Heaphy elected as SABR Vice-President; Dial, Nowlin as Directors
Members of the Society for American Baseball Research have elected three incumbents to the organization’s Board of Directors in 2016.
Leslie Heaphy was elected as SABR’s Vice-President in an unopposed race, receiving 825 of 845 first-preference votes.
Heaphy swaps positions on the Board with Bill Nowlin, who was elected as a SABR Director, receiving 409 of 903 first-preference votes.
Chris Dial was also re-elected as a SABR Director, receiving 164 of 903 first-preference votes. Barry M. Bloom finished runner-up for a Director’s seat with 129 first-preference votes, while George Skornickel received 76, Dennis Degenhardt 72, and Barry Deutsch 51.
Heaphy was elected to the SABR Board as a Director in 2010 and re-elected in 2013. She has been a member of SABR since 1989 and chair of the Women in Baseball Committee since 1995. Leslie is an Associate Professor of History at Kent State University at Stark and publishes in the area of the Negro Leagues and women’s baseball. In 2008, she became the founding editor of the journal Black Ball, published by McFarland. She was the 2014 winner of the Bob Davids Award, SABR’s highest honor. She lives in Kent, Ohio.
Nowlin was elected as SABR’s Vice-President in 2004 and re-elected for five more terms until stepping down this year. He has specialized in Boston Red Sox research since he turned to writing and research in the late 1990s and has published about 30 books and several hundred articles, almost all of which are Red Sox-related. He is one of three founders of Rounder Records, one of America’s most successful independent record labels. He’s traveled widely, visiting more than 125 countries to date, and has recently returned to academia (he taught college for 12 years), offering an online course on “Baseball and Politics” at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He was the 2011 winner of the Bob Davids Award, SABR’s highest honor. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dial was appointed to the SABR Board in 2014. He was named in 2013 to the SABR Defensive Committee which adds a sabermetric component to the selection of the Rawlings Gold Glove Awards and Rawlings Platinum Glove Award, presented by SABR. He is the developer of a statistical measure called Runs Effectively Defended (RED), a defensive analysis system used in the formation of the SABR Defensive Index (SDI). Dial also helped create and develop the SABR initiative of Chartered Communities, which launched in the fall of 2009; he is co-chair of the Baseball Think Factory chartered community. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from what is now Pfeiffer University in North Carolina. He is Director of Integration at Catalent Pharma Solutions, where he has worked since 1998.
Special thanks go out to Tellers Committee members Mort Bloomberg, Annie Chaloupka, and Michael Holden for certifying the results on May 4 at the SABR office.
The 2016 SABR elections featured online voting for the seventh consecutive year as well as traditional paper ballots. A total of 903 votes were received, constituting about 15.90 percent of the membership.
SABR members can find complete 2016 election results, including write-in candidates and voting totals, posted here.
A historical list of SABR’s Board of Directors can be found by clicking here. Past voting totals can be found here.
Originally published: May 4, 2016. Last Updated: May 4, 2016.