raise. It was really about the pension fund. When Norman Lewis, who was one of the early legal consultants to the association in the 1950s, said, ‘Well, maybe we should start looking at more than the pension fund for you guys,’ the owners suggested, ‘Well, maybe you should get rid of Norman Lewis.’ And the players did. So there was definitely this sense of they wanted to be collegial.”

On how Marvin Miller persuaded the players to support the union

• Haupert: “The union kind of coalesced around the idea that the players were unhappy with the way their pension was being handled. Originally, they were supposed to get a certain percentage of the All-Star Game revenue from television and tickets. Well, the problem was they had no idea how much revenue was really coming in because the owners wouldn’t check the contract with them. The TV contract wasn’t for the All-Star Game; it was an overall contract for a bunch of games. Major League Baseball’s owners said, ‘This is how much the All Star Game is worth.’ And the players suspected, rightly, that they were undervaluing the All-Star Game. And that’s how they really started to get movement in that direction. Ultimately, when Miller came along, he accepted a proposal from the owners that was really not a good one initially — the owners said, ‘Forget the percentage. We just want to give you a lump sum of money, and we’re going to give you $4 million.’ Miller was pretty sure that was less than the percentage they were supposed to get. But he couldn’t get access to the contract. So instead what he did was, he pointed out to Major League Baseball that the arrangement they had was illegal because they were paying for the offices of the players association, which was illegal under labor law. So they agreed they wouldn’t do that anymore. And the arrangement Miller made was instead of the players contributing $340 out of their salary, which they did for their pension, that MLB would just fund it completely with this $4 million. The $340 would then go not back to the players, but would go into union dues instead. And the $50 in union dues would go back to the players. So what Miller sold them was, ‘You’re going to get a $50 increase in your take home pay, no change whatsoever in anything else.’ But now all of a sudden you’re funding your own union, which is not only legal … but they (owners) inadvertently admitted that they really were a profitable business. And those admissions would come back to haunt them later on. So Miller gave up in the short run for the players, but very astutely gained in the long run. He gained a lot of leverage. … It put them on a really solid basis that they could bargain with in the future.”
• Armour: “Miller was a lifelong baseball fan. I think he definitely got a kick out of getting this job. But one thing he convinced the players of, which ran counter to what the owners had been telling them for a long time, is that they were the game. He preached that his whole career. ‘You are the game. You’re the reason why people come to the game.’ And some of the players, like Joe Torre, later talked about the fact that ‘I was always taught by my teams that I was interchangeable. I had no stake in this situation. The owners were the game, and we were lucky to play.’ The owners would tell this to the press, and a lot of the public, frankly, believed that you’re damn lucky to have this job. Tim McCarver said, ‘I just assumed these people were going to take care of me. And I learned later, the hard way, that they weren’t going to take care of me. I had to take care of myself and the players.’ It definitely created this ‘rah, rah’ thing among the players that, ‘Yeah, it’s us. That’s the game.’ And I think that made them really stick together in the tough times that were ahead.”

On public misconceptions about revenue sharing and team finances

• Frankel: “I don’t know if misunderstood is the right word, but fans and the general public maybe just don’t know as much about … the financial support that exists for all 30 clubs in the system right now, but in particular (for) smaller market, lower revenue clubs. I’ll break that down three ways. One is national revenue — that’s revenue generated by MLB and distributed equally to the 30 clubs. That includes a lot of things, but the main thing it includes is national TV dollars, ESPN, Fox. … That’s billions of dollars brought in and distributed equally to all 30 clubs. What this practically means is that the World Series winner each year gets the same cut of postseason TV dollars as the team that finishes last in the standings. … Second, we have a collectively bargained system of revenue sharing that transfers every year hundreds of millions of dollars from higher revenue teams — Dodgers, Yankees, Cubs, Red Sox, a few examples — to lower revenue teams. We’re in Cleveland, Cleveland is one of those teams. But other examples, Tampa, Miami, Pittsburgh (are) all receiving collectively hundreds of millions of dollars. And then the third example is luxury tax proceeds. We have a system right now where higher payroll teams are taxed and half of it is distributed again to lower revenue teams. So we have systems in place right now that provide significant support for all teams in all markets, but particularly for lower revenue teams. In this round of negotiations, we’re essentially proposing to enhance how revenue sharing works, to provide in the case of revenue sharing more support for some of these lower revenue teams, but make sure that revenue shows up back on the field.”

On attributes that makes for a successful player representative

• Frankel: “I can start by saying it doesn’t really matter what I or anyone who works at the players association wants in a rep. It exclusively matters what other players want in their reps. The reps are elected by their teammates. That being said, there are some core qualities and characteristics we see amongst most of our player reps and executive subcommittee members. … Communication and education are the most important things. Our reps tend to be very good at soliciting feedback from their clubhouses and then providing the information we give them and educating their teammates. I think a lot of the guys are well educated and understand the history of the union, understand the stuff we’re talking about today, understand what players before them fought for, and what essentially gave them the rights they have now. I guess the last thing I’ll say is they understand the responsibility. It’s a huge responsibility. These guys have a day job. Sitting in bargaining meetings listening to lawyers blab for two hours isn’t always the most fun, but they do it. They’re educated, they keep their teammates educated, and they understand what they’re doing now is going to be important, not just for them, but essentially generations of players to come after them.”

For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.

On Saturday, August 1, 2026, the Cleveland Guardians Analytics Panel was held at SABR 54 at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.

Panelists included Sky Andrecheck, Assistant General Manager of the Cleveland Guardians; Kyle Burris, Vice President of Baseball Research and Development with the Cleveland Guardians; and Keith Woolner, Principal Data Scientist in Baseball Research and Development for the Cleveland Guardians. The panel was moderated by Zack Meisel, Senior Writer at The Athletic.

• Audio: Click here to listen to the Cleveland Guardians Analytics Panel at SABR 54 (58:24; MP3)

Here are some highlights:

On the evolution of baseball front offices

• Andrecheck: “I think it’s amazing just to think about how much the game has changed and how much more emphasis there is on analytics than there ever was before. When I was growing up, I was a huge baseball fan, a huge math guy, and had always dreamed of working in a baseball front office, but there was really no path. But we all know Moneyball happened, and I was lucky enough to have Keith hire me in 2010. At that point, there were not that many jobs in the game. And now we’ve seen front offices explode with the number of analysts. But what’s also amazing to me, that I didn’t necessarily foresee, is the explosion of data that’s available. When I first walked into the Cleveland offices, we pretty much just had the box score data, and pitch effects had just come online. We were starting to get some data about pitch characteristics, but besides that, we didn’t have a lot else to work with. And now, just the explosion of data, everything that’s being tracked with Statcast, biomechanics, and everything else, it’s created so many more interesting things to look into throughout the game.”
• Woolner: “I collected baseball cards. I was good at math. But there was never an indication there would be a place in the baseball front office for someone with my skill set, particularly someone who was a very bad baseball player. When I got to college, just on a whim, I did send a resume to the commissioner’s office and I got two letters back. The first one was a very polite form rejection letter, and the other one was a misdirected memo that was supposed to be sent to umpires about how long the breaks between innings were going to be in the upcoming season. And to this day, I’m still not sure which one I’m supposed to frame.”

On using data to support player development and on-field strategy

• Burris: “It’s a little bit of everything, right? Everything from thinking about things like pitch design, if this guy were able to throw 1 mile an hour harder or get his cutter to cut 1 inch more, how much more effective would that pitch be? Or something along the lines of defensive positioning, in order to maximize the likelihood of an out or minimize the expected run scored by the offense, where would be the best place to position the fielders? … What’s really kind of cool since I’ve started is how much of a complicated engineering problem solving some of the baseball analytics problems have been. The biomechanics data, especially when you’re processing that data at scale, that’s going to be a real engineering bear to have to work through. So it’s not just a growth in the analytics departments, it’s a growth in baseball systems. Folks who are working with the data on the back end and then also folks who are working with the data on the front end. That way we can essentially take the data in, harness it, apply analytical tooling to that, and then be able to display that for folks throughout the organization.”

On the pressures of the trading deadline

• Andrecheck: “I think your organization is trying to capture all the information about all the players that we could potentially acquire, and of course, about our own information on our own players as well. So our decision makers, Chris Antonetti and Mike Chernoff, are really canvassing our entire organization to try to leverage that information, gather as much information as we can, and then bring that into an ultimate decision. The analytics we provide are a big part of that. Obviously, also our scouting or player development group, we have a lot of different inputs that go into that in order to hopefully make the best decisions we can at the deadline.”

On the path from writing to working in a front office for a team

• Woolner: “When I first got this job in 2007, I thought, ‘Wow, this is so cool. I have one of 30 jobs that will ever exist in this industry.’ At the time, I could not conceive of a team really needing more than one — there were certainly no teams that had gone and gotten more than one. I look at it now, and it’s a genuine career path that people can aspire to that. There are sports analytics tracks in colleges that can prepare people for the kind of work we’re doing. And the hiring has not let up. We have hundreds of people now in R&D and analytics groups across front offices, and that’s not including all of the vendors and other companies supplying technology and information and services to help us do our analytics. So it’s grown much bigger than I ever thought it would, and it makes me doubt whether people should ever trust anything I forecast.”

For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.

On Friday, July 31, 2026, the 1990s Cleveland Indians Panel was held at SABR 54 at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.

Panelists included Sandy Alomar Jr., 1990 American League Rookie of the Year, Gold Glove-winning catcher, and 1997 All-Star Game MVP; Carlos Baerga, fan favorite as a switch-hitting second baseman during his 14-year major league career; Mike Hargrove, who won two AL pennants and 5 consecutive AL Central Division titles as Cleveland’s manager from 1991 to 1999; Kenny Lofton, all-around star center fielder who holds Cleveland franchise record for stolen bases; and Charles Nagy, three-time All-Star pitcher and Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame inductee. The panel was moderated by Paul Hoynes, Cleveland Plain Dealer sports writer and 2026 BBWAA Career Excellence Award recipient.

• Audio: Click here to listen to the 1990s Cleveland Indians Panel at SABR 54 (1:26:47; MP3)

Here are some highlights:

On playing in front of 455 consecutive sellouts in Cleveland

• Nagy: “It was just awesome. We came from a place (Municipal Stadium) that had 75,000 (seats) and we pretty much knew everyone who was in the stands. When we weren’t doing well and someone was yelling at you, you were like, ‘Bob, I heard that.’ … (Jacobs Field) was a state-of-the-art facility. People came out in the beginning to check out the new stadium and see what it was all about. And then we came out of the gate hot and started playing well, and then they just stayed. It was fantastic. It’s a tribute to the fans, we were so excited, they stayed from one through nine, no matter if we were down by three or up by four. We knew we always had a chance to win those games.” 

On Cleveland’s powerful offense

• Alomar: “We always thought we were never out of the game. With the top of our lineup (Kenny Lofton and Omar Vizquel), we always had traffic (on the bases). … The excitement of playing in front of a sellout crowd, I felt like other teams, (especially) their bullpens, felt that too. It was almost like a playoff atmosphere every single day. When pitchers saw the bottom of the lineup (for other teams), they were like, ‘Oh man, I get a break right here.’ But there was no break with us, because everyone made contact and there was power up and down the lineup.”

On playing with Albert Belle

• Hargrove: “I don’t know which story to tell you. I got a couple I can’t tell you!”
• Lofton: “On any team I’m on, I want Albert Belle hitting fourth and playing left field, without a doubt. One thing about Albert, he was an RBI machine. People see all the antics and the things he did … but if you put a man on base and he strikes out, he is pissed. You put a runner in scoring position, he gets mad. … Carlos Baerga, we all know was (also) an RBI machine. If I’m on base and Carlos hits a double, I’m scoring. There was one time, I’m on first base and Carlos and Albert were going for the RBI team lead. Carlos hits a double and I touch second, I’m rounding third, I’m going to score. I look up, and Albert Belle is halfway down the line with his bat telling me to hold! He did not want Carlos to get that RBI. It was him, not the coach. And he ended up getting the base hit and I scored, and he got the RBI. So that’s Albert.”  
• Baerga: “He had to be perfect. He wanted to get better every day. This guy wrote everything down. You know how many little books he had, on every pitcher? I didn’t do that, but he did it — every year since he came up to the big leagues. … Every year he wanted to be the first player to throw out a baserunner from left field at third base. He did it five times in a row. I remember Mike (Hargrove) getting pissed off at him, ‘What are you doing? Hit the cutoff!’ … But Albert was one of the best players that I ever played with. I know he’s a Hall of Famer. Nobody put up the numbers that Albert Belle put up.”
• Alomar: “Albert was very analytically driven. He could play in this era, big-time. The one difference between him and Juan Soto is Albert would go out of his zone to get an RBI where Juan Soto will take a walk. Albert always said, ‘Batting averages can go up and down, but RBIs can only go up.’ ” 
• Nagy: “He wanted to play every day. He was in the lineup every day, regardless of how he felt, who was pitching, the weather. And everyone saw that and everyone respected him for that. He played hard and, to his credit, he became a really good outfielder. And his hitting spoke for itself.” 

On his 30-game hitting streak in 1997

• Alomar: “I was most focused on the pitching staff. I didn’t realize I was in a hitting streak until it was around 12 (games). You get a walk here, you get a blooper, you don’t feel like you hit the ball hard, and you don’t fee like you got a hit. People started bringing it to my attention and I’m like, ‘OK, now I gotta think about this too?’ The most important part was taking care of the pitching staff. But for some reason, I felt healthy the whole year, I was making hard contact more often than not. I don’t know, I got lucky many times. A couple of times I pinch-hit — thanks, Grover! He tried to screw up my hitting streak because he put me in as a pinch-hitter. He said, ‘I need a win, I don’t care about a hitting streak.’ “

For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.

On Saturday, August 1, 2026, Billy Altman gave a presentation on “Learning the Score: Bats, Balls, and Rock & Roll” during the SABR 54 convention at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Altman is an award-winning cultural journalist, critic and historian; a founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; and an official scorer for Major League Baseball at New York Mets and Yankees games since 2004.

• Audio: Click here to listen to Billy Altman’s presentation, “Learning the Score,” at SABR 54 (58:45; MP3)

Here are some highlights:

On changing calls as an official scorer

• “You have up to 24 hours to change a call. With all the betting and everything, we’re encouraged to make calls as quickly as we can. You want to make sure you made the right call. Sometimes you might not see that a ball takes a bad hop. We can always look at a replay, if we’re not sure about a call. But you have to make the call first. And sometimes a media member will call or they call us from the dugout and ask us to take a second look at a play, and we’re happy to do so. The players are also able to do an appeal if they want to. It goes in front of a committee. You have to have a thick skin to do this job.”  

On baseball and music connections

• “I got to be good friends with Mike Piazza. He liked a lot of hair metal, Guns N’ Roses, Ratt, Poison, Motley Crue. In 2004, the Beastie Boys put out an album called To the 5 Boroughs, which they dedicated to New York after 9/11. And they had one song called “3 the Hard Way” and in the middle of this song, they rhymed Piazza with matzah. I got an advance on this and I’m in the Mets clubhouse and I say, ‘Mike, you got a shoutout on a Beastie Boys song.’ And he said, ‘Dude, no way!’ And I said, ‘Yes, way!’ So I got the record company to send Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ PR guy, a copy of the CD. I walk into the Mets clubhouse during their next homestand and as I’m walking in, I get punched in the right shoulder. I turn around and it’s Piazza. He says, ‘Dude, way!’ “

On opening the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

• “When the Rock Hall opened in 1995, we were all coming out from New York to Cleveland. I’d been writing for Rolling Stone since 1974. And whenever I went up to the office to deliver a review, [magazine co-founder] Jann Wenner came up to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jann Wenner.’ And this went on every time. ‘Hi, I’m Jann Wenner.’ When the Rock Hall opened in 1995, they had a walk-through for us. We’re going down the escalator, and Jann Wenner is down there with one of his sons. We get to the bottom and Jann walks over and he says, ‘Billy, great to see you. You guys did a great job.’ And later I said, ‘I’ve known Jann Wenner for 20 years and this is the first time he’s ever remembered my name.’ And my friend looks at me and he says, ‘Billy, we’re wearing name tags.’ ”     

For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, acclaimed filmmaker David S. Ward and author Jonathan Knight led a discussion about the classic baseball film Major League during the SABR 54 convention at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. A screening of the film for SABR 54 attendees followed the Q&A.

Ward is the writer and director of Major League, the classic 1989 baseball film about the Cleveland Indians, along with a pair of sequels. The Indians were his favorite childhood team while he was growing up in northern Ohio. His screenplay for The Sting won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1974. He was also nominated for an Oscar in the same category in 1994 for Sleepless in Seattle (co-written with Nora Ephron and Jeff Arch). His other feature films include Cannery Row, King Ralph, and The Program.

Knight is the author of The Making of Major League: A Juuuust a Bit Inside Look at the Classic Baseball Comedy, a best-seller on the classic 1989 film. He has also written 10 other books on Cleveland sports history and other topics. He served as editor of the Classic Sports series from Kent State University Press and he is a graduate of Ohio University’s prestigious E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

• Video: Click here to watch the Major League Q&A with David S. Ward at SABR 54 (YouTube)

Here are some highlights:

On finding new audiences in the 21st century

• Ward: “Every kid — boys and girls now, because girls are playing a lot of softball and even hardball now — wants to see the well-known baseball movies because they’ve heard about them. So every year, we have a new group of young people seeing the movie. There are four or five of those: The Sandlot, Bull Durham, Major League. … There haven’t been a lot of baseball movies made lately, because they don’t do that well (internationally). They play pretty well in Japan, in South Korea, maybe in China a little bit. But not in the rest of the world. They don’t make many baseball movies anymore for that reason. So the best baseball movies were made many years ago. People who love baseball still watch those movies.”

On casting actors with varied baseball experience

• Ward: “When I was casting, I would take actors outside, I’d give them a glove, and we’d play catch. I saw how they caught and how they threw. I had one guy tell me he had played Triple-A ball in the Cardinals organization. I took him outside and he couldn’t catch the ball I threw him. First of all, actors will lie about this! They will tell you they can do things they can’t do. I traveled all the way to South Carolina to meet Tom [Berenger] in Beaufort. His mechanics were fine. I wasn’t able to hit with him yet. The only player, strangely enough, who admitted he had never really played baseball was Wesley Snipes. But Wesley was one of the best athletes I had ever met. He was a dancer, originally. Before Major League, he had done a small boxing film. I cast him because he was so talented and so funny and I figured, ‘We’ll figure this out.’ But he was the only one. Chelcie Ross [who played pitcher Eddie Harris] had a little arthritis in his arm, but he used to play baseball, and that’s why we made him a junkballer. … What we did was we had a two-week training camp that Steve Yeager ran. He was the former Dodger catcher who was our consultant. … Baseball involves very quick stops and starts. And if you’re not in shape to do that, you’re going to get hurt.”  

On the crowd at Milwaukee County Stadium, where the film was shot

• Ward: “The most amazing experience I’ve ever had as a director was the night that we had 27,000 people there and to have everyone singing ‘Wild Thing.’ We crowded them all in the background behind home plate and down the first-base line. It was incredible. When [Pedro] Cerrano is running around the bases with the bat, they would stand and cheer. All of the actors came up to me and said, ‘This is the greatest experience I’ve ever had.’ You really don’t know what it’s like for baseball players to have the crowd behind them. They say they don’t hear it, they do. They’re human, they’ve gotta hear it. … But when that whole stadium was standing up and singing ‘Wild Thing,’ and those young girls came out and stood on the top of the dugout — we had six cameras and I turned to Rey [cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos] and said, ‘Do we have a camera on that?’ … It just was remarkable. We had the lyrics to ‘Wild Thing’ on the scoreboard and they were all belting it out. … Today they’d put that crowd in digitally. We had ’em live.”

On the inspiration for Jake Taylor’s bunt in the final scene

• Ward: “Most sports movies come down to the final game and the big moment of victory. And I felt like if we’re going to end a baseball movie, let’s not have somebody hit the big home run. Let’s do it in a way that involves a couple of players doing something you may have never seen before. I had never seen a guy score from second base on a bunt that was still in play. And then I thought, Jake Taylor [played by Tom Berenger] is not going to give any indication to the third baseman that he’s going to bunt. So he calls his shot. Which to both the pitcher and Yankee fans feels like, ‘Oh my god, what a piece of pretension that is!’ So he calls his shot, gets some chin music, gets dusted off, and then he does it again. … I just felt like, I haven’t seen that before and I hope people appreciate a different way to end a sports movie.” 

For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, Chris Antonetti of the Cleveland Guardians delivered the welcome remarks at SABR 54 at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.

Antonetti is the President of Baseball Operations for the Cleveland Guardians and in his 11th season as the club’s top baseball decision-maker. He was named 2016 Executive of the Year by Baseball America following the club’s World Series run. He has been with the organization since 1998, and served as Executive Vice President/General Manager from 2011 to 2015 and Assistant GM/Vice President of Baseball Operations from 2002 to 2010.

The session was moderated by Vince Guerrieri, president of SABR’s Jack Graney Chapter in Cleveland.

• Audio: Click here to listen to Chris Antonetti’s welcome remarks at SABR 54 (56:21; MP3)

Here are some highlights:

On staying with the same organization for many years

• Antonetti: “It starts with the people that I have been fortunate to work alongside in Cleveland. People often ask, what is it about the Guardians organization that keeps you here and that makes it successful? I know it’s somewhat cliche to say, but it’s really the people. I had an opportunity to come to the organization in November of 1998. Mark Shapiro hired me, John Hart was the GM, and Neal Huntington — who actually hired me with the Montreal Expos — was helping to lead the player development department. From the moment I joined the organization, I was immersed in a culture of learning and curiosity. There were incredibly high standards and a desire to be the best in the game at what we do. Being immersed in that environment really helped bring out, I hope, the best of me. And the fact that Mark and others continued to believe in me and give me maybe more responsibility than I thought I was ready for energized me to try to do the best I could do in whatever role I had. From that moment, one of our guiding principles has always been: let’s make sure we try to do the best we can to hire people that are going to make us materially better as an organization in some ways. And 28 years later, after hiring lots of people, I continue to feel privileged to work alongside so many great people that challenge me every day to be a better version of myself and that environment I’m grateful our ownership has allowed us to cultivate, and the continuity that we’ve had has made it a truly special place to work.”

On changes in baseball operations since 1998

• Antonetti: “When I joined the Guardians front office in November of 1998, there were eight of us that resided there in the baseball operations department here in Cleveland. There’s currently nearly 60 people in Cleveland. It’s ridiculous for me to say, especially in front of this room, but I was the analytics department and the R&D group at that time. It’s comical, knowing how far we’ve come in that space and things like research and development, strategy and analytics, sports science, performance science, mental skills, all of those areas weren’t built out in baseball at that time. We’ve seen a massive growth in the game and with that, there’s been a tremendous growth in data and what’s available to us and how we look at the game. That informs a lot more of our decisions in different ways than it did maybe 25 years ago.”

On the possibility of a labor stoppage in the 2027 MLB season

• Antonetti: “There’s two different ways I have to think about that in my role. First, the short term — which is, how do we build our team and what impact might that have as we think about trading players, acquiring players, and building our team in 2026 and beyond, and then try to weigh that against what we think might happen in the future. Then there’s the other element, to make sure regardless of what 2027 brings, we continue to be an adaptable, resilient organization that can get to the other side no matter what, no matter when there’s (a collective bargaining) agreement or what the structure looks like. So we kind of look at it through both of those lenses. On the first lens, there is admittedly uncertainty for what that means in 2027. As we’re thinking about maybe acquiring players that have control beyond this year, we have to think about how do we price that out and what talent we’re willing to give up, if we’re trying to trade back for a player. But beyond that, because it is unpredictable and we don’t know exactly what it will look like, we don’t place too much emphasis and allow that to impact the short-term planning of our team too much.”

On public response to the Guardians’ name change in 2021

• Antonetti: “There are a lot of very strong feelings on both sides of the coin. The good thing about doing this job for as long as I have is I’ve gotten used to a lot of people yelling at me. That’s just part of the deal, whether it’s about the name change or our terrible offense at the moment. … I do think it was the right decision for the organization, and I am certainly appreciative of our history and what the Indians’ name meant to so many people. And we’re not trying to forget about that. But I do think the more we engage with the Native American community, the more we really understood the negative impact it has had on them and their constituents, we felt we needed to be responsive to that and become an organization that could be more inclusive and more welcoming of everybody. It’s really sad when you hear stories about people literally making choices not to take their young children to the ballpark because of the name or because of a logo or because of an icon. And we thought we can do better as an organization, so let’s try to do that.”

For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.

On Wednesday, July 29, 2026, Bob Kendrick of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum sat down for a fireside chat at SABR 54 at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.

Kendrick has served as president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City since 2011. He has been responsible for the creation of several signature museum educational programs and events, including Buck O’Neil’s Birthday Bash and the Hall of Game. Kendrick has been associated with the museum for more than three decades, beginning as a volunteer during his 10-year newspaper career at the Kansas City Star. He was appointed to the museum’s Board of Directors in 1993, became its first Director of Marketing in 1998, and was named Vice President of Marketing in 2009 before accepting his current position.

The session was moderated by Stephanie Liscio, the author of Integrating Cleveland Baseball: Media Activism, the Integration of the Indians, and the Demise of the Negro League Buckeyes. She is a past president of SABR’s Jack Graney Chapter in Cleveland and a board member for SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee.

• Audio: Click here to listen to Bob Kendrick’s fireside chat at SABR 54 (35:57; MP3)

Here are some highlights:

On visiting League Park in Cleveland

• Kendrick: “I get the same emotion every time I step on what I consider to be sacred, very hallowed grounds as it relates to the history of the Negro Leagues. To think about all the legendary stars that called League Park home, what it would have been like to go to a game there, and the fact that that ballpark is absolutely gorgeous. It is beautiful. And to see it active again and to think about perhaps the next Sam Jethroe might come through that park at some point in time, or Quincy Trouppe or some of the other legendary stars that called Cleveland home. It just gives you goosebumps.”

On Cleveland baseball artifacts at the Negro Leagues Museum

• Kendrick: “One of our prized possessions came from the Archie Ware family. … Archie Ware was a tremendous first baseman for the Cleveland Buckeyes, helped them win the 1945 Negro League World Series. Of course, they swept the powerful Homestead Grays, who were prohibitive favorites to beat the Buckeyes. The Grays had Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson in the middle of a juggernaut offensive lineup. And the Buckeyes caught them at the right time because they swept them. I think they only gave up three runs in that entire series. But Archie Ware was a tremendous first baseman, and we have his collection. Young major league athletes, y’all, they get a kick because part of his collection is an old steel cup. As I tell people, it was crude but effective. We also have his travel bag. But the centerpiece of the collection is his championship ring that was won while playing in Venezuela. Think about what I just said. Venezuela just won the World Baseball Classic. And it speaks to the fact that the Negro Leagues had gone to those Spanish-speaking countries decades ago where they were treated like heroes. Staying in the finest hotels those countries could offer, eating in the finest restaurants those countries could offer, teaching the brand of baseball that you see so many Spanish-speaking athletes play to this day. I had the honor of taking our great catcher, who I think is going to be a future Hall of Famer, the great Salvador Perez [of the Kansas City Royals], through the museum. Needless to say, he was blown away by seeing Archie Ware’s championship ring playing in his native homeland of Venezuela.”

On the impact of Larry Doby

• Kendrick: “I was very fortunate to have Larry Doby Jr. as a guest on my podcast (Black Diamonds at SiriusXM). And it was really interesting talking to Junior because he’s so young that a lot of the history around his father, he didn’t really know. … I had the honor of meeting Larry Doby before he passed away. It was at the All Star Game, and I was hanging out with the legendary Buck O’Neil. Any time you hang out with Buck O’Neil, you get an opportunity to meet a lot of people. … And the first thing that struck me about Larry Doby was his tremendous graciousness. He was as gracious a human being as you will ever want to meet. And obviously, his journey into Major League Baseball was significant. The second man, as I like to say, to walk on the moon. Because for black folks, Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier carried the same level of euphoria we saw collectively as a nation when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. In many ways, Jackie was our Neil Armstrong. Well, Larry Doby was our Buzz Aldrin. People seemingly forget that Buzz walked on the moon. Buzz walked on the moon just seconds after Neil Armstrong. And poor Buzz gets no love. The thing that I find so intriguing, I guess you could say, is that both Larry Doby and Buzz Aldrin lived in Montclair, New Jersey, the two second men to walk on the moon. Larry’s story is so profound, and I’m so thrilled there’s a concerted effort to pay attention to Larry Doby’s pioneering role in this game. Because it’s almost human nature, we don’t necessarily celebrate number two. We always celebrate the first. We rarely ever celebrate the second and of course, if you’re number 16, then pretty much forget it. We have an exhibition at the museum called “Barrier Breakers.” It chronicles all of baseball’s integration pioneers, from Jackie joining Brooklyn through, of course, Elijah “Pumpsie” Green completing the integration cycle 12 years later. It took 12 years before every major league team had at least one Black baseball player, with Boston being the last. Larry Doby was 23 years old when he joined Cleveland. He was just a baby, thrown into a powder keg of racism. And he handled himself with the same great grace, class, and dignity that we rightfully celebrate Jackie for having demonstrated.”

For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.