This Week in SABR: July 6, 2012

/in /by

Here’s what we’ve been up to as of July 6, 2012:

SABR 42 convention recap

Couldn’t make it to Minneapolis for SABR 42? We’ve got you covered online at SABR.org/convention. The 42nd annual SABR convention was held June 27-July 1, 2012, at the Marriott City Center, just blocks from Target Field, home of the Minnesota Twins.

Twins president Dave St. Peter and general manager Terry Ryan highlighted our list of featured speakers and panelists at SABR 42. Our keynote speaker was John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s Official Historian.

  • During the convention, you could follow along on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #SABR42 or by reading tweets from our account (@SABR) and from other conference attendees. Check out what your fellow SABR 42 attendees had to say each day in our SABR 42 web recaps at Storify.com/SABR.
  • View our photo galleries from each day of the conference at SABR.org/convention/SABR42-photos.

Here are some highlights from SABR 42:

Wednesday, June 27

Thursday, June 28

Friday, June 29

Saturday, June 30

Around the Web

We’ll have a lot more to come from the conference, including select audio and video clips from the rest of the panels and research presentations, so stay tuned at SABR.org/convention!

Watch SABR panels at 2012 MLB All-Star FanFest

SABR is heading to Kansas City this week for the MLB All-Star FanFest!

SABR members will be participating in a variety of panels throughout the weekend. To learn more about the All-Star FanFest, July 6-10 at the Kansas City Convention Center, visit http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/all_star/y2012/index.jsp?content=fanfest.

Stay tuned to MLB.com next week to watch these discussions online as we talk about the Negro Leagues, Kansas City baseball history, and women in baseball.

Here’s the schedule for the SABR FanFest panels (all times local):

Women’s Baseball Panel
11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Saturday, July 7

  • Amanda Rykoff, moderator
  • Leslie Heaphy, panelist
  • Justine Siegal, panelist
  • Wendy Lewis, panelist

Negro League Legends
3:00-4:00 p.m. Saturday, July 7

  • Larry Lester, moderator
  • Bob Motley, umpire
  • DeMorris Smith, son of Hilton Smith
  • Robert Paige, son of Satchel Paige

Negro League historians
11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Sunday, July 8

  • Larry Lester, moderator
  • Peter Gorton, panelist
  • Todd Peterson, panelist
  • Leslie Heaphy, panelist

Kansas City Baseball History
2:00-3:00 p.m. Sunday, July 8

  • David Starbuck, moderator
  • Roger Erickson, author
  • Jay Hankins, Kansas City A’s
  • Larry Lester, Kansas City Monarchs

SABR Panel
4:00-5:00 p.m. Monday, July 9

  • Cory Schwartz, moderator
  • Vince Gennaro, SABR President
  • John Thorn, MLB Official Historian
  • Roland Hemond, 3-time Executive of the Year

SABR Trivia
3:00-4:00 p.m. Tuesday, July 10

  • Cory Schwartz, host

We’ll post links to these panels online at SABR.org next week, so you can watch them at home, too.

2 days left to pre-register for Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues Conference

Pre-registration for the 15th annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference — July 19-21, 2012, at the Renaissance Cleveland hotel in Cleveland, Ohio — is available online only through tomorrow (Saturday, July 7; Satchel Paige’s birthday!) at SABR.org/malloy.

The full conference rate is $125, which includes all panels and presentations, Thursday meet-and-greet, Friday picnic, a ticket to the Friday Indians game, and Saturday banquet. The two-day rate (Friday-Saturday) is $110 for adults, $70 for students. One-day rate (Friday or Saturday) is $60.

The Malloy Conference, hosted by SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee, promotes activities to enhance scholarly, educational, and literary objectives. For the past 14 years, the event has been the only symposium dedicated exclusively to the examination and promotion of black baseball history. The conference is open to baseball and history fans of all ages. Each year, monies are targeted to donate books to schools or libraries; raise funds for the Grave Marker Project; and award scholarships to high school seniors in a nationwide essay contest and a nationwide art contest. A complete information packet with schedule, mail-in registration form and program advertising opportunities can be downloaded here (PDF) or on the website.

Retrosheet announces semiannual update of website

We’re pleased to pass along this note from SABR member David W. Smith of Retrosheet.org:

It is with great pleasure that I announce the semiannual update of the Retrosheet website. The quick summary of additions is:

  • Play by play event files for 1927 and 1947
  • Box score event files for 1916 and 1917
  • Ejection details for 1990 to 2011
  • Discrepancy files for 1916 and 1917
  • Deduced games for 1951

New play by play accounts were added to several previously released seasons, so the number of missing games from 1950 to the present continues to shrink. The most wanted lists were updated to reflect the inclusion of these games.

In addition, there were enhancements and corrections to many event and box score files, thanks to information sent in by users of our site; we are grateful to everyone for helping us improve our offerings; it is always impressive to see how carefully our files are scrutinized! The discrepancy files were update for many years, especially 1927 and 1947, since the detailed proofing of those seasons identified many discrepancy issues. Tom Ruane continued the generation of box score files for older seasons, and we now have a continuous run back to 1916. This is an extraordinarily time-consuming task and everyone is grateful to Tom for managing this effort and working out the details so tirelessly.

There are three of the additions that deserve special attention.

The addition of ejection data into the event files was done singlehandedly by David Vincent who painstakingly inserted the details into the appropriate place. He devised a systematic coding system so that users can easily search for these banishments and also added comments with more complete explanations. These comments appear in bold face in the narrative play by play text. For example, in http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1995/B06210PIT1995.htm (Giants at Pirates, 6-21-1995), Jay Bell of the Pirates was ejected in the bottom of the 9th inning, which appears in the narrative account. Also, Bell’s career player page: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/B/Pbellj001.htm has a list of all his ejections at the bottom, just before his transaction history. He was ejected six times as a player and once as a coach. An abbreviated description of the reason appears for each and each is linked to the box score/play by play account for that game. This is excellent information that we are pleased to be able to present and David is continuing to work backward in typical Retro-style so we can look forward to the documentation of more ejections in subsequent releases.

The 1947 event files are not complete as we are still missing the details for over 400 games from that season; the released files contain 782 games that have been rigorously proofed by day by day comparison to the official totals. Hopefully more games will be added to these files in the future, but in the meantime we decided it was valuable to get what we have into the hands of researchers now. One team for which we do have complete coverage in 1947 is the Dodgers and we now have available on the website complete play by play coverage for the careers of Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider.

The release of the 1927 event files is very exciting. We have coverage for 923 games, which means that we still need a little over 300 more. These games were also proofed via day by day comparison to the official totals. Of particular note to many people will be the fact that we have complete play by play for all but 3 of the games played by the 1927 Yankees, thanks to some accounts copied at the Hall of Fame library in 2011. For those last three games, multiple newspapers were examined (between 6 and 8) and accounts were deduced. Of course, fielding credit is missing for most plays, but the resultant files check out perfectly for totals for each player and we have great confidence in the reliability of these three games.

In the fall we update the site with data from 2012 and hopefully play by play files for one or two additional older seasons.

Dave Smith
Retrosheet

Related links:

3 new biographies published by the SABR BioProject

While we were away, three new biographies were posted as part of the SABR Baseball Biography Project — and we’re still putting the finshing touches on our new BioProject book, Red Sox Baseball in the Days of Ike and Elvis: The Red Sox of the 1950s, edited by Mark Armour and Bill Nowlin, with Maurice Bouchard and Len Levin — which brings us to a total of 2,009 published biographies.

Here are the new bios:

All new biographies can be found here: http://sabr.org/bioproj/recent

We recently relaunched the BioProject at its new home page: SABR.org/BioProject. The new BioProject fully integrates its design with SABR.org and upgrades the back-end platform, making it easier for us to post and edit new bios and eliminating some formatting problems with the original software. All of your old URLs should still work (and if you find one that doesn’t, please contact jpomrenke@sabr.org.)

Get involved! If you’d like to help contribute to the SABR BioProject, visit our BioProject Resources page or read the FAQs section to get started. We’re also looking to expand the BioProject to include all “encyclopedic” articles on baseball-related subjects from past SABR publications or committee newsletters. If you come across an article you think should be included in the SABR “baseball repository” at the BioProject, send a copy or link to markarmour04@gmail.com or jpomrenke@sabr.org.

June 4 Board minutes posted

Minutes from the June 4 Board of Directors conference call have now been posted on the SABR website.

You can view all past minutes of SABR Board meetings by going to the page below:

http://sabr.org/content/sabr-board-minutes

Or you can go to the Members’ Info page and click on “Organizational Files”, then “Board Minutes” to view the minutes.

Research committee newsletters

Find all SABR research committee newsletters at SABR.org/research.

Chapter meeting recaps

  • There were no chapter meeting recaps this week.

Visit SABR.org/chapters for more information on SABR regional chapters.

SABR Events Calendar

Here is a list of upcoming SABR events:

All SABR meetings and events are open to the public. Feel free to bring a baseball-loving friend … and make many new ones! Check out the SABR Events Calendar at SABR.org/events.

Around the Web

Here are some recent articles published by and about SABR members:

Read these articles and more at SABR.org/latest.

All previous editions of This Week in SABR can be found here: http://sabr.org/content/this-week-in-sabr-archives. If you would like us to include an upcoming event, article or any other information in “This Week in SABR”, e-mail Jacob Pomrenke at jpomrenke@sabr.org.

Find exclusive Members’ Only resources and information here: http://sabr.org/about/members-info

Did you know you can renew your membership at any time? 1- and 3-year SABR memberships are available at http://store.sabr.org. Please also consider a donation to SABR to support baseball research at SABR.org/donate.

Are you following us on Twitter or Facebook? Get SABR updates every day at @SABR or by searching “SABR” on Facebook.

Replying to this e-mail goes to an undeliverable address. If you would like to contact the SABR office, please visit: http://sabr.org/about/contact-sabr


Originally published: July 6, 2012. Last Updated: April 3, 2020.

Support SABR today!

Donate Join

Cronkite School at ASU
555 N. Central Ave. #406-C
Phoenix, AZ 85004
Phone: 602-496-1460

About

History

Meet the Staff

Board of Directors

Annual Reports

Diversity Statement

Contact SABR

DONATE

© SABR. All Rights Reserved