SABR 40: This year’s award winners!

Announcement of the winners of this year’s award winners!
Neal Traven, head of the judges, announces that unfortunately neither the poster winner nor the research presentation winner could be present. But he gives a recap of the winners and their topics. (And the poster, which was very beautifully done, was displayed in the back.)

Winner of the USA Today Sports Weekly Poster Presentation is “The best vs. the best: W-L records of Hall of Fame pitchers against each other” by J-P Caillault

Caillault presents for every pitcher in the Hall of Fame, their career won-lost totals in head-to-head match-ups with other members of the HoF. His results date back to the beginning of the National League in 1876 (when Al Spalding and Candy Cummings were 1-1 against each other) and extend up to and including 1987 (when Don Sutton beat Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro beat Sutton). There have been no such matchups since, although that will change as more pitchers are inducted.
J-P Caillault (jpc1957@msn.com) is a professor of astronomy at the University of Georgia, where he also teaches classes on the physics of baseball, the history of the major leagues, and sabermetrics. He is the author of A Tale of Four Cities (McFarland 2003), The Complete New York Clipper Baseball Biographies (McFarland, 2009), and has written articles for Baseball Digest and Baseball Research Journal. He lives in Winterville, Georgia.

Of the 40 judges, they were very much in agreement on this being the best poster.

And now for the oral presentations. There were a total of 40 presentations, and five that were seen as really head and shoulders above the others. A grudging consensus was reached, and we have four honorable mentions, and one winner.

First, the four honorable mentions:

Robert Fitts, for “Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura, and the War”
Michael Haupert for “Earning Like a Woman: The Gender Gap in Professional Baseball 1944-1954”
Alan Nathan “Revisiting Mantle’s Griffith Stadium Home Run”
Mark Stang “The Barnum of the Bushes: Chattanooga’s Joe Engel”

And the winner is:

Ross Davies for “Long Before Ping-Pong: Chinese-US Diplomacy Before the Great War”

I am pleased to say I did see this presentation and it is recapped in an earlier post. Since Ross wasn’t there, but Neal did have his slides, I gave a brief recap from my notes and Neal showed the slides, so the folks who missed it could get the gist.