Touring the Bases With D. Bruce Brown
From SABR member Ted Leavengood at Seamheads.com on July 25:
D. Bruce Brown is the chairman of the Bob Davids Chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR). The chapter serves the Mid-Atlantic region of the country and is the oldest SABR chapter–named for the founder of SABR, Washington, DC resident, Bob Davids. D. Bruce Brown has attended the last ten SABR national conventions and is an excellent representative of the organization, knowledgeable about it at the national and local chapter level. More importantly, he can tell you about the new “Moneyball” movie and just about everything baseball under the sun. We were fortunate enough to have him as the guest on the Outta the Parkway Show on Friday to provide a report on the national convention held a few weeks ago in Los Angeles.
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When representatives of the clubs address SABR groups, when they take the lectern, they say they are a little nervous to talk to you guys, because while they are typically the people in their circles who know the most about baseball, they are afraid that we know so much more than they do and of course that is just not true. We are social about it, but we are fans of the game. We are also researchers. People join SABR for a lot of different reasons. We have about 6,500 members world wide.
We are NOT just SABRmetricians; we are not just merely stat heads. There are people who might make that their specialty, but it was Bill James–who has been a SABR member for a long time–who invented the term SABRmetrician, and he said that almost as soon as it was out of his mouth he regretted it. It is a misnomer. People who are SABR members are baseball fans who congregate and are maybe one tick more serious than the average fan about their baseball. They are fans who keep score at games and who read three or four baseball books each year. It’s hard to build a profile of an average SABR member. I thought SABR was a bunch of mathematicians, but once I attended a meeting I came back and told my wife, “I have found my people.”
Read the full article here: http://seamheads.com/2011/07/25/touring-the-bases-with%E2%80%A6d-bruce-brown/
Originally published: July 25, 2011. Last Updated: July 25, 2011.