Primate Studies— Where BTF's Members Investigate the Grand Old Game
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Greg Spira, RIP
Greg Spira, fellow Primate and long-time friend to many of us, passed away today. Will pass along details as I get them.
Mike Emeigh
Posted: December 29, 2011 at 02:27 AM | 45 comment(s)
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1. The Interdimensional Council of Rickey!'s Posted: December 29, 2011 at 02:57 AM (#4024829)Didn't know him IRL, but definitely did here. Condolences to his family and friends.
IIRC he had terrible health problems in the 90s (and presumably after) but never made any kind of deal about them.
To use a phrase from another usenet regular, a friend I've never met. And I'll miss him.
I did a little research - he had a kidney transplant in 1997. RIP, Greg.
RIP, Greg.
I never really got to know him, but I remember him all the way back from rsb in the mid-90s. He ran one of the precursors to the Hall of Merit, an rsb HOF or something.
Ray already quoted Greg's old sig/nick from rsb: "Sarcasm is a way of life." Which summed it up so well: "Don't take offense, that's just how we do things here." Greg's wit was sharp but never mean or unfair. Seeing a thread with a last post from Spira was a definite click-through in my formative years.
For those who didn't have the distinct pleasure of meeting Greg... you missed out. He had the most wonderful ability to seem both shy and engaging. I spent some time with Greg... probably half a dozen SABR conventions over the years. I regret not spending more time with him. He was a pleasure to be around. Greg had a love of baseball and of books (particularly baseball books) that is equal to any one I have ever known. His contributions to our baseball community will be missed both on-line and particularly at SABR (for me).
What feels like many years ago, at SABR Boston - I didn't know many people. Greg was a light house. I knew that where-ever I saw him, I could follow and be welcome. In some cases I'm sure I wore out that welcome, but never with Greg. I am a better man today for knowing Greg and for that I am eternally grateful. I hope I can take the lessons I have learned from him forward in 2012 and forever.
God bless you.
-- MWE
I was actually kicking some ideas around in my head last night (it took me a long time to go to sleep). SABR has a Doug Pappas Award that is given to the best oral presentation at the convention, and I was thinking about whether we should establish the Greg Spira Award for the best original piece of research done on the Internet, since Greg was one of the pioneers in bringing the research community on the Internet together.
-- MWE
Greg was a world-class researcher and an awfully good (though very reluctant) writer. He didn't publish many articles, never had a blog, and that's a shame, because he was driven by a curiosity that led him in a lot of interesting directions. Greg was always sending me articles he thought I'd like to read, and was usually spot on, although on more than one occasion he sent me an article I had written myself without realizing it.
Lots of fun stories I'd love to share about Greg, but today I'm just consumed by sadness.
Typically, Greg took it with good humor.
http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/a-may-birthday-so-that-explains-why-i-was-such-a-lousy-baseball-player/
Isn't that the truth? Our last call was only a few weeks ago, ostensibly to relay a message that Maple Street was pulling the plug on the Mets annual (a thing Greg pushed to start btw and was good as any of them) but went on and on (Mets, music, supermarkets, etc), until I walked out of cellphone range. Nobody gave me calls like that. I'll miss Greg!
FROM: The Baseball Prospectus ~
By Dave Pease
Our friend, Greg Spira, passed away yesterday.
I've been in a reflective mood lately. Part of it is the holidays, I'm sure,
and spending some precious quality time with family. Part of it is the
recency of the Best of Baseball Prospectus editing experience... working
with all of that content really brought back memories of how things were in
the old days. We dedicated those books to Doug Pappas, another of our
friends who left us too soon, and whenever I flip past the dedication I'm
reminded of Doug's entertaining phone conversation with the commish...
goodness, we were all once so young and full of vinegar.
I met Greg the same way I met most of the founders of Baseball
Prospectus--on Usenet. For many of us, rec.sport.baseball was an important
place in the early '90s, and finding it changed my life. One of the most
authoritative voices on rsbb when I first discovered it was Greg Spira. And
speaking of vinegar, he used to use the phrase "sarcasm is a way of life"
right in the middle of his handle. He was working on a little project he
called the Internet Baseball Awards, and I got to know him better when I
started working with him on the awards in 1993. Before web-based balloting,
running a project like the IBAs was hard work--we had to take ballots via
e-mail; we couldn't depend on consistent formatting or spelling, and we had
to tabulate the results manually. I suppose working for Greg on the
tabulation was kind of my "first job" having to do with baseball... it was
certainly the first time I was working on producing anything larger than a
Usenet post. Luckily, we were dealing with dozens of ballots instead of the
hundreds that are submitted now, but I know Greg spent a massive amount of
time administrating the IBAs over the years.
One of the things that impressed me most about Greg was his sense of
fairness. Under his somewhat grouchy demeanor, I think Greg was an idealist
at heart, and he always wanted to give people a chance. In the early days,
we got a lot of ballots that were plainly filled out by homers, idiots, or
both, and one year there was a ballot submitted with Houston Astros players
for every award. This joker's third-place Cy Young vote was a write-in of
"the ENTIRE Astros bullpen," which was plainly in violation of the rules. I
was ready to consider that a sign and dump this ballot completely, but Greg
really wanted to contact this voter, both to make sure that they knew that
their ballot was in jeopardy of not being fully counted and to clarify their
wishes for that Cy Young vote. I said, "Greg, there's nothing I can do--they
didn't enter an e-mail address in the ballot, so we don't know who they
are." He ended up trying to locate them by IP address. There's a certain
purity in that approach, I think, that I'll never be able to attain.
As you can see, Greg took the Internet Baseball Awards quite seriously. He
enjoyed their anyone-can-vote popularist aspects, and especially in some of
those lean years where the official post-season awards were just brutal, I
know he was proud that the IBAs went to such relatively deserving people.
But I was chatting with Christina Kahrl earlier today, and she brought up a
great point: Greg also did some impressive research, and if he'd had the
time and availability to write more, he had everything it would have taken
to be a well-known and influential analyst. Jay Jaffe reminded me of Greg's
contribution to Baseball Prospectus 1997 on pitching to the score, and how
it basically doesn't happen, which we're going to re-format and re-run here
at Baseball Prospectus in Greg's honor tomorrow. Remember, this was back
before BP.com (or baseball-reference, or Fangraphs); your go-to site for
baseball stats probably would have been the great Doug Steele's MLB Stats
page, where the stats are flat files and the disclaimer is cheerful... it
was a lot of work to do this kind of analysis, but Greg had what it took.
Greg liked pretty much everything about baseball, but he really liked
baseball books. Rest easy, Greg, my friend, and I hope you've got all the
baseball books you want wherever you are.
Meanwhile, back here, our next book is for you.
Fittingly, Greg's last post to SABR-L (less than two weeks ago) was on the subject of baseball books. In this case, information about the economics of print-on-demand. I wish it had been a bit snarkier, which would have made it even more fitting, but sobeit.
Mister High Standards captured the essence of Greg Spira back in comment #15: Greg spoke very, very quietly, but behind it there was always a twinkle in his eye. His viewpoint was just a bit non-orthogonal, his commentary often so droll that you didn't quite recognize the humor as quickly as you ordinarily did.
Greg knew about the fragility of life and health, because he'd been living on the knife-edge for years and years. In the years (decades, really) I knew him, even his best times were difficult. But no matter how tired, how weak he might be, he never let it get him down.
Gone too soon... Requiescat in pace, my friend.
-- MWE
Welcome, JW. We hope you will be a frequent participant.
-- MWE
An additional obituary (reflecting yet another facet of Greg's life) is online here.
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