Greetings. I must start this post with an apology. I have very obviously not been able to use this blog as a motivation tool for myself, and I haven’t been able to update you on the progress of my dissertation project as well as tell you about other related developments. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been neglecting my personal blog as well. That doesn’t make you feel any better does it? Didn’t think so. I guess I should just stop dwelling on it and start by updating you on where I am in the data collection process.

By this time, I have completed about 24 interviews. I did about 12 interviews at the SABR conference, and the rest of the interviews have been done over the phone, with my most recent one being last Saturday. They have been all with what I’m calling the “rank and file” of the sabermetrics movement meaning that they are just regular people who aren’t necessarily involved with any professional sports franchises or what I’ve been referring to as the baseball institution. All of them have been very interesting and great conversations to have. They’ve ranged from age 17 to 78. They’re all males, and they’re pretty much all white. I’ll be scouring the world for a female sabermetrician, as well as one of color soon enough, so if anyone can refer one to me, that’d be great.

The next phase of my data collection revolves around doing interviews with “key informants”, those people who are plugged into the baseball institution and can speak directly to the way that the knowledge has made its way through the system. The kinds of people I’m looking for here are statisticians who actually work for baseball franchises, front office baseball people, and sports journalists. I really need to get my ass in gear and start contacting these people because if I don’t have the data collected by Christmas, I think I’m going to shoot myself.

I’ve been pretty bad about transcribing the interviews. This is bad for two reasons. One, I should be listening to the interviews as soon as possible after doing them so that I can recall the most detail about the conversation when transcribing. Second, it’s bad because I haven’t really listened to them so that I can start to really begin to outline the research. I have some ideas of what I’m going to do, but those ideas would be much better fleshed out if I had been transcribing this whole time. In any case, I’ve decided to dedicate all of my time at my second job as a computer lab desk attendant to transcribing. My colleague, the great MG, says that I just need to put the blinders on and get into the habit of doing it before it is too late.

We also discussed the need to spell out specific tasks that need to be done to advance the dissertation, so the first order of business for me (besides transcribing) is to write a blog entry tomorrow about two players around which I want to possibly organize two of my chapters.

So again, my sincerest apologies, and please check back tomorrow for some of the things I’ve learned about Joe Morgan and Barry Bonds.

I know it must have seemed like I dropped off the face of the earth after day 2 of St. Louis.  However, as I indicated I was in no condition to write that night.  I had planned to finish up the blog after I got back to Santa Barbara the next day, but after 5 flight delays, 2 cancellations, and 1 lost bag, I ended up getting home on Monday at around 7:30PM.  Consequently, I’ve been playing catch up as that one day delay ended up putting me really behind in an already busy schedule.  In any case, I’m working furiously right now, and I anticipate the rest of my SABR convention recap to be up in the next few days.  Also, I plan on putting together some kind of work plan for the next three months as well.  I know this doesn’t mean much since it is so late, but I just wanted to let you all know that I’m still here and that I didn’t choke on my own vomit or something weird like that after the Cardinals game.

Adam and Mark????

Today was an intense work day. I did five interviews and attended only one session. The session of course was the Statistical Analysis section, but I got to introduce myself to the group and got a bunch of names for potential interviews. So while it was a very productive day, I am quite exhausted. I’m not sure if it was the cherry coke that I had at 9PM, but I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night, so I was extremely tired when I started the day. I am also tired because I have basically been drinking all day. I bought all of my interview subjects a drink and naturally, I had one myself. Luckily, it was spread out through the day, so it didn’t interfere with the actual interviews. Crap….I just got a call and I have to go do an interview.

Read the rest of this entry »

…and I came here alone!

I decided to use today as a exploring day. Since I ended up getting in late, there were only a couple of sessions left anyways, so I decided to go to the sessions that I could and then I had an phone interview at 7. So I didn’t really get to press any flesh, but I figure that tomorrow at the Statistics section meeting, I’ll have the chance to get my name out there. I kinda wish I had the foresight to have business cards made, but there’s nothing to do about it now. Anyways, I’ll try to outline my day with a photo essay.

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you can’t tell, the view from my hotel room includes the big arch.

Sorry that I haven’t been updating much, but to be honest, not much has been going on. I’ve interviewed a few more people over the phone, but I’m now here in St. Louis for the big conference. I just got into the hotel room after missing my first flight this morning. This post is going to be a quickie, as I need to go check in at the conference and then start pressing flesh to try and get some interviews scheduled. Anyways, I’m going to try to write a post at least once a day while I’m here to keep you posted on what’s happening from both the dissertation point of view, and from a more personal travel log point of view. It’s been a while since I’ve traveled by myself and I’ve never been to St. Louis before, so hopefully I’ll get to explore the city a little bit. And as I’ve mentioned before, I do want to capture some of the more personal moments of the dissertation process and I think this is a perfect example of something that is a little bit personal but still interesting for posterity’s sake. Anyways, I need to get going, but expect frequent updates about my experiences from the conference in the next three days.