McCurdy: In SABR’s history, some things change and some things don’t
From SABR member Bill McCurdy at the Pecan Park Eagle on May 2, 2014:
At a convention planning session in Houston on April 23rd, SABR Board President Vince Gennaro eloquently expressed the belief that all we do in SABR is only as good as our sense of community. It is our whole sense of community, Gennaro says, that allows the mathematics and poetry of divergently inclined interests of SABR members to come together and flourish under one roof of dedication to the history of baseball.
As a planning committee participant, I walked away from that session feeling energized by the big picture that Mr. Gennaro had dangled before us. It was all in one body, as each was a challenge, a joy, an essential, and an explanation of SABR’s success over the years. As an organization, we as SABR are like the elephant challenge to the twelve blind men in mythology. When each of the blind men asked their sighted guide to describe the looks of the elephant to them, he answered: “Walk toward the beast yourselves and feel it. It will be whatever you ever find it to be.
And so SABR is. It is what it is. And as a connected community of divergent talents, interests, and abilities, we are united in our acceptance of each others’ differences by one sure common thread – our united love of the game. And it is that one powerfully uniting common thread that most strongly makes our sense of community in SABR possible.
Last night, I decided to go looking for earlier support of these ideas through my historical newspaper sources. Lo and behold, in the first rattle out of the box, I found this very supportive un-by-lined comment in a 1985 New Mexico newspaper about SABR. Some things, the cost of membership, have changed since then, but not everything. The thread of everything else I tried to describe above is also here too, but simply expressed in different language in an earlier time and place.
Enjoy.
Read the full article here: http://bill37mccurdy.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/sabr-history-some-things-change-others-dont/
Originally published: May 2, 2014. Last Updated: May 2, 2014.