Graham Womack: Saving a Minor League Treasure Trove

[redsmetz]

I think this is a good title for this thread. Here's a piece written by Graham Womack about the work to conserve a vast baseball collection of a SABR member, a one-time minor league scorekeeper, among other things. It looks like it will now be housed at the San Diego library.

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/66450530/

It's a fascinating piece and there's a few scanned images of a survey the owner had players fill out (likely on 100K players!).

I've often wondered about even just some smaller collections. My friend who played for the Reds minor leagues in the 50's has a scrap book his mother kept of his playing days. Another buddy and I sat around one evening having a beer looking it over. One article from his B League season reported him giving up a home run to Brooks Robinson. I plan on talking to Don about what his plans are for posterity.

[dfs]

I believe "about the work to conserve a vast baseball collection from a SABR membership" should read..."about the work to conserve a vast baseball collection of a SABR member" or I missed something.

One of the nice things the article infers is that being a member of SABR isn't only limited to those who try and compute there way to the one grand number that quantifies what happens on the field.

[westofyou]

I believe "about the work to conserve a vast baseball collection from a SABR membership" should read..."about the work to conserve a vast baseball collection of a SABR member" or I missed something.

One of the nice things the article infers is that being a member of SABR isn't only limited to those who try and compute there way to the one grand number that quantifies what happens on the field.

SABR initially and currently is more about the history of the game than the numbers that come from the games, by a pretty large margin, spend some time on their site, you'll find that there is stuff out being churned out and cataloged by members who could care less about WAR or OPSplus

[Larry Schuler]

Off topic but...Tony Womack only played a handful of games for the Reds before being released? I thought he had a full Royce Clayton sized cup of coffee that year. Interesting how memory/trauma works.

[cumberlandreds]

Off topic but...Tony Womack only played a handful of games for the Reds before being released? I thought he had a full Royce Clayton sized cup of coffee that year. Interesting how memory/trauma works.

That's who I thought about when I saw the title of the thread.

Good article. Its amazing what people do. You see this every once in a while where someone spent their entire life doing something like this. I hope his work finds a home. It is a good piece of history that should not be lost.

[redsmetz]

Thanks for some of the input. I changed the topic to show the author's first name - I can see how a moment of confusion was certainly possible (and yes, btw, Tony Womack was shown the door amazingly quick). And I certainly not clear in my sentence viz the collection.

[westofyou]

Some SABR content that has nothing to do with advanced numbers

1 - Bio Project - Like this of Ewell Blackwell

2 - Historical Journals like The National Pastime

3 - Numerous Events

4 - As for SABR being populated by run counting robots, here's the recent poll