SABR 53: Poster Presentations
Here is the list of SABR 53 poster presentations that will be on display throughout the convention on June 25-29, 2025, at the Westin DFW Airport hotel in Irving, Texas. Abstracts and presenter bios are available below.
P01: Andrew Jett, “The 1943 Camp Hood Baseball Season”
Jackie Robinson didn’t play baseball at Camp Hood in 1943. Many other soldiers, however – Black and white – did play, and they left a record of their leagues and games. Using the base’s archives as well as newspaper articles about the semi-pro tournament in Waco, Jett paints a picture of baseball at Camp Hood, from rosters to standings, team photos to game reports.
Andrew Jett (andrewmjett@gmail.com) graduated from Trinity University in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science. Since then, he has volunteered with Retrosheet rectifying discrepancies in play-by-play data of the 1911 and 1910 seasons. He has also worked to deduce play-by-play for Negro Leagues games based on newspaper stories. Currently, he works at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Other projects he has worked on include transcribing data as a citizen archivist for NARA, and transcription projects for the Wiener Holocaust Library.
P02: Ebenezer Olubayode, “Real-Time Biomechanical Feedback for Injury Prevention in Baseball Pitching”
The revolution in biomechanical analysis of pitchers’ motions continues unabated. While most tracking systems are based on post-game analysis of the reams of collected data, Olubayode describes an analytic system that can provide immediate feedback to the pitcher, who may be able to adjust his approach based on the results. The PitchPerfectAI system uses computer vision and AI-driven motion analysis to achieve its results. Beyond baseball, it may have utility in medical rehabilitation of musculoskeletal and stroke patients.
Ebenezer Olubayode (olubayodeeben@gmail.com) is a sports data analyst with expertise in baseball analytics, scouting, player evaluation, and sports business strategy. Growing up in Nigeria, where baseball opportunities were scarce, he developed a deep understanding of the game through independent research and statistical analysis. He holds SABR, Rapsodo, and professional scouting certifications. At the University of Oklahoma, he teaches fitness courses and works with the Sooners softball team, tracking offensive play calls, assessing batter-pitcher matchups, and optimizing lineups. His research focuses on statistical Bayesian modeling, biomechanics, and injury prevention, and he has presented at the SABR Analytics Conference and Sabermetrics: Scouting & Science of Baseball Conference.
P03: Dan Cichalski, “Route 66: Mickey Mantle’s Road to the Show”
While many travelers throughout history, both real (folk singer Woody Guthrie) and fictional (John Steinbeck’s Joad family in “The Grapes of Wrath”) used the road to travel west in search of a better life, Route 66 took Mickey east to the Yankees. Route 66 connected Mickey and his high school teammates to the schools they’d compete against in the 1940s as he honed his skills, and his home ballpark when he played his one minor league season for the Joplin Miners was just blocks from the Mother Road. Cichalski shows Mantle’s path to the majors along Route 66, showing photos, landmarks, clippings and maps tracing Mickey’s rise to stardom.
Dan Cichalski (njbaseball@gmail.com) has been an editor and writer at MLB.com since 2006. A 1998 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he covered minor league baseball for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey from 1999-2002, serving as the beat reporter for the Lakewood BlueClaws during their first two seasons. Dan and his wife, Casey, live in Clifton, N.J., with their cats – except for the three weeks in November 2019 when they drove the length of Route 66 in a camper van. Whenever possible, they try to include a baseball game in their travel itineraries.
P04: John Nogowski, “The Deception of Whitey Ford”
As a reliable left-handed starter for the dynastic New York Yankees from the 1950s through the middle sixties, Edward “Whitey” Ford’s game was always deception rather than throwing hard. Nogowski shows how Ford’s pitching style wasn’t the only thing that was deceptive. So was his record. Nogowski points out that Ford rarely started “win or go home” games, almost never pitched in Fenway Park, and didn’t face the Red Sox as much as most of the other teams. His poster explores this idea in more depth, reviewing a variety of ways in which Yankees manager Casey Stengel seemed to choose Ford’s starts carefully.
John Nogowski (soxgreateight@yahoo.com) is a retired author, former educator and sportswriter. He has written eight books, two on baseball, including his most recent, Diamond Duels. He has written extensively on sports, music (three books on Bob Dylan), teaching, politics and currently writes a Substack. He currently is working on a book on Neil Young. His name may sound familiar as his son played in the major leagues for the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates, and was briefly a Yinzer folk hero in Pittsburgh. They are still selling his jersey there.
P05: Ed Baranoski, “Another Look Down the Expected RBI Rabbit Hole”
Our understanding of baseball has come a long way since average, home runs, and RBIs. Many statistics have grown from the use of run expectancy, which looks at a neutral evaluation comparing a player’s performance to an average player with an average line-up behind him. Others have looked at RBI expectancy, calculating expected outcomes versus the expected RBIs produced by batters over all the base-out states over a season. Statistics like win probability add situational context but are heavily weighted by what inning an event occurs and the score of the game. Baranoski balances these to separate run expectancy for a batter from the real lineup behind him for the rest of the inning. He also illustrates how this approach can be used to evaluate pitchers based on actual situational performance.
Ed Baranoski (ed.baranoski@gmail.com) has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and he worked in signal processing before his retirement. He has been a member of SABR since 2019 and he is the current Vice-President of the Bob Davids Chapter in Washington, DC. In that role, he has helped other board members across the range of chapter activities including development of by-laws, event planning, and other aspects of board leadership. He has published frequently in his field, and he submitted an early view of this work at SABR Day as his initial step into baseball research.
P06: Alan Cohen, “Negro Leagues Teams Barnstorm to Semi-Pro Venues”
Bulkeley Field in Hartford, named for a long-gone baseball executive, and Dexter Park near the Brooklyn/Queens border, named for a horse, are but two venues to which Negro League teams traveled in bygone days. White audiences would come to these ballparks to see competitive games between their local heroes and the best that Black baseball had to offer. Often Negro League teams from other cities would face off against each other, such as when the Newark Eagles and the Homestead Grays faced off in Hartford. Cohen shows stories of games played in these parks, including a game between a semi-pro team featuring Hartford native Negro Leaguer Johnny Taylor and the New York Yankees, possibly the first time that the New Yorkers played against an integrated team.
Alan Cohen (adc0317@comcast.net) has been a SABR member since 2011. He chairs the BioProject fact-checking team, serves as Vice President-Treasurer of the Connecticut Smoky Joe Wood Chapter, and is a datacaster (MiLB stringer) with the Eastern League’s Hartford Yard Goats, the Class AA affiliate of the Colorado Rockies. He also works with the Retrosheet Negro Leagues project and has served on SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee. His biographies, game stories, and essays have appeared in more than 80 baseball-related publications. He has four children, nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, and resides in Connecticut with wife Frances, their cats Zoe and Ava, and their dog Buddy.
P07: Barry Mednick, “Are Official Scorers Biased?”
Are official scorers biased? Of course not. Most official scorer duties are straightforward and unambiguous. It is rare for an official scorer to invoke the “brief and ineffective” clause to change the assignment of the winning pitcher. Pitchers and catchers are rarely evaluated based on wild pitch and passed ball totals. Most hit/error decisions are obvious, but there are a few that are not. Mednick provides a methodology to see if there are home and road differences in scoring decisions. He looks for normally distributed results and for outliers, suggesting ideas for future investigation.
Barry Mednick (bmednick@adelphia.net) is a Senior Math Quality Control Specialist for ALEKS, an educational software provider. He chairs the Allan Roth Los Angeles SABR Chapter. In addition to baseball research, his interests include cribbage and Jewish history.
P08: Allison Levin, “Packaging Baseball: Using Retro Sports Marketing to Increase Baseball Consumers”
Levin explores nostalgia’s effect on MLB spectators’ psychological, emotional, and behavioral responses, particularly how nostalgia is used to maintain positive relationships with attendee’s fan intentions. By researching the emotional and behavioral responses of fan identification, she shows the role and success of retro marketing on baseball consumers. Using content analysis, Levin looks at modern nostalgia or near history nostalgia to see how it is being used to attract millennials and Generation Z to baseball games. She examines modern nostalgia such as Emo nights and Harry Potter nights, studying the effectiveness of how they are marketed on TikTok and Instagram to see the impact the promotions have on the intended audience — social and casual fans. Levin will explore how successfully the modern nostalgia campaigns take the consumer purchase intentions and translate that to increased baseball fandom amongst the desired generations.
Allison Levin (allison.levin@gmail.com) is a Professor of Sports Communication at Webster University. Her work explores social/cultural issues of sports fandom, particularly in baseball. Allison serves as Vice President of the SABR Board of Directors. She has presented on many topics at SABR conventions over the years and enjoys finding the topics that have little research and digging into them. She is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan, but her favorite player is Clayton Kershaw.
P09: Connie Sharpe, “University Coach to Sam Crawford Manager”
Sharpe shows glimpses of American baseball culture before, during, and after World War II through the a story of a coach tagged by the Nebraska Baseball Digest to be “a real legend of Nebraska Baseball – a great leader, great Nebraskan, and a great friend of many kids that played baseball for the University of Nebraska.” He continued friendships with the dozen or so collegiate players that “went national”. Sharpe takes us through his pre-war playing days in Indiana’s last Sweet 16 Tournament, coaching an Indiana high school basketball team to win a state championship. In between time on the courts, Coach Sharpe turned to the diamonds and played with the Cincinnati minor league team in Fort Wayne, Indiana before being called up by St. Louis.
Connie Sharpe (csharpe1110@gmail.com) is a retired university professor, having taught at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Tampa. She has written for the Detroit News, Detroit Monitor, Boca Raton News, and the Pelican Press in Sarasota, Florida. She was born during World War II and found herself behind the coaches’ benches at the very early age of one. Spring training in Florida is her favorite.
P10: Steve Krevisky, “Dizzy Dean’s Traveling Arkansas-Oklahoma-New Mexico Barnstorming Team!”
There is a long-standing history of baseball teams barnstorming throughout the country. The Texas League was founded as a barnstorming league, Negro League teams barnstormed, as did the Ruth-Gehrig team. Krevisky displays a strong barnstorming team from neighboring states to Texas, including team captain Dizzy Dean, who won an MVP in the Texas League, along with other luminaries such as Mickey Mantle, Ralph Kiner, Willie Stargell, Johnny Bench, and many others. This team will challenge the Texas League to a best-of-seven championship, which should be exciting. Baseball simulation is now represented by a SABR committee, which was originally suggested by Bill James years ago, as he watched one of our GAFL league simulation games, so there is continuity with that theme in this poster.
Steve Krevisky (stephen.krevisky@ctstate.edu) is a math professor at Middlesex Community College in Connecticut. He uses baseball in his classes to motivate students. He has given many presentations, both on campus, and at national and international conferences. He has been on seven winning teams at the annual SABR Trivia Contest. He is President of the Connecticut Smoky Joe Wood Chapter and active in the Great American Fantasy League (GAFL), a baseball simulation league.
P11: Dave Raglin, “Creating a ‘Wall of Fame’ at the Hall of Fame”
Induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame is designed to be reserved for the very best players in baseball; just over one percent of major leaguers earns a spot in the Hall. And yet as we know, there are many other players who make significant contributions to our game. Raglin will discuss creating a wall of nameplates in Cooper Park next to the Hall of Fame for every player who played at least ten years in the majors. He provides rationales for suggesting 10 years is the appropriate cutoff, why Cooper Park is a good location for this wall, logistical details about the proposal, and the benefits of this wall for fans and for the Hall of Fame.
Dave Raglin (darags@ymail.com) has been a SABR member since 1984 and has attended 36 SABR national conventions. He is a board member of the Bob Davids Chapter in the Washington, DC area. He has co-edited two SABR BioProject books and contributed to several others, as well as co-authored three other books on the Detroit Tigers. He met his wife, Barb Mantegani, at a SABR event in 2001.
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