Twenty-second in a new series
The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is an enduring success story, enriching the game for those who care about it deeply. For half a century it has been a gathering place for scholars, statisticians, and those who just like to read great baseball stuff. Its founders, back in 1971, could not have imagined their group’s success … nor could Bob Davids, the man whose idea it was, and who for decades guided the organization as it grew in membership, stature, and influence.
SABR took the game seriously. Poking into the recesses of baseball history, its members published deeply researched stories that, early on, baseball people dismissed as the epitome of irrelevance. Yet even the most grizzled veterans of the game began to come around to SABR’s innovations.
Individual discovery and group sharing –not the proprietary practices of academia — were the hallmarks of this volunteer society, no less today than at its onset. This was Bob Davids’ signal contribution to SABR and to the game he loved.
Leonard Davids was born in Kanawha, Iowa in 1926. He acquired the nickname “Bob” early in life and later used the nom de plume “L. Robert Davids.” After graduating from high school, where he had pitched, he moved to San Diego in 1943, where he worked in an aircraft factory. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1944 and flew as a gunner in the same aircraft type (the B-24) that he had helped build. During his time overseas he took two baseball publications with him: the Baseball Register and Ted Oliver’s Kings of the Mound, an odd little pamphlet that related pitchers’ won-lost records to that of their teams. (The resulting stat, Wins Above Team, is one that Pete Palmer and I ran in the first edition of Total Baseball in 1989.)
His interest in baseball continued as he moved to Washington, DC after the War. In 1951, when he began his career with the Department of Defense, he published his first story in The Sporting News (TSN), a four-inch column that netted him $7.50. As a “statistorian” — a term he coined to describe not only himself but also the individuals he would invite, 20 years later, to form SABR — Davids, perhaps inspired by Ted Oliver, found new ways to look at the old ball game.
Davids continued to write many stories and statistical squibs for TSN. By 1965, however, the editors closed the door to his further contributions. But then a window opened, in 1971 when Bob decided to publish his own Baseball Briefs, a four-page monthly, advertising it in the publication that had blacklisted him. Leaning upon his own subscription list, he approached other researchers and devotees of what TSN had come to view as oddball.
On August 10 of that very same year, 16 people established SABR at a meeting at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library. Davids was elected the first president, an office he would hold on three distinct occasions. In addition, he served as a member of SABR’s board of directors in two separate five-year terms. He edited its publications, notably the SABR Bulletin and the Baseball Research Journal — initiated in 1972 and still SABR’s main research outlet — and mailed them from his home. For at least the first decade of its existence, the society reflected his likes and dislikes.
In the SABR Bulletin №1, issued in August of that year, Bob wrote about the initial meeting:
Discussion of a name for the group centered around geographic coverage, a possible acronym, and a means of covering both the historical and statistical aspects of the group without a long title. It was generally agreed that the word research accomplished the latter. In regard to geographic scope, it was stated that American was broader than national. Society was preferred over association. Efforts to come up with a name resulting in a baseball acronym like RBI or something similar proved fruitless. Consequently, we became the Society for American Baseball Research.
(An early attempt at a catchier name yielded an acronym that was deemed indelicate and thus rejected: Baseball Research Association.)
Baseball has not lacked for nerds. But until Davids came up with the idea of SABR, back in 1971, there was no place for them to convene and consult with their brethren, onsite or online. There had been no way but through lone and lonely effort, sadly unpublicized, to advance our understanding of this great game.
Clarence Dow, a pioneering nerd, is a neglected patron saint of SABR. “He can’t be replaced,” fellow nerd Jacob Morse said of him, but of course he was — by Ernie Lanigan, by F.C. Lane, by Allan Roth, by Pete Palmer, by Bill James and, in our time, by legions more.
If SABR is to continue to record and preserve the story of baseball, and to provide a virtual think tank for its analysis, then Bob Davids’ SABR must continue in its habits of mind, its rigor, and its collegiality.
I am now older than Davids was at his death, so may feel free to comment. I have been a member since 1981 and, however much I, like Bob, may be thought to have have done for SABR, its members have done more for me. As MLB’s official historian, I stand on their shoulders.
PIONEERS: Bob Davids was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.