You don’t have to know a lot about baseball to know that the most-ardent followers of the national pastime live in a universe ruled by the laws of statistics. And anyone who works in the meetings and conventions industry knows that anytime there is a group of enthusiasts with an affinity to anything, there’s a society or association that exists to get them together.
The Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR—i.e., sabermetrics, a term that actually stems from the society’s acronym and which means the empirical analysis of baseball—is one such affinity group, a 6,000-member team of Major League Baseball fans, franchise owners and former players and managers that Ernie Harwell, the late Detroit Tigers broadcaster, called “the Phi Beta Kappa of baseball.”
These baseball stats nerds are managed, in a way, by Deb Jayne, membership and events director of the society.
A born Yankees fan, Jayne was put into the game after one of her former co-workers got involved in the organization and told its executive director about her.
“The rest is history,” Jayne says. “I’ve been here two-and-a-half years and planned about five conferences.”
SABR, a 501c3 not-for-profit organization, holds a four-day annual convention that draws between 500 and 700 attendees. Following an opening-night reception that typically happens on a Wednesday, members slide into committee meetings, a Thursday general session and then a business meeting and presentations by speakers, and then a call for presentations from membership. Friday is reserved for the group’s major, and secret, awards banquet, and Friday night is usually held in the Major League Ballpark of the city they’re meeting in, so they can see all of those numbers and probabilities collide in an actual game.
“This is the once-a-year get-together, and they like to meet their friends and talk baseball,” Jayne says. “They only see each other once a year, and they don’t do a lot of Internet or e-mail—the average age of the society is 55—so they just pick up where they left off the previous year. It’s pretty funny.”
Last year’s Annual Convention was held in Philadelphia, the 2014 event will be in Houston, and Chicago will play host in 2015. The society also organizes SABR Day local chapter meetings, the Frederick Ivor-Campbell 19th Century Base Ball Conference, the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference and the Arizona Fall League Conference.
Members focus on a wide variety of baseball research, Jayne says, anything “from old history to everyday life on baseball teams, or players and stats—a huge gamut of all that they’re passionate about.”
SABR, which has more than 60 chapters and committees spread throughout North America and as far away as Venezuela and South Korea, also holds a spring SABR Analytics Conference during Spring Training in its home base of Phoenix, which typically draws a lot of Major League owners and general managers.
