ESPN: Neyer: Recapping the SABR convention (Insider)

“You’re with me, flannel” and for a short time in Cleveland…we all were.

Anyway, every year somebody asks me what happens at a SABR convention.

...Also, for the last few years the convention has been a wonderful opportunity to see how Baseball Think Factory’s “Primates” behave when they’re not being chaperoned.

...• Anthony Giacalone—one of those Primates I mentioned—on “Baseball and America in the Summer of ‘65.” He tied everything together: baseball, Vietnam, the counter-culture, Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, even the revolution in the Dominican Republic that year. Honestly? I don’t know if Giacalone actually tied everything together in his 20 minutes. But he put on one hell of a good show.

• Chris Jaffe, another Primate, had some fantastic stuff on managerial tendencies that I’d never seen before. It’s the sort of stuff that Bill James probably would have put in his book about managers, if only the data had existed then. Among the stuff I wrote down: “Zimmer!” (in a bad way) and “Gaston #1 positional CG,” which means, as I recall, that nobody did less than Cito Gaston. And that might explain why nobody was particularly impressed with his work the first time around. I believe Jaffe’s working on a book of his own, and if his presentation’s any indication, it’ll be a corker.

• Steve Treder—yet another, and our last Primate—talked about longtime GM Frank Lane, who was nicknamed both “Frantic” and (more famously) “Trader.” Lane made 290 trades during his career, far more than any other general manager, and Treder has analyzed all of them. Bottom line: Lane made some brilliant moves very early in his career—most notably, he picked up Billy Pierce, Nellie Fox and Minnie Minoso for almost nothing—but otherwise he was just making trades for the sake of making trades.