Yesterday was Day 1 of the 23rd Annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. I’m speaking Friday about “The Digital Preservation of Baseball”. I discovered the conference during a visit to the Cooperstown Hall of Fame last November. The Hall of Fame and State University of New York Oneonta put out a call for papers and the topic of digital preservation is very relevant given the HOF-EMC partnership.
Here is a list of the lectures that I attended during the first day:
- Roberto Clemente as a model for Continuous Quality Improvement, by Oren Renick of Texas State University.
- Does George Steinbrenner Belong in the Hall of Fame?, by Joseph Dorinson of Long Island University.
- Pete Rose’s Renewed Image Repair Discourse on the 25th Anniversary of Breaking Ty Cobb’s Hit Record, by Todd McDorman, Wabash College.
- Competitors and Colleagues, The World of Baseball Scouting, by Lee Lowenfish, Columbia University.
- Unbroken Circle (about deaf baseball player Luther Taylor and some of his contemporaries) by Rebecca Edwards, Rochester Institute of Technology.
- The US Women’s National Baseball Team of 2010, by Jennifer Ring, University of Nevada.
Red Sox fans would have appreciated Joseph Dorinson’s answer to the George Steinbrenner question. He spent over 20 minutes justifying his adamant “no” in a very humorous way.
I was interested in the discussion about Pete Rose’s image, given that I was a fan of the Big Red Machine in the 1970s. It was fascinating to watch a professor of rhetoric analyze Rose’s image-repair strategies. He claimed that Rose has been using a wide variety of strategies: denial, bolstering, evasion, reducing offensiveness, transcendence, mortification, and corrective action.
The keynote speaker to open the conference was Jack O’Connell, secretary/treasurer of the Baseball Writer’s Association of America. The secretary/treasurer of the BBWAA is the one that “makes the call” to new Halll of Fame inductees. (for a great story about some of Jack’s calls, read this article).
Jack painted a great picture of what it means to be a baseball writer. He related the formation of the BBWAA in 1908 as a statement from writers to owners that “writing is the primary medium between the game and the fans”. Work conditions were abysmal, and the writers essentially said “just give us a place to work”. To this day, writers view their press box as a business-only location; e.g. no cheering and no autographs. In the 1930s the respect for the BBWAA reached the point that they were given responsibility to select players for awards (such as the MVP).
Perhaps the most interesting insight from Jack is that “he had it easier” compared to today’s writers, who face a deadline of “now” for every pitch (never mind just delivering a game summary!). In addition, they often have to be extremely video savvy and quick on their feet in the social-media dominated landscape of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
I’m looking forward to my presentation on Friday; I will be following two archaeologists from St. Louis and a history professor. I hope to post more from the Symposium soon.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
