September 20, 2011

This past Tuesday 25 SABR members met for our regular monthly meeting at the Ragin Cajun Restaurant in Houston, first enjoying some outstanding cajun food, followed by our session at 7 o'clock.

Bob Dorrill led a discussion on SABR activity including chapter membership, prospective meeting locations, vintage baseball and the necessity to begin making plans for the SABR Day in America celebration scheduled for January 2012.

Scott Barzilla brought us up to date on the recently completed SABR National Convention and showed us the poster he had entered which placed second. He thoroughly enjoyed the convention, the seminars, the visits to various ballparks in the Los Angeles area but mostly the baseball atmosphere and networking with authors he had only read about in the past.

Bill McCurdy brought everyone up to date on the fast moving Houston baseball historical project he is chairing. Already amazing discoveries have been found such as Houston being the site of the very first night game ever played. There are 12 local SABR members involved in the research phase including the recently added Houston Icon Author Mickey Herskowitz.

For our first formal presentation our chapter was privileged to be the first group to see a brand new art history poster created by artist Randy Foltin entitled "1888-1931 Houston Baseball". This massive poster contains 39 photographs that made up the origin of baseball as played in Houston and included photographs of long gone ballparks like West End Park and East End Park as well as key high school, college and Houston Buff teams. Randy spent a year and a half creating, designing and producing this outstanding poster.

Next came Stan "The Man" Curtis. a local author who has written the book "Covering all the Bases". Stan. who grew up in Maryland has had a lifetime love affair with major league ballparks starting with Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC. He has now visited over 50 such stadiums and his book tells a story (with photographs) about each visit from a fan's prospective.

We also had 2 trivia contests; one authored by Tom Kleinworth on "Name that Player" which was won by Andy Lopez and a second contest based on the Houston Astros in the 70's prepared by Joe Thompson and won by Mike Vance. You can see we had a busy evening.