The Chris Moeller Archives

A fan convention for cool people

St. Louis plays host this week to an inviting event: the 37th annual convention of the Society For American Baseball Research (SABR). The organization has a large number of dues-paying members that will be in attendance, but non-members are welcome also for many of the events at the five-day festival that concludes Sunday. Joe Garagiola will be this year's keynote speaker Saturday afternoon, and there have already been panel conversations with groups of former St. Louis Browns and St. Louis Cardinals players.

A busy schedule, and the fact that I just heard about the convention yesterday, precludes my attendance, but trusted baseball and St. Louis media sources have provided a breadth of information about their varied gathering of speakers. Researchers delivering presentations this year include the author of "A Well-Paid Slave," about the life and legal trials of Curt Flood, and the author of a second book I enjoyed earlier this year-- "Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History."

Other presentations with provocative titles include "Should the pitcher bat 9th?" "How valuable is strike one?" "What are these weird marks?: Decoding Other People's Scorecards," "Wrigley Field Los Angeles: One Shining Season in the Major League Sun," and "'They must think we're a bunch of (censored)': Gussie Busch, Paternalism, and the Collapse of the Cardinals Dynasty."

The two presentations, though, for which I've read specific reviews, are the ones by broadcaster George Michael, former host of TV's "Sports Machine," and former MLB pitcher Mike Marshall.

Michael grew up selling scorecards at St. Louis' Sportsman Park, and can apparently take almost any baseball action photograph from history, and track the year, date, and inning of the play, maybe even the umpire. He recently had a picture of Ty Cobb spiking a Browns catcher in the crotch, and sourced it to the precise afternoon in 1913, the inning, the catcher, and the umpire, and determined that the play was an attempted steal of home, and that Cobb was safe, though the ball beat him.

Marshall's presentation on the mechanics of pitching was teased in the Post-Dispatch today. The National League's 1974 Cy Young Award winner has a doctorate in exercise physiology, and believes he has invented a pitching motion, abandoning the overhand standard, that will completely eliminate arm stress and injuries, while maximizing the speed of each pitch. He calls the Major League establishment "the flat-earth society, " and his proteges, such as former Devil Ray Jeff Sparks, say they've been constantly forced by pitching coaches to tinker and readjust their Marshall-developed motions at the professional level.

Marshall pitched in the bigs from 1967 to 1981, and still owns a handful of Major League pitching endurance records for relievers, including most games pitched in a season (106!), and consecutive games (13). He believes no kid should pitch competitively until their arm x-rays reveal the biological progression of a 13-year-old, and even then, should be limited to one inning per game, two games per week, and two months per season. A pitcher has to be at least 19 years old to enroll in his training school.

Fascinating, huh?! The seminar was already held this afternoon, but I doubt we've heard the last of Marshall.



More on the Marshall Plan.

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Lately, during my 15 minute breaks at work, I've been going out to my car to listen to the radio. I work in a music-free environment so these melodic interludes help to break up the routine of the day. A trip to the bathroom each break, and the elapsed time of the journey to and from the car leaves it so that I really only get to enjoy one full song per break. Kind of like a lapdance...(pause for effect)... my brother tells me. Sometimes the best I can do is an Elton John song or one of the new R&B hits on the urban station, but it will be tough to top the happy timing of today's tunes: for the first break, "What a Fool Believes," by the Doobies, and for the second, "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I Got)," by the Four Tops. Those are a couple beauties, man. I needed 'em on a slow-moving Friday.

posted by CM @ 8:03 PM