SABR-L: Information and Guidelines

SABR-L is a listserv for members of the Society for American Baseball Research to share and seek research and information. The goal of SABR-L is to provide members with the opportunity to increase their knowledge of the game of baseball through thoughtful, informed discussion. It is not intended as a fan-talk forum, and moderators may cut off discussions that stray from being research-based.

Since accepted posts are archived and become a valuable resource for member research, careful attention should be paid to spelling, grammar and syntax. Additional details regarding the approval of SABR-L submissions are below.

• How to subscribe: Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to subscribe to SABR-L or change your settings

The role of the moderator is to review posts and approve or reject them for distribution to the SABR-L list. Moderators may return a post to the person making it with suggestions or requests for revisions, though this is not required. Moderators do not edit messages. If your post does not appear on the list, please review it in light of moderator guidelines before trying to resubmit it.

Moderator Guidelines

A moderator may reject or return a post for a variety of reasons.

Here are some things that will NOT be approved on SABR-L:

• Copyright violations. Any information from a copyrighted source or provider, including content that requires a subscription to access, should be shared on SABR-L with a URL link to the original source. A brief description (no more than 1-2 sentences) of the content may also be appropriate under Fair Use. Any attempt to circumvent a paywall, post excessive copyrighted material, or that may otherwise be in violation of US copyright laws will be rejected by the moderators. For example, subscribers to Stathead.com are encouraged to use the convenient "Share" link for any query when posting replies on SABR-L, rather than including the entire query results.
• Posts of questionable quality or intent. While this guideline is subjective, it is important to remember that the goal of SABR-L is to encourage thoughtful, informed discussion and that your posts may be shared anywhere after publishing and reflect on SABR as a whole. Moderators have the latitude to reject any submission they feel is low-quality or they feel has ill-intent.
• Multiple replies. Multiple replies to the same thread or topic by the same person in the same day will not be accepted.
• Duplicate posts. When a question is answered, it only needs to be answered once. If your post is not approved, it may be that someone else has already submitted the same information.
• Thread hijacking. If someone asks who was the oldest pitcher to win his 300th game, don't send a list of the oldest pitchers to win 20 games in a season. If you wish to post about that, please start a new thread.
• Requests for information that indicate the poster has done no legwork or is trying to circumvent a paywall. For example, we will not allow posts like:
  
  "Hey, I was thinking that players who play in games their team wins should be credited with a win and those who play in losses should be credited with a loss. On that basis Aaron Judge went something like 92-69 last year (I'm just typing away and don't want to go on the internet and look it up). Maybe one of you guys with those databases or subscriptions could look up this stuff for me and tell me the answer to that and many other questions I have. For example, did Carl Yastrzemski really have a winning season in 1969? "
  
  but we will allow:
  
  "I'm trying to develop a metric for measuring what I call Winning Innings. A player gets credited with one winning inning if he's in the lineup at the conclusion of an inning and his team is ahead. I find that this is very difficult to do by hand and I'm wondering if anyone can direct me to data sources that would permit me to accomplish this task. Suggestions for which software to use would also be appreciated."

• Responses to questions that should more appropriately go to the original poster. For example, if someone is compiling a list of the players with the longest hair, replies should generally be sent to them off-list, unless you think your response will be of interest to the whole list. The person can post his conclusion when their research is complete.
• Diatribes about current events. We will not allow posts like "None of the home runs players hit these days should count because the ball is so lively!" On the other hand, a post that would be OK might be:
  
  "I am examining whether the baseball used now is livelier than those from the 1960s. Studies by X, Y, and Z show they are. Does anyone know of other studies of this issue?"
• Advertising. While we will permit one, brief announcement of your new product or service if it is relevant to the readers of this list, repeated promotion of the same, even in the context of answering a question, will not be approved.

HOW WE DISCUSS

Arguments and disputation are essential in the quest for knowledge. Just bear in mind that it is possible to argue and dispute without showing your anger. It is fine to attack an argument, but not the arguer. Please maintain respect for your fellow SABR members.

Respect the Moderators

The moderators are a bunch of hard-working volunteers, who review submissions to SABR-L and decide whether or not to approve them. They are to be treated with respect. Failure to do so may result in a warning, suspension, or removal from SABR-L.

**Email habits that bug the moderators**

1. Including mail headers (From: To: etc) in quoted replies. Please learn how your email software works when you click on reply or forward.

2. Quoting the whole message (or digest) when you are responding. Instead make sure your subject is Re: which makes it easy to find the post you're writing about, and then quote a line or two. **Hint** If you're quoting more than 3 lines you're quoting excessively. Ideally, your post should look something like this:

Larry Vivaldi wrote:

>Larry MacSuccess was the first person to think of playing games at night in 1935
>which was highly profitable for the Blues.

Actually, the first night baseball game was played back in 1880, according to Peter Morris's A Game of Inches, and minor league and Negro League teams were using lights by 1930.

Phinneas T. Fogg

3. Including long signatures, extensive quotations and corporate boilerplate. Please, turn it off when posting here, if you can.

ON UNANSWERED RESEARCH REQUESTS

If you post a particular request to the list and nobody responds, repost it two weeks later, and keep posting. Try a different subject line. Keep in mind that all subscribers don't read every message every day, so repetition may be the key to success. If your request doesn't appear, re-read the material above on what doesn't get posted, and consider rewriting your request to conform to the list's editorial policies. Keep in mind that the list moderators are volunteers, who have other priorities besides SABR-L, so please be considerate and don't take it personally if a post of yours does not appear.

ABOUT --embedded Mime-- AND end of line= GOBBLEDYGOOK

Because there are so many different email clients, some of which do not like messages that aren't sent as plain-text, please set your email software so that messages sent to SABR-L are sent as plain-text only. If you need help in doing this, please write us at SABR-L-request@apple.ease.lsoft.com — do not write directly to the list.

THE MODERATORS POLITELY REQUEST THREAD DISCIPLINE

If you are participating in an ongoing discussion — especially if you are receiving the messages in digest mode — strive mightily to make your subject line Re: <>. Doing this makes researching the archives a lot easier.

A NOTE ON POSTING TABULAR DATA

From time to time members will post tables or lists consisting of two or more columns of related data items. Because of the many different e-mail clients in use it is a certainty that the tables you make up will look great to you and terribly jumbled to another member.

What to do?

1) Make sure your E-mail client is set to post messages in plain-text if possible (see above).

2) Make sure you use spaces and not tabs to separate the columns. Cutting and pasting from a spreadsheet puts tabs into the text. A better strategy is to print the spreadsheet to a text file, then cut and paste from the text file.

ON PINCH-MODERATING

We continue to seek assistant list moderators. Please volunteer by emailing SABR-L-request@apple.ease.lsoft.com.

OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION

If you are having problems with the list itself ("hey, I haven't received SABR-L mail for a week! What gives?") or have a question about a particular post (after re-reading the information above, of course), you can write us with your question to us at SABR-L-request@apple.ease.lsoft.com and we will do our best to resolve your problem.