Heaphy, Flinn re-elected; Levitt elected as SABR Director

SABR members have re-elected Vice President Leslie Heaphy and Treasurer F.X. Flinn, and elected newcomer Daniel Levitt to the organization’s Board of Directors in the 2020 election.

Leslie Heaphy was re-elected as SABR’s Vice President in an unopposed race, receiving 934 of 938 first-preference votes.

F.X. Flinn was re-elected as SABR’s Treasurer in an unopposed race, receiving 926 of 933 first-preference votes.

Daniel Levitt was elected as a SABR Director, receiving 355 of 953 first-preference votes. Tara Krieger finished runner-up with 249 first-preference votes. Gregory H. Wolf received 153 first-preference votes, John McMurray 120, and Karl Cicitto 71.

Heaphy was first elected to the SABR Board in 2010 and elected as Vice-President in 2016. She has been a member of SABR since 1989 and chair of the Women in Baseball Committee since 1995. She 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 Canton, Ohio.

Flinn is the senior member of the SABR Board, first elected as Treasurer in 2001. In 1990, he started Expert Systems Development Corp, an IT consulting firm specializing in data warehousing, knowledge management and process development. After graduating from Cornell University in 1975, he worked in the trade book publishing industry for Doubleday and Bantam. In 1981 he became involved with the Rotisserie League founders and in 1984 published the first book on fantasy sports, Rotisserie League Baseball. Flinn comes from a large extended family, and while he and his wife have no children, they enjoy doting on more than a score of nieces and nephews. They live in Quechee, Vermont.

Levitt will be serving his first term on the SABR Board. He is an award-winning author of four baseball books, past president of SABR’s Halsey Hall Chapter in Minnesota, and the recipient of the Henry Chadwick Award (2017) and Bob Davids Award (2015). His book, The Battle That Forged Modern Baseball: The Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy, won the Larry Ritter Award in 2013 and Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way (with Mark Armour) won the Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award in 2004. He is a Senior Vice President for Ryan Companies US, Inc., where he manages the capital markets for Ryan-owned properties. He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison but migrated home to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Special thanks go out to Tellers Committee members Stephen Barnes, Richard Kirschner, and Kevin Schlinder for certifying the results on May 5 in a virtual meeting and to the Nominations Committee of Anthony Salazar, Lorene Kennard, and Clayton Trutor for their help in preparing the candidate statements.

The 2020 SABR elections featured online voting for the 11th consecutive year as well as traditional paper ballots. A total of 953 votes were received, constituting about 17.25 percent of the membership.

SABR members can find complete 2020 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 5, 2020. Last Updated: May 29, 2020.