Society for American Baseball Research
Rogers Hornsby Chapter (Central and South Texas)
Annual Report, June 2022 – May 2023
By Gilbert D. Martinez
Chapter Commissioner
As precautions against the pandemic have eased in the last year, the Rogers Hornsby Chapter returned to more in-person meetings, continuing its streak of monthly meetings to 198 months in May.
The chapter also continued long-standing traditions such as an outing to see the Round Rock Express, a World Series watch party and annual winter meeting. We also celebrated SABR Day with a Zoom meeting and added an outing to see the Austin Weirdos of the Pecos League of Professional Baseball.
Most of our meetings involve lunches on the weekend with baseball chatter and a trivia quiz. Jim Baker continued his long-running Predictaron contest in which members try to forecast the regular and post seasons and presented trophies to the regular season and postseason winners. Ryan Pollack added Awardatron, a contest in which members try to guess the winners of the major baseball awards by making their picks before the start of the season.
In May, under guidance from the SABR national office, the Hornsby Chapter conducted its first-ever election for chapter leadership. After a week-long self-nomination process and a three-day online voting period, chapter members unanimously elected Gilbert Martinez as chapter commissioner. He was the only candidate on the ballot and plans to appoint directors to the chapter’s leadership team.
In April, Ryan Pollack created a poll to survey members about their overall satisfaction with the chapter and their suggestions for improvement. We had 20 out of 78 members respond, for a response rate of 25%, and 19 out of 20 rated their satisfaction with the chapter at 3 or 4 (satisfied and very satisfied). Among the suggestions from survey respondents was to incorporate an outing to a Minor League game in San Antonio, which has been tentatively scheduled for later in 2023. We’re hoping to conduct the survey annually to stay in touch with all our members and let that guide our decisions for chapter activities.
Another change the chapter made was transforming the monthly meeting summaries into monthly newsletters, launching for the first time in April. In addition to summarizing the monthly meeting, the newsletter also includes tidbits about regular chapter activities involving the baseball memories volunteer efforts, Predictatron and Awardatron contests, baseball research and other baseball-related topics.
At the 17th Annual Bill Gilbert Winter Meeting in January, Nancy Finley, niece of Oakland A’s owner Charlie O. Finley, talked about her book “Finley Ball: How Two Baseball Outsiders Turned the Oakland A’s into a Dynasty and Changed the Game Forever.” David Vaught, a Texas A&M history professor and author of “Spitter: Baseball’s Notorious Gaylord Perry,” told of Perry’s life and career of a pitcher known to use foreign substances while pitching. Feature writer Mike Bryan shared anecdotes of working with Cal Ripken Jr., Keith Hernandez and Kirby Puckett in writing books with them about their lives. Express General Manager Tim Jackson and broadcaster Mike Capps previewed the team’s roster and MLB’s rules experimentation with bigger bases and pitch clocks. Our youngest member and high school sophomore, Bailey Hall, gave a brief history of the use of statistics in baseball and how technology has transformed how we watch and analyze the game we love. Also, winter meeting coordinator Jerry Miller, a long-time Dodgers fan, gave a touching remembrance of Vin Scully. Members also shared their baseball memories from the 2022 season and participated in a mock Hall of Fame vote.
In addition, Hornsby volunteers are beginning their ninth year offering a baseball memories program to participants and care partners living with Alzheimer’s, dementia, or living in isolation or institutionalized. The chapter established a partnership with AGE of Central Texas and are offering regular sessions.
For SABR Day, we held a meeting on Zoom and spoke with longtime Astros broadcaster Bill Brown, who is part of the Class of 2023 to be inducted into the Astros Hall of Fame in August.