40th anniversary edition of the Baseball Research Journal
“Life begins at 40,” or so the saying goes. Having crossed the 40-year threshold myself a few years back, I take it to mean that when one reaches 40, everything gets better. Life is even more enjoyable thanks to the stature one has achieved and the mastery one may have gained through experience. In modern game parlance, one “levels up.”
That’s where SABR is at this moment. We’re reaching a stage where knowledge and understanding of the game are leaping forward based on the foundations built in our earlier days.
We don’t often do “themed” issues of the Baseball Research Journal, but to celebrate our 40th anniversary, we asked for papers looking at 1971 (the year of SABR’s founding) to the present. We hoped to encourage new contributors to try publication and also to remind folks that the present is history in the making. If we do not record our current era, we make the task of future historians harder. What we received ranges from pieces that reference SABR directly, like Rick Schell’s look at how SABR and computers grew up together, to others that overlap or loosely coincide with the “SABR era,“ like Tim Ponisciak’s history of tabletop baseball games and Zachary Jendro’s article on baseball museums since 1971.
In addition to these great articles, Herm Krabbenhoft continues his extraordinary research into Lou Gehrig’s career RBI record. We’ve posted exclusive supplemental material from his research notes at SABR.org and you can fact-check his work yourself.
Today at SABR.org, we’re offering everyone a free preview of the 40th anniversary edition of the Baseball Research Journal.
- Click here to read Gary Gillette and Lyle Spatz’s article “Not Chiseled in Stone: Baseball’s Enduring Records and the SABR Era”, on how SABR members have filled in missing details and corrected erroneous beliefs about the numbers you know and love in the baseball record books.
- Click here to check out an interactive collage of the cover images on the Fall 2011 Baseball Research Journal. Who’s on the cover and why are these players significant in the SABR Era?
SABR members can read every article from the Fall 2011 edition of the Baseball Research Journal online by clicking on the magazine cover above. SABR members receive full online and print access to every article in the Baseball Research Journal, which is published twice annually. (To become a member of SABR, click here to join.) The articles from 1971 to 2010 on our Baseball Research Journal archives page, however, are open to everyone.
Cecilia Tan is SABR’s Publications Editor. Contact her at ctan@sabr.org.
Originally published: November 18, 2011. Last Updated: November 18, 2011.