Join Me For SABR Day In KC This Saturday, January 29

Society For American Baseball Research (SABR) chapters are meeting all across the world this Saturday. In Kansas City, I will be participating in a panel discussion on baseball blogging with actual journalist Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports and Craig Brown and Nick Scott from the essential Royals blog Royals Authority. Two local authors will also be discussing their work: Todd Peterson will discuss his book Early Black Baseball in Minnesota, and Phil Dixon will present a discussion on his book Andrew "Rube" Foster: A Harvest On Freedom's Fields. The meeting gets under way at 1:00 at Trailside Center, 9901 Holmes Road, Kansas City, MO. It is free to attend and non-members are welcome.

(I know some people confuse SABR with only being about advanced stats thanks to the unfortunate term "sabermetrics," but don't let that scare you away. SABR is for anyone who loves baseball. As you can tell from the speakers who will be at the meeting, the scope of SABR is broad.)

2010 Royals Pitcher wOBA

Wanted to move this from the sidebar, but keep it as a post for posterity:

.252 Soria

.285 Farnsworth

.291 Humber

.304 Greinke

.305 Tejeda

.320 C'mon Chen

.325 Hughes

.331 Hochevar

.341 Texeira

.344 Wood

.347 Davies
.361 O'Sullivan
.361 Meche
.361 Chavez
.367 Bullington
.374 Bannister
.414 Lerew's Sideburns

.423 Marte

wOBA = ((.72 x BB) + (.75 x HBP) + (.9 x 1B) + (1.24 x 2B) + (1.56 x 3B) + (1.95 x HR))/PA

"High School Students Brawl After Athletics-Tigers Game"

click to enlarge

This 1956 picture of high school students brawling on the Municipal Stadium field that I posted in my previous entry caught the attention of a few folks on Twitter, resulting in the following tweets:

@brokenbatsingle: This picture is amazing.

@funkyball77: Holy crap! Freakiest part are the ushers standing around watching.

@brokenbatsingle: Absolutely.

@funkyball77: Was everyone mad because Arnie Portocarrero lost? http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1956/B04240KC11956.htm

@brokenbatsingle: Wouldn't you be?

@3rdPeriodPoints: This just in: 1956 NOT idyllic.

@funkyball77: Not sure. Gus Zernial going 0-for-3 against Steve Gromek might have bothered me more.

@KC_Baseball: Crazy, right?! I need to find newspaper reports for that game to see if they mention brawl.

@brokenbatsingle: It's a stunning picture on so many levels. part of me hopes the usher was just caught at the wrong moment.

@3rdPeriodPoints: You can see 2 other ushers twiddling their thumbs too.

I did manage to find a little more info on the brawl with just a little digging in The Sporting News archive (available free to members of SABR). Here's the item:

May 2, 1956 The Sporting News