Everybody is going at each other in the most public of arenas. So you would think that any slight advantage that would come your way, you’d grab it. So why did they resist sabermetrics? And what I found as I was studying that was there is a pattern involved.
Brian Kenny’s keynote speech highlights Cooperstown Symposium
Different ways to look at our National Pastime are on full display at the 29th Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture.
The three-day affair held at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which concludes on Friday, brings together academics, students, historians, writers and fans with an interest in the sport. Founded in 1989, the Symposium constitutes baseball’s preeminent academic conference with interesting and incisive presentations on virtually every aspect of the game.
“We provide a unique platform for academics from around the country to come to Cooperstown and to discuss baseball and its relation to our culture and society,” said Hall of Fame Librarian Jim Gates, a co-coordinator of the event. “We don’t talk about baseball on the field; we talk about everything else – art, music, poetry, literature, economics, architecture, whatever.”
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Co-sponsored by the State University of New York College at Oneonta and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, the Symposium examines the impact of baseball on American culture from inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives.
In front of the keynote address crowd, the Symposium’s other co-coordinator, Bill Simons, a history professor at the SUNY Oneonta, said, “Thanks to each and every one of you, our presenters, our moderators and the audience for making this the great event that it is. Twenty-nine years to keep a conference vibrant and vital is no small achievement.”
Brian Kenny speaking about human resistance to knowledge at the 29th Cooperstown Symposium
This year’s annual Symposium, with almost 200 attendees from around the country, had more than 50 presentations that took place in both the Bullpen Theater and Learning Center. The wide-ranging titles included: “White Face in a Black Place: Eddie Klep and the Integration of the Negro Leagues,” “Baseball: The First Social Network,” “Robinson Agonistes: The Curious Bromance and Breakup of Jackie Robinson and Richard Nixon,” and “Craft in the Clubhouse: A Comparative Study of American Freemasonry and the National Game.”
This year’s keynote address was given by Brian Kenny, a broadcaster known first nationally as an ESPN fixture for over a decade before joining the MLB Network in 2011. His presentation, entitled, “What Were We Thinking?: A History of Ignoring Competitive Advantage,” was held before a full house in the Hall of Fame’s Plaque Galley on Wednesday night.
Kenny’s talk was based in part on his recent book, “Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution Hardcover,” published by Simon & Schuster in 2016. A book reviewer said of the work, “Baseball traditionalists who prefer the old ways of doing things won’t find an ally in Brian Kenny. He is considered one of the foremost proponents of statistical analytics. Whether you agree with him or not, Kenny keeps things interesting.”
“I had lived through and was, if not at the center, really sort of at the hub of the era of sabermetric resistance,” said Kenny, dressed in a blue suit and standing among the bronze plaques – his passion, knowledge of the subject, and sense of humor on display for an attentive crowd. “That subject I knew. That I had lived through. I had seen it myself. So at the core of my book was sabermetric resistance and why it became what it did. That puzzled me.
“When you think about what baseball is, so competitive, working so hard. The players working to the point where they will put hormones into their own system to get better. Where general managers and managers work night and day giving themselves ulcers working so hard,” added Kenny, early on removing the microphone from the podium and walking amidst the audience. “Everybody is going at each other in the most public of arenas. Going after each other where winning means your livelihood, public glory, acclaim, achievement, it means everything. So you would think that any slight advantage that would come your way, you’d grab it. So why did they resist sabermetrics? And what I found as I was studying that was there is a pattern involved.
Examples Kenny would use to demonstrate his point of view were the years it took for NBA teams to embrace the three-point shot, the MLB teams to embrace the relief ace, defensive shifting and NFL teams punting and not taking advantage of all four of its downs – attributing this reluctance as simply a human trait until it becomes fashionable.
“What’s amazing to me is it quickly went from ‘the shifts don’t work,’ as one of my colleagues said to me and continues to say to me on the air, ‘Doubleday put them there for a reason,’” Kenny said.
“It’s amazing we survived as a species,” he joked.
It was recently announced that Kenny, for his work with “Ahead of the Curve,” was one of three recipients of a 2017 SABR Baseball Research Award, which “honor outstanding research projects completed during the preceding calendar year that have significantly expanded our knowledge or understanding of baseball.”
An impressive list of past keynote speakers at the Symposium includes Stephen Jay Gould, Ken Burns, W.P. Kinsella, Eliot Asinof, Roger Kahn, George Plimpton, Marvin Miller, Frank Deford and Janet Marie Smith.
Bill Francis is a Library Associate at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
