SABR38 Wrapup

After the movie yesterday, I grabbed lunch with a couple of folks at a Mexican place in the alley at East Fourth Street. Chalk it up as one of those things you simply don't expect, but my lunch companions -- both of whom live out west -- thought that their burritos were the best they'd ever had. Cleveland, Ohio. Who knew?

After lunch we booked back to the hotel to catch a roundtable with minor league executive/eccentric folk hero/disco demolisher Mike Veeck and Cleveland Indians' GM Mark Shapiro. It was entertaining and informative. Mike Veeck is everything you've read about. During the audience Q&A, someone asked him a question that required him to tell the story of Disco Demolition Night. Now you know and I know that he has told that story hundreds if not thousands of times in his life, so you might expect it to be a little rote by now. Except it wasn't. Sure, it was obviously a long-rehearsed, frequently-repeated, and sharply-polished account, but he told it with such enthusiasm and humor that you'd think it happened yesterday. I have this feeling that I wouldn't be half as enthusiastic talking about something that essentially derailed my career for a decade.

Not that he was there just to talk about the past. There were several questions about the state of the minor leagues and, not surprisingly, Veeck has some pretty interesting ideas about that. One, which Mark Shapiro agreed with more enthusiastically than I expected, was that given how the major prospects basically jump from AA to the majors anymore, it might be a good idea for AAA to revert to some form of quasi-independent system. Definitely something worth thinking about.

Shapiro was a lot of fun too. You can tell by listening to him that the man is scary-smart. The thing that struck me the most, however, was when he said that he has kids that are the same age as mine. Knowing how hard one has to work at running a Major League team, and knowing how exhausting two kids under five can be, the man must be on greenies or something to simply get through the day.

Later that afternoon I caught a presentation on clutch hitting by sabermetric legends Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer and another on game scores, what they mean, are they useful, etc. I'll be honest, though, and admit that by the time those presentations came around the carnitas plate and two Tecates I had at lunch were starting to mess with my attention span. When they were over I went upstairs to my room, caught a couple of innings of the Cubs-White Sox game on TV, and listened to a pretty hellacious thunderstorm outside my window.

Thankfully the thunderstorm passed quickly, because I was going to the Reds-Indians game. Unlike Friday night's nosebleeders, last night's were pretty amazing seats a handful of rows behind the first base dugout. The company was pretty amazing too: Rob Neyer, Don Zminda from STATS, and SABR member and all-around smart and hilarious guy Jeff Bower. Wanna feel inadequate? Watch a game with these guys. As we sat down, Jeff, Don, and Rob each took out scorebooks already full of dozens of other games. Me? I ordered a beer and made a mental note not to buy that foam finger I had my eye on. The game itself: ho-hum. The Reds won 5-0 behind 6+ uneven but obviously effective innings from Johnny Cueto, an Adam Dunn home run that cleared the fence by about three inches, and a three-run double from Paul Bako of all people. The highlight(s) of the game, however, came when Indians' catcher Sal Fasano threw out two runners in one inning to get Paul Byrd out of a jam. At least temporarily.

After the game it was back to the hotel where it seemed like all of SABR had congregated in the lobby/bar area to drink and, of course, talk baseball. The SABR trivia contest had taken place while we were at the game, and folks were rehashing some of the questions for those of us who had missed it. I actually got one right -- what NL pitcher in 1985 actually had a better strikeout and hit per-innings pitched ratio than Doc Gooden? Answer in the first comment below -- but the rest of the questions made my head hurt. Of course people had answers for almost all of them, which made me feel pretty damn inadequate for the second time in four hours. After that pizza was ordered, beer was consumed, and the end of the Angels' not-really-no-hitter was watched on somebody's laptop.

I went upstairs at around 1:30 and hit the hay, and with that, SABR was over for me. Despite the fact that I have learned exactly how little I know about baseball over the past few days, I am truly glad I came. I enjoyed finally putting faces to the names of baseball fanatics I have known only online for so long -- guys like Repoz, Jim Furtado, Sean Forman, Mike McClary, Dave Studeman, John Daly, Rob Neyer, Chris Jaffe, Steve Treder, Joe Dimino, Matt Young, Aaron Gleeman, Mark Armour, Dan Levitt, and many, many others -- and I really enjoyed getting to know some of them a bit.

SABR39 will be in Washington D.C., and I'm not going to miss it for the world.