This Week in SABR: August 5, 2011

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Here’s what we’ve been up to as of August 5, 2011:

Lordy, lordy, SABR’s about to turn 40!

We’ve got a lot in store for you next week as SABR celebrates its 40th anniversary.

On Wednesday, August 10, join us at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown — site of the first SABR meeting on August 10, 1971 — for a commemorative ceremony at 2 p.m. in the Education Room (near the Art Gallery). It will be emceed by Tom Hufford, one of SABR’s 16 founding members. Cake and refreshments to be served afterward.

An optional lunch meeting will take place before the ceremony at noon at the Otesaga Hotel’s Hawkeye Bar & Grill.

All members of the public are welcome. Please RSVP to Gary Gillette if you intend to come to the ceremony.

  • Online coverage: Be sure to check SABR.org all next week for complete coverage of our 40th anniversary, including an updated history of the organization, profiles of and interviews with the founders, a multimedia look at all 41 SABR conventions — the 1971 founding is considered to be our first — and much more. For a sneak peek, check out “SABR 14: An Ironic Oversight”, by Rich “Dixie” Tourangeau, with photos by James D. Smith III of the 1884 World Series re-enactment game played at the Providence convention in 1984.  

Help us rank the top baseball storylines of the SABR Era

Today (August 5) is the last day to vote for our list of the top 40 storylines in baseball during the SABR Era (1971-2011).

Over the last few months, we’ve solicited suggestions from SABR members and received more than one hundred responses — everything from “the introduction of the designated hitter” to “the steroids era” to “Roy Halladay’s 2010 postseason no-hitter.” We took the 16 most suggested ideas and now we want you to rank them.

Click the link below to rank the top selections:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VWTMRNH

The final list will be revealed next week in conjunction with SABR’s 40th anniversary.

Bill Bergen’s awesome record of baseball futility

Records are made to be broken … even those held by Bill Bergen, widely considered to be the worst hitter in major league history. Craig Counsell and Adam Dunn are “chasing” two of Bergen’s inglorious marks this season, one of which is only known because of research by SABR member Joe Dittmar.

Read Dittmar’s BioProject essay on Bergen here.

For many years, the longest streak of consecutive hitless at-bats (by a non-pitcher) was thought to be held by Luis Aparicio and Tony Bernazard at 44. But in the Aprill 1997 edition of the Baseball Records Research Committee newsletter, Dittmar revealed that he had discovered Bergen’s streak of 46 hitless at-bats with the Brooklyn Superbas in 1909, which began against the New York Giants on June 29 and ended during the second game of a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs on July 17.

Four new biographies posted at SABR BioProject

Four new biographies were posted this week as part of the SABR Baseball Biography Project, bringing us to a total of 1,641 published biographies:

All new biographies can be found here: http://bioproj.sabr.org/bioproj.cfm?a=n&m=61

Writing a biography for the BioProject is an easy way to get involved as a SABR member. Find out how by visiting our BioProject Resources page or reading the FAQs section.

  • Read more from the BioProject: One hundred years ago Thursday, Herman “Germany” Schaefer of the Detroit Tigers took advantage of a loophole in the rulebook to famously steal FIRST base. Here’s Dan Holmes’s biography on one of the Deadball Era’s most colorful characters.

Boston Chapter welcomes special guests

On July 30, the SABR Boston Chapter welcomed special guests Cam Perron, a teenager researching the lives and careers of Negro Leaguers, and Gil Hernandez Black, a former Indianapolis Clowns player to its summer meeting at the NonProfit Center in Boston.

As Joanne Hulbert reports, “Cam told how he came to be interested in the players and also how he found Gil and brought his story to our attention. Gil said he had never talked in front of an audience before, but he spoke for over an hour and kept the audience enthralled.”

Recent Research Committee newsletters

As a service to those members who have reported problems with logging in to the SABRNation system, here are direct links to download recent Research Committee newsletters that have been published so far this summer:

(If you have a recent newsletter that does not appear on this list, please e-mail a PDF copy to Jacob Pomrenke.)

The SABR office staff is in ongoing discussions with the support team from the software provider that manages SABRNation, and we hope to have those problems resolved as soon as possible.

Please note: If you receive an error screen asking you to log in again when you are already logged in, just click the word “SABRNation” on the left side of the screen and that should take you back to the SABRNation home page. From there, you can navigate to the page you were originally searching for. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Upcoming SABR events:

In other recent SABR news:

All previous editions of This Week in SABR can be found here.

Find more information about SABR and SABR.org at the Members’ Info page here: http://sabr.org/about/members-info


Originally published: August 5, 2011. Last Updated: April 3, 2020.

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