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This is remarkable given the sheer number of players they’ve had on the DL or lost for the season. With a 73-55 record, they’d be in FIRST PLACE in either of the other two American League divisions as of today! (And be only half a game back in two of the NL’s divisions, as well.) This is not exactly the usual showing of a gritty team barely holding it together.

Maybe it’s that Terry Francona finally picked up the Bigelow Green Tea sponsorship that Joe Torre started in New York. A magic elixir that allows teams to overachieve (and yes, most of Torre’s Yankees squads exceeded predictions, especially in October). More likely it’s that Francona has the even keel of Torre, never panicking or making sudden moves, and just rolling with the punches (and groin injuries, and season-ending collisions, etc…) no matter how rough it gets.

That’s a lesson Joe Girardi finally learned last year, allowing him to be calmer and get out of his team’s way. The Yankee managerial job has aged Girardi quickly–the gray hair and hang-dog jowls suggest that in the not too distant future Girardi will resemble Torre, too. (Catchers are high mileage vehicles to begin with.) More importantly, though, the job has matured him. He was always one of the most mature and intelligent players in the game, but it took a few years of skipper duty to grow into the role.

Since the All-Star break, the Yankees have been the team that is just barely maintaining. Pettitte is still out, A-Rod is also on the shelf, the bullpen continues to experience ups and downs, Swisher is banged up, Posada has a recurring knee thing, et cetera. The rotation currently sports both Dustin Moseley and Ivan Nova, while Javier Vazquez (insert one of those stats about most strikeouts since such-and-such year, blah blah blah) has been demoted to the pen with a “dead arm.” Burnett and Hughes have been good/bad/good/bad of late, and only Sabathia and Cano have been rolling consistently all season long.

It’s going to be an interesting final month of the season.

Caillault presents for every pitcher in the Hall of Fame, their career won-lost totals in head-to-head match-ups with other members of the HoF. His results date back to the beginning of the National League in 1876 (when Al Spalding and Candy Cummings were 1-1 against each other) and extend up to and including 1987 (when Don Sutton beat Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro beat Sutton). There have been no such matchups since, although that will change as more pitchers are inducted.
J-P Caillault (jpc1957@msn.com) is a professor of astronomy at the University of Georgia, where he also teaches classes on the physics of baseball, the history of the major leagues, and sabermetrics. He is the author of A Tale of Four Cities (McFarland 2003), The Complete New York Clipper Baseball Biographies (McFarland, 2009), and has written articles for Baseball Digest and Baseball Research Journal. He lives in Winterville, Georgia.

Of the 40 judges, they were very much in agreement on this being the best poster.

And now for the oral presentations. There were a total of 40 presentations, and five that were seen as really head and shoulders above the others. A grudging consensus was reached, and we have four honorable mentions, and one winner.

First, the four honorable mentions:

Robert Fitts, for “Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura, and the War”
Michael Haupert for “Earning Like a Woman: The Gender Gap in Professional Baseball 1944-1954″
Alan Nathan “Revisiting Mantle’s Griffith Stadium Home Run”
Mark Stang “The Barnum of the Bushes: Chattanooga’s Joe Engel”

And the winner is:

Ross Davies for “Long Before Ping-Pong: Chinese-US Diplomacy Before the Great War”

I am pleased to say I did see this presentation and it is recapped in an earlier post. Since Ross wasn’t there, but Neal did have his slides, I gave a brief recap from my notes and Neal showed the slides, so the folks who missed it could get the gist.

Official description(s):
Magnolia Chapter member Ken Fenster moderates a discussion with Dorothy Seymour Mills, David Block and Tom Swift about the ups and downs of the research process, from the formulation of original ideas all the way through to publication. The panelists will use examples from their own works to illustrate the difficulties researchers must face, and the strategies that were useful in meeting those challenges.

Ken Fenster is a Professor of History at Georgia Perimeter College, Clarkston campus. He joined SABR in the early 1990s. He has published articles and book reviews in The Baseball Research Journal, The National Pastime, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, and The New Georgia Encyclopedia. He is co-editor of the 2010 convention publication. He received the McFarland-SABR award in 2004 and was awarded a Yoseloff-SABR grant in 2009.
Dorothy Seymour Mills is the co-author with Harold Seymour of the classic scholarly histories of early baseball for Oxford University Press (Baseball The Early Years; Baseball: The Golden Age; and Baseball: A People’s Game). She has detailed their work together in a memoir, A Woman’s Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour (McFarland 2007). During the convention she will be autographing her latest book, Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places (McFarland 2010), which is already in its second printing. Dorothy is honored by the annual presentation of the “Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Award” and received the first medal herself. In 2010 she was among the first group of recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award, which honors the most important scholars of the game. Dorothy has published 25 books, not all in the field of baseball history, and at 82 years old is writing another.
David Block is a baseball historian and antiquarian whose research and writings have shed new light on the distant origins of the game. His landmark book on the subject, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game is generally recognized as the authoritative work on the subject of baseball’s origins. It was the recipient of the 2006 SABR Seymour Medal, the 2006 NASSH book, named to the New York Times Reading List of sports books (2005), and was designated an “Outstanding Academic Title of 2005″ by the American Library Association. David is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, and serves on the editorial board of “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.” He lives with his family in San Francisco.
Tom Swift is an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines. His book, Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star, won the 2009 Seymour Medal, which honors the best work of baseball history of the year. The book tells the true story of Charles Albert Bender, the first Minnesota-born man inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the most accomplished American Indian player of all time. Tom and his wife, Carrie, live with their two terriers, Barry and Tobias, in Northfield, Minnesota. Like boyhood hero Kent Hrbek, he throws right and bats left. His web site: Tom Swift.

Ken begins by introducing Dorothy’s work, pointing out that Dorothy will now be listed as a full co-author on the Oxford University Press re-issues of the Seymour volumes.

Dorothy speaks. “I think most people think that writers come up with the theme for a book, and then go out and research it to write the book. And then write the book. That would be logical! But mostly it happens that while you’re researching, the theme or idea for a book emerges, and you start writing, and you’re writing and researching at the same time, and it doesn’t happen quite so neatly. You find other things out as you are going along, and you have to change your ideas and reaarange as what you discover may differ from your expectations.”

Dorothy ended up having to re-arrange the whole section on women playing baseball in her book Chasing Baseball, because what she discovered about the game turned out to be quite different than her original expectations.

Research can also take you off on tangents you don’t expect. “While working on The People’s Game I learned that baseball was played in the 1870s in schools for Native Americans. Baseball was also being used in mission schools. To understand the childrens’ experience, I found some biographies about people who had grown up in those schools. And then I found the federal reports from the Department of Indian Affairs, which brought me to the government reports of the school superintendents, which led me to the discovery that some of the schools were still in existence. That led me to some important primary sources. Ultimately it became a whole chapter in the book that wouldn’t have been there in the original plan.”

“Research is like a treasure hunt, each thing leads you to another thing.”

“You might think that an autobiography would be easy, just remember everything and write it down! But I didn’t want to fall into the trap that some writers have run into where they get things wrong in their own books. So I had to travel to Cornell, where the Harold and Dorothy Seymour papers are archived. I discovered there that there were plenty of things I had forgotten that I had done, and that there were places I forgot I had gone. I studied the footnotes in the PhD thesis that I helped Seymour to write. Later, a reader came up to me to say it was remarkable how well I remembered the past. Ha! Fooled him! When you’re writing autobiography or biography, you have to fact check your subject. People’s memories are imperfect.”

Dorothy calls for a comprehensive update of the works she and Harold Seymour did, which ends in the 1940s. She describes work she did on military baseball, but what about how military baseball is doing now? Baghdad has a civilian baseball league now, but it must be related to the military somehow, isn’t it? What about prison baseball? I was able to write to the penitentiary directors who sent me copies of the prison newsletters written by the inmates themselves. Those kinds of primary sources are vital. You can start in the card catalog of your local library, but you can go so far beyond that.

Some more of Dorothy’s tips:
You can email Dave Kelly, the librarian at the Library of Congress who specializes in helping sports historians. Dave’s email dkel@loc.gov
Sign up for Google alerts.
Always check Wikipedia with another source.
Use the SABR Guide to doing Baseball Research, which is available free to SABR members in email from Peter Garver at the SABR office: pgarver@sabr.org

David Block is up next.

David: It was a great honor for me to win the Seymour Medal because it bears the name Seymour, which was very significant to me. As Ken mentioned, Dorothy and Harold transformed the way baseball research was done. Before them, baseball history was treated as storytelling, and although the stories were good, they were not always very accurate. The work we do now in SABR is really in the footsteps of the work they did.

I took an early retirement about 10 years ago, and discovered retirement wasn’t as easy as I thought it was. I didn’t have a schedule to follow and I was kind of rattling around the house and my wife threatened to send me back to work if I didn’t stop complaining. I had a hobby at the time on baseball memorabilia collecting, and I started collecting books in particular. I started a modest project to make a bibliography of old biographies and books before 1860 that mention baseball. While proceeding on this bibliography I thought well I’ll write an introduction to it on where baseball came from. I knew Abner Doubleday hadn’t invented it. I started reading a lot of books the talked about the origins of baseball, and discovered that most of it was anecdotal and much of it was contradictory. This really puzzled me, since baseball history since the Seymours it has been studied and dissected as much as any other sport. Every other era of baseball history had been focused on except the beginning.

I got into researching it and discovered so much of what had been written was inaccurate. Eventually my research for this introduction ended up turning into a whole book.

Because the era of baseball I was researching many people didn’t even know existed, I had to look in a lot of little corners. I started by gathering all the baseball histories I could find, and itemizing all these pieces of information, and then going off and seeing which ones I could corroborate. Many I could, but many I couldn’t. I looked in sources like the Oxford English Dictionary and English regional glossaries. Trap ball, hand in hand out, stop ball, and many other games that led to the development of baseball. Many of these would list “first usage” which would lead me to a primary source. At the time I had to visit a lot of libraries in the course of my research, since it was before the digitization of library catalogs and sources. I would find in the card catalogs things like children’s books that were a major source of information for me, as well as books on folk games, et cetera. Many of the illustrations from the very early game come out of books for children.

It was really fun. It was really a treasure hunt. I would see a reference someplace and I would try to follow it as far as I could. Many of them were dead ends, but sometimes you’d find a pot of gold at the end of it. Robert Henderson had done some good work in the 1940s but he had barely scratched the surface, plus he did all ball sports, not just baseball. When you stumble into an era of baseball history that no one else has done serious extensive work in, it’s a privilege and a responsibility, because you’ll be reporting on something that no one else has before. The people in the SABR chapter in the UK has done a lot of work now, and Tom’s essay A Place Level Enough to Play Ball was a very inspiration piece for me.

Obstacles in this area of research were formidable. The previous 150 years were packed with misinformation and the opinions on baseball’s origins were largely based on things other than facts. National chauvinism, politics, opinions, falsehoods, and many other assumptions, yarns, and stories — I had to wade my way through to find out how the game really started. I don’t know if I successfully wove my way through all those obstacles. Sometimes there were partial truths. The whole debate between Chadwick and Spalding about whether baseball was English or American in origin. It was an important debate a hundred years ago, but neither of them was quite right. Chadwick argued it was English, which is correct, and that it developed from rounders, which is incorrect. Baseball actually pre-dated rounders in the early 18th century, rounder came in the 19th century.

There are great gaps in what we know. How did it migrate to the New World? There’s a lot of that history that remains to be uncovered. I encourage anyone who is interested to get involved. With the increase in digital databases, it’s possible to research much more than when I started.

Be skeptical. I constantly ran into things that weren’t what they purported to be. Even this past year as I continue to do research, I was in England and I saw a reference to a diary from Lancashire that had been transcribed from the 17th century and mentioned baseball, but I eventually found the 1870s transcription and it wasn’t baseball. It was a game called prisoners bars or prisoners base, which is a form of tag. This guy who transcribed it in 1870 substituted the word baseball incorrectly. You get a lot of false positives.

Tom Swift

“Writing a book is a horrible exhausting struggle. One would never undertake such a thing if not driven by a demon one cannot exist or understand.” said George Orwell, and quoted by Tom to open his remarks.

I do not, alas, have the level of experience (of Dorothy and David on the panel), but what I lack in longevity I make up for in the ability to concentrate years of trials and tribulations into a short period of time.

The impetus behind me book. I am from Minnesota, “you betcha.” And for 50 years Charles Bender was out lone representative in the Hall of Fame. And when Paul Molitor and Dave Winfield were inducted, the newspaper articles would keep mentioning Bender. I even wrote a magazine article about him, but the more i learned about Bender the more I wanted to learn about him.

He pitched in 5 World Series, he may have invented the slider. But I was drawn to his life story as a compelling human interest story. This question of where did you get the idea is appropriate since I get that one more frequently from journalists and readers. It’s all a lot less complicated that people think. What interests you? You live with your subject, for years in my case, so you better like him or her. Bender fascinated me and if he didn’t there’s no way I could have written the book.

I’ve been a writer all my professional life, on mostly un-glamorous stuff. It could become mere drudgery. I had to skip a few stones on the pond to see if it would interest me. Reading and then following your curiosity. Were I to catalog all the challenges I faced, most of them self-inflicted, you’d probably miss your flights or your ride home. Every aspects of it was a challenge to me. I actually consulted that SABR How To Manual.

My journalism background helped. But most of the stories and articles I had written in my career were in the hear and now. I was interviewing subjects and writing in the present. But this was a steep learning curve. It took me far longer than I think it would take most people. But in some ways I had the advantage of ignorance. The road to baseball research is littered with apocryphal tales and preconceived notions. But since I was learning it all new, I was able to come to it without trying to fit it into a preconceived tale and ask very basic questions.

I was very inefficient. I gathered from a lot of sources, many of them were not essential. I read well beyond what I needed to, but it was important to me to gather up as much as I could. It was a slow process for me, and not always an emotionally easy one. I had to restructure my life in some ways. There are those who can do it just on evenings and weekends and still have jobs and kids and grandkids. I couldn’t. I ended up working fewer hours and earning less, and putting a lot of pressure on myself so that the people in this room would find it good. I thought about abandoning it more than once, I suppose, and I wrote in fits and starts. My spouse talked me down from the ledge more than once. One time my computer hard drive fried. I lost a lot of writing, some typing of notes, and fortunately as I was going through all those microfilm reels I was printing a lot of stuff out. So I could retrace my steps. But here’s one bit of advice. Back up your files! Every night!

Also, be hyper-organized. Looking back on it, I wasn’t sorting my stuff well. Every minute you spend placing things where you can access them and noting where they came from and where they go, is a minute well spent.

Cast a wide net. It was important to me to get a sense of what Philadelphia was like when Bender lived there. That all infused my understanding of where he lived. I felt closer to my subject and I understood him a little bit more. He also struck a pedestrian with his car and killed him. I found every scrap of information about that as about the World Series. It was obviously an important chapter in his life.

Once you do all this stuff, immerse yourself in your details, read your notes until your sick of them, then set them aside and see what you can write without referring to them, to get into a flow that you can craft a good story. You sacrifice acuracy for nothing, but it’s important to tell good stories.

I’ve heard from some readers who say I don’t read baseball books, but I enjoyed yours. It’s important to reach a little broader audience than just SABR.

One of the things I asked myself is, what was it like? What was it like to stand on the mound in the Polo Grounds, with people hurling racial epithets at you and John McGraw standing in the dugout? There’s no definitive answer to that question, but you still have to ask the question.

Tap into SABR’s deep well of intellectual capital. I received so much from people who wouldn’t know me on the street, good book recommendations, an article they wrote, information and facts and leads. I became around this time much more active in my local chapter, the Halsey Hall chapter in Minnesota.

Questions.

Ken: Dorothy, in your book Chasing Baseball, you advocate for a professional women’s baseball league.

Dorothy: I thought about that for quite a while. What it will take is a structure. Boys have easy access to a structure and girls don’t. Justine Siegal has started one, but it’s not nationwide. Boys have it at every age starting at age 6 or 7, but even if girls have a youth league, they are unlikely to be able to play at the high school or college level. The only way it’s really going to happen would be if Major League Baseball would support it, and give money as they do to Little League aimed at boys. MLB’s efforts toward women are about developing women fans, but not women players.

One way would be like they do it in Australia, with men’s and women’s sports clubs, who offer many sports, and baseball would be one of them. The government of Australia supports the clubs, not the individual sports. Some teams eventually develop stars who could play professionally. That would be the feeder system.

If a stand-alone professional league is started, there are no feeder teams to bring the talent in. A formal structure is vital to a strong league.

Ken: David, have you determined any better the use of the bat in the origins of baseball?

David: I had made the assumption that the bat was as essential to the game as the ball. But in the 18th century there was a book published in 1796, a German book, that included a two foot long bat described as “English baseball.” So I assumed a bat had always been a part of baseball.

My thinking since then has changed somewhat. I’ve analyzed other mentions of English baseball written in the English language and none of them mention a bat at all. The 1744 book that mentions it has an illustration, but there’s no evidence of a bat in the picture or the description! The game of English baseball that grew into rounders and American baseball, it was likely the girl who was the runner would just hit it with her hand. And I say her because it was a game played by girls and young women.

When the bat was introduced is unclear. It’s pretty sure it happened very early in the United States, but we’re not sure exactly when. Illustrations from early 1800s show it. The earliest text information that mentions the bat is from 1834.

In England my hypothesis is that rounders distinguished itself from English baseball by using the bat, in fact. It’s now my speculation that the German book in 1796 which mentions the bat, was describing baseball in a transitional state, and that it was the beginning of rounders. Until more evidence is uncovered we may never know when the bat first appeared.

Ken: Tom, you begin your book with Bender’s performance in the 1914 World Series and you anchor the book on that performance. Yet you argue in the book that this was an atypical performance for him, so why did you choose it?

Tom: You know, it wasn’t an intellectual decision. I was well into the research, and I was looking at some microfilm from the day before that performance. And I just knew it. It was a demarcation point in his career, he became in his manager’s eyes the greatest “money pitcher,” it was his final game with the A’s. Everything that happened before was one part of the story, and after that everything changed. I didn’t sit there and think “this is how it should go.” It was a rare case of me just reading over something and it just kind of occurred to me. Once I thought of it, I didn’t consider any other way to go about it.

(Followed by questions from the audience. My wrist hurts so I’m not going to type all of those.)

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Official description: Alan Nathan moderates a discussion of the latest developments in Sportsvision’s PITCHf/x, HITf/x and FIELDf/x, and TrackMan’s radar technology used to measure ball flight.

Dave Allen is an expert in spatial statistics and graphical analysis. He is a staff writer for Fangraphs and Baseball Analysts. He will talk about PITCHf/x analysis.
Josh Kalk is the Baseball Operations Analyst for the Tampa Bay Rays. Prior to that he was one of the leading PITCHf/x analysts and a writer for The Hardball Times.
Greg Moore is in charge of marketing for Sportvision’s baseball products, including PITCHf/x, HITf/x, and FIELDf/x.
Rob Ristagno is Director of Business Development for TrackMan. He seeks new markets in which to apply the TrackMan radar technology, including professional baseball.
Alan Nathan is an expert in the physics of baseball, with experience using both PITCHf/x and Trackman for trajectory analysis.

Alan Schwarz of the NY Times reported on a small conference on PITCHf/x and tons of people on SABR-L were excited about it and wanted to know if some of those topics could be covered here at SABR40. Alan Nathan was involved with the PITCHf/x conference and agreed to organize this panel.

One who was not listed in the program: Rand Pendleton is Director of Video Broadcast Development for Sportsvision and has been with all their projects. It appears he is replacing Greg Moore.

Rand goes first. There is an amusing and ironic pause as it takes the technology panel a small delay to get their Powerpoint running.

Sportvision started in 1998 and what they are known most for is that yellow line that shows up in football games. Then NASCAR that tracks cars within a few centimeters. Won some Emmys. 5000+ live events since 1998, not counting all the pitchf/x. Started out to enhance broadcasting, but a side effect was all the data collection, which is now a focus.

Pitchf/xis a camera based system, accurate to less than one inch.
Data is used for a variety of media analysis, teams, and sabermetricians.
All the pro broadcasts (ESPN, FOX, MLB, etc) are all using the pitchf/x data even if they call it something different.
Pitchf/x uses two cameras, 90 degrees apart, high home and high first. They are not genlocked. Installations at the MLB parks are permanent, so pitchf/x can have a broom closet to call their own. They run two computers, one for each camera, looking for the baseball constantly. They find one and then look for the next image and determine if it is a pitch. The software can tell the difference between a pitch and a hot dog wrapper. Then the images are carefully timestamped to give a trajectory series.
Can calculate Covington drag.
Speed, location, and trajectory are calculated immediately when pitch crosses home plate. Can replace the speed gun.

The cameras don’t see the ball at the same time, but they crunch the data. (Rand shows a nifty graphic showing the interleaving of the different image captures by the two cameras… I can’t really recreate it or describe it well.)
Keep the pixel density high enough for accuracy, but wide enough to see entire flight and 3D markers like third base.

Rand then shows some awesome graphs of pitchf/x analysis–which I can neither recreate nor adequately describe. You just had to be there.

Then comes HITf/x.
Uses the exact same cameras as pitchf/x, finds baseball in the images, and get initial speed, trajectory, and azimuth angle. Only tracks back to the pitchers mound so it doesn’t track where the ball comes down. (Unless it’s a bunt, obviously.)

Fieldf/x is a timed history of the players and the ball, two different cameras that show the whole field. Only one installation right now, at Giants PNC park. System will be able to calculate top speed of the player, range, and trajectories of the ball. Not completely automatic–needs some operator intervention but mostly automatic tracking of players and ball. In beta testing now so only operational in the one park, but two more will be up and running soon.

Question from the audience. When they show that pitch location graphic in two dimensions on ESPN or whatever, what is that meant to represent?

Answer: The box on EPSN’s pitch tracker, Gameday, etc… is meant to represent the front of the plate.

Rob is next to talk about Trackman
Incorporated in 2003 in a garage in Denmark, and has its roots in golf.
4 founders, 2 active in the company, started in Klaus’s garage.
In 2004 Trackman Pro demoed to customers, 5 demos resulted in 5 sales
By 2008 entered cricket, soccer, and baseball.

It’s military grade doppler radar software, so you get 24,000 samples in a single pitch. It locks on to the pitch as if it were a missile, and it follows it until it stops moving. Just one “camera” behind home plate.

The data it provides is actionable and the technology is scalable. “What happened?” (did the pitch break? and why?)

Actionability: release conditions, 3D release slot, speed at release, angle, spin rate, spin axis
plus the laws of physics, you will get movement (break horiz and vert), plate location, plate approach, time of pitch flight, speed at plate

So now you can diagnose if a pitch is different from another — did a guy change his angle? did his spin rate change?

Proves the more spin rate on the ball creates more strikeouts, so perhaps How able a guy is able to spin a pitch will be a tool that is graded in the future.

But spin isn’t enough if the spin axis isn’t good — one guy could get 2750 RPMs on his ball (MLB avg 2450) but if spin axis not good ball won’t break or have bite.

Also the lower the vertical release angle on a curve ball the more swings and misses because of deception. You have to release it a higher angle than other pitches, but you can tip your pitch if you have it too high.

Likewise, Trackman can tell on hits the launch angle etc.

Well hit versus not well hit shows hot and cold zones on data compiled into chart. Another one of those graphics you had to be in the room to appreciate.

If a batter is in a slump, you might be able to actually tell if he’s not getting the right exit speed or launch angle or if he’s just unlucky.

Right now the data is proprietary to Trackman customers. But Josh Orenstein runs the Trackman Baseball Insight Lab, jko@trackman.dk and you can get your hands on some data through there and your ideas.

DAVE ALLEN
Using pitchf/x to measure pitch success by location
Can use pitchf/x data to assess pitch success by location where it crosses plate (or where it WOULD have if not hit before getting there)

Assign linear weights run value to each pitch: what was the change in the expect number of runs before and after the pitch
Scale pitch height within the strike zone to account for different strike zone sizes

Fit a loess regression surface to these values

For more info on this method and replicating the analysis, see The Hardball Times Annual 2009, Dave’s pitchf/x Summit 2009 talk, and his posts at Baseball Analysts

A strike it about -0.05, while a ball is about +0.05

Shows some cool diagrams showing things like Dustin Pedroia’s hot and cold hitting zones. Again, you had to be there.

Since pitchers do not have perfect location this isn’t as actionable as you might always like.

One thing talked about is tracking the catcher’s glove and how good are guys at hitting their location.

You do have to look at one standard error from Pedroia’s graph, since a single year’s sample size for one batter. is small.

You can get all the pitchf/x data for free from MLB Advanced Media in xml, of through various third-party online providers (brooksbaseball.net, texasleaguers.com, joeleftkowitz.com)

Even some players like Max Scherzer and Brian Bannister are looking at their own pitchf/x data.

Josh Kalk “The Red Dot”
(Amusing, Josh has put the date 9/7/2010 on his talk. However it is only 8/7 today. Numbers geeks, I tellya…)

Begin by playing a Reggie Jackson quote from NPR.
“If you can’t see the rotation, you have to be able to recognize if it’s a curve ball or a slider. And if you can’t, you’re not going to be a major league player. Anyone who can hit above .270 can see the red dot. Anyone who saw that dot on the ball, you knew it was the slider. If it was a really big dot, you knew it was a hanger and you could hit it out.”

Reggie claims that small dot means good slider, large dot means a sloppy one.

Josh then shows, using a baseball attached to a dowel, spinning, as a four seam fastball. Pure backspin. It gives a rising action (counteracted by gravity). Then he puts them on the graph he’s making.

Then he shows a curve ball, and places them at the bottom of the graph. Neither of these has much left/right movement.

Then he shows a ball spinning as if its drilling toward us with a gyroscopic movement — like a football or a bullet. It gives no effect left, right or up or down.

Finally the slider has a “drilling” motion toward the ground which gives it left/right motion.

The dot comes from the red seam always ending up on the spin axis.

Josh then produces a power drill with a baseball attached to the bit. So he can show everyone the red dot. This is fabulously successful until the ball flies off the end. Um.

“Apparently a little more epoxy was needed,” he says. But the point is made.

(I should point out that the red dot and “nickel” curves and so on was covered quite a lot of this topic in the Baseball Research Journal, oh, now Alan Nathan is mentioning that Dave Baldwin and he worked on the article “Nickel and Dime Curves.”)

ALAN NATHAN, four quick things
showing nifty graphs using these kinds of data to answer questions

Why Is Mariano Rivera So Good?
Location, Location, Location.
Shows a graph built from pitchf/x data that shows that he “lives on the black.”

“Late break” truth or myth? Graph shows a 5″ break from the straight line trajectory, another shows less that 1 inch of break. How is the poor batter to know which one he’s getting? Shown on actual trajectories. It just appears to be a late break when he gets the 5″ one.

Using HITF/x on BABIP establishing outcome-independent metrics
HR have a launch angle around 30 degrees. But if you want to get on base, you want to have a smaller vertical launch angle. Angle correlates with outcome. High batted ball speed and vertical launch angle 10-12 degrees gives a line drive.

Combining HITf/x with Hittracker
HITf/x gives initial sped and direction
HIttracker (Greg Rybarczyk) records landing point and flight time of every batted ball
Together these constrain the full trajectory!

So, does the ball carry especially well in the new Yankee Stadium in 2009? were there funny wind currents?
“carry” = actual distance/vacuum distance
so a ball that went 397 feet but would have gone 571 in vacuum, has a carry of 0.695
Found the average “carry” at all ballparks, so normalized to one. Those with higher than average carry would be greater than one.

Denver has a carry of 1.07 — the highest of all. Texas also high, 1.04.
Cleveland has the lowest, .98. San Francisco also pretty low.
Yankee Stadium came out slightly below one, as well. Totally average. Also didn’t find an effect looking just at right field of Yankee Stadium either.

(In other words, it was the ghosts of Ruth and Gehrig coming over to the new stadium making it seem like that and now they’ve settled down. Wink.)

Questions from the audience.

Now the Henry Chadwick Award, which is an award for best baseball historical writers of all time. Winners who are in attendance are Dorothy Seymour Mills and Bill James. Other recipients have included Lawrence Ritter, Lee Allen, Bob Davids, and others.

The Roland Hemond Award for best baseball executive, scout, or front office person will now be given. Roland is usually on hand to give the award out himself, but he had to be in Arizona for the retirement of Luis Gonzalez’s number. Instead, Paul Snyder, who won the award in 2004, will give the award to John Schuerholz, the former GM and now president of the Braves. Paul is reading a letter from Roland now. He remarks that John and Paul make the best GM an scouting director team he knows, and that he looks forward to seeing John in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown someday.

Schuerholz’s remarks: Paul was the first person I tampered with when I got the job here. He was working for the Kansas City Royals and I couldn’t wait to ask him if he wanted to get out of the midwest. I am honored to accept this award that is named for my idol in professional baseball, Roland Hemond. I’m almost 70 years old, and have been 47 years in baseball, and whenever I look in the mirror and think I’m looking a little old, I remember Roland, who has been 60 years in baseball and is my hero.

Then comes the McFarland Baseball Research award. Len Levin, chairman of the awards committee, comes to the podium to give the awards. “THe field of candidates this year was very very good. We could have picked enough winners from this field to last about the next five years. And they are, if you will, all tied for first place.” And the winners are: Mark Armour, for A Tale of Two Umpires, about the firing of Bill Valentine and Al Salerno by Joe Cronin. William “Bill” Lamm for A Fearsome Collaboration: The Alliance between Andrew Freedman and John T. Brush. Geri Strecker, for The Rise and Fall of Greenlee Field.

The next edition of the prize will be for articles written or published this year (2010).

The Sporting News Baseball Research Award. For those projects that don’t fit into the Seymour Medal or McFarland awards. Steve Gietscher to announce.

By the way, I’m no longer the only poor schlub sitting on the floor in the back now. Even SABR vice president Bill Nowlin is here with me, along with about a dozen others.

Sporting News Baseball Research Award winners:
Robert Gorman and David Weeks for their book Death At The Ballpark.
Dennis Pajot for the book The Rise of Milwaukee Baseball
(Ms.) L. M Sutter for her book Ball, Bat and Bitumen
(All three titles were published by McFarland.)

The winners of the Doug Pappas Award and the USA Today Sports Weekly poster presentation award for this year will be announced tomorrow morning.

And now the presentation of SABR’s highest honor, the Bob Davids award, for service to the organization. Many of the previous winners are here in the room, and as the names of the previous are read out, the names of the deceased stand out. The lifetime awards are, by necessity, populated by the older of our number.

Bill Nowlin just mentioned to me that it’s now dead silent while John Thorn makes his way to the podium to announce the winner. The background sound of gentle clinking of glasses and cups has completely ceased. “Our most revered award,” Bill whispers.

Mark Rucker is the winner. Rucker is one of our most revered photo archivists. He has collaborated with Ken Burns, Larry Ritter, David Nemec, and on and on. I can’t begin to list all his efforts, but if you have ever seen the graphic credit for Transcendental Graphics, or The Rucker archive, you have seen an image he curated.

Mark couldn’t be here this year, and John accepts on his behalf. “As John Zajc has suggeted, I will pose with the award in such a way as I can be Photoshopped out.”

And now, the keynote remarks by John Scherholz, whose name I have spelled at least three different ways already today, dang it.

Our speaker

Bob Fischer: I first met John in West Palm Beach at the Braves’ training facility in 1991. His philsophy is the same as mine. Good scouting and player development is the key to winning. He served 28 years as general manager, including 17 as vice president. he Braves compile the best record in baseball over that span, a .593 record from 1991-2007. Five pennants, one World Series, and several organization of the year award. And have passed 3 million in home attendance six times. In 2003 the Braves reached 100 wins for the sixth time since 1993. When they won the world Series, he became the first executive to lead both an AL and an NL team World Championship. He’s now president of the Braves.

Schuerholz:

Last night we retired Tom Glavine’s number, a very rare tribute to a player. I thought that was the most loving and understanding baseball environment there could be. But then I came here today. I’m delighted that you invited me. (gives a shoutout to Fredi Gonzalez in the audience, joking that no tampering necessary since he should still be with the Marlins, but is not)

Then mentions all the award winners. Mark, where’s the guy who won the award on the firing of umpires? Mark? You might want to write a followup after the “imperfect game” and the fair foul ball call the other night.

I taught school for four years in Baltimore, but my love of baseball led me to write a letter to the Baltimore Orioles. The letter got passed to Frank Cashen, and in 1966 I was hired. I later went to Kansas City where I was given the chance to be part of building a franchise. I worked fo great grea baseball people. I was the “young guy” in the office at the Orioles and then in Kansas City. And I was allowed to use my skills to analyze statistics and help make decisions and they worked out, and I was promoted up the ladder, and eventually at age 40 in 1981 I became a general manager. At the time I was the youngest general manager in the baseball. Now these guys who are 40 are on their way out! (laughter) They come out of college ready to do the job.

I always used statstics effectively. But I also listend to Paul Snyder, and Tom Ferrick, where I could turn as a young GM to these people. He would say to me, a great and respected scout, “Stats don’t lie,” don’t forget that. We would not have won 14 division championships if I had not believed that. He would turn over a guy’s baseball card and show them to me. I would also rely on the instinct of Paul Snyder, and Jum Fregosi, and others. I would then make a choice based on all that knowledge. Okay, I did trade Adam Wainwright. But I did also make a trade for Fred McGriff. The lifeblood of any good organization is the prospects in your system.

In those days Kansas City was considered the IBM of the American League. The dynamic thinking of the Royals Baseball Academy (didn’t work but it was outside the box thinking) and the rock solid management. But I came to Atlanta as the Braves were just starting to get serious and emerge as a power, potentially. From worst to first in 1991, the “outdoor” baseball World Champions! (laughter) Of course we played the Twins and they played indoors, and we won all the outdoor games in the championship and they won all the indoor games… but there were four indoor games.

In those days Chipper Jones and Dave Justice and all of them were in the pipeline. We signed Terry Pendleton as a free agent, and Rafael Belliard, and we made a trade for Otis Nixon. It provided a veteran leadership and a great defensive matrix behind those great young pitchers. That spring, Terry called me over on one of the back field that was so far away that we called it “Iwo Jima” and said “We’re going to have some fun here. This is going to be a good team.”

Before we turned out the lights in 1994, when baseball went dark, we were on a trajectory. And in 1993 if raw rookie Ed Sprague had not swung fro his heels and sent a ball out of the park things might have been different. And in 1995 of course it all came together. We won and we became the first and only championship team for the city of Atlanta.

In 1996 we had the Yankees right where we wanted them. But it didn’t happen. All of a sudden the Yankees climbed back in it. Mark Wohlers was our best reliever, and up comes this guy Jim Leyritz. Wohlers throws a slider, Leyritz fouls it back. This is a guy with a 98 mile an hour fastball. But he throws another slider, and Leyritz fouls that one back. Bat head right on it. Good speed. He throws another slider and you know those cartoons where the ball is hit so hard that its eyes bug out? I think that ball looked like that.

The secret potion to succeeding with continuity is the lifeblood of scouting and development. Up in Kansas City these days they took their eye off the ball. They have forgotten that. The Yankees had forgotten it for a while when they had their ten-year-long dip.

The key today to success is to manage your team economics. Most of us have EITHER good scouting like the Red Sox are now doing or saddlebags of money. We’ve done that. Baseball organizations rely on one principle ingredient and that’s PEOPLE. You have to have precise goals. It’s not to “get better” but to win a world series. The commissioner now called the Atlanta Braves the gold standard in baseball.

I believe hiring good people is the key ingredient. Giving them the ability to contribute to your success and give them hope for progress. You have to have enthusiasm for what you do. Two things I saw as a young baseball executive, while in Buefield one day while working for the Orioles. Bunt situation, everyone knew it, guy bunts the ball down the first base line, and the pitcher goes and gets the ball, and runs to tag the runner, and they get in a rundown between first and HOME PLATE. He dives back into home and is tagged, and called out. I asked Lou Gorman later, what would have happened if he was called safe? No one knows.

A couple of weeks later a kid slides into home plate with a cloud of dust and the catcher trying to tag him with the throw from the outfield. The umpire just stands there. The runner goes to the dugout. The manager of the other team tells the catcher, go tag him! He goes over to the dugout and there are 25 guys he doesn’t know from Adam, so he just starts tagging everyone. The manager of that team then pushes the guy out of the dugout and tells him to go tag home plate, because he must never have touched it. The kid ends up in a rundown between the dugout and home plate.

Those two examples really taught me the value of enthusiasm.

I lost the hearing in one of my ears after a high fever when I was a child. It’s amazing I didnt’ lose the hearing in both ears or get brain damage. Well, maybe the jury is out on that. (laughter) What losing the hearing in one ear taught me, though, is to listen to people. I started paying attention to how people spoke, how they communicate. And one of the things I have brought to the Braves is this. I try to teach people to represent themselves well. Present yourself well, dress well, and speak well.

(At this point, people who were going on a bus trip to the Joe Jackson Museum had to get up and scurry out, and audience members lined up at the microphone to ask questions in the Q&A session.)

(Many members got up and started chatting then and wouldn’t leave while the Q&A was going on.)

Question: I’m an Expos fan in mouring. They broke up that great 1994 team. If you had been the Expos GM at that time, what would you have done?

JOhn: I don’t know what the economics were. They were obviously failing, but they knew they couldnt’ afford to keep them all. That’s a tough decision to make. You have to make the choice for your organization to survive.

Q: I wanted to ask about the Sprague story you told. if it was so obvious you should have thrown him three split fingers why didn’t they?

John: Well I wasn’t calling the pitches.

Q: Is it hard?

John: That’s what we do. it’s out job to have confidence in the peopel you hire and rely on and trust. Empower and trust those peopel, and then stand back and let them do it. That’s been my operating philosophy all my life.

Q: If there were one or two things you could change, what would they be?

John: The designated hitter. (applause) There are a lot of old guys who can’t run who can still play, and the union likes it, but… And there’s probably something about the economics I would change, but I’m not exactly sure what.

Q: I’m a Royals fan. i wanted to ask you about the scouting of Dan Quisenberry. Today he would probably have a problem being scouted by a guy with a radar gun.

John: I’m happy to talk about Quis. He had a lot of quotes, like “To be a relief pitcher in MLB you have to pitch like your hair’s on fire.” In college he was a traditional overhand pitcher, and he wasn’t very good. And his college coahch said if you’re going to make it you better try something different. And he did. And his competitiveness and his fire, smart, thinking outside the box, all those things helped him. I was pleased and blessed to have known him.

Q: I saw the Rome Braves play a few weeks ago. That team looks great and I appreciate they all wear their socks high. Is there an organizational policy on that?

John: from Triple A to the rookie league we control everything. The major leaguers have a union backing them. And Bobby Cox does the best job he can to wear the uniform with dignity and honor and respect. And that’s the way our whole system does it. We imbue that feeling in them. That is our policy.

Q: You said statitistics never lie. What role does the advance in stats take in your office?

John: I’ve had to learn a whole new language. WHen John Coppolella talks about BABIP and VORP I thought he was talking to me in Martian. But I’ve learned. In the war room if you will talking about trades and acquisition, we constantly talk about stats we never used before. It used to be sophisticated to just to home versus road and turf versus grass. Now we’re in a new stratosphere of stats.

Q: I think the Expos were probably going to win in 1994, playing at full speed, while everyone else knew there was going to be a work stoppage. The other teams were just going through the motions as professionals. What is your take?

John: I think the players were fearful that their game might be taken from them and their livelihood was going to be taken from them. Probably the weight of that kept them from playing with verve and vigor. Why the Expos didn’t feel that I don’t know. Your observations are likely very true and accurate.

Q: When you changed from KC to Atlanta, were you aware that the KC organization had developed a multi-level aversion to walks?

John: Quite candidly, it wasn’t that specific. We hadn’t reached that level of statistical sophistication in KC at all. I left because of an internal ownership circumstance and the problems that was creating in the organization. The fracturing and unsettling of the ground beneath us, I couldn’t take it, and then this opportunity presented itself and I took it.

Q: When you grew up who were your baseball heroes?

John: It was an International League team in Baltimore then, but when the Orioles came into town in the 1954, when the St. Louis Browns relocated to Baltimore. I started late being a fan, but I remember catching those styrofoam baseballs that they were throwing from convertibles in the parade when they came to town. Luis Aparicio, Mark Belanger, those guys were mine.

Q: Level salaries?

John: Most clubs do have a better feeling about their ability to compete now. We are better at spending what money we have. But smartly, the rich clubs are also investing into scouting and international signings, so they have the same advantages there.

Q: What is Sid Bream had been out? Would it have derailed the franchise?

John: Thanks to psyschoanalysis I no longer get nightmares. (laughter) It was a close play. Bonds’ throw was up the line about three feet. And Randy Marsh got the call right, and…

Q: It sounds like you realy HAVE thought about it a lot.

John: Maybe a little. I don’t think it would have derailed the franchise.

Q: Yankees fan here.

John: Brian Cashman is one of the smartest guys in baseball, one of the brightest running a team. George Steinbrenner, god rest his soul, often made things difficult for his people, but even he eventually realized to let Brian do his job. Thankfully I’ve had some success and every owner I’ve worked for has trusted me to let me do my job. Hughie Kaufman and Ted Turner was like the difference between Mars and Earth. And by the way, Turner was the one on Mars. Kaufman was the first sabermetrician I ever met. He knew mathematics so well that was one of the ways he always had success, even from poker games in the Navy.

Q: Drafting of george Brett and what about Mike Schmidt? Who went in that draft.

John: You might remembre Brett was not our first round pick. We drafted Roy Branch who people had said was like the next Bob Gibson. But he had some bone chips, and we said well, if there’s any doubt about Branch, get this shortstop from El Segundo, Brett. We got them both fortunately, Brett in the second round, and Branch blew out his arm.

Q: (couldn’t hear it)

John: The other players who come to Turner Field and see the 14 consecutive division championship flags, the Derek Jeters and A-Rods who come in, they never say “But you only won one championship.” Those guys know how hard it is, they know how getting there is the hardest part and how much a part luck can play. That “but” is really not fair to the players and managers who worked so hard.

Q: What’s been the effect of being on the TBS “Superstation”?

John: After we won, I got tons and tons of letters from elderly people in Idaho and Montana and Ohio and wherever saying thank you, thank you, “my boys finally won.” Sadly, once we lost the super satellite signal because of the super high tariff on it, we’ve now lost those fans.

Q: Would Whitey Herzog have lost his job if he had won?

John: It was an oil and water mix. Whitey was a great baseball man, and he did a great job for us in the short time he was there.

Q: I’m a Yankee fan, but I thought the Braves had a better ballclub in 96 and 99. I was surprised the Yankees won both World Series. Did you guys feel like you should have won one or two of those?

John. YES. (laughter) Okay, I do wake up at night seeing that Leyritz homer. I rest my case.

Q: Were you there when Ted decided to make himself manager?

John: No. I watched it with great glee from Kansas City. But I did accept a job from that guy.

Q: What about your relationships with agents?

John: I’m negotating a contract with Alan and Randy Hendricks. Contracts should be based on facts, right? It was a guy named Keith Creel from Texas. He had a horrible year. I have to sanitize this story a bit. I figure I have it made. I read off all these stats, and figure the guy is not getting a raise. ALan says “Spare me the freeking stats.” I said waitasec, you quote stats to me all the time! But when stats don’t work for agents, they ignore them.

Closing comments and such. Giving John a complimentary SABR membership, saying now he can email everyone to do his stat analysis for him.

Coming up later today, the New Technologies in Baseball panel, and tomorrow, the Seymour Medal winners panel.

This was during the same MLB all-star tour of Japan on which Moe Berg did some of his infamous spying. The MLB team played 10 games on the tour and won them all, but the game Fitts described, which the young Sawamura pitched, was a near thing. Sawamura held the big leaguers in check, ending up losing 1-0 on a solo homer by Lou Gehrig.

I ducked out of the room just as Fitts was reading an ironic quote from some optimistic observer of the baseball tour of Japan, claiming that these nations would never be wracked by war again. (World War II was just around the corner.)

As it turned out, I needn’t have rushed to get to the bus on time, as when I arrived in the lobby, no bus was in evidence, and a heavy downpour, with thunder and lightning, was. Radar showed a storm front working its way through, and it looked for sure like the start of the game would be delayed. Eventually buses did pull up and we made our way through the flooded driveway to get into them.

By the time we arrived at the park, the rain had lightened, at least long enough for us to walk to the park.

The SABR group was broken into a few different sections (and price points) and I’d apparently chosen, months ago when I bought my tickets to the convention, a seat by the left field foul poul that included $10 worth of food in the ticket price. Sweet! I circumnavigated the concourse with my friend Joanne Hulbert from Boston, surveying the food options. Joanne’s ticket was in yet a nother section, of All You Can Eat seats, so I left her off there and then went to the SmokeHouse barbecue stand myself, where for $8.25 you can get an entree with two side dishes. Quite a bargain. I got ribs, mac & cheese, and corn.

They had glitches in the system scanning the tickets, though. Apparently with all the lightning strikes and such the computer systems needed to be rebooted. Eventually it was all straightened out at the central computer banks and off I went. I found a picnic table indoors and settled down to eat and watch the first few innings of Yankees/Red Sox on my iPhone. Yes, I now take every MLB TV and radio broadcast with me in my pocket wherever I go. I love living in the future.

A lovely rainbow appeared in the sky on the first base side some time later, as the sun set and the rain started to clear. The game was ‘delayed’ still further by the actual Tom Glavine induction ceremony to the Braves Hall of Fame and the retirement of his #47. Glavine looked dinstinctly uncomfortable up there on the podium, probably holding in a lot of emotion. He gave a short speech, saying he knew the players had had a really long day already, between the earlier ceremony at the CNN Center, and then the delay, and now they had a ballgame to play.

The opponents were the San Francisco Giants, and I have to say I am really spoiled from the American League East. I felt like pretty much no matter who got up to bat for either team all night long that none of them would have batted higher than eighth in any AL east lineup other than Baltimore’s. What the hell has happened to Chipper Jones? Just getting old suddenly, or off the juice, or what? (Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and might even be related, I realize.)

Barry Zito pitched for the Giants, which meant I sort of went against my usual policy of rooting for the home team whenever I’m not seeing the Yankees play. I’ve been to Turner Field before, though, and rooted for the Braves then.

Zito pitched great. He appears to have abandoned that big 12-6 curve in favor of a bunch of other baffling junk. There were only three big hits off him all night. Chipper had a double in the first but was stranded. Later, Alex Gonzalez hit a homer off him, and then Chipper took him deep an inning after that, but that was it. Seven innings, 10 strikeouts. But I bet Zito misses the days when he had Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez putting up three-run bombs behind him on a regular basis. The Giants didn’t managed to tie the score until the ninth.

When they did, they did it off Billy Wagner. I have to say, as a Yankees fan, that I felt somewhat the Wagner deserved this, for the hubris of having co-opted Mariano Rivera’s “Enter Sandman.” At the end of the eighth inning, all the scoreboards go completely dark. Then, flames start to appear. The opening strains of “Enter Sandman” play. And then the word WAGNER appears all over the stadium IN FLAMES. Ooooh. And then Wagner jogs to the mound. It’s all quite overblown and I am not the only person in my section who remarked, “Mr. Wagner, you are no Mariano Rivera,” at that point.

All that buildup, all that hoopla, and then Wagner laid an egg. Ooops. At least he didn’t cough up the lead run, as well, though it was a near thing. There’s a poster presentation downstairs making the claim that Wagner is the best lefthanded relief pitcher of all time. I wonder if by now someone has tacked on a page that says “But is no Mariano Rivera.”

The Giants eventually won the game, which actually was VERY briskly played, despite going into extra innings. However, because of the two hour delayed start, it was after midnight when the game ended, and because of local noise laws, the fireworks were cancelled. Disappointing, but ah well. By the time the bus pulled in to the hotel, it was so late the bar was already closed. I went right back to my room and was so exhausted I slept through the morning research presentations and the Joe Jackson Black Sox panel, which supposedly had new revelations to share. I’ll try to get the scoop on those later and post what people said, if I can.

Now it’s time for the luncheon with John Shuerholz. I’m too poor to attend the banquet part so I’m having a cup of ramen noodles in my room and then I’ll go down just to hear the awards and speeches.

EDIT: I should add that the one scoreboard shot of the SABR group at the ballpark focused on Mike Conlon, and it was fitting that at his moment of glory, he wasn’t looking at the scoreboard at all, but actually using his smartphone to look up a fact on Retrosheet. Cheers, Mike!

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This afternoon it is really difficult to choose which presentation to see, but I decided to start with Vince Gennaro because every year he comes up with something very sharp and insightful. It means missing Gary Gillette’s presentation on disappearing Negro League ballparks, but I figure I can get Gary to give me the gist of it later if I see him in the bar or at the game.

The slate:

Vince Gennaro – Measuring the asset value of players: A framework for evaluating trades

Geri Strecker – Whose dream was it?: Revisiting the formation of the Negro National League in 1920

Ross Davies – Chinese-U.S. baseball diplomacy before the Great War

Will Dahlberg – A tool for diplomacy: Baseball in occupied Japan 1945-1952

Robert Fitts – Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura and war

Measuring the asset value of players: A framework for evaluating trades
Vince Gennaro

In particular, Gennaro here focuses on the trade deadline deals, when teams are making those trades to fix up their rosters for the end of the season, the time value of players as teams re-set their rosters for the stretch drive.

Gennaro has the ability to make economics seem simple and straight-forward, at least while you’re listening to him. It’s a bit like when Richard Feynman would explain particle physics, making it all crystal clear… at least until you try to repeat it to someone else and realize how much depth of understanding goes into what was said, because even if you can parrot it, it isn’t always as clear later. I will, however, try to lay out the facts as presented by Vince. They’re quite convincing to me.

You used to see name players traded straight up for each other, Tris Speaker for Sad Sam Jones, Colavito, etc. You see some of these today but they are not the predominant form of trade. They are more about reallocating playing assets to help a team reach the playoffs. Some are dumping salary and restocking the farm system while others are renting a player looking for the financial boon of reaching the postseason.

Recent examples:
Abreu to the Yankees in 2006
Carlos Lee to the Rangers in 2007
Teixeira both times
Sabathia to Milwaukee
Manny to LA
etc etc

Why has the style of trade changed?

Free agency has created higher salaries. Rising salaries and revenue growth are taking place at vastly different rates for different teams. When the Yankees went into their new ballpark, the delta change in their revenues alone was greater than [the total revenue for] about 8 teams. From a revenue standpoint it’s as if the Yankees annexed the KC Royals without taking on additional costs.

Team revenues are highly sensitive to winning. $25 to $50 million in revenue can be got just by reaching the postseason ONCE. (As anyone who has read Vince’s articles in the Yankees Annual already knows.)

It’s no longer about TALENT evaluation and today is about a little talent evaluation PLUS asset evaluation. Roster management is about having ENOUGH good players to contend for the postseason and reap the big postseason boon. Playing assets should be shifted to where [or when] they have the highest return. Not about having the BEST players you can have, just have enough to place you in contention in order to reap best financial reward for minimum cost.

Teams tend to be in one of two scenarios at the trade deadline.
1) no chance to contend: trade today’s win for future wins
2) need last piece of puzzle: trade future wins for today’s wins

GM’s job is more like a portfolio manager of investments.

Player’s Value as a Team Asset:
the dollar value of having control of a player is based on
-number of years remaining*
-expected performance of the player
-financial impact of the performance

(*residual value when control ends, ie Type A free agent, gets draft picks)

Vince then shows the Win-Curve graph about how teams make more if they win more games in the regular season. People who read his piece in the Yankees Annual a few years ago or his book DIAMOND DOLLARS are very familiar with this graph. (I think he won the SABR research presentation award for the first presentation he gave that included this, a few years back.)

The Postseason Effect: The Game Changer
Fans get dissatisfied with seat choices and the price of playoff tickets or how hard they are to get. The result of that is:
-strong season ticket renewals
-high demand for new season tickets
-advance sales are strong
-stronger broadcast ratings
-corporate sponsor demand
-suite demand increases
-ticket prices overall increase

In the wild card era, postseason teams tend to raise prices 5% for the following season.

Guess what? The economic bump is not just a one-year effect. Multi-year revenue stream effect from reaching the postseason. Vince shows a graph showing the effect falling off only gradually as the years go on. Uses White Sox as an example, where season ticket base doubled and although they haven’t gotten there again, they have not dropped off all the way to where they started.

The Brewers did get the payoff for renting CC Sabathia.

And then even looking at regular season, if a team thinks they’re going to win 89 games, and then they look at their win-curve graph and could improve to a 93 win season, they could bring in, say, $21 million more dollars. (The graph is going to look different for different teams, but as an example.)

Let’s look at Cliff Lee. Former Seattle LHP to Rangers at the break
To Seattle his value was his marginal revenue of about a million per win, whereas Rangers he’s probably worth $5 million per win.
To Seattle, Lee total worth $2.5 million Asset
-owed 4.5 million in salary
yielded $3 million in draft pick compensation
generates $4 million in revenue with 4 wins
nets out to $2.5

Now to the Rangers:
Cliff Lee: $19.5 million asset
-owed $4.5 million salary
yielded $3mil in draft picks
generates $21 million in revenue
increases postseason chances by 47% x $36 million

Asset values:
Seattle gave up Lee $2.5 million, plus $2.5 million in cash
Mark Lowe is a wash

Rangers gave up $16 million: Smoak, Beavens, Lueke, Lawson, mostly in SMOAK’s value

So, the Mariners gave up $5 million and received $16 million in value
The Rangers gave up $16 million in value received $22 million in value

So it’s win-win. It’s not just about who is right about the talent, it’s about how the players and assets can affect the teams positively.

Vince then shows a graph with
Roy Oswalt for JA Happ and prospects: value created for HOU $15 million, PHL get $8 million
Edwin Jackson for prospects, follows suit
Miguel Tejada for prospects. follows suit

Admits that may not be valuing the risk of prospects properly, but it can be debated.

Conclusions:
-Deadline deals have as much to do with financial management as talent evaluation
-Player’s true value is different to each team
-July trades are about swapping the timing of expected wins now vs. the future
-Teams need to incorporate risk into their valuation of prospects

(questions from the audience)

Whose dream was it?: Revisiting the formation of the Negro National League in 1920
Geri Strecker

(This segment has been removed by request of the presenter.)

Chinese-U.S. baseball diplomacy before the Great War, 1902-1907
Ross Davies

Edit: This is the presentation that would win the award for best presentation at the conference.

Ross opened his remarks by saying “This is a small debunking exercise. I’ll tell you a piece of convention wisdom and then correct it.”

The term “ping pong diplomacy” to refer to the technique of using sports as a strategy to thaw tense relations comes from the Nixon-Kissinger era, when in 1971 the Chinese invited an American ping pong team over. This is thought to be, as evidenced by the name, the first time such a thing happened. But as Ross shows in the presentation, not only had it happened before, it was China that had previously used the technique on the US, all the way back in 1902.

Back in 1902 anti-Chinese sentiment was very high in the US. Mutual hostility was at a peak then. Ross describes how both candidates running for president (Grover Cleveland versus Benjamin Harrison) had anti-immigration and anti-Chinese rhetoric in their campaigns. Likewise in China the Empress Dowager speaking out. Quick recap of The Boxer Rebellion. Western military power moves in, the eight nation alliance, wins and demands reparations. The US portion of the reparations equals about $41 million, three times again what had been spent by the US on the military operation.

At that point, China is weak, and has no diplomatic apparatus, since it had been the center of the universe for so long, it was only tributary nations to it before that. In 1901 the eight nation alliance basically forced China to establish a State Department and forced to engage with the west.

Now back up to 1863, the Chinese watched the Americans play baseball. (Shows historical photos.) And from 1872 to 1881 they would send Chinese boys to the USA to learn engineering… and they would also learn baseball while there. They would then come back to China, and would in fact beat a team of Oakland boys on their way back to Asia. (Newspaper clippings about that game.)

Here’s where Ross got very analytical, even statistical, for a history presentation. He shows a graph on use of pejorative terms for the Chinese in newspaper from 1882 – 1901 labeled “The Least-Hated Chinese.” It quantifies that in stories on opera, baseball, and museums there were relatively few pejorative terms, while those on labor, etc. there were many. Baseball seem to show the Chinese in their “least-hated” context. For contrast, another graph showed an analysis of Congressional precedings, which seemed to have pejoratives used in all contexts.

So, who are they going to send to the US to repair relations? Ross contends that the Chinese could read the American newspapers and knew that a baseball context would serve their image. They send a guy, Sir Chintung Liang Cheng, who is reported in the newspapers “at six feet in height, famed as a right-fielder and batter on the Philips Andover baseball team.” He had been one of those boys who was sent over to learn engineering, and the newspapers could not get enough of the story. They would tell over and over an Andover vs. Exeter story, with a photo of him in his old school uniform. (For those not familiar with the prep schools in New England, the Andover/Exeter rivalry is longstanding, heated, and legendary. Think Harvard/Yale only it’s prep school rather than university.)

A friend of his remembers him getting a game-winning home run. In fact, it was a triple, but he is a diplomat, and didn’t correct his friend right away. Subsequent stories would recount it as a triple. Because of the baseball connection, Liang was not seen as alien; he had an American love of baseball. With the help of the newspapers, Liang kept the story alive. It became a Horatio Alger story.

Liang was in fact the kind of man who walks softly and carries a big stick. Teddy Roosevelt had used the phrase in a speech just six months before Liang’s appointment. Liang’s recounts of the story included many elements that would disarm (or modestly chastise) American listeners. He described fans yelling pidgin English at him from the stands, making fun of him, says he got angry at that, showing that he was passionate and not “inscrutable,” and he delivered the goods, the game-winning hit, essentially saying to Teddy Roosevelt “you must respect me.”

In 1905 Liang suggests to the secretary of state that the amount of money be revised, because it would be in the “spirit of fair play.” (Not coincidentally, the Chinese people were boycotting US goods in 1905.) By 1907, the US gave back $27 million of the $41 million that had been paid.

After he gets called back, the next two replacements they sent were also touted as baseball fans. Another graph then, showing the use of pejorative words for the Chinese in 1902-1915 news stories. There are still plenty of pejorative stories, but Liang was able to personalize his own relations with the government enough to deliver the goods.

Further reading suggested: Taking in a Game, Joseph Reaves

A tool for diplomacy: Baseball in occupied Japan 1945-1952
Will Dahlberg

Will opens by saying that academia there is the “so what?” factor. Today, August 6th is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “I hope my research will illuminate how such catastrophic and devastating events can be followed by a bonding tie between the occupiers and occupied. This will be a significant part of my masters thesis at Dartmouth. This period sets the stage for our current state of baseball both in the USA and in Japan, where baseball is fanatically followed.”

MacArthur faced a tough road in rebuilding Japan. For him it was the great experiment in liberation from totalitarian rule, and in liberalizing government from within. One million Japanese soldiers had been killed, two million homes had been destroyed, factories were gone, and seven million more soldiers were repatriated. The people had been told all throughout the war that their victory over the barbaric, rapacious Americans was assured. And then they lost.

MacArthur thought Japan needed to be purged of its old military leadership and hyper-military culture. His closest staff, “the baton boys,” were his inner circle in running the country.

When it comes to baseball, though, Major General F. Marquat was MacArthur’s second hand man, He was seen as a simple-minded man, but he might have been smarter than you think. He was charged with re-doing the educational system, and he instituted two years of physical education. But they were not allowed to do the old budo pursuits of judo, kendo, etc… and they replaced it with baseball. (Interesting side note: this isn’t the first time that the Japanese took up baseball in place of budo. In the 1890s when the samurai way of life was outlawed, there were those who turned to baseball then, as well! I have a young adult book called Samurai Shortstop on the subject. I should probably drop Will Dahlberg a note about it.)

It took some time though to build the baseball fields and import the equipment. “wholesome, democratic games” were to take the place of the war-like sports and “reduce the problems of the occupation.” (quoted from a request to requisition the equipment needed to put the physical education plan into place). “Without this equipment they will not be able to institute democratic games for the budo sports.”

In setting out to get the equipment, they got donations from major league baseball, MLB players, the leagues, as well as schools and universities.

Before they could get hardballs, they had 30,000 teams registered of “rubber ball” teams.

Many cool photos shown which I can’t recreate of course. Even the Japanese Diet played games. (The House of Representatives won 32-2 in the photo shown.) Photo of the Emperor’s personal guard playing outside the palace.

“It is the duty of the people in Japan to reconstruct their society as a democratic society.” And sports plays a role in that. National Athletic Meet, had tens of thousands of participants.

Marquat was also approached by the Yomiuri newspapers and the national commission on juvenile delinquency. How to deal with the leisure hours of the youth? Baseball was seen as one of the best sources of recreation to promote juvenile welfare. In 1950 they held a 3 day meet for juvenile baseball, with students arriving from all over the country, with thousands and thousands of players all taking an oath. They gave prizes to every child that played.

As baseball caught on more and more, their official efforts could die out because they had become self-sustaining.

All culminates in the tours of Joe DiMaggio and Lefty O’Doul, and adoption of American baseball heroes, and then the creation of the truly professional Japanese baseball major leagues.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay to see Robert Fitts speak on “Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura and war” because I had to run to put my computer away before getting the bus to the ballgame!