The Pastime

Well, I’m here at the Adam’s Mark Hotel (the tan building on the left in the above picture) in downtown St. Louis, the home of the 37th SABR convention. So far, I’ve been having a great time talking with all of these baseball-lovin’ folks. It’s nice to be able to sit around and talk with people about the game without boring them — as usually happens back home in Nebraska.

The bag I got at the registration desk contained a really amusing variety of items:

• Pocket schedules for the Angels, Astros, Royals, A’s, Tigers and the River City Rascals of the Frontier League.
• A magnetic schedule for the Washington Nationals. Seriously.
• A package of baseball cards put out not by Topps or Upper Deck, but by the Disabled American Veterans. It’s the Nationals team set from 2006. Instead of stats or a bio on the back of each card, it has the same message summarizing what the DAV is. I’m confused as to why anyone would want this.
• A postcard promoting this kids’ book. It looks interesting enough (for a nine -year-old), but I don’t know why the promo is in the form of a postcard with the book’s title on the front.
• A DVD of Game One of the 1977 World Series, Yankees vs. Dodgers. Random, but not a bad thing, really.
• This book, about… um, unique events in the World Series? It looks like it would be nice to randomly open up to a page, but I’d have a hard time sitting down and reading straight through all 300+ pages of it. Good thing it has an index.
• A nicely bound glossy convention program. I’ve seen a lot of books that weren’t published as nicely as this program is. It helps that McFarland printed it for SABR.
• A pocket schedule of events, so I don’t forget to see a presentation or panel that I otherwise might have missed. The best item in the bag.
• An official visitor’s guide to St. Louis. Otherwise known as an ad-soaked guide to blowing through your next three paychecks in the Mound City.
• Oddly, a Kansas City Royals jersey t-shirt, with 00 SLUGGERRR on the back. Yea, I’m not wearing that… Sluggerrr is one damn weird mascot. His crown seems to have replaced the top of his skull in some sort of bizarre baseball-related accident that required emergency improvised surgery.
• “Mound City Memories”, the annual convention collection of writings and studies centered around the host city. In this case, it’s all about the Cardinals and Browns, with some local St. Louis fare thrown in for good measure. It looks promising.
• A complimentary copy of the latest Baseball America magazine. I’m not a big fan of the publication during the regular season, since it’s always a week behind everything, but it’s the best resource out there in the offseason and regarding college players and the Draft. It’s just too damn expensive for a subscription, really, otherwise I’d still be getting them in the mail.

I wandered a couple blocks from my hotel to go observe the Cubs-Cardinals hoopla going on in and around Busch Stadium.

I’ll tell you what, I really like the bricked look of Busch. Anything is better than cast concrete, but this looks really good. I’m going to the game on Friday (Cardinals-Brewers), and I look forward to seeing what the inside looks like without peering through a fence.

I found that Jack Buck’s commemorative statue was a lot less… hellishly frightening than Harry Caray’s in Chicago. It looks like Caray is rising from a pit of tortured souls. Well, I guess they are Cubs fans in the depiction, after all… 99 years and counting?

Speaking of statues, boy do they like them in St. Louis. There are more than a dozen around the ballpark, but chief among them (for this Nebraska native) was the Bob Gibson statue.

Back at the convention, not much happened other than some random conversation, since everything is yet to officially begin. Some of the highlights so far:

• I met Yusuke Okada and Daisuke Hoshikawa, representatives for “Data Stadium”, a stats company from Japan. I think they were trying to sell me something, but I’m not sure. Their website isn’t that helpful, either, since I don’t speak much more Japanese than “teriyaki” and “domo arigato”. Nice people, though.
• Also from Japan, I met Dr. Norio Torigoe, who holds a Ph. D. in “Science”, according to his business card. He works for Tokai University. I have no idea what he was trying to tell me about, but he got a good laugh of out me making a joke about the gyroball…
• After noticing that I was wearing an A’s cap, the chair of the Lefty O’Doul chapter of SABR (in the Bay Area) came over and introduced herself. It turns out that Marlene Vogelsang is also a denizen of Athletics Nation (as LongTimeFan), and I’m likely going to run into her at AN Day next week in Oakland.
• I hit it off immediately with Dick Beverage, the president of SABR. He was apparently born in Omaha, and went to high school in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, just down the road from my stomping grounds. He now lives in southern California, and also runs the APBPA, a resource to help those that were at one point involved in pro baseball. He introduced me to some members of the board of directors, and other prominent SABR members. He mentioned more than once that SABR is all about making connections with people, and I can’t say enough about his effort to help me make some important ones. I also spoke with him at length about my interests, and my wish to complete the historical statistical record on the Western League. He was really enthusiastic about it, and told me he’d put me in touch with McFarland Publishers, and he’d like to talk to me again about it. I really think this might get done. I need to get back to the Historical Society and dig up some more old statistics from the microfilmed newspapers…
• After speaking with F.X. Flinn, a genial guy who serves as the treasurer for SABR, I learned that SABR is going to spend $30,000 to overhaul their online statistical encyclopedia. From what I hear, it should be a pretty outstanding resource when the upgrade is complete. It’s already pretty useful, so I’m looking forward to the new functionality, query options and information it will feature.
• And lastly, here’s a bit of fun trivia: The sport coat that Dick Beverage is going to wear at Thursday’s official opening ceremony for the convention was given to him by the manager who oversaw the 1956 season when Dick Stuart hit 66 home runs while playing for the Lincoln, NE team in the Western League. Funny how it all comes around like that.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll have numerous updates over the next few days, letting you in on the comings and goings of the convention. I’ll see if I can’t get a few more pictures, too. Here’s the view I’ve got from my hotel room, over the Mississippi River. The Arch is just out of view on the right.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 1:15 am and is filed under General Baseball, SABR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.