Mark Armour elected as SABR President; Nowlin, Levin win Director seats

SABR members have elected a new President and Director and re-elected one incumbent to the organization’s Board of Directors in the 2019 election.

Mark Armour was elected as SABR’s President in an unopposed race, receiving 955 of 975 first-preference votes.

Bill Nowlin was re-elected as a SABR Director, receiving 552 of 1,008 first-preference votes. Allison Levin was also elected as a SABR Director, receiving 277 first-preference votes. Chris Dial finished runner-up for a Director’s seat with 177 first-preference votes.

Armour’s election creates a vacancy for a Director’s seat, and a candidate will be appointed by the Board of Directors. Any SABR member who is interested in filling the rest of that seat’s term — which begins at the conclusion of the Annual Business Meeting at SABR 49 in June and runs until 2021 — should fill out the candidate statement form and send an email to board2019@sabr.org.  

Armour is the founder and longtime director of SABR’s Baseball Biography Project from 2002-16. He was the recipient of SABR’s highest honor, the Bob Davids Award, in 2008 and the Henry Chadwick Award, honoring baseball’s greatest researchers, in 2014. His book, Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball was a finalist for the prestigious Seymour Medal in 2011, as was In Pursuit of Pennants, also published by Nebraska, which he co-wrote with Dan Levitt in 2015. He was elected to the SABR Board as a Director in 2018. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

Nowlin will be serving his second term as a Director after serving from 2004 to 2016 as SABR’s Vice President. He has specialized in Red Sox research since he turned to writing and research in the late 1990s and has written, edited, or co-edited more than 75 books and more than 750 articles, many of which are Red Sox-related. He is one of three founders of Rounder Records, one of America’s most successful independent record labels. A member of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, he has also traveled widely, visiting more than 125 countries to date, and has occasionally taught courses at Boston-area universities on “Baseball and Politics” and Sportswriting. He was the 2011 winner of the Bob Davids Award, SABR’s highest honor. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Levin will be serving her first term on the SABR Board. She has been a SABR member since 2013 and is an active member of the Women in Baseball and Educational Resources Committees, as well as the Bob Broeg St. Louis Chapter, where she organizes a local research conference every year. She presents her research regularly at local and national SABR events and other sports and academic conferences. She is an adjunct professor of Sports Communications and Sports Management at Webster University, where she sponsors the school’s Sports Media and Analytics Club and mentors students in baseball-related work. She holds bachelor’s degrees in economics and political science from Grinnell College, a master’s degree in applied communications from Southern Illinois University, and a JD degree from Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Special thanks go out to Tellers Committee members Stephen Barnes, Mort Bloomberg, and Johanna Wagner for certifying the results on April 24 at the SABR office.

The 2019 SABR elections featured online voting for the 10th consecutive year as well as traditional paper ballots. A total of 1,008 votes were received, constituting about 18.43 percent of the membership.

SABR members can find complete 2019 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: April 26, 2019. Last Updated: April 26, 2019.