SABR39 Wrap (with pictures!)

Well, indrectly with pictures, anyway.

You’ve read all about the most important things that happened at SABR39, so I think I’ll just add a handful of personal comments:

1. I missed all of the Primate presentations (not intentionally - other things got in the way) except for Anthony Giacolone’s on how the Great Depression affected 60s baseball. Anthony did his usual excellent job of presenting something that focused more on the social/historical context than it did on the game itself. I heard a couple off-the-cuff discussions from non-BTFers over the weekend that indicated that at least some people got it.

2. BTF was directly responsibie for the presence three of first-time attendees (Larry Mahnken, Josh Heit, and AJM) under the age of 35. I doubt that anyone else can match that.

3. After my own presentation, I had a young fellow (must have been about 12 or so) asking me a lot of questions about whether managers had pushed the usage of relievers too far and whether they’d come back in the opposite direction. I think this young fellow is somehow related to Eric Van - I saw him in Eric’s company a couple of times over the weekend. He reminded mke of me when I was that age - or what I might have been had I grown up in the computer age.

4. Overall, I think this was the best group of presentations in the six conventions I attended. Yes, there were a few clinkers here and there, but the breadth and depth was quite good overall.

5. I didn’t see the winning presentation (21*, by Tim Herlich, which was about Tom Cheney’s 21-K game against the Orioles in 1962), but I don’t see how it could possibly have been better than Geri Strecker’s masterpiece about Greenlee Field in Pittsburgh, which included previously unseen photos of the ballpark that she uncovered while reviewing the architect’s file for the housing project that replaced it.

6. The posters were, on the other hand, mostly disappointing. The winning poster, by a HS senior named Susan Ballentine, was very slickly done but had a lot (and I mean a LOT) of very dense math.

7. The guys (and gals, lest you think I forgot you, Stacy and Andrea) were, as usual, the best part of the convention. What I enjoy most is that we can have passionate conversations, disagree about as strongly as we possibly can (you should have heard Dimino on the subject of the Phillies trading for Cliff Lee instead of Roy Halliday) and still come away ready to do it all again the next night - and we have each other’s back when it’s needed.

8. This was the best organized convention I’ve attended. Things moved along very well; I never felt like the organizers were scrambling to keep everything on schedule.

9. The only downside was that the hotel bar was too small, and there were not too many other places that could handle us close to the hotel. (This is not a complaint, mind you - we didn’t have a lot of trouble finding places to congregate - but it did limit to some extent our contact with other SABRen).

It was a great week. Now to make sure that the Atlanta convention is NOT held until after the 4th of July weekend so that I can go next year…