This Week in SABR: June 12, 2020

June 12, 2020/in This Week in SABR /by Jacob Pomrenke

Welcome to “This Week in SABR!” Click here to view this week’s newsletter on the web. Here’s what we’ve been up to as of June 12, 2020:

Join us for SABR Virtual throughout July

Baseball fans, join us throughout the month of July for SABR Virtual, a series of presentations, chats, and one-on-one interviews featuring authors, scholars, and figures from around the game.

SABR Virtual sessions are scheduled each weekend from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 26, highlighted by:

40 research presentations on all aspects of baseball, past and present
6 special presentations, including one from Major League Baseball
Annual Business Meeting on Friday, July 10, with Bob Davids Award announcement to follow (livestreamed on SABR’s Facebook page)
Online raffle in which all SABR members will have the opportunity to win baseball memorabilia

The full schedule of presentations will be announced soon. Thursday and Friday sessions will be held from 7:00-9:00 p.m. EDT on July 9-10, 16-17, and 23-24. Saturday and Sunday sessions will be held from 3:00-5:00 p.m. EDT on July 11-12, 18-19, and 25-26.

SABR members will have first priority to reserve their spot for each daily two-hour session, which are limited to the first 100 participants. Sessions will be opened to all baseball fans based on availability. Registration will open beginning Thursday, June 25 at SABR.org/virtual-meetings. Recordings will be available for all baseball fans to view afterward on SABR’s YouTube channel.

SABR chapters and committees will also hold online meetings with guest speakers as part of our Stay Home With SABR initiative; check out our events calendar for upcoming events.

Stay tuned for launch of our new SABR.org website next week!

On Thursday, June 18, we’re excited to unveil a brand-new design at SABR.org, which will enhance the user experience and provide greater visual appeal, while a new search engine will better connect SABR’s rich content archive from our first 50 years.

Thousands of stories from SABR’s Research Collection will be available online, showcasing the breadth and depth of our members’ groundbreaking work on all aspects of baseball, from the sport’s early origins to the Negro Leagues to sabermetric analysis of the modern game. With a growing audience of nearly 2.5 million annual visitors, SABR.org highlights the organization’s passionate community of baseball fans.

Please note: SABR.org will be unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period from 7:00-10:00 p.m. MST on Wednesday, June 17. You may notice changes to some pages and service may be slow or interrupted on Wednesday as we begin our transition to the new website.

SABR Digital Library: Harvey’s Wallbangers: The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers

Add a pennant-winning baseball book to your collection from the SABR Digital Library:

Harvey’s Wallbangers: The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers
Edited by Gregory H. Wolf
Associate Editors: Len Levin, Bill Nowlin, and Carl Riechers
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-970159-27-1, $34.95
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-970159-26-4, $9.99
8.5” x 11”, 407 pages

Harvey’s Wallbangers: The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers commemorates a team that captured the hearts and imagination of baseball fans not just in Wisconsin, but around the country. Named for skipper Harvey Kuenn, the home-run slugging club was filled with a memorable cast of characters, future Hall of Famers, and All-Stars: from Robin Yount, Gorman Thomas, Ted Simmons, and Rollie Fingers to Cecil Cooper, Ben Oglivie, Paul Molitor, and Don Sutton. They were a close-knit and resilient group that weathered controversies and slumps to capture the AL East crown on the last day of the season, overcome a two-games-to-none deficit to win the best-of-five League Championship Series, and move to within one game of winning the World Series.

This book is the result of the tireless work of more than 40 members of the Society for American Baseball Research. SABR members researched and wrote all of the biographies, game accounts, and essays in this volume.

Contributors include: Eric Aron, Bill Bishop, Richard Bogovich, Phillip Bolda, Frederick “Rick” Bush, Isaac Buttke, Ken Carrano, Alan Cohen, Rory Costello, Dennis D. Degenhardt, Dan Fields, John Gabcik, Gordon J. Gattie, Austin Gisriel, Gregg Hoffmann, Mike Huber, Jay Hurd, Maxwell Kates, Jimmy Keenan, Norm King, Lee Kluck, Steven Kuehl, Russ Lake, Len Levin, Dan Levitt, Bill Mortell, Rod Nelson, Bill Nowlin, J.G. Preston, Carl Riechers, Richard Riis, Joel Rippel, Rick Schabowski, David E. Skelton, Doug Skipper, Stew Thornley, Clayton Trutor, Dale Voiss, Joseph Wancho, Gregory H. Wolf, and Mario Ziino.

SABR members, get this e-book for FREE!

E-book: Click here to download the e-book version of Harvey’s Wallbangers for FREE from the SABR Store. Available in PDF, Kindle/MOBI and EPUB formats.
Paperback: Get a 50% discount on the Harvey’s Wallbangers paperback edition from the SABR Store ($17.95 includes shipping/tax; delivery via Kindle Direct Publishing can take up to 4-6 weeks.)

SABR members can download all Digital Library e-books for free or get 50% off the paperback editions. Find past titles at SABR.org/ebooks.

Having trouble downloading our e-books? To view PDF files on your computer, click here to download the free Adobe Reader software. Having trouble downloading e-books to your Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader or iPad? Click here for additional help.

**Spring 2020 Baseball Research Journal is on its way soon**

Good news! The Spring 2020 edition of the Baseball Research Journal will be mailed out to all SABR members very soon.

Those of you who receive the print edition should find your BRJ arriving in the next few weeks. For digital subscribers, the e-book edition will also be delivered to your inboxes soon.

To read more articles from the BRJ archives, our flagship publication for nearly the past half-century, click here.

To learn more about contributing to a future SABR publication, click here.

We hope you enjoy reading the Spring 2020 Baseball Research Journal!

**Get a 25% discount on pre-orders of new SABR 50 at 50 book**

Baseball has seen many changes in the last 50 years, and SABR’s 50th anniversary provides an opportunity to highlight the most memorable players, teams, and events from the game’s glorious past.

SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game, edited by Bill Nowlin and now available for pre-order from the University of Nebraska Press, celebrates and highlights SABR’s wide-ranging contributions to baseball history.

SABR members can get a 25% discount off the cover price by using the discount code 6SFF when ordering at nebraskapress.unl.edu or calling 800-848-6224. (To order outside of North America, please call +44 (0)1423 526350 and use the discount code CS40UNP.)

Click here to read the full announcement at SABR.org.

Join us for more Stay Home With SABR virtual events

SABR chapters and committees are encouraged to set up virtual meetings to stay engaged with our members throughout the world at SABR.org, as part of our Stay Home With SABR initiative to assist in limiting the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

This week, we heard from Inside Pitch author Rick Allen, The Blake Street Bombers author Manny Randhawa, plus Roger Kinney, Jeff Kingery, and Ed Henderson.

Here are some more upcoming virtual events you can “attend” online:

June 13: Halsey Hall Chapter meeting with authors Dan Levitt and Paul Spyhalski (9:00 a.m. CDT)
June 13: Carolina Chapter meeting (11:00 a.m. EDT)
June 15: Larry Dierker Chapter meeting with former MLB pitcher and Astros broadcaster Mike Stanton (7:00 p.m. CDT)
June 16: Games Project Committee meeting (1:00 p.m. EDT)
June 16: Sacramento/Bay Area joint chapter meeting with The Wax Pack Book author Brad Balukjian (7:00 p.m. PDT)
June 17: Baltimore Babe Ruth Chapter meeting with The Called Shot author Thomas Wolf (12:00 p.m. EDT)
June 17: “Say it Ain’t Contagious” panel discussion with authors Lincoln Mitchell, Steven Goldman, Craig Calcaterra, Frank Guridy, and Tova Wang (7:00 p.m. EDT)
June 18: Magnolia Chapter meeting with a panel discussion on SABR’s 1995 Atlanta Braves book with Tom Hufford and more authors (7:30 p.m. EDT)

Find more upcoming virtual meetings and watch replays of past events on our SABR Virtual Calendar page.

Vote now for the 2020 SABR Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legend

Each year, SABR’s Nineteenth Century Research Committee selects its Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legend — a 19th century player, manager, executive or other baseball personality not yet inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Committee members vote to narrow down the ballot to 12 finalists, then all SABR members are eligible to cast a vote for the winner. The winner will be announced in July during a Nineteenth Century Committee virtual meeting.

This December, the Hall of Fame’s Early Baseball Committee will meet and vote on eligible candidates for induction whose greatest contributions to the game were realized prior to 1950. This committee is not scheduled to vote again for 10 more years, until 2030.

2020 finalists: Earlier this year, members of the Nineteenth Century Research Committee selected the finalists for the 2020 Overlooked 19th Century Baseball Legend. Click here to download a PDF with the finalists’ bios, compiled by project co-chairs Adam Darowski and Joe Williams. Voting in the final election will run until June 29, and will be open to all SABR members.
Vote now! Click here to access the 2020 ballot. All SABR members are eligible to vote in the election for this year’s Overlooked 19th Century Legend. You *MUST* select five candidates — ranking them from first choice to fifth choice — from among the candidates presented. You are only allowed to vote once. ALL BALLOTS MUST BE CAST PRIOR TO 11:59 p.m. PDT on Monday, June 29, 2020.

Click here for a list of past winners or to learn more about the project.

Call for papers: 2020 SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference

SABR and the International Women’s Baseball Center have announced a call for papers for the second annual SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference, scheduled for September 11-13, 2020, at Rockford University in Rockford, Illinois.

This year’s conference theme is celebrating African American women in baseball. All topics related to women’s baseball and the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues are welcome for individual oral and poster presentations.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 200 words, along with contact information and a short biography, by July 15, 2020, to Leslie Heaphy at Lheaphy@kent.edu.

Click here to read the full announcement at SABR.org.

SABR office continuing to work remotely

The SABR office, housed at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix, Arizona, has been closed indefinitely due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) situation. Staff members will work remotely until it is advisable to resume normal operations on-site.

On Monday, March 16, ASU announced that all in-person classes would transition to online instruction for the rest of the spring semester. Please contact a member of the SABR staff by email or phone with any questions.

SABR Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference rescheduled for 2021

Due to the global COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, SABR’s Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference has been rescheduled for June 10-13, 2021, at the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama.

Anyone who has already registered for the Malloy Conference is encouraged to contact Deb Jayne at the SABR office to discuss options regarding their conference registration fees, including converting it into a donation toward SABR’s Sustainability Campaign fund.

The Negro Leagues Committee is one of SABR’s original committees, formed in 1971. It has continued to preserve and highlight the contributions of African-American players in baseball history. Visit SABR.org/malloy to learn more.

SABRcast with Rob Neyer: Listen to an interview with Hannah Keyser of Yahoo! Sports

Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer.

Episode #63 on Monday, June 8 featured Hannah Keyser, a writer and reporter with Yahoo! Sports. She has covered sports and food for Major League Baseball, Deadspin, and Vice. She lives in New York, after growing up outside of Philly and getting an ancient history degree from the University of Pennsylvania that almost never comes up in her current line of work. She most recently appeared on SABRcast in November 2019 for Episode #35.

Visit SABR.org/sabrcast to listen to the full episode.

Subscribe to SABRcast on your favorite podcast networks, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play, and listen to each episode as soon as it’s released on Mondays. To learn more, visit SABR.org/sabrcast.

4 new SABR biographies published

Four new biographies were posted this week as part of the SABR Baseball Biography Project, which brings us to a total of 5,215 published biographies. Here are the new bios published this week:

Roy Crabb, by Terry Bohn
Cal Hogue, by Gregory H. Wolf
Red Nelson, by Terry Bohn
Robin Yount, by Gregory H. Wolf

All new biographies can be found here: SABR.org/bioproject

Find any SABR biography: You can visit sabr.org/bioproject to search for any player — or manager, executive, scout, spouse, broadcaster, or umpire — who appears in the SABR BioProject. In addition, we have pages for Ballparks, Broadcasters, Executives, Games, Managers, Scouts, Spouses, Umpires, Writers, people who were Famous Outside Baseball, and a lot more.

4 new stories published by the SABR Games Project

Four new game stories were posted this week as part of the SABR Games Project. Here are the new game stories:

July 4, 1911: Ty Cobb’s 40-game hitting streak ends as Ed Walsh, White Sox drop Detroit, by Thomas E. Merrick
January 26, 1919: The Flu Mask Baseball Game, by Jacob Pomrenke
July 18, 2019: Strasburg sets records, homers, has to dance in dugout, by Laura H. Peebles
September 4, 2019: Shades of The Babe: Reds’ Michael Lorenzen wins, homers, plays the field, by Laura H. Peebles

New Games Project stories can be found at SABR.org/gamesproject.

Get involved: Have memories of a game you attended? Or a game you watched that caught your interest? Write about it! Writing for the Games Project is an easy way to get involved as a SABR member. Find out how by reading the Games Project FAQs section or checking out the Authors’ Guidelines. We have editors and fact checkers who are willing to help you write your first article.
Social media: Follow the SABR Games Project on Twitter or Facebook to keep up with new stories and updates.

Special offer for SABR members from MLBPAA

The Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association (MLBPAA) has put together an exclusive offer for SABR members. Become a Professional Member ($55 annually), and receive two FREE gifts: a signed photo from a team of your choice and an Alumni Nation dri-fit athletic shirt.

As a Professional member, you’ll receive the quarterly newsletter Baseball Alumni News and exclusive discounts with: MLB.TV (50% off), Oakley (40% off), Mizuno (40% off), Baseballism (20% off), Rawlings (20% off), and more.

Join the official Alumni Association of Major League Baseball to enjoy many of the same great benefits as your baseball heroes! Click here to sign up today.

**Listen to recent episodes of Behind the Numbers: Baseball SABR Style on SiriusXM on Saturdays**

Behind the Numbers: Baseball SABR Style on SiriusXM, a radio show hosted by former SABR Board President Vince Gennaro, is back at a new time. Listen to new episodes at 4:00-5:00 p.m. ET on Saturdays on MLB Network Radio.

You can also listen to archives of recent episodes on-demand on the SiriusXM Internet Radio app. Click here to learn more.

Behind the Numbers: Baseball SABR Style on SiriusXM focuses on examining and interpreting the statistical analysis that plays a critical role in baseball today. It airs weekly throughout the year on MLB Network Radio, available to subscribers nationwide on XM channel 89, Sirius channel 209, and on the SiriusXM Internet Radio App.

ICYMI: Highlights from last week’s This Week in SABR

We’ve heard your feedback: Some of you have said you look forward to “This Week in SABR” every Friday, but sometimes there are just too many compelling articles and announcements to read every week. We’re not complaining — hey, keep up the great work! — but we know the feeling. So in an effort to make the length of this newsletter more manageable to read, we’ll summarize some of the repeating/recurring announcements in a special “In Case You Missed It (ICYMI)” section of “This Week in SABR”.

Here are some major headlines from recent weeks that we don’t want you to miss:

All previous editions of This Week in SABR can be found here: https://sabr.org/content/this-week-in-sabr-archives.

Welcome, new members!

We’d like to welcome all of our new SABR members who have joined this week. You can find all Members-Only resources at members.sabr.org and the Membership Handbook can be downloaded here.

Please give these new members a warm welcome and help them make the most of their membership by giving them the opportunity to get involved in their local chapter or a research committee.

You can find contact information for any SABR member in the online Membership Directory.

Name	Hometown	Name	Hometown
Rick Bradford	Olympia, WA	Adam Korengold	Alexandria, VA
Dylan Brennan	Philadelphia, PA	Kent Krause	Lincoln, NE
Mike Cieslinski	Stuart, FL	Keith Lefkof	Boca Raton, FL
Jake Devereaux	Waltham, MA	John Marshall	Springfield, MO
Stephen Dixon	Ashburn, VA	Wayne Walker	N. Myrtle Beach, SC
Chase Forbes	New York, NY	Jason Wilder	Rochester, NY
Patrick Fuller	Edmond, OK	Joshua Wilson	Havertown, PA
Joe Hirsch	Houston, TX	Brian Yuncker	Johns Island, SC
Kevin King	Kalamazoo, MI

Research Committee news

Here are the new research committee updates this week:

Nineteenth Century: Vote now for the 2020 SABR Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legend

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

Regional Chapter news

Here are the new regional chapter updates this week:

Boston Chapter: Read a new “Dispatches From the Mudville Bureau,” by Joanne Hulbert (Boston, MA)
Ken Keltner Badger State Chapter: June 2020 newsletter (Milwaukee, WI)

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

SABR Virtual Events Calendar

Here are the upcoming virtual events on the SABR calendar:

June 13: Halsey Hall Chapter meeting with authors Dan Levitt and Paul Spyhalski (9:00 a.m. CDT)
June 13: Carolina Chapter meeting (11:00 a.m. EDT)
June 15: Larry Dierker Chapter meeting with former MLB pitcher and Astros broadcaster Mike Stanton (7:00 p.m. CDT)
June 16: Games Project Committee meeting (1:00 p.m. EDT)
June 16: Sacramento/Bay Area joint chapter meeting with The Wax Pack Book author Brad Balukjian (7:00 p.m. PDT)
June 17: Baltimore Babe Ruth Chapter meeting with The Called Shot author Thomas Wolf (12:00 p.m. EDT)
June 17: “Say it Ain’t Contagious” panel discussion with authors Lincoln Mitchell, Steven Goldman, Craig Calcaterra, Frank Guridy, and Tova Wang (7:00 p.m. EDT)
June 18: Magnolia Chapter meeting with a panel discussion on SABR’s 1995 Atlanta Braves book with Tom Hufford and more authors (7:30 p.m. EDT)

Find more virtual meetings on our SABR Virtual Events Calendar page.

Around the Web

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

Take a 40% discount on all McFarland & Co. sports books through June 14 (McFarlandBooks.com)
Rob Arthur: Baseball Ought to Confront Its Own Racism (Baseball Prospectus)
Alex Speier: How racial bias can seep into baseball scouting reports (Boston Globe)
Jim Margalus: The White Sox’s silence on protests grows louder by the day (Sox Machine)
Emma Baccellieri: MLB leans on mental skills coaches to keep players sharp (Sports Illustrated)
Jay Jaffe: Long Gone Summer Revisits the Great (?) 1998 Home Run Chase (FanGraphs)
Charles Young/Alan Nathan: Studies of the Active Spin Ratio (Baseball Prospectus)
Michael Cunningham: MLB draft cost cuts will create shallower talent pool of prospects (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Eric Nusbaum: The Murder of Octavius Catto (Sports Stories)
Steven Goldman: The Saddest of Possible Words (Baseball Prospectus)
Rachael McDaniel: Four Songs of the King of Swat (FanGraphs)
Grant Brisbee: The All-Star and Hall of Fame pitchers who hated facing the Giants (The Athletic)
Bruce Adams: Interview with St. Paul Saints owner Mike Veeck (Big Train TV)
Mark Simon: Who are some of the top KBO pitchers? (ACTA Sports)
Benjamin Hill: Eight unique facts about Texas League history (MiLB.com)
Rob Fitts: An Illustrated Introduction to Japanese Baseball Cards (RobFitts.com)
David Laurila: A conversation with Rockies 2019 draft pick Aaron Schunk (FanGraphs)
Alex Gary: One final honor needed for Rockford’s best big-leaguer (Rockford Register Star)
Davy Andrews/Roger Cormier: Too Far From Town: Great Falls Voyagers (Baseball Prospectus)
Tom Wylie: Montana’s rich pro baseball history facing inflection point (Montana Sports)
Mike McGreehan: Alameda native pens baseball history book about father-in-law (East Bay Times)
Rex Nelson: A league of her own (NW Arkansas Democrat Gazette)
Oriana Pawlyk: DC Air National Guard F-16 Gets a Baseball Makeover (Military.com)
David A. Scott: The 1920 Indians and the Philadelphia blues (Medium.com)
Jason Schwartz: The first HOF baseball card for every team (SABR Baseball Cards Blog)
DJ Weller: My Card Collections (SABR Baseball Cards Blog)
Jason Schwartz: The greatest year in baseball card history (SABR Baseball Cards Blog)

This Week in SABR is compiled by Jacob Pomrenke. If you would like us to include an upcoming event, article or any other information in “This Week in SABR,” e-mail jpomrenke@sabr.org.

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