SABR Day 2019
It’s taken me more than a month to get this recap up, but that doesn’t mean SABR Day 2019 was any less of an event for the Emil Rothe Chapter. Gathering on Groundhog Day, the meeting opened per usual with a welcome from chapter president Rich Hansen to at least 25 sick-of-winter baseball fans gathered at the Evanston Public Library for the chapter’s first SABR Day celebration on Chicago’s North Shore.
Rich Smiley opened with some key announcements, including notes about the upcoming SABR 49 in San Diego and a Black Sox centennial symposium at the Chicago Historical Society in September. He also relayed the announcement of the 2019 Seymour Award to Jane Levy for The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created and a few announcements about upcoming chapter events, more info about which can be found here.
After the pleasantries were out of the way, the eclectic program began with a statistical analysis from Scott Lindholm attempting to quantifiably determine the best teams in major league history. Citing Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein’s Baseball Dynasties as inspiration, Scott introduced his method based on how many standard deviations a team was better than the league average in both runs allowed and runs scored for the season. Rather than spoil his results, I’ll leave it to the reader to get the data from Baseball-Reference or the Lahman database to replicate his results.
Following this statistically based opener was an update on the effort to get a plaque recognizing the location of Lakefront Park, the first home of the Chicago National League Ball Club in current-day Millenium Park. Jon Daniels had attempted to get the plaque placed during the park’s initial construction, but ran into a myraid of hurdles befitting the well-earned reputation of City Hall. He did have some hopeful indicators from the current head of the park, though it seems to many that placing the plaque will ultimately require the cooperation of the ball club’s current ownership. A draft of the proposed plaque text was circulated to attendees.
The most lively presentation of the day followed, as the “Boss Lady” introduced the goings on of the Chicago Salmon Vintage Base Ball Club. The team, a member of the Vintage Base Ball Association, plays games using a rule set from 1858, often in Chicago’s Lincoln Park but also at other grounds around the area. They also travel on the road against other vintage base ball clubs in far-off cities such as Detroit and New York. Club co-founder Gary Schiappacase also discussed the function of the VBBA and their efforts to get Doc Adams elected to the Hall of Fame when the Early Baseball committee convenes in 2020.
Batting clean-up where the father-son tandem of Neal and Matt Johnson, developers of the Thinking Baseball app. Thinking Baseball is an mobile phone application designed to help aspiring ballplayers know what to do in a myriad of situations on the diamond. With upwards of 8,000 scenarios, users can move players around on the touch screen interface to answer the questions posed about, for instance, what the 3rd basemen should do on a liner to right with runners on 1st and 2nd. While the app can be tried for free, the full capabilities do cost money. Neal Johnson also talked about the timeline of how it came to be and how they were able to get Pat Hughes to record the narration for the app.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a SABR meeting without trivia of some form, and the quiz for the Chicago chapter pitted its 2 foremost masters, Dave Zeieren and Chris Kamka, against each other. A common through line infiltrated all of the questions, one that was apropos on a day immortalized by a Bill Murray film. Kamka emerged the victor on this day. After settling business with the silent auction, all went home happily sated with a fill of baseball and renewed hope for the long winter to finally, mercifully, break.
Four Pitch Random Walk 