On Saturday, April 17, ten members and guests enjoyed a hearty meal at the Salt Lick restaurant followed by the Round Rock Express vs. New Orleans Zephyrs game at the Dell Diamond in Round Rock, Texas.
After dinner we made our way across the parking lot and into the stadium. Shortly after finding our seats, the Texas skies opened up and the game was delayed nearly 90 minutes by rain.
Eventually the rain ceased, the tarp was removed, the field prepared and a baseball game was played on what turned out to be a fairly pleasant evening.
Several members suffered from divided attention while following not only the action on the field, but also following (via smart phone) the action in St. Louis where the Mets defeated the Cardinals 2-1 in 20 innings and in Atlanta where the Rockies’ Ubaldo Jiminez threw the first no-hitter in franchise history at the Braves.
Although the visiting Zephyrs left the field with a 5-4 win, a good time was had by all.
Eight members of the Rogers Hornsby Chapter met Tuesday evening, March 30, 2010 for dinner at Cover3 in Austin. Discussion centered around the upcoming season and the Astros’ prospects for the 2010 campaign. Interest was expressed in a summer road trip to see the Corpus Christi Hooks or San Antonio Missions.
Monte Cely presented a quiz on the history of the Cy Young Award (a copy of the quiz is under the "Contests" tab above). Michael Bass won the quiz and a copy of the book, "Cy Young Award Winners". Jan Larson was also presented with a St. Patrick’s green Astros cap for winning the February quiz.
The next chapter meeting will be an outing to Dell Diamond to see a Round Rock Express game. Tentative date is Saturday evening, April 17. More information will be forthcoming.
Ten members had dinner and chatted about baseball, football, basketball and the Olympics at Cover 3 in Austin on Feb. 25.
Jan Larson won Bill Gilbert’s trivia quiz related to the 2009 season and 2000 decade with a total score of 24 points, leaving everyone else in the dust. (The quiz can be found under the Contests tab above.)
Most of us agreed that Cover 3 was not as noisy as some of the other locations we’ve met at recently. The chapter plans to have the next meeting at Cover 3 on Tuesday, March 30.
The Rogers Hornsby Chapter joined chapters all across the country and around the world to celebrate SABR Day on Saturday, Jan. 30.
Thirteen people gathered at Chuck Kaufman’s house in northwest Austin to share baseball stories, memorabilia and thoughts about the upcoming season. Chuck and Jennifer Kaufman prepared a veggie tray, chips and salsa and pizza. Monte and Linda Cely brought delicious cupcakes that spelled out SABR Day.
Bill Gilbert brought the ball he threw out as the first pitch to Jeff Kent at Minute Maid Park in April 2009. The Astros invited current and former players who were involved in great games and plays during the first decade of the ballpark. Included with the ball was a photo of Bill and Jeff Kent standing on the field.
Gilbert Martinez shared a photo of Jackie Robinson taken at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J., in 1946, when he played for the Montreal Royals. The group discussed ways to figure out at which game the photo was taken.
Pictured above are, in the front row, from left, Monte Cely, Bill Gilbert and Gilbert Martinez; in the back row, from left, Chuck Kaufman, Jim Baker, Rob Radmer and Jan Larson. Not pictured is Michael Bass. In the photo below are Monte and Linda Cely.
An Astros broadcaster, a major league scout, a sabermetrician, a baseball grave hunter and others shared their baseball stories and research at the 4th Annual SABR Rogers Hornsby Chapter Winter Meeting, held Jan. 16, 2010, at Texas State University.
Bill Brown, Houston Astros play-by-play broadcaster for 23 years, shared an essay titled “The Greatest Game in Astros History,” which was about the thrilling 18-inning Astros playoff win against the Atlanta Braves in the 2005 National League Division Series. He also shared stories about how he got his start in broadcasting with the Cincinnati Reds and his approach to broadcasting games. In addition, Brown was generous with his time, answering a wide range of questions for more than an hour.
Jan Larson, who helps maintain the Hornsby Chapter website, moderated a lively panel discussion with Gene Watson, coordinator of professional scouting for the Kansas City Royals; Mike Capps, the voice of the Round Rock Express who won the 2009 Broadcaster of the Year from BallparkDigest.com; and Jim Baker, former columnist for ESPN.com and Baseball Prospectus. They discussed the use of instant replay, whether international players should be included in the amateur draft and what Mark McGwire’s admission means for his Hall of Fame chances.
Other presentations included one by Dr. Fred Worth, a mathematics professor from Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. He shared stories and photos of baseball player gravesites, including several notable ones in Central Texas. He also brought a binder with photos of graves he has visited. His endeavor is to visit, photograph and mark by GPS gravesites of players, managers and umpires associated with Major League Baseball.
Scott Barzilla, an active member of the SABR Larry Dierker Chapter in Houston, talked about his research, which combines statistical measures of baseball players such as win shares (WS), wins above replacement player (WARP), wins above replacement (WAR), plus those values at the player’s peak. The result is a list of players by position that attempts to quantify a player’s value as compared to other players. Barzilla said his goal isn’t to rank the top X number of players by position; instead, he hopes that those who vote in Hall of Fame balloting might use his tool to see that his method shows how some players have been overvalued or overlooked. He’s writing a book about his statistical rankings and hopes to have it published next year.
Norman Macht, author of “Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball,” talked about his interesting visit with former major league player Ted Lyons, who played 21 seasons with the Chicago White Sox and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1955. Macht played audio excerpts of his interview with Lyons. Macht also kicked off the meeting with a creative and challenging baseball quiz that entertained and stumped the audience.
Hornsby Chapter member Michael Bass brought several pieces of memorabilia to share with the group, including a "knobless" bat used by Bill North, who had a 10-year MLB career, mostly with the Oakland A’s. Bass also shared a pennant and a program from the Baltimore Orioles’ inaugural season in 1954.
Thirty-four people attended the winter meeting, which included a drawing for items brought by Gene Watson. Prizes included baseballs signed by Kansas City Royals Manager Trey Hillman and Royals first baseman Billy Butler and two copies of the Baseball America 2010 Almanac. Watson also brought some Royals T-shirts, yearbooks and signed cards by some Royals minor league prospects.
For the third consecutive year, the winter meeting was held in historic Old Main, the oldest building on the Texas State campus and home to the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and the College of Fine Arts & Communication. It was the fourth year the winter meeting was held on the Texas State campus.
Eleven members met Thursday evening, December 17, at Third Base in Austin for the monthly meeting of the Rogers Hornsby Chapter. New member Wells Oliver was welcomed to the group.
Jim Baker developed the trivia quiz, entitled "Tis the Football Season Baseball Quiz". The theme was the intersection of football and baseball. Norman Macht blitzed the field to win the quiz by several touchdowns. Jan Larson took second.
The planning committee for the Hornsby Chapter annual Winter Meeting finalized the lineup. The Winter Meeting will be held Saturday, January 16 on the campus of Texas State University in San Marcos. Much more information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.
Discussion revolved around recent trades and free agent signings, as well as other hot-stove issues.
Our next meeting will be the Winter Meeting on Saturday, January 16.
Eight members assembled at Third Base in Austin for the November meeting of the Rogers Hornsby chapter. Monte Cely presented Jan Larson with a major award for winning Monte’s annual Cy Young prediction contest.
Michael Bass had prepared a trivia quiz on the decade of the 1960s. Unfortunately a conflict prevented Michael from presenting the quiz but he did leave the answers in a hermetically sealed envelope with Tom Wancho who handled administration duties. Dan Walsh edged Jim Baker for the win by a score of 13-12 with the other contestants relegated to also-ran status.
Tom Wancho also served in an administrative capacity as the members conducted a vote on the upcoming Hall of Fame managers/umpires and executive candidates. Applying the same standards as the Hall of Fame, specifically requiring 75% of the votes cast for an individual to be elected, the chapter elected only one candidate – Marvin Miller, former executive director of the Major League Players Association.
The planning committee for the Hornsby Chapter Winter Meeting put together a preliminary agenda for that meeting which will be held on January 16. Details will be finalized at a later date.
Discussion centered on the recently completed post-season and the traditional off-season "hot stove" topics.
The next monthly meeting was scheduled for Thursday, December 17 also at Third Base.
Eight members and four guests enjoyed the first-ever Rogers Hornsby Chapter Playoff Watch Party and Cookout on Saturday at the home of Gilbert and Raeanne Martinez.
The only disappointment – aside from the lackluster performance by the St. Louis Cardinals – was the postponement of the late game between the Rockies and the Phillies due to snow in Denver.
The jalapeño-onion burgers were popular, as were the raspberry-filled cupcakes with icing designed to look like baseballs (the cupcakes were courtesy Lucila Martinez, Gilbert Martinez’s sister-in-law).
There was no quiz, but the group grappled with some baseball trivia. Norman Macht pondered how many Hall of Famers (as a player or manager) had won exactly one World Series. He didn’t know how many there have been, but one candidate would be Earl Weaver. Are there others?
Gilbert Martinez repeated a question he asked on the list-serve – Which is the only team, since 1930, that had four players each with 200 or more hits in a season?
With barely a pause, Bill Gilbert named the team: the 1937 Detroit Tigers. The group came up with the four players: G. Walker (213), C. Gehringer (209), P. Fox (208) and H. Greenberg (200).
Gilbert Martinez also shared that a team with three players with 200+ hits each has occurred a handful of times. They are the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs in 1930, the ’35 N.Y. Giants, the ’63 Cardinals, the ’82 Brewers and the ’91 Rangers.
There was some discussion about a fair flyball by Joe Mauer that had been mistakenly called a foul ball in the Yankees-Twins game the night before. There was also some discussion about who the Astros should hire as their next manager. Both Bill Gilbert and Gilbert Martinez said they hoped it would be Tim Bogar, first base coach for the Boston Red Sox, and former Astros player. Bill joked that Bogar’s schedule was about to be wide open (for interview purposes) because the Angels had the Red Sox on the brink of elimination (And Bill was right – the Angels eliminated the Red Sox at Fenway with a dramatic 9th inning come-back the following day).
The next meeting has not yet been scheduled, but will probably be in early November.
Larry Dierker is part of Houston Astros history. During his 12-year career (1964 to 1976), he became the team’s winningest living pitcher (139-123, 3.31) now that Joe Niekro has passed. But the two-time All-Star never thought that much about history until he started witnessing some of the oddball events of baseball. He detailed some of these and his acquired taste for the pastime’s history during the Winter Meeting of the Rogers Hornsby Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research on Jan. 17, 2009, at Texas State University.
In 1992, during a trip to Philadelphia, Mickey Morandini was involved in an unassisted triple play in the sixth inning. Dierker was amazed . . . and curious. A quick check into history revealed that Neal Ball first turned the feat for the Cleveland Indians in 1909; Bill Wambsganss, also of the Indians, did it in 1920.Ron Hansen did it for the Senators.
“I looked up all of them,” Dierker said. “I was on the air and was able to name all of them. It’s the most rare thing in baseball. I credit SABR for producing publications that had such stories.”
Fifteen such plays have dotted the Major League Baseball landscape, the most recent being eight months after Dierker made his appearance before the Hornsby SABR chapter, when former Astro and current Phillies utility player Eric Bruntlett caught a line drive in the ninth inning, touched second and tagged the runner coming from first.
Dierker’s subsequent searches took him to the personal recollections recorded in “Glory of Their Times.” The taped personal recollections gave him “a sense of perspective and heightened my sense of aesthetic value” of baseball, he said. “I’ve thought how baseball differs from other sports we follow in the United States. All of the great sports books have been about baseball and golf. Why is that? A large part of it is because of the playing field. Avid golfers go around and study courses. Baseball people want to see the ballparks, with different outfield configurations. Soldier Field may be great panorama, but the field is the field.”
Beyond the field, there are the statistics, the numbers and the ability to compare players against another and the probability in different situations. In a nutshell, such logic-inducing minutia is meaningless. “One thing left out of managerial thinking is whether a batter has a tendency to draw walks or if he won’t take a walk,” Dierker said. “(Steve) Garvey hit me very well, but never would walk. I would have never thrown him a strike. Knowing that helped the pitchers when I managed. It would have helped me.
“Another thing I got from SABR people concerns the probability of scoring runs, although I prefer to consider the chances of something happening. People say you play the percentages, and I said, ‘Well, tell me the percentages of something happening’ and they couldn’t answer that. I think you have to play the chances. Statistics show that the team that scores first would win 70 percent of the time or something like that. (Jim) Leyland had Jay Bell hitting second, Bonds hitting first, Van Slyke third, Bonilla fourth. Bell was going to get Bonds over to second 95 percent of the time. A lot of stuff I got from SABR was helpful to me in a general sense, but in the heat of managing, with emotions running there’s an intangible way of looking at the game.”
Dierker remembered Derek Bell wanting to hit second, after Biggio and in front of Bagwell, rather than fifth. "Well, who doesn’t" want to bat there? Dierker asked, getting some laughs from the audience. Batting second, Bell told him, would allow him to see more fastballs. Bell’s manager penciled him second on the lineup card and, sure enough, he homered. Dierker left him in the second spot the rest of the year. “You don’t do everything based on everything you know, particularly when you win,” he said. He also learned that more than 50 percent of the time teams that win games score more runs in one inning than the other team. “I decided that I’m playing for the big inning,” he said. “So from an emotional team concept, the statistical move isn’t as important as the psychological move.”
Dierker was asked about the concept of a clutch hitter, whether there was such a thing. He said that although Bill James had studied the concept, the idea is overrated from the fans’ and announcers’ points of view. “The guys I thought were clutch hitters weren’t just the big hitters,” he said. “Jose Cruz hit better from the seventh inning on with a player in scoring position. The reason is because he had a knack for putting the ball in play. Same for Ichiro (Suzuki) and (Pete) Rose. They put the ball in play and seldom strike out. If you put the ball in play, then everything else is luck.
“I’d rather face (Johnny) Bench or (Tony) Perez than, say, Dan Driessen because I could strike the other guys out or get him to pop out. The guy I feared the most was the guy who was hard to strike out.”
Dierker discussed striking out Willie Mays and giving up a 450-foot blast to him. He was asked his thoughts about streaks and slumps and he said “everyone has them” and that “the guys who go to Cooperstown are the ones who have the longest streaks and the shortest slumps.”
Now living in Houston, Dierker left the field as a manager following a seizure in 1999 during the eighth inning of a game in the Astrodome against the San Diego Padres. Subsequently, he wrote “This Ain’t Brain Surgery: How to win the Pennant Without Losing Your Mind.” All that he learned on the field, off the field and in the history books is now going into a musical. At the time he was just waiting for the music. Through it all, two main pieces of knowledge surfaced. “From an emotional team concept, the statistical move isn’t as important as the psychological move,” he said. “And it’s easier to manage a game from the broadcast booth.”
Mike Capps, the radio voice of the Round Rock Express, was a guest at the meeting. He gave us some insights on the Round Rock players that will be competing for positions with the Astros next year. Mike has been selected to be the play-by-play announcer for the Triple-A Championship game in Oklahoma City next Tuesday which will be telecast on one of the ESPN channels. Chris Chambliss will be working with Mike at the game.
Capitalizing on the excitement earlier this week when Roy Oswalt broke the Club record with 16 no-decisions for the Astros, Gilbert Martinez did some quick research to determine that Bert Blyleven holds the major league record for no-decisions in one season with 20 for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979 when he was 12-5 in 37 starts.
The trivia contest this month required the identification of the career leaders in hits and home runs for the 14 American League franchises. Dan Walsh blew away the competition by getting 23 of 28 but he didn’t know that Aubrey Huff is Tampa Bay’s career home run leader. He won a coupon that paid for his dinner.
The date for the October meeting will be announced in the next few days. Plans are to schedule it in conjunction with one or two Division Series games.
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