I have just spent the past four days with the world's most intense baseball devotees, attending the thirty-third annual Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) convention in Denver. Unlike last year, when the convention was here in Boston and I was involved in hosting it, this year I could just soak it all in. And, boy, did I.

I arrived late Wednesday night and my brother Julian picked me up at the airport. Julian, for those of you new to WILBB, is as huge a Yankees fan as everyone in my immediate family. My flight came in close to midnight, but we needed a snack before calling it a night, so we settled down in front of the TiVo with a favorite Tan family snack: rice crackers and cream cheese. Julian had TiVo'ed something for me: the recent ESPN Classic replay of the Dave Righetti no-hitter from July 4, 1983, which we had attended with my parents. We only got through about four innings of it though before we were too sleepy and called it a night.

About five hours later, we got up, Julian to go to work, me to catch a ride from him to the convention hotel. I walked into the lobby to find the SABR logo projected in red above the check-in desk. My room was ready, even though it was only 8am, so I went to drop off my suitcase and investigate the first thing I usually look for in a hotel: do they get ESPN? ROcky Mountain SABR made a great choice in this venue. Instead of the usual lame 10-12 channels of "hotel only" cable, the Marriott City Center had ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPN News, and Fox Sports Net. Heaven.

I hung up my pinstripes and then went down to pick up my badge. Despite the early hour, the registration area was buzzing. Dozens of SABRen were milling about, investigating their goodie bags and checking the schedule of events. The first thing I wanted to see was not until noon, so after a quick spin through the vendor's room, I went back to my room and took a nap.

Or tried to. Two hours of extra sleep would have done me good, I think, but I was just too excited about being at the convention, and I slept very fitfully. I dreamed that I was awake and walking around the convention, but various bizarre things kept happening... I would wake up, realize I was in bed in my room, and then drift off again, only to pickup where I left off... I resigned myself to being somewhat tired, sleep-deprived, and jet-lagged, and went to see Terrie Aamodt's presentation on "'Bearded Beauties:' Baseball, Business, and Entertainment During the Depression." Ms. Aamodt is a professor of history and English at Walla Walla College in College Place, WA, and she presented a historical look at the all-Jewish House of David and City of David teams' participation in the Denver Post tournament of the 1930s. The tournament was a huge annual event, drawing barnstorming teams that included the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs, all-Indian teams, as well as the Jewish teams, and thousands and thousands of spectators, even in the tough economic times. In 1934, the House of David team even won the tournament, albeit with the help of the legendary Satchel Paige on the mound!

This was followed by a linguistic investigation into whether baseball signs could be considered a form of language or not. Fortunately for me, my undergraduate degree is in linguistics, so when Bill Lehn started quoting from De Sassure and Foucault, I was highly engaged. I think others in the room were a little left behind though, even as Lehn tried to boil down linguistic theory into layman's terms. Lehn's conclusion, based on several rubrics: yes, baseball signs do constitute a language.

If this all sounds rather scholarly--guess what? It is! That's what makes SABR so much fun for an over-educated baseball-lover such as myself. Physics, history, applied math, sociology, economics, linguistics... There's no intellectual discipline that cannot be applied to this game and SABR proves it.

To give my brain a break to cool down, I went back to browse the vendors room. Most of the vendors fell into two categories: publishers of baseball books, and sellers of used books, magazines, and photos. I was attracted by one box of magazines with an irresistible label--"FREE!"--on it. I picked out several baseball-themed magazines from the late 1970s and 1980s. The same table had copies of The Sporting News from the same era priced 4 for a $1. I found myself combing the whole stack for issues whose dates corresponded with the "50 Greatest Yankees Games" I am researching for the book I am writing on the subject.

Two dollars later, I realized I had lingered too long and had missed the beginning of the panel on The Art of Relief Pitching. Former big league relievers Ryne Duren, Charlie Metro, and Nick Willhite spoke on a panel moderated by George Frazier, himself a reliever for the early 80s Yankees and now a Fox Sports announcer for the Rockies. The audience peppered them with questions ranging from their thoughts on the modern reliance on pitch counts and the emergence of lefty specialists to their most favorite managers and least favorite hitters. We could have listened to them talk for hours, but alas, there was only time for 75 minutes before the next featured panel: Baseball At Altitude.

For this discussion of the challenges of baseball in the mile-high city, Rocky Mountain SABR brought together Dr. Robert Adair, former official physicist of the National League, Yale professor emeritus, and author of "The Physics of Baseball," Dan O'Dowd, general manager of the Rockies, and Rany Jazayerli, a medical doctor who wrote on the topics of "Offense and Defense Construction in Colorado" for Baseball Prospectus. All three admitted they don't have the answers for how to create a winning team that can succeed at both sea level and mile-high. Topics ranged from the use of the humidor on game balls to keep them in spec to the difficulty the human body has recovering from muscle fatigue at altitude. The challenges are myriad. Not only does the ball fly farther in the thin air when hit, and break less when pitched, the dry climate also makes the skin of the ball extra slick, leading to blister problems for the pitchers. Pitchers also have to be held to a stricter pitch count. After pitching a complete game shut out of "only" 125 pitches, Mike Hampton found his body more sore than it had ever been. "It took him five starts to recover from that," said O'Dowd, though some of us probably would consider that Hampton never recovered from it, until he was traded this season to humid Atlanta! Even pitching an "oxygen tent" (as some football teams do) wouldn't help with players wearing down--they would have to sleep with an oxygen tank every night to approximate the same hemoglobin healing effects that athletes at sea level enjoy.

Then it was back to research presentations. I hurried to get a seat in the standing-room-only "Do Good Teams Win More Close Games?" by David W. Smith. Dave has been a SABRite since 1977, a founder of Project Retrosheet and is a perennial favorite at SABR conventions with his statistical analyses that often puncture baseball truisms. In this case the old chestnut is one trotted out regularly by baseball broadcasters whenever a "championship team" pulls out a win in a tight game, as if somehow a team with a winning attitude will have the edge in close contests that allows them to pull off more one-run wins than inferior teams. Well, Smith points out, a team that wins more games overall is naturally going to win more close games--they're going to win more of EVERY kind of game. Through various statistical analyses of game results throughout baseball history, Smith showed that first of all, close to a third of ALL baseball games ever played are one-run contests. If we accept that a one-run difference in score is the definition of a close game, then many more games are close than most fans subjectively believe. Then he went on to show that although there is a correlation between "winning teams" and the fact that they win more close games, this is no more than one would expect from a team who is going to win many games of every flavor. His most interesting result is that the strongest correlation comes in the number of blow-out games a "good team" wins. It appears that the better predictor of whether a team has a championship chance is not in how many close games they pull out, but in how many times they absolutely crush the opposition! Smith is still interested in this subject though, and he will continue to delve into it. After all, a 1-0 game and a 10-9 game with two lead changes both result in a one-run score. Next year I look forward to seeing what he has come up with regarding come-from-behind wins and so on.

For a change of pace I then went to Jean Ardell's presentation on "Minorities: Three Women of Color," in which she profiled three women in baseball front offices, Kim Ng, former assistant GM of the Yankees and now with the Dodgers, Elaine Weddington Steward, current Red Sox assistant GM, and Linda Alvarado, the owner of a construction company ion Denver and a minority owner of the Colorado Rockies. Jean will have a book out on women in baseball from Southern Illinois University Press next year.

Then I milled about and chatted with people in the registration lobby while waiting for the Women In Baseball committee to meet. Women In Baseball is one of dozens of SABR committees, and the one I am nominally a member of, though I have been too busy to do much. SABR's committees range over many common topics of research interest, including the 19th Century committee, Deadball era, Latin America, baseball economics, oral history, scouts, science of baseball, umpires and rules, statistical analysis, negro leagues, and many more, plus the "functional committees" on the Internet and Education and Youth. Leslie Heaphy and Claudia Perry, whose terms as SABR president ended during the convention, ran a quick and friendly meeting where members introduced themselves to the group and we discussed the upcoming book project the committee is compiling for publication by McFarland next year.

After that, it was time for the poster presentations. Various SABR members presented their research as posters on bulletin boards, rather than as timed presentations. The posters were up all weekend, but that evening each researcher stood by his or her board and discussed their results with whoever wanted to. Topics ranged from clutch hitting (or lack thereof), uses of intentional walks, Gil Hodges' hall of fame candidacy, and a follow up on Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball," detailing "where are they now" for the players whose draft day was described in the book.

By 8pm, my brain was quite full, and I was quite hungry. Julian took me and Steve Steinberg out for a great, inexpensive thai meal somewhere a few miles from the hotel. By the time I got back to my room it was time for an hour of Sportscenter to catch up on all the scores before I went to sleep. After all, my plan was to get up at 6:30 am so I could participate in a new tradition Seamus Kearney is trying to start at these conventions: morning catch. With events due to start up again at 8am, catch would have to be at seven. I think the last time I got up that early voluntarily on vacation it was to ski... or maybe 4-H camp when I was eleven...

Anyway, I did get up and play catch with eight or nine SABRen, and resigned myself to another day of sleep deprivation. We walked to a nearby park and threw for a while, then most of the group headed for the Wall Street Deli for breakfast. We had so much fun at breakfast talking about the New York murals on the walls, where various hall of famers are buried, and the like, that we missed the morning committee meetings completely.

The first thing I saw Friday, then, was a 10am presentation by Jim Vail on the reluctance of the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) to elect relief pitchers to the Hall of Fame. Dennis Eckersly, Goose Gossage, Bruce Sutter, and Lee Smith are all on the ballot in 2004. Vail explored various ways of evaluating HOF worth beyond the "save" statistic, and concluded that even if the voters would take more into account, the four might split the votes, resulting in none of them reaching the needed percentage for election.

Then came two presentations I really wanted to see, one by Shayna Sigman on a "Jurisprudential Analysis of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis," and Peter Morris' "Origins of the Word 'Fan.'" But I got talking to people in the vendors room and missed both. Both drew raves from other attendees I talked to, and Morris' ended up winning the award for best presentation. In fact, I talked so long that I missed the beginning of "Hanlon's Spectacular Grab," a historical look at a Denver barnstorming trip that Albert Spalding made with a team in 1888, presented by Mark Lamster. Yes, they've been crazy about baseball in Denver since long before the Rockies came to town.

Then, I took a nap. Well, what actually happened was I went up to my room to drop off the books and things I had accumulated while in the vendor's room, and I flipped on the television to find a replay of the previous night's Rockies/Giants game on. I decided to "scout" the Rockies a little in preparation for that night's game, since I had about two hours free before the next thing on the schedule I wanted to see. But the soothing sounds of baseball soon lulled me to sleep, and I had a nice nap for about four innings (although I did learn that Jay Payton hit about the same number of home runs at Coors as he did on the road).

I woke up bleary-eyed but ready for the Baseball 2020 panel, which began with a tribute to the late great sportswriter, Leonard Koppett. Perhaps that was why the panel got off on such a down note. The panel itself ended up being mostly about the economics of baseball, about the state of the owners and rather dire predictions about where the sport is going. Well, it was mostly dire. George Will sent a videotaped statement and he seemed to think things are in better shape than ever before, with attendance higher than ever, etc... but the other panelists (Andrew Zimbalist, William Gould IV, Gary Gillette) seemed to feel that baseball is losing ground so quickly to the other sports that it is in danger of being relegated to a cult curiosity in the near future. I agree, of course, that Major League Baseball needs to wise up about how to market itself and how to market the players. But the whole panel ended up being a bit of a downer. Given that the idea for the panel started with a questionnaire that hundreds of people filled out regarding what we thought baseball would be like in 2020, which included questions that speculated about many directions the game could go, internationalization, etc... (everything short of "gee whiz, will we have flying cars?") I had been hoping for a more lively, speculative interaction, rather than an overall condemnation about the state of the game today. Ah well. Moderator Tom Goldstein, editor of Elysian Fields Quarterly, did a pretty good job of trying to inject other topics--and kudos to him for pointing out to Gary Gillette that softball is not baseball. One of the things Gillette believes MLB should do is to support professional women's fastpitch softball, which already has a bit of a following and an organized structure. But SOFTBALL IS NOT BASEBALL, dammit.

Aside: to me, MLB supporting women's softball would be like if the NBA, instead of supporting a women's basketball league, decided to support women's lacrosse instead. After all, there is a passing resemblance between the games... people run from one end to the other trying to put a ball into a basket. Softball bears a resemblance to baseball, but it is not baseball. And women baseball players are sick of being told that baseball is for boys and softball is for girls! Why is the United States the only country with this absurd sexist notion? In Japan they have women's baseball. In Canada. In Australia. They don't have softball INSTEAD OF baseball for women. Why is the US stuck on this notion that women are supposed to do one and not the other? Of course, women's softball is a college sport, a scholarship sport, and that is going to attract a lot of the top women athletes. If they have a way to "go pro" after college, that is great for them, too. But it is not baseball. What I see happening down the line, if women's professional fastpitch catches on a la the WUSA and WNBA (both leagues are not doing well financially though...) is that you will never see a female player in Major League Baseball. Why? Because she will be told there is this separate-but-equal league for her. Despite the fact that they don't play the same game... That is a long way away, but here is the flaw in Gillette's argument. He seems to believe that by supporting fastpitch, MLB will help to grow the love of the game of baseball. I think he's wrong. Baseball is not softball. Help the minor leagues and the men's independent leagues to grow, and you help baseball to grow. And how about the women's baseball leagues, while we're at it? We're here, and we deserve the support of MLB as much or more than softball does. Gillette argues that fastpitch is "further along" in its development and so should be the choice, but I think all it would take is a little money (very little money, compared to MLB's budget) and a teeny bit of attention to put women's baseball at exactly the same level that women's fastpitch is currently at. End of aside...

I was perked up after Baseball 2020 by Tom Tippett's presentation on "Can Pitchers Prevent Hits on Balls In Play?" In January 2001, Voros McCracken published a paper at Baseball Prospectus that pointed toward the possibility that pitchers really can't prevent hits on balls in play, except maybe knuckleballers. McCracken's theory is detailed in the recent book MONEYBALL by Michael Lewis, which I've mentioned before. Among SABRites it is a love it or hate it book. Here's my take: it's a very gripping account of how sabermetrics transformed the way a ballclub did business, loads of fun to read, and I quite enjoyed it. But it has serious flaws in that in order to tell its story in a gripping and accessible way, it glosses over some of the complexities of life and history (for example, the book makes it sound like Bill James invented statistical analysis shortly after inventing the number zero... not to downplay the extreme importance of Bill James' place in the history of sabermetrics, but Lewis really plays up James and then only mentions the existence of SABR in passing...)

Anyway, Tippett suspected that McCracken had gone too far in concluding that pitchers have almost no control over the outcome of balls put in play. Expanding the analysis from the few years McCracken looked at to 100 years of major league play, Tippett found that, indeed, although there can be some wild variations due to luck, overall good pitchers really can exert some influence over whether balls are hit for a hit or for an out. Some pitchers definitely demonstrate the ability to hold hitters to a below-average rate of hits per balls in play over the course of their careers. That is a skill and not luck. And yes, knuckleballers have the highest ability in this regard. Makes me wonder if we won't see more knuckleballers coming up in the future... or does the fact that they yield higher walks and HBP also cancel out the effect? Perhaps someone will look at that in a future year.

There were more presentations I wanted to see that afternoon, like Sheila Nyugen's "Psychological Skills and Player Position: A Quantitative Look At Catchers." But I wanted to get to Coors Field in time for bating practice even more. So after Tippett, I grabbed my gloved and jumped in a cab down to the ballpark.

I had been to Coors Field last year, after Julian's wedding, so I didn't need to wander around gawking at everything and looking at food stands. I headed straight for the bleachers, where 50 or so intrepid individuals were waiting for home run balls to come their way.

Unfortunately for us, the Rockies opponent that night was one of the lightest hitting teams in the majors, the LA Dodgers. Man, what a pathetic display of batting ability. These Dodgers were having trouble hitting the ball out of the infield DURING BATTING PRACTICE!! At Coors Field, no less! I'd say only about 12-15 balls flew into the LF bleachers during the next forty five minutes. It was much more amusing to watch the coach trying to hit fungoes to the outfielders. One fielder was trying to practice making catches at the wall. The coach would hit one softly, he would break back, and then the ball would sail twenty or thirty feet beyond the fence. They tried again and again, and finally gave up. Unfortunately, they were using the bullpen wall, so we eager souvenir hunters didn't get any of them.

The game itself was fun. Should I even bother to describe it? The Rockies did their usual job at home of mashing nicely, and it was a fairly close, low scoring game for Coors. Nomo was on he mound for the Dodgers, but the Rockies got to him. And they got three quick outs in succession in the ninth for the save. Very nice. The nicest part though was the spectacular sunset over the Rocky Mountains which we could see from the SABR section in the upper deck above first base.

After the game I ended up in a microbrewery with Neal Traven, Bob Timmerman, and Daniel Levine and we talked baseball for about three hours. It wasn't until I was walking back to the hotel that it occurred to me that it seemed completely NORMAL to have just talked about nothing but baseball for the previous six hours (game included) and to not have come anywhere close to exhausting the topic. I HAVE FOUND MY PEOPLE AND THEY ARE SABR!

Saturday morning I could not get myself up to play catch--Sorry Seamus! Lack of sleep was starting to catch up to me and I wanted to be up in time for the Scouts Roundtable with Pat Gillick at 8:15 am. It turned out to be not only Pat Gillick (GM of the Mariners), but also Tracy Ringolsby from the Denver Post (or was it Rocky Mt. News?) and also Roland Hemond (who has had a long, distinguished career and is currently advising the White Sox GM). The roundtable turned into partly a roast of Pat Gillick, as the other scouts/GMs in the room had to constantly remind themselves and us that anything Gillick said could possibly be to put us off the trail of what he is really trying to do but doesn't want anyone to know... Bill Clark, head of the scouts committee and also the supervisor of International Scouting for the San Diego Padres, kept things lively, exchanging tales with Gillick about "the ones that got away" as well as guys he signed right out from under Gillick's nose. The panel was great fun and very illuminating about the world of scouts. The panelists also had to mention MONEYBALL, but didn't dwell on it.

Then at 10:45 was the "Coors Field Braintrust." This was a really unique thing and I'm glad I went to it. The panelists included Mark Razum, head groundskeeper, Dave Moore, director of Coors Field Development, and Kevin Kahn, v.p. of ballpark operations. After a brief introduction where each panelist talked about how he ended up being a part of the Coors Field stadium team, the audience peppered them with questions. Everything from "why are the stairways to the Rockpile so ugly and unfinished-looking?" (answer: ran out of money while building the park, so they were left as is) to "how to you get that pattern in the outfield grass?" (answer: it's just the way you mow it in different directions that makes the nap of the grass lie facing different ways and reflect the light differently). "I get that question all the time," Mark Razum said. "Guys call the stadium, they've got bets with their friends as to how we do it, is it painted, do you grow strips of different grass, etc... but it's just mowing."

And then it was time for the awards banquet/luncheon. Julian got stuck in traffic so we were already into our main course when he arrived. After the many awards were given out and acceptance speeches finished, the keynote speech was delivered by Jim Evans, who was a major league ump for 30 years, and, as it turns out, is also a hoot. This is a guy who has no shortage of funny anecdotes about working in baseball--and he has a few tearjerkers, too. He told maybe a few too many jokes that weren't directly baseball related, but overall it was quite a speech... god, I was so tired by then that now I can't even remember a single one of his really great stories. (I didn't take notes during the banquet, of course!) Suffice to say, he was fun.

Julian and I stuck our heads into Bill James and Rob Neyer's "What They Threw" presentation, billed as "The Pitching Repertoires of 1,400 pitchers Along With Some Other Stuff." James and Neyer started talking about this some ten years ago, when they realized that many of the great pitchers we can talk about in history we DON'T really know what they threw. Did that guy have a sinker? Was his curve a 12-6 curve, or did it have more side-to-side break on it? Is there a difference between a 12-6 curve and a "drop ball," or does it depend on the pitcher? What's the difference between a forkball and a splitter? They started compiling all the information that could on every pitcher who ever pitched. Now they're at the point where they need to start sharing some of this information and putting it together into a publishable form. We could only stay for about 20 minutes of it, though, as we had to go off to the ballpark again to meet a friend of Julian's, and I wanted to catch BP again.

This time we were using Julian's company's season tickets. The Dodgers' bats had perked up a little in the light air, and we had a few more chances in the bleachers. I got into two tussles for balls that ricocheted to my area, but didn't win the tug of war either time (the glove actually hampered there). The season tickets turned out to be directly behind home plate and back about 25-30 rows. Very nice seats. We had a great view of the movement on the pitches and I was sorry that Nomo had pitched the night before! I was also so tired by that point that I didn't quite have the attention span to pay attention to the individual pitches. The Rockies won again with a 1-2-3 ninth inning. I said goodbye to Julian and went back to the hotel to pack.

My flight left Denver the next morning at 6am, so I had to miss the final few agenda items left in the convention. But that was okay. I was ready for some serious sleep.

Next year Cincinnati!