Clearing The Bases - Issue 021

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Hello and welcome to Issue 021 of Clearing The Bases, an email newsletter in conjunction with the My Baseball History podcast hosted by Dan Wallach.

As I briefly mentioned in the last issue of the newsletter, I was recently in Minneapolis for the 52^nd convention held by the Society for American Baseball Research. I helped a friend of the pod (and SABR’s Director of Editorial Content) JACOB POMRENKE record the audio from the convention, so anyone who wasn’t there can listen to the recordings online in the future. Or, if you were there but could only be in one room at a time and missed the presentations happening in the other room, you can listen to the ones you missed. Or, if you were there and loved a presentation so much that you want to listen to it again and again, you can listen to those online. Anyway, the point is, mostly everything was recorded, and once everything eventually gets edited and posted, you’ll be able to listen to it all HERE.

There were more than 70 research presentations, committee meetings, panels, discussions, and Q&A sessions over the course of five days, so it was impossible to catch them all, but I was able to attend dozens of them. The panel discussions consisting of former Minnesota Twins and Hall of Famers were true highlights, as it isn’t super often you get to hear living legends talk about their time in the game and their approach. It was extremely evident how cooperative and engaged both the Twins and the St. Paul Saints were with SABR and this convention, and their inclusion was noted and immensely appreciated by everyone in attendance.

I missed basically half of the research presentations since I could only be in one room at a time, but of the ones I was able to catch, my favorites were Vince Guerrieri’s “Ten-Cent Beer Night”, Alan Cohen’s “Josh Gibson Achieves Great Home Run Feats”, John Bauer’s “Charles Comiskey in St. Paul and the Road to the American League,” and Mark Armour’s brilliantly researched “The One-Millionth Run.”

Every year there seems to be a surprise presentation. One that you’re not expecting to be insanely captivating, but the presenter(s) just knock it out of the park. That presentation for me this year was “Assessment of the Last At-Bat in Situations Where the Winning Run Scores Before the Batter Reaches First Base,” which was researched and presented by Yeon Woo Oh and Kum Kang Lee of South Korea.

One of the best parts of the SABR convention every year is the numerous social gatherings where the entire point is to just have fun getting to know or getting to catch up with SABR members from all over the country. Opening night saw more than 50 people attend a gathering hosted by Jason “Heavy J” Schwartz and the SABR Baseball Cards Committee where we all just hung out in the hallway outside the conference rooms and ripped open packs of baseball cards from the 1980s and ‘90s. Before we started, we went around the room and everyone introduced themselves to say where they were from and who their favorite player was, so as people opened their packs, if they got a card they didn’t care about but knew someone else was looking for (like the one attendee who was specifically looking for “bad Mariners players”), they’d go over and hand it to them or trade with them. It was such a fun and easy way for everyone to get to know each other, and that set the tone for the rest of the week where everyone could say hey to one another and go “Oh! You’re the Rickey Henderson guy!”

In addition to Pack Night, there were daily Coffee Talks, nightly Happy Hours, a screening of a new documentary on legendary baseball artist Dick Perez, trivia contests, and even off-campus excursions to see a St. Paul Saints game (where we got to see a new GRAIG KREINDLER painting in the City of Baseball Museum at CHS Field), to tour Target Field, to see a Minnesota Twins game, and to see a genuine Minnesota Town Ball game. On top of all of that, nearly everyone was staying in the same hotel, so there were many late nights either in the hotel lobby or just hanging around with other SABR members who have turned into real-life friends, not just baseball colleagues.

A very underrated part of the SABR convention is the poster presentation room, where researchers display on poster boards the research they have done on a particular topic over the previous year. There is a set time during the week when all of the presenters are supposed to be next to their posters to explain their research and answer questions from anyone curious about their work, and while I definitely enjoy that, I always like to browse that room earlier in the week when no one else is in there. It allows me to take things at my own pace and really read the information without feeling like I’m in someone else’s way who is also trying to read that same poster. Like the difference between being in a crowded museum or walking through by yourself.

The poster that jumped out at me the most was a beautifully designed and printed poster that asked (and answered) the question “Which is worse: a leadoff single or a leadoff walk?” The data analyzed came from every regular season game from 2008 through 2023 (2008 was the first year Statcast began) and was exhaustively researched and interpreted. To me, it was by far the most impressive poster in the room, both visually and in terms of its content, so I was excited to ask the researcher some follow-up questions. When that time came, it was an unbelievably pleasant surprise to learn that the presenter was a high school junior named BAILEY HALL! Bailey said she got the idea to research this specific topic because she’s been watching baseball games with her dad her entire life, and any time a team gave up a leadoff walk, her dad would be up in arms about it. Bailey decided to put the data together and see if a leadoff walk was any worse than a leadoff single, and THE RESULTS were surprising.

The poster room each year also has tables where book publishers set up and sell copies of their most recent baseball-related books. My personal baseball library has grown immensely over the past couple of years thanks to those very tables. This year was no different, as I took home more than a dozen new books. But maybe my favorite little moment from the entire week happened in that room, purely by chance. Bill Pearch, Sean Kolodziej, and I were lingering one late afternoon, trying to decide what we were going to do for dinner and who else might be able to join us. Someone came up to us and asked “You guys wanna see something cool?”

That person just happened to be legendary sabermetrician DICK CRAMER, who invented OPS in 1969. Like, he came up with the stat. Well, 55 years later, he just finished his latest project. Dick recently launched retroplayball.org, which permits batter-by-batter replay of historic games dating all the way back to 1916, thanks to the database at Retrosheet. The four of us sat at a table and used Dick’s laptop to replay The Homer in the Gloamin’ game, and then the 1933 East-West Negro Leagues All-Star Game at Comiskey Park, which has long been my answer to the question “If you had a time machine and could go back to watch one game in history, which game would you pick?” Thanks to Dick Cramer, and being in the right place at the right time, I kind of had that chance. If there’s a game in baseball history that you’ve always wanted to go back and watch, now you have that chance, too.

Thank you so much to everyone who worked behind the scenes to make SABR52 such a fun time and such an incredible success. It’s an insane amount of work to put a convention like this together, but you all pulled it off and I hope you were as happy with the results as those of us who attended. It was also announced at the convention that next year’s SABR convention will be held in Dallas/Fort Worth. SABR53 will take place from June 25 through June 29, so keep your calendars open! You don’t have to be a SABR member to attend the convention, but if you’d like to become a member, you can do that HERE.

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Until next time, I’m Dan Wallach, and this is My Baseball History.