Bob Broeg St. Louis Chapter meeting recap – 11/15/2016
Twenty members and guests of the Bob Broeg St. Louis Chapter gathered at The Original Crusoe’s Restaurant in South St. Louis on Tuesday, November 15, 2016.
Chapter president Brian Flaspohler called the meeting to order. Here in the heart of Cardinals Country we gave recognition to the new World Series champion Chicago Cubs and presented our resident die-hard Cubs fan, Burton Boxerman, with a cupcake that was topped with a Cubs decoration. Chapter treasurer, Wayne Hebden, passed out envelopes with an annual request for donations to help cover costs for the upcoming Hot Stove Luncheon on SABR Day and other various chapter expenses. If there are any members reading this, that were not present, and would like to make a contribution, send it to Wayne’s home address.
The passing of longtime member Edward Robert “Bob” Meyer Jr. was acknowledged. Bob had been a member for 20 years.
Items noted in “Today in Baseball History” largely dealt with league awards: 1946 – Ted Williams was named the A.L MVP. !961 – Roger Maris, on the strength of his 61 home runs, wins his second consecutive A. L. MVP award. 1962 – Don Drysdale wins the N.L. Cy Young Award. 1967 – Triple Crown winner Carl Yastrzemski is the overwhelming winner of the A.L. MVP. 1979 – Dave Goltz is selected by the maximum 13 teams in the free-agent reentry draft, which was then used as a way of allowing teams the right to deal with free agents. 1988 – Dodgers outfielder Kirk Gibson wins the N. L. MVP award.
Carl Riechers gave an interesting report on how he does the time-consuming task of fact-checking for the SABR BioProject, using several resources like Baseball-Reference.com (including the Play Index), Retrosheet, and The Sporting News archives available on the SABR website.
Ryan Parker posed a question to the group about a scoring decision that he noticed while researching the 1934 World Series on a batter’s interference called in the fifth game. It seems as if it was scored differently in various resources.
John Schoon entertained us with a humorous dissertation on the history of punctuation.
With the 2016 season in the books, it was time to look back at the preseason predictions by the chapter members. Thirteen people tried their luck this year to foresee the future and Wayne Hebden was the winner, based largely on being the only one to predict the Cubs as the World Series winner.
Bob Tiemann’s trivia topic was “Test Your Stan Musial Knowledge”. Bob Giovanni was the winner with a score of 43 out of a possible 48 and won a Stan Musial T-shirt.
The next Baseball Fellowship Gathering (formerly known as the alternate meeting) will be on Wednesday, December 7 at the Sports Café, 3579 Pennridge Drive in Bridgeton. Next month’s regular meeting will be Monday, December 19 at Crusoe’s.
— Jim Leefers