Notes from SABR 37 - Day Two (part two)
I’ve just returned from participating in the trivia contest, and I don’t have especially good news to report. Out of 54 questions, I managed to answer nine correctly, or 17%. You’ve got to really curve that grade to make that a passing mark. Thankfully, the test was brutal, and everyone scored low. The top five (out of 100+ people) scored between 19 and 23. Nearly everyone I asked also scored nine, and there were quite a few with 7-12 correct. The finals are Sunday morning, and they’ll be taped by MLB TV to be braodcast at some point online.
Before scoring a very average mark in the trivia contest, I spent the late afternoon perusing through the poster presentations. Out of the seven or eight posters there, quality varied wildly. One poster seemed to be a photo tribute to women involved in the Negro Leagues. Another was basically a research paper that had been unstapled and tacked up on a board — great info, poor poster.
The best, by far, was a poster done by Patrick Kilgo, a professor at Emory University. He’s taken every qualified offensive season since 1900, normalized it to the average numbers put up in that era, and figured out not who’s best and worst, but who had the most unusual seasons in baseball history.
By “most unusual”, he means those players that put up stats that are so different then the rest of the league, they stand out. Babe Ruth hitting 54 home runs in 1920 — an astounding 35 more than the next closest guy in the majors — is such a season. It’s the most unusual season of all time, in fact. Second on the list is Maury Wills’ 1962 season, in which he stole 104 bases, more than the next three guys combined.
More than his research, though, I loved the chart he presented his findings in. It was simple, elegant even, and conveyed an enormous amount of relevant data easily and smoothly. It is something that I’m confident Edward Tufte would appreciate. I’m a fan of his, as I’ve mentioned before.
The method that Kilgo and his associates used to chart each season was particularly brilliant, I’d have to say. Instead of using dots or other solid marks to indicate how unusual a season was, they used thin circles. This enables the data points to overlap many times, and not disappear — a very important thing when you’re trying to show so many overlapping points.
I spoke with Kilgo about his poster, and his research, and I learned that he’s going to do a similar study for pitchers in the coming year. I’m very interested to see where that goes. My bet was that Greg Maddux’s 1994 and 1995 seasons show up as some of the most unique, due to his extremely low ERA in the midst of a highly offensive era in the game. For the same reason, Pedro Martinez’s 2000 campaign will probably also stand out. I’d like to see what happens, though.
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Most amusing conversation I’ve overheard so far:
Old Guy #1 — “… and they can just make up a name on the internet, like The Chicken or The Flower.”
Old Guy #2 — “Yea, and then they go to the libraries, and they just use the serial number of that computer so you can’t track them.”
OG #1 — “They travel around the country, going to libraries, vandalizing the internet.”
OG #2 — “That’s the problem with the country today. Vandals everywhere. They just try and vandalize the internet with made-up statistics. I’m a serious researcher, I’m not going to travel around the country vandalizing the internet.”
I’m guessing that they think someone is trying to falsify baseball statistics somewhere online? So watch out, because someone named The Flower is traveling the country, using the serial numbers of library computers to hide themselves when they vandalize your internet. You’ve been warned.
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I chatted with Sean Forman, the wonderful man who gave the world Baseball-Reference, and found out he’s originally from my neck of the woods, more or less. He grew up in western Iowa as a Husker fan, which makes him a good guy in my book. The fact that he created what is probably the greatest website in the history of the internet is a big point in his favor, too.
It was quite surreal to learn that Forman himself has browsed through my humble writings on a few occasions. I’m still kind of surprised anyone has read what I wrote, although I know I get a lot of hits between The Pastime, Catfish Stew, A Minor Consideration and the half dozen other outlets I’ve written for in the past couple of years.
At the Baseball-Reference booth in the vendors hall — the only booth not selling books, by the way — they had a little contest to win a t-shirt. If you guessed the player that had his mug on the front of the shirt, with his career stats on the back, you won it. No one seemed to have any idea. I decided to cheat, and look them up on their own fine website. (I didn’t try to win the shirts, though, that would be wrong…) The players were the immortal Sherry McGee and the world-famous Wid Conroy. I’ve never heard of either of them… since they played in the very early 1900’s, and had fairly unremarkable careers.
B-R was there to promote their invaluable new addition to the website, the Play Index. I use it virtually every day, and it’s been worth every penny of the subscription fee — twice over. It’s a quantum leap forward in bringing deep statistical research to the masses. It’s given retrosheet a friendly front-end in a way that I would liken to taking a library card catalog and suddenly giving it Google’s usability. B-R with the new Play Index gets nine stars out of five for awesomeness, if you’ll excuse my enthusiasm.
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Friday morning is going to witness a vintage baseball game set to be played in the shadow of the Arch here in St. Louis, a game I’m looking forward to with great anticipation. I’ll be back with a full, illustrated report around lunchtime Friday.