The Pecan Park Eagle

Our love of the game is our uniting force for community.

At a convention planning session in Houston on April 23rd, SABR Board President Vince Gennaro eloquently expressed the belief that all we do in SABR is only as good as our sense of community. It is our whole sense of community, Gennaro says, that allows the mathematics and poetry of divergently inclined interests of SABR members to come together and flourish under one roof of dedication to the history of baseball.

As a planning committee participant, I walked away from that session feeling energized by the big picture that Mr. Gennaro had dangled before us. It was all in one body, as each was a challenge, a joy, an essential, and an explanation of SABR’s success over the years. As an organization, we as SABR are like the elephant challenge to the twelve blind men in mythology. When each of the blind men asked their sighted guide to describe the looks of the elephant to them, he answered: “Walk toward the beast yourselves and feel it. It will be whatever you ever find it to be.

And so SABR is. It is what it is. And as a connected community of divergent talents, interests, and abilities, we are united in our acceptance of each others’ differences by one sure common thread – our united love of the game. And it is that one powerfully uniting common thread that most strongly makes our sense of community in SABR possible.

Last night, I decided to go looking for earlier support of these ideas through my historical newspaper sources. Lo and behold, in the first rattle out of the box, I found this very supportive un-by-lined comment in a 1985 New Mexico newspaper about SABR. Some things, the cost of membership, have changed since then, but not everything. The thread of everything else I tried to describe above is also here too, but simply expressed in different language in an earlier time and place.

Enjoy.

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Sports highlights 

The World Series is a joyous time for baseball fans (See On The Cover). But it is also a sad time: Soon the season will end, and there will be no more baseball until next March.  One admirable way of passing the winter is to hook up with the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), a group of writers, researchers, and just plain fans, dedicated to the proposition that baseball is a rich part of American folklore and history worthy of our year-round attention.  

“You don’t have to be a professional researcher to join SABR,” explains the group’s executive director, Cliff Kachline. “All you have to be is somebody who enjoys reading and learning about baseball.”  

SABR’S researchers have contributed considerably to the annals of baseball history during the group’s 14-year existence by helping to correct errors in the major-league record books and filling gaps in the history of the game.

Sabermetricians like Bill James (author of the annual “Bill James Baseball Abstract”) have attracted a lot of publicity for their unorthodox approach to baseball stats, but “there’s no real conflict in the organization over sabermetrics,” says Kachline. “Most of our research involves the past; the feeling about sabermetrics among most members is, ‘let ’em enjoy themselves. If they can convince others, that’s OK too.’ ”   

For better or worse, sabermetric-generated controversies have helped to make SABR a household word in the baseball community. Another spur to membership has been SABR publications such as “The National Pastime,” “Baseball Research Journal,” and numerous other books, including “Great  Hitting Pitchers” and “Minor League Baseball Stars.”

In addition to a number of sportswriters and former ballplayers, SABR now counts among its number two current San Diego Padres: Terry Kennedy and Kurt Bevacqua, and NL ump Doug Harvey. A year’s membership in SABR costs $20. For information, write: SABR, Box 1010, Cooperstown N.Y ., 13326.    

~ Sports Highlights, Santa Fe New Mexican, October 19, 1985, Page 59.  PLEASE NOTE:

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 PLEASE NOTE: If you have been thinking about joining SABR, but have been reading the above column too casually, do not send $20 to SABR’s ancient address in Cooperstown. This information was derived from an article written almost 29 years ago. – SABR has moved on in 2014 under the same world economy it shares with everyone else.

One-year memberships today start at $45 for really younger and really older new members, but today’s membership benefits are even more attractive than ever. Click onto the SABR website “join” page and look around. Then check out the bottom of the page for registration info. If  you have questions, contact SABR at 1-800-969-7227 and let  someone walk you through your easy choices.

Here’s the SABR website link: http://sabr.org/join

Have a nice baseball weekend, everybody!