Scott Bush

Interview

I am responsible for organizing our annual SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. On March 11, I received a phone call from one of my MLB contacts informing me that their representatives would not be able to attend the conference due to health concerns surrounding COVID-19. The next day, that same contact broke the news that MLB pulled the plug on spring training. Our conference was scheduled to start March 13.

Many of the speakers and participants were already in Phoenix. We developed measures to proceed with the conference in a safe manner. We established a live stream for participants who were uncomfortable attending. We issued a stay-at-home advisory to everyone who registered, as well as partners. These efforts, along with employees’ recommendations to stay home, significantly reduced the number of participants from the 400 we normally welcome to the 24 in attendance Sunday.

If the conference had been scheduled the next weekend, we would have had to cancel or postpone. If it had been the weekend before, it would have proceeded as normal. We just found ourselves in a strange and tenuous 24-48 hours.

Looking forward, SABR is uniquely positioned to produce baseball content in the absence of an MLB season. Content-based sites, like Fangraphs, are struggling due to their focus on current baseball happenings. SABR is more research-focused and historical in nature. Due to this focus on the past, we have actually seen an increase in site traffic.

SABR has always been able to talk about the past very capably. What does impact us is the lack of baseball today to connect us to the past. No one is going to hit for a cycle tonight and allow us to showcase relevant statistics from our database. No one is going to turn a triple play. As any historian will tell you, it is best to connect the past to what is happening right now. Our inability to do that will undoubtedly matter.

As for membership, we are still in solid shape. We recently launched, “Stay Home With SABR.”  The goal is to encourage baseball fans to become SABR members while also contributing to the global fight against the pandemic. We are planning to kick 50 percent of the new membership dues to a nonprofit called Heart to Heart, which provides personal protective equipment to folks on the front lines. It is not necessarily about driving membership as much as feeling a sense of obligation to do our part.

We have a weekly podcast called SABRcast hosted by Rob Neyer. Rob reports live every Monday night in a Zoom meeting, so viewers can ask questions. Overall, we want you to stay home and enjoy our content, but we also hope you will become a member.

Our chapters have shifted to virtual online video meetings. That goes against human nature and against the way SABR has been run in the past. I think this will benefit us. We can create a catalogue [of virtual meetings] that can then be shared and distributed across chapters. This is something many of us wanted to do prior to the pandemic. I believe our community is going to come out of this stronger for having to pivot and innovate.