SABR 52: David W. Smith, Bailey Hall win 2024 convention presentation awards
David W. Smith has won the 2024 Doug Pappas Award for the best oral research presentation and Bailey Hall has won the SABR Convention Poster Presentation Award for the best poster presentation at SABR 52 in Minneapolis.
Smith, the founder and retired president of Retrosheet, won the Pappas Award for his presentation, “Where Did the 24 Minutes Go?”, which he delivered Friday, August 9 during SABR 52 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis hotel. Smith also won the Pappas Award in 2016.
Smith’s abstract is posted below:
The average MLB game was 24 minutes shorter in 2023 than in 2022, coming in at 2:40. This is the fastest time since 1985 and the first year the average has been under three hours since 2015. The implementation of the pitch clock received most of the media attention as an explanation for the shorter game length, but it is not the only factor that brought about the decrease. There were also rule changes relating to pickoff attempts, limitations on batters calling timeout, and stricter enforcement of time between innings, during mound visits, replay challenges, and substitutions. Smith examines these other factors in addition to the effect of the pitch clock. Analyzing data obtained from MLB.com, where freely available files give the exact timing of every event in every 2023 game, including each pitch, down to 1/100 of a second, he discusses the impact of different events on game times.
The Doug Pappas Award was originally established as the USA Today Sports Weekly Award in 1992 and renamed in 2004 to honor the late baseball researcher.
Hall, a rising high school senior from Austin, Texas, won the SABR Convention Poster Presentation Award for her poster, “Leadoff Walk vs. Leadoff Single: Which is Actually Worse?” Her abstract is posted below:
We can all agree: watching a leadoff walk is agonizing. How could you, as the pitcher, give something away like that? Or is that actually the calculated best outcome? In Hall’s family of baseball fanatics, a leadoff walk is an unforgivable sin, but she has always been an outlier in this opinion. Is a leadoff walk actually the worst outcome, or is that a strategic choice? Is it worse than a leadoff single? Hall addresses the age-old question: is a leadoff walk or a leadoff single worse? Which produces a higher run total in an inning? Hall uses data from baseballsavant.com and statcast.com to cross-reference innings beginning with a leadoff walk or single with the corresponding box scores for runs in those innings, and following that, unifying the data in a form that is queryable by inning, pitcher and team. Hall also intertwines the research with the larger concept of baseball ethics and where statistics belong in the sport: as a catalyst for learning and improvement rather than an apparatus to do jobs for us.
Click here to view a high-resolution photo of Bailey Hall’s award-winning poster.
The SABR Convention Poster Presentation Award was previously known as the USA Today Sports Weekly Award; it was first presented in 1990 as the John W. Cox Award.
Honorable mentions for the oral presentation were:
- Vince Guerrieri, “Ten-Cent Beer Night: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy”
- Dan Levitt, “John McGraw’s Florida Land Investment Fiasco”
Honorable mention for the poster presentations was:
- Chuck Hildebrandt, “The Practical Effects of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption”
For more coverage of SABR 52, visit SABR.org/convention.
Originally published: August 10, 2024. Last Updated: August 13, 2024.